In the midst of all the writing I do, I'm also endeavoring to read 52 books in 2022. Here are my thoughts on the second batch of 13 books I read this year:
SCRIPTING HITCHCOCK: PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, AND MARNIE, by Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick
I read Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho because I was doing research for a video I wrote about Psycho (you can watch it on the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel). Same goes for Scripting Hitchcock, which also provided information on the making of the two thrillers Hitchcock made after Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. Authors Raubicheck and Srebnick not only give information on how Hitchcock worked with the three different writers on these three movies, they also give their very academic analyses of the movies. If you want to dig into in the career of Hitchcock, this is an interesting read.
I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS by Iain Reid
Twists can be a tricky thing to pull off. When done right, a twist can reframe everything that came before it in such a way that you can’t wait to go back and experience it all over again so you can try to pick up clues you may have missed the first time around. But sometimes a twist can make you feel like you wasted the time you invested before the twist came around. Unfortunately, the twist in Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things made me wish I hadn’t bothered to read the book.
The story is told from the perspective of a young woman who has agreed to meet her boyfriend’s family despite the fact that she’s already considering breaking up with him. (Thus the title.) It’s clear that there’s something strange going on and things are going to get even stranger, and I was very interested as we accompanied the couple on the drive to his parents’ house. I was still interested as we eavesdrop on their odd visit with the guy’s parents. But once the couple stops at the guy’s former school on the way back home, everything fell apart as far as I was concerned. The book received a film adaptation from Charlie Kaufman that apparently goes even further off the rails than Reid’s story does.
THE STINK OF FLESH: THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY by Scott S. Phillips
Released in 2005, writer/director Scott Phillips’ The Stink of Flesh is one of my favorite zombie movies not to be directed by George A. Romero. It’s a unique entry in the zombie sub-genre, focusing on a couple’s attempts to keep their alternative lifestyle going with the few living humans they can find in a world that’s now largely populated by rotting corpses. Into the lives of swingers Nathan and Dexy (and Dexy’s sister Sassy, who has a parasitic twin named Dorothy growing on her side) comes a man called Matool, who likes to take zombies down with a hammer and nails. Plus a strange, silent kid. Plus a couple of soldiers. And their wounded buddy. Yeah, now there are more men in Dexy’s life than Nathan can handle. The situation doesn’t end well.
Phillips wrote a great screenplay for his movie, which he brought to the screen for just $3000, and it’s nice to have a copy of it. If you’re familiar with the movie, it’s also interesting to see the original names written for the soldier characters, as their names were changed for the movie so they would match the actual military name tags Phillips was able to find for sale.
Full disclosure: a Film Appreciation article I wrote about The Stink of Flesh is included with the published screenplay, so this also counts as my first official publication.
PSYCHO by Robert Bloch
Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho and Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick’s Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie weren’t the only books I read while doing research for the Psycho video I wrote for the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel. I also went back to the source. The 1959 Robert Bloch novel that provided the blueprint for Hitchcock’s prestigious picture. Inspired by the sparse details that newspapers printed about the Ed Gein crimes at the time of his arrest, Bloch’s novel is an interesting read, and also an example of how an adaptation can improve on the source. The movie Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano brought us is a faithful adaptation, but better choices went into it. The novel introduces Norman Bates right away – overweight, bespectacled, balding, the book’s version of Norman has been described as a Rod Steiger type rather than an Anthony Perkins. And the reader is already given reason to be suspicious of him, especially when he daydreams about cannibal tribes. Soon Mary Crane (Marion in the movie) enters the story, but she’s only around for two chapters before she gets killed in the shower. In the movie we’re with Marion for almost half the running time before she gets stabbed to death in the shower. Here, she’s decapitated. The events in the book play out much like they play out in the movie, but Stefano wrote better dialogue. If you’re a fan of the film Psycho, the book is definitely worth checking out. It’s good, it’s close to the movie, but not yet on the level that Hitchcock and Stefano were able to boost it to.
THE STINK OF FLESH by Robert E. Vardeman
Robert E. Vardeman not only has an acting role in director Scott Phillips’ $3000 zombie classic The Stink of Flesh, he also wrote this novelization of Phillips’ screenplay. Vardeman adds some details about life in Albuquerque during the zombie apocalypse, putting in scenes with a character who’s called Vegetable Man for obvious reasons, and also greatly expands the role of soldier Mandel. Mandel shows up relatively late in the movie, but in Vardeman’s novelization he basically shares the lead with zombie killer Matool. Chapters of Matool settling in at the home of swingers Nathan and Dexy are followed by chapters about Dalton battling zombies beside his fellow soldiers. So if you watched The Stink of Flesh and wanted to know a lot more about what brought Mandel and his cohorts to Nathan and Dexy’s door, you’ll find some very interesting passages in this book. Aside from the opening where Matool meets with the Vegetable Man, his chapters follow the events of the movie closely. Once Matool and Mandel are in the same place, the novelization sticks to what we see in the movie.
