6WH: Season’s Readings

Coming down the homestretch of the Six Weeks of Halloween, it appears that my movie consumption is higher than normal (I’ve already far surpassed the last few years’ marathons, and there’s still a week left). However, this has come at the expense of other activities like watching horror-themed TV shows and reading horror books. That being said, I’ve still read a bunch of seasonal stuff, so let’s take a look:

• True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking by Don Coscarelli – Longtime readers of Kaedrin (all four of you) know of my inexplicable but abiding love for the movie Phantasm. I’ve seen the movie around, oh, let’s just say we’ve probably reached triple digits at this point. So this memoir from the filmmaker behind that movie was a welcome diversion from the normal seasonal fare. Covering his path to the director’s chair (which he does not sit in, for reasons I will not spoil) from a humble childhood to initial flirtations with the studio system, to less fruitful interactions with studios, to his consistent return to independence, the book is full of bite sized anecdotes from a storied career in indie filmmaking. Some early luck coupled with later, distinctly unlucky occasions lead to an interesting career for an unheralded filmmaker. He’s one of my favorites and by all accounts is a really likable guy, and this book illustrates his demeanor well. Some of these stories we’ve heard before (i.e. how did they film the famous silver sphere sequence in Phantasm?), others we haven’t (his face caught fire while filming a shotgun blast), and yet more we never heard of because the movie never panned out (I would have loved to have seen Coscarelli’s take on Stephen King’s Silver Bullet). He apparently knew Quentin Tarantino when he was but a lowely PA (and gave QT terrible advice on Reservoir Dogs). His longstanding relationships with Reggie Bannister and especially the late Angus Scrimm are quite touching. It’s a great little read for fans of film and I suspect it would work even for folks who aren’t horror fanatics, well worth checking out!
• Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias – Enforcer and drug dealer Fernando gets jumped after work one night, and a coworker is cut to bits and fed to… something. This ultimately turns out to be much more of a crime thriller than a horror novel, though it does imply some demonic happenings here or there, and as Texas-based drug dealer thrillers go, it’s pretty decent. I still found myself craving more of the supernatural elements here though, and what’s there is really quite sparse. Iglesias also peppers the prose with a lot of Spanish language which, well, I only took two years of Spanish. I could follow some stuff, and I could certainly look up a word here or there, but I suspect some of the story was lost in (my admittedly poor) translation. That being said, it’s short and sweet, and a pretty decent little page turner. Not sure it really tickled my seasonal itch, but it was still an entertaining read.
• We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix – Kris Pulaski is a former heavy metal guitarist for Dürt Würk, a band that was once poised for success, but which collapsed when lead singer Terry Hunt quit the band and started his own solo career as Koffin. As the title implies, there’s something mysterious about the band’s dissolution, and it does have something to do with the selling of souls. Spoilers aho! The wrinkle that Hendrix throws on this is that Terry Hunt doesn’t exactly sell his own soul, but rather those of his bandmates (and, later, audiences). The entity to which he’s dealing with, dubbed Black Iron Mountain, is also a little different than your typical crossroads demon, adding new flavor to an old story. Hendrix clearly knows his stuff when it comes to horror (see below), but he also appears to have a great affinity for Metal music in all its various forms. I like Metal just fine, but am hardly an expert, so I suspect some of the references went right over my head, and Metal does have a, well, reputation for cheesy pretentiousness, which suffuses the book. For instance, there’s lots of quoted fictional verses of corny material. If that isn’t your jam, you probably won’t like this, but I enjoyed it just fine. It’s pretty straightforward but I wasn’t entirely sure where it was headed. The ending works a lot better than I would have ever thought, though it’s ultimately still a little unclear what the deal is with Black Iron Mountain or how successful our protagonists actually were in that fated performance. In the end, I enjoyed the book. It didn’t blow my mind or engage the imagination in the way the best horror does, but it’s an entertaining yarn that’s worth checking out, especially for metal fans (who may get more out of this than I did).
• Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix – Speaking of Hendrix, this little non-fiction compendium of the boom in horror fiction set off by the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other, culminating with the serial killer craze when authors started to eschew the “horror” label in an effort to become “respectable” and thus kinda “boring”. In between, we’re treated to all sorts of cuckoo nutso novels featuring things like horny Bigfoots, Nazi leprechauns, killer maggots, and rabbis blasting KGB demons with super-shofars. It’s all a bit surface-level, with only the major entries getting real depth, but he does reach a wide breadth of work, even if he can’t devote too much space to the lesser works. I have not read a ton of these, but as an avid horror movie fan, many of the kookier examples of the genre have, in fact, been adapted to film (stuff like The Manitou, which has a plot best described: “A woman gets a weird growth on her shoulder. As is often the case, it turns out to be a fetus.”) It’s all in good fun, and the book also has a ton of great artwork (also a staple of the genre at the time) that’s just a blast to look at.
  

  I mean, they say not to judge a book by the cover, but damn, these covers represent something of an exception (though Hendrix does go to pains to explain that sometimes the covers truly are better than the books they’re supposedly portraying). I do wish there was a little more in the way of concrete recommendations (there is a chapter about this sort of thing at the end, but it leaves something to be desired), rather than the full firehose of horror novels the book references. Still well worth checking out, and even if you never get to read the Nazi Leprechaun book, you do get to know that it exists, which is a miracle in itself.

• Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz – Koontz was the first author that got me reading for pleasure (i.e. reading even when it wasn’t required for school!), so I have a soft spot for him. That being said, I’ve never really been able to recapture that initial burst of enthusiasm for his work. Perhaps it’s because he does tend to get repetitive and since he’s super-prolific, his books have a hit-or-miss quality to them. While it seems like most of my recent attempts to find something new-to-me from Koontz that I love have mostly failed, it hasn’t stopped me from trying. This book didn’t exactly rekindle my love, but it was still a pretty easygoing read with some creepy atmosphere appropriate for the season. Slim MacKenzie has a sorta psychic power which lets him see what he calls “goblins”, fowl creatures who are able to disguise themselves as humans, but who live off the misery and pain of others. We meet him as he joins up at a circus, a venue that attracts lost souls like himself and his later girlfriend/wife, Rya Raines. There’s some interesting components here, but the nuts-and-bolts storytelling bits are askew. For one thing, it almost feels like two separate novellas (or maybe novels) were sorta glued together in the middle. For another, much of the background of the goblins is interesting, but delivered in a pretty clunky section of exposition. This section is capped off by a nice little twist, but the twist does sorta just get glossed over. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would be so easily resolved. Again, the whole thing can get a little repetitive and overlong and repetitive, so it’s not Koontz’s tightest work. It seems that the hunt for new-to-me Koontz that I’ll love continues, though I will say that it’s not like this is the one book that caused me to give up or anything. It’s cromulent enough, in that respect. If you ever do want to check out something that I do love from Koontz, try Lightning, Phantoms, Midnight, Strangers, or maybe Intensity.
• The Professor’s Teddy Bear by Theodore Sturgeon – It’s a short story about a time-bending vampiric maybe-alien Teddy Bear (I linked to a copy right there). It’s a bit mind-scrambling and makes for a nice little seasonal read. Check it out.

And that’s all for now… stay tuned for the last week of The Six Weeks of Halloween, featuring some Netflix movies, and the final installment on Halloween, with a speed round of all the things I’ve watched that didn’t get covered yet…