Just catching up on some of this Halloween season’s readings. I’ve already covered Stephen King’s Christine and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (and their corresponding filmic adaptations), but here’s the rest of what I read:
- Death Count: All of the Deaths in the Friday the 13th Film Series, Illustrated by Stacie Ponder – As a big fan of the recently revived Final Girl blog and Stacie Ponder’s associated offerings, I was happy to see that she decided to collect her artwork from the Death Count blog into a fancy schmanzy book.
Ponder’s artwork is distinctive and generally fun, even when depicting horrific scenes of terror (some choices are absolutely inspired), and her short writeups of each movie are well done. Most of the actual content is still available online, but fans of the Friday the 13th series might want a copy all for themselves.
- Deep State by Christopher Farnsworth – I’ve long been a fan of Farnsworth’s Nathaniel Cade books, particularly Red, White, and Blood. For the uninitiated, Cade is a vampire who is magically bound to serve the President of the United States. It’s ridiculous, of course, but a whole lot of fun. The series has been on a bit of a hiatus since Farnsworth switched publishers, but he’s published a couple of novellas, including this most recent one, which actually picks up after the cliffhanger at the end of Red, White, and Blood. A nuclear missile silo has gone dark, and the president calls in Cade to resolve the matter. The only problem is that he needs a handler for the vampire, and no one seems up to the task since Zach Barrows was unceremoniously fired during the events of the previous book. So the president finally admits his mistake and rehires Zach, then they go fight some vegetal monsters and save the world. Again. Spoilers, I guess, but Cade is kinda like a superhero – you know he’s going to win. It’s great to see the duo paired up again. This wasn’t quite the continuation of the story I was expecting, but the greatest part of these stories is the esoteric bits and pieces of horror lore, not the overarching meta-story. Someday I hope Farnsworth can free himself from whatever legal bonds are preventing him from a proper, novel length Cade story. In the meantime, this is a decent story (and better than the previous short offering, The Burning Men) and worth checking out for fans.
- Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon – This is a hard one to talk about without spoiling anything, but if you like Sturgeon and horror-adjacent psychological stories, it might be your bag. It doesn’t seem like much at first. Told in an epistolary format, it initially covers a sort of auto-biography of George Smith, followed by some correspondence and documentation from his psychiatrist, who manages to deduce Smith’s true nature. It makes for a good companion piece to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, only instead of focusing on physical explanations for vampirism, Sturgeon goes into psychological reasons, positing a non-supernatural vampire. It takes a while to get there, but overall the story is very short and strays considerably from whatever you might expect from the description above. It’s slow and oddly structured, but I kinda appreciated that and ultimately really enjoyed the book for what it was.
- Final Girls by Riley Sager – I originally picked this audiobook up because I thought it was the next book on this list (the titles both involving “Final Girls” in some way), but I immediately realized my mistake when I started listening. But hey, both are literary takes on my beloved slasher sub-genre, so that’s fine by me. The story follows one Quincy Carpenter, lone survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre that claimed the lives of five friends. The ever considerate media thus associated her with two other women who had survived similar ordeals, thus dubbing them “The Final Girls”. Ten years after her traumatic experience, Quincy is doing ok for herself. A popular food blogger with a loving boyfriend and a support network that includes Lisa (one of the other Final Girls) and Coop (the cop who saved her life that fateful night), she almost feels normal. Then Lisa turns up dead, an apparent suicide. And Sam, the only other remaining Final Girl shows up at Quincy’s doorstep. Is someone trying to finish off the Final Girls? It’s a neat premise that has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, Quincy isn’t the greatest protagonist, constantly filled with self-doubt (understandable!) and getting herself into obviously dumb binds (not so understandable). Sager does a great job implicating just about everyone we spend time with in the story, such that any of them could turn out to be the killer in the end… but there aren’t enough characters for this to entirely work, and she makes these ambiguities so conspicuous that by the time she actually does reveal the killer, it’s not as surprising as it could be, since we’ve already been considering that person the whole time (and we’re never quite able to really rule anyone out). Still, despite dragging a little in the second act, the finale works well enough. I admit I was hoping for something more slasher-esque, but this doesn’t really deliver on the potential of its premise, even if it was a diverting enough read.
- The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones – Lindsay, homecoming queen, has just survived a typical slasher movie style massacre at the hands of a madman wearing a Michael Jackson mask. But the killer’s body was never recovered, and it seems like the replacement homecoming court is in for a bumpy ride. Now this is more like it, a story that is drenched in slasher tropes and explicit references, sorta like Scream on hallucinogens. The prose style is unusual though, and I’m not entirely sure it works. It’s kinda like a hybrid movie script and novel; explicitly specifying camera movements and cuts, but adding a little literary flare too. It does imbue the story with momentum, but clarity suffers a bit. There’s not a ton of exposition, so some stuff feels a little unexplored, and it’s hard to keep the characters straight. Stephen Graham Jones clearly knows his stuff though, and not just the big names of the sub-genre. And so do his characters, who all know they’re in a slasher film and have seen enough to know the ins and outs. The final revelations are, perhaps, a bit too twisty, but this is definitely better than the previous book on the list in that respect, and this one’s a lot shorter too. Fans of the sub-genre could enjoy this, assuming they can get past the odd formatting… I certainly did.
- Shutter by Courtney Alameda – Micheline Helsing is one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing line, and she continues their monster hunting ways. Her weapon of choice? An analog camera, which can capture spiritual energy on film. A seemingly routine haunting turns complicated when her entire team (including herself) is infected with a curse that could kill them all in seven days if they don’t exorcise the ghost that infected them. Cut off from the Helsing organization, they must find this powerful ghost and figure out a way to defeat her. A decent, light YA novel with some creepy atmosphere and imaginative creations, it also struggles a bit with exposition (not a huge deal in my book, honestly) and there’s simply not much here that we haven’t seen before. It’s a little formulaic, but well executed and generally fun. Not something you need to rush out and read, but it’d be a good introduction to many of the tropes it relies on. Those of us already steeped in those tropes might find it a bit staid, but you could do worse.
We’re in the homestretch now, stay tuned for a Speed Round of short reviews of all the movies that didn’t make it into the weekly (usually themed) recaps…