FIGHT CLUB by Chuck Palahniuk
Like Psycho, Fight Club is one of the rare cases where I feel that a cinematic adaptation took the characters and concepts from the source material and improved them, allowing them to reach their full potential. That’s actually an opinion shared by author Chuck Palahniuk – but to say the movie is better isn’t to say the book version of Fight Club is bad. Palahniuk provided a great foundation for the film, crafting a fascinating story that’s told in a very unique way. If you have seen the movie, you’re familiar with the unnamed Narrator’s commentary, and the book is written just like that narration, entirely from the Narrator’s perspective.
The Narrator is a dissatisfied young man who attends support groups for people with serious diseases because he finds them comforting. One day, he meets a nihilistic fellow Tyler Durden and they inadvertently start a fight club where dissatisfied people can beat the hell out of each other for catharsis. But then Tyler moves beyond fight club to something called Project Mayhem, and things get out of hand. It’s all darkly comedic and totally irreverent. If you’ve read the book, you should definitely check out the movie. If you’ve watched the movie, you should check out the book.
HIGH COTTON by Joe R. Lansdale
I had been interested in the work of Joe R. Lansdale ever since the Don Coscarelli-directed adaptations Bubba Ho-Tep and Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road were released in the first decade of this century… it just took me a long time to get around to reading some Lansdale. High Cotton, a collection of twenty-one short stories, seemed like a good place to start, especially since Incident On and Off a Mountain Road happens to be one of the stories in it. I ended up really enjoying High Cotton, which is a fun mixture of tones and genres. I’m disappointed by the thought that some authors get boxed into genres, having to play to what readers expect from them and not getting the chance to branch out (unless they use a different name). Lansdale is definitely not boxed in anywhere. While several of the stories contained in High Cotton are deeply disturbing, they vary from being horror to crime thrillers to dark comedy. There’s even a Godzilla parody in here. So you never know quite what to expect from story to story – except for the fact that it’s going to be engaging and well written.
I was surprised to see how often Lansdale uses a certain word that Quentin Tarantino has gotten some heat for using repeatedly in his movies. This word was jarring every time it came up, and it did with so much frequency I started to wonder where it was going to appear in each story. (It’s not actually in every story, but it got to a point where it felt like it was.) Sometimes it comes from a lead character, sometimes from a side character or even a random bystander, but it would show up often. Even in the Godzilla story.
KILLING FLOOR by Lee Child
In 1997, Lee Child introduced the world to Jack Reacher, a smart, highly capable, hulking beast of a man who left a military career – which included investigating homicides as an MP – behind and decided to spend his days drifting around America with nothing in his pockets but the bare essentials. Obviously Reacher didn’t have a peaceful retirement, because Child has written nearly thirty novels about him at this point, as he crosses paths with criminals and often has to put his homicide investigation skills to use. Along with his knowledge of weaponry and his brute strength.
In Child’s first Reacher story, our hero gets off a bus in a small Georgia town and is almost immediately accused of committing a murder he wasn’t around to commit. And coincidentally, the dead man is his own brother. So when Reacher starts investigating the crime, he’s not just out to clear his name, he’s also out for vengeance. Since writing Killing Floor, the author has gone on to write a new Jack Reacher novel every year, and surprisingly they are not short novels. While “Reacher said nothing” is a line you’ll see frequently in the books, Child always has plenty to say about Reacher and the messes he finds himself in. The paperback edition of Killing Floor is 522 pages, and the story could have benefited from being a bit shorter, because there are times when this book starts to feel like it’s meandering. But for the most part it’s an intriguing read. Child crafted a good mystery here, peppered in some fun action sequences, and created an iconic character that readers (including myself) just can’t seem to get enough of.
NO EXIT by Taylor Adams
Don’t judge a book by its cover, but if you happen to see a copy of Taylor Adams’ book No Exit that describes it as a “gripping thriller full of heart-stopping twists”, you should absolutely believe that promotional line. I couldn’t get through this book fast enough – not because I wanted to get it over with, but because I was so invested in seeing how the story was going to play out that it was giving me anxiety.
