It Came from the 80's | ELJ Editions

It Came from the 80’s

The 80’s were a golden age for horror. Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and their many offspring were everywhere. It was also a golden age for pop and rock music. Prince, Bruce Springsteen, and Culture Club, among many others. So what happens when you put those two things together? In It Came from the 80’s, Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me” turns into a battle to the death between good and evil magic, “Footloose” becomes a grotesque mass violence event, and even “Escape (If you love pina coladas...)” transforms into a grim tale of desire gone wrong.

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Praise for It Came from the 80’s

“Jarvis offers a something else that frequently leads to appalling acts of brutality. Like a DJ with a deranged MTV playlist, he’s having fun spinning our recognizably twisted world, but also leads us to valuable questions about empathy, culpability, and our responsibility to each other in our increasingly bizarre times.”

—John McDermott, The Last Spirits of Manhattan

“Nostalgia for the 1980s can be powerful, but Zeke Jarvis shows us in It Came From the ‘80s how scary it can be too. The decade that gave us Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street now inspires this eerie, though also quite danceable, collection of stories that pays homage to pop songs from the era. Demons, skeletons rising from their graves, bloodthirsty exotic animals, and flesh-eating mermaids will chill you and have your toes tapping at the same time in these strange, twisted, and sometimes hilarious tales that evoke the glorious chart-toppers of the 1980s.”

—Stephen Powers, The Follower’s Tale, Highway Speed

“The scariest realization isn’t that monsters exist. What’s scarier is that we’ve already made room for them … Zeke Jarvis doesn’t just aim to unsettle. It asks a question as large as the stakes within its stories: When the unimaginable happens, do we resist it? Or do we learn how to live with it?”

—Joe Chianakas, author of Darkness Calls

About the Author

Zeke Jarvis (he/him/his) is a Professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit, and KNOCK, among other places. His books include, So Anyway…, In A Family Way, The Three of Them, Antisocial Norms, The Calling, It’s Haunted!, and It Came From the 80’s. His website is zekedotjarvis.wordpress.com.