Attempting to read 52 books this year. As Stephen King said, "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." Here's the second batch of thirteen:
THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES OF ELMORE LEONARD by Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is best known for his contemporary crime stories, many of which take place in either Detroit or Florida. But when he was just getting the started in the early 1950s, the most popular stories were Westerns. So he started writing short Western stories and selling them to various magazines as he learned his craft by doing. Like the title promises, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard collects all of the Western short stories he ever wrote, with twenty-seven of them being published from December of 1951 to December of 1956. Then the publication dates move ahead into the ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘90s for the last three stories in the book.
Leonard is one of my favorite authors, and whenever I try to put together some prose I keep his “Rules of Writing” in mind. Going through these stories, you get to see the writer find his voice and style. The earliest stories read like they could have been written by any random writer sending material in to Western magazines, but soon enough you see the familiar Leonard style coming through. The descriptions become more succinct, characters start trading more dialogue. It’s really interesting to watch his writing evolve. And as the stories go along, we start getting less of the standard “cowboys and Native Americans” set-ups and more crime stories that just happen to be set in the Old West.
My review of Kevin Smith: His Films and Fans can be read here on Life Between Frames at THIS LINK.
EMPIRE OF THE ‘B’S: THE MAD MOVIE WORLD OF CHARLES BAND by Dave Jay, Torsten Dewi, and Nathan Shumate
I have been a fan of producer Charles Band and his company Full Moon since I was a kid, and in recent years I’ve really started to appreciate Band’s overall career and his output even more. Since I read his memoir Confessions of a Puppetmaster last year and got this year started with Nat Brehmer’s book on the Puppet Master franchise, Empire of the ‘B’s, from the team of Dave Jay, Torsten Dewi, and Nathan Shumate, seemed like the next best step to take on my journey through the world of Charles Band.
I thought Band’s memoir was great, but I was also left wishing that he had gone through his career film-by-film, sharing every recollection he had about the making of each one. It just wasn’t that kind of book – and given that he often sent filmmakers out to make a movie to match a title he had come up with and a poster he had commissioned, chances are he doesn’t have much to say about a lot of those productions. But Empire of the ‘B’s pretty much is the book I had been daydreaming about, up to a point. It covers every movie Band had a hand in from 1973 to 1989, with the authors reviewing each one, providing any behind-the-scenes trivia they managed to dig up, and featuring interviews with people who worked in the cast or on the crew of many of them. The films that came out during the days when Band was running a company called Empire (‘83 – ‘89) are the primary focus, but Band produced more than a dozen movies before he founded Empire, and the authors didn’t neglect those. They get covered just like the Empire output does, and I really appreciated that.
Making Empire of the ‘B’s even more interesting to me is the fact that I haven’t seen nearly as many of the Empire movies as I should have by now. I have seen some, but only a fraction of their output. I’m much more familiar with the Full Moon days. I need to go back and watch my way through the Empire era, and reading about the movies in this book has me hyped to do so.
Empire of ‘B’s was a fascinating read for me, and its 501 pages went by very quickly. I will definitely be revisiting this one as I go on my Empire viewing spree.
HALLOWEEN 3 - “WHERE THE HELL IS MICHAEL MYERS?”: A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF HORROR’S MOST MISUNDERSTOOD FILM by Tommy Lee Wallace
Tommy Lee Wallace had quite a ride with his feature directorial debut, Halloween III: Season of the Witch – which is one of the most divisive entries in the Halloween franchise, since the decision was made to ditch the Michael Myers character in an effort to turn Halloween into an anthology series that would tell a variety of different stories. The fact that we’ve since gotten ten more Michael Myers movies shows how well the anthology idea went over. The initial response to Halloween III was very negative, but the movie gained a cult following over the years, and now it’s quite popular. Enjoying the positive reassessment his movie has gotten, Wallace decided to put together a book about the experience of making it.
