As the Six Weeks of Halloween approaches, I’ve excitedly been planning the festivities. In a fun way, of course. I’m not a monster, even if that would be appropriate for the season. Anywho, after a few years of this, the horror movie marathon is pretty much on auto-pilot, and I could do that in my sleep. The thing that I’ve never been very good at, though, is aligning my reading schedule with the 6WH marathon. I managed a decent showing last year, but I kinda lucked into a couple of those choices, so I figured I should put some actual thought into it this year. As such, here’s a few things I’m planning to read during the 6WH marathon:
- Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover – I’ve made no secret of my inexplicable love of Slasher movies, that most reviled of sub-genres, but for some reason, I’ve never gone back and read this seminal text. Clover is famous for coining the term Final Girl, and I’ve even referenced this book before on the blog, so I figured it’s worth checking out. I’m not much of an identity politics kinda guy, but so far, so good. I am cheating a little in that I’ve already started reading this book a few days early, but that’s ok, right?
- Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill – I know very little about this, but it’s been highly recommended to me by Kaedrin compatriot Mike Connelly, one of the hosts of the most excellent Echo Rift podcast. It’s a comic book, and I’m usually able to burn through these trade paperbacks at a pretty fast rate, so I expect further volumes to be read during the season.
- Night Film by Marisha Pessl – Another book I don’t know much about, but I’ve heard favorable comparison’s to Mark Z. Danielewski’s creepy House of Leaves, which is pretty high praise. A quick scan through the pages even reveals lots of non-standard text, pictures of web browsers, and so on. Not quite as expansive or weird as House of Leaves, but that might ultimately be a good thing. While I really enjoyed most parts of House of Leaves, it was tough to get through at times. Still, I’ve heard good things about this from multiple sources, so I’m looking forward to it.
- Books of Blood, Volume Three by Clive Barker – I have, very slowly, been making my way through Barker’s short stories from the 80s. As you might expect from a short story collection, it is hit or miss, but even the misses are so blindingly creative and weird that I generally don’t mind. Of the six short story collections, I think I’ll only have one left after I read this. But! Did you see that The Scarlet Gospels has finally been completed? He just sent it to the publisher, so it probably won’t be out until next year (at the earliest), but since we’ve been waiting for this thing for 20 damn years (for serious, he’s been talking about this Pinhead versus Harry D’Amour story since the early 90s, first as a short story, now as a hugemongous 240,000 word monster), another year can’t hurt too much. Unless they split it into two volumes, as publishers sometimes do with novels of this size. Now if we can just get Barker to finish the third Book of the Art (which he’s been talking about since 1990, sheesh), we’ll be in good shape.
And I think that should be enough to keep me busy for these 6 awesometastic weeks. Tune in Sunday for week one of the horror movie marathon. It’s looking like Kaiju movies this weekend, so stay frosty. It’s going to be good Halloween season!