The lead character is Darby Thorne, a college student whose mother is having a medical emergency, which is why Darby has made the bad decision to try driving home through a major winter storm. She ends up stuck at a small rest stop with a handful of other people… and the book has barely even gotten started by the time Darby realizes that a little girl is being held captive in a vehicle belonging to one of the other travelers. Given that No Exit has a page count over 350, you might expect that it’s going to take Darby a while to figure out who that vehicle belongs to. But everything in this story happens earlier than you would expect it to. The solving of the mystery. The first confrontation with the kidnapper. That’s how Adams keeps the reader hooked and the tension rising for the whole ride.
CARRIE by Stephen King
The first novel from Stephen King, and a novel that almost never existed. Inspired by two unfortunate girls he had known in his youth, King started writing about a put-upon teenage girl who learns to use her telekinetic abilities to fight back against the bullies that have been making her life hell. Including her own insane mother. Sadly, this girl, the Carrie of the title, also causes the deaths of a lot of innocent bystanders in the process. King had only written a few pages of Carrie before he decided to abandon the story and dropped those pages in the trash. We have his wife Tabitha to thank for fishing those pages out of the trash and encouraging him to keep the story going. The world has been greatly benefiting from King’s writing skills ever since.
Carrie is written in a unique way, dropping in excerpts from books and news reports that were written about the tragic ending met by Carrie and many people around her. We know early on that everything is going to go terribly wrong, but King holds off on giving us the full details until there’s no turning back.
ROCK ON FILM: THE MOVIES THAT ROCKED THE BIG SCREEN by Fred Goodman
My review of this one was already posted here on Life Between Frames, at THIS LINK.
FLETCH by Gregory Mcdonald
Fletch isn’t chronologically the first book in the Fletch series, as author Gregory Mcdonald would go back and write some prequels to this one, but this book is the first time Mcdonald wrote about investigative journalist I.M. Fletcher of the News-Tribune. And this is the one that served as the basis for the 1985 film starring Chevy Chase. The movie is actually a reasonably faithful adaptation, with some tweaks to make the story more cinematic. As the story begins, Fletch has been hanging out with a bunch of junkies because he’s writing an exposé article about drug deals on the beach and is trying to figure out where the drugs are coming from. The wealthy Alan Stanwyck doesn’t know that, so he thinks Fletch is just a drug-addled bum when he invites him to his house and asks Fletch to kill him later in the week. He’ll even pay Fletch for his troubles and provide his getaway plane ticket. Stanwyck says he has terminal cancer, but Fletch isn’t so sure. So he starts juggling his “drugs on the beach” investigation with a personal investigation into Alan Stanwyck.
In the movie, you get Chase’s Fletch meeting with people in various locations, using fake names and often wearing disguises while trying to get information on Stanwyck. The book Fletch’s investigation happens almost entirely through phone calls, so only fake names are required. Phone calls aren’t very cinematic, but Mcdonald did an incredible job of writing them in the book, filling pages with interesting, witty dialogue between wonderfully succinct descriptive passages. The movie enhanced the comedy a bit for Chase, but Fletch was already quite amusing from the start.
The book does have a darker edge, and some of the darker aspects don’t sit well with me. Like the fact that Fletch’s wife has filed divorce because he threw her cat out the window of their seventh floor apartment. Or that it’s implied that Fletch has an inappropriate relationship with a teenage drug addict, who dies in his room one night. But everything around those cringe-worthy aspects is so well written, and the irreverence of the Fletch character is so fun to read (even if he is cruel to some people), that it’s easy to look past them and enjoy the ride. Mcdonald wrote nine Fletch books and two books about Fletch’s son, and they rank among my favorite books to read. Kevin Smith has said that he learned to write dialogue by reading Mcdonald’s books, and he really did amazing work with the dialogue in Fletch and its prequels and follow-ups.
THE KARATE KID by B.B. Hiller
Caught up in Cobra Kai fever in anticipation of the premiere of the show’s fifth season, I decided to dig into the novelization of the original The Karate Kid while going through the first four seasons of Cobra Kai for the umpteenth time. B.B. Hiller wrote this novelization “for young readers”, so there’s not much extrapolation going on here – the book is really just the movie written out in prose. Which is fine. That’s all it needed to be. Whether it’s on the screen or on the page, the story of Daniel LaRusso being taught karate by the iconic Mr. Miyagi so he can take on his bully Johnny Lawrence at the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament is a classic. Since the book was based on the screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen rather than the final cut of the movie, there are some deleted scenes in here, including the blueberry pie scene that was later included as a flashback in Cobra Kai and the climactic confrontation between Mr. Miyagi and Cobra Kai dojo sensei John Kreese – which was cut from The Karate Kid, but then the footage was used as the opening scene of The Karate Kid Part II. Fans who read the novelization of The Karate Kid knew that scene two years before they got to see it in the movie’s sequel.
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