I have to admit, I was disappointed by how little new information was in this “definitive history”. There wasn’t a whole lot in here that Halloween fans haven’t already gleaned from commentaries, documentaries, featurettes, or the book Taking Shape. But it’s kind of interesting to hear about the project from Wallace’s perspective, and there are some new revelations in there, especially in regard to the initial screenplay written by Nigel Kneale. There are even some pages from Kneale’s script in the book – and yes, you can easily understand why Wallace and John Carpenter did their own rewrites, causing Kneale to take his name off the movie. Wallace also shares some call sheets and storyboard pages.
One of the most surprising things about the Halloween III story is that nobody, from Carpenter on up to the studio executives, ever seemed to have second-guessed the decision to leave out Michael Myers and tell a different story. They were all so cool with the idea, Universal didn’t even market the film in a way to let audiences know they were going to be in for something completely different. They just put “All New” on the poster and left movie-goers to figure it out from there.
This Halloween 3 book wasn’t as illuminating as I hoped it would be, but it’s another piece for die-hard Halloween fans to add to their collections.
EVIDENCE OF LOVE: A TRUE STORY OF PASSION AND DEATH IN THE SUBURBS by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson
On Friday, June 13, 1980, Texas housewife Candace Montgomery dropped by the home of her pal Betty Gore – and by the time she left the house, she had killed Betty with forty-one swings of an axe. Over the course of the ensuing arrest and trial, Candy admitted to the crime, and said that it was – despite the amount of overkill – done in self defense after Betty had threatened her with the axe for having an affair with her husband. This trial got so much attention, investigative journalist John Bloom and fellow journalist Jim Atkinson decided to write a pair of articles on the shocking story, and then they expanded those articles into this nearly-400-page book that tells pretty much everything you could ever hope to learn about Candy, Betty, their husbands, and the church they both attended. Bloom and Atkinson were able to compile a staggering amount of information, and a lot of it came from extensive interviews with Candy and Betty’s husband Allan. That pair did indeed have an affair in the months before Betty was killed.
Bloom and Atkinson hold off on giving the reader the details of what exactly happened between Candy and Betty. Those don’t come out until she testifies at her trial late in the book. Regardless of what exactly occurred, it was an awful situation... and whether Candy was acting in self defense or not, I found her to be a maddening person to read about.
If you’re interested in true crime stories, Evidence of Love is a very intriguing one. And it’s worth noting that John Bloom happens to be the real person behind the character of drive-in movie critic and movie host Joe Bob Briggs.
THE SHINING by Stephen King
A lot of Stephen King’s books and stories have been adapted for the screen, but The Shining is an example where it’s very difficult to talk about the book without referencing the movie. That’s because director Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining is widely considered to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made – and King has taken many opportunities over the years to mention that he didn’t like the adaptation, singling out the awesome performance delivered by Jack Nicholson as one of the things he didn’t like about it. A lot of fans of the book have also expressed disappointment with the adaptation. So here’s where I stand on the subject: I prefer Kubrick’s film over King’s novel, feeling that Kubrick did a great job of bringing the story to the screen in an interesting way, taking the scares that were set up on the page and improving them along the way while trimming out ideas that wouldn’t have worked in a movie.
But while reading The Shining, I can see why King would take the adaptation more personally than he has in other cases, because this book really comes off like he was Working Stuff Out while writing it. His own issues with alcohol and drugs have been widely publicized, so you can imagine that he could relate to the character of Jack Torrance. A failed teacher and struggling writer who is trying to overcome alcoholism for the sake of his wife Wendy and their young son Danny, who he accidentally injured while drunk. Jack takes a winter caretaker job at an isolated hotel that happens to be packed with restless spirits – entities that little Danny is especially aware of, since he has extra-sensory abilities described as “the shining”.
For a book that centers on three people who are largely confined to one location, The Shining is a very wordy and over-written book that’s packed with stream-of-consciousness deep dives into the minds of each of the characters. Their minds aren’t the most pleasant place to be... really, these people are miserable. Jack and Wendy’s marriage is on shaky ground, Danny is afraid they’re going to split up. And while Jack thinks he’s one of the nicest guys around, it’s clear from very early on that he’s really not that good of a guy. To use a word he favors, he’s a prick. King complains about Jack Nicholson’s version of the character being questionable from the start, but at least Nicholson entertains me in a way the guy on the page doesn’t. For many of The Shining’s pages, there’s not a whole lot actually going on. It’s mostly just Wendy and Danny hanging out and Jack gradually cracking while going through papers on the history of hotel. When the action really kicks in, there’s a balance of the tragic and terrifying (Jack rampaging through the hotel with a mallet) with the goofy (killer hedge animals outside).
The Shining is okay, but when I revisit King’s work it’s a book that I find to be a bit of a chore to get through.
THE WORLD OF SHAFT: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE NOVELS, COMIC STRIP, FILMS AND TELEVISION SERIES by Steve Aldous
As a fan of the Shaft movies – the ones from the ‘70s, the more recent ones, the TV movies, I like them all – I have been very curious to read the series of seven Shaft novels that were written by the character’s creator, Ernest Tidyman. But most of the books have been out of print since the ‘70s, so they’re not the easiest to get your hands on. So while I hold out hope that I’ll someday have the chance to read the Tidyman books, I decided to check out Steve Aldous’s The World of Shaft, which provides a nice overview of the entire franchise. Aldous covers all seven of the Tidyman books here, providing plot synopses, discussing the events and the characters, and giving a review of each one. He also branches out and covers the films and the comic strip that Tidyman unsuccessfully tried to get into newspapers. We get behind-the-scenes stories on both the making of the films and the writing of the books – including the revelation that Tidyman used ghost writers for several of the books, providing other writers with outlines and then doing revisions on the manuscripts they turned in.
At times, The World of Shaft becomes an interesting look at a writer who struggled with the fame of his own character, since the Shaft the world knew from the films didn’t completely match the Shaft he envisioned when he was working on the books... and he started to resent the fact that people had a different idea of Shaft than he did. He even had Shaft speak out against mustaches in a book because the film version of the character had one (but so did Tidyman himself), and unceremoniously had the character killed off in the closing paragraph of book 7. Only the first Shaft film was based on a Tidyman novel, the others have been original stories because it was somehow a cheaper option for MGM to commission an original screenplay than adapt one of the books, despite the studio holding the film rights to the book series. Once MGM finished their initial trilogy, Tidyman was hoping to make another series of movies that would be faithful adaptations of the other novels, but it didn’t work out.
Maybe I’ll get to read the Tidyman books someday, but The World of Shaft was a good read in the meantime. I should note that this book was first published in 2015, so it predates some of the franchise additions that have been written by David F. Walker (who provided a foreword) and the most recent film.
RAGE by Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King)
When Stephen King’s career was first on the rise, publishers felt authors should be limited to one novel per year - but King had more stories he wanted to get out into the world, so he convinced his publisher to let him start putting books out under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in addition to the novels that had his own name on them. The story he chose to be the first Bachman novel was Rage (originally known as Getting It On), which he had written years earlier, when he was a college student. And it is clearly the work of a frustrated youth, telling the story of a troubled high school senior who kills two teachers and holds his algebra class hostage. The unexpected thing about this is, most of the kids in the class don’t mind being held hostage, and they proceed to have deep conversations and reveal hidden personal details to each other. When Rage started being linked to real-life school-based tragedies, King let the book go out of print, and it has been out of print for decades now. I can understand the decision, because events like the ones depicted in the book (and much worse) happen with disgusting regularity these days. But Rage is a novel I have always liked a lot.
In fact, there was a time when I would have said that if I could direct one Stephen King movie, it would be an adaptation of Rage. I wouldn’t say that now because I don’t think the world needs a movie like Rage, but when I was in my late teens and early twenties I could clearly visualize the awesome movie I wanted to make from this source material. I connected with the story because – while I was never violent – I was, like the lead character, a depressed, angry young man with daddy issues. Also, Rage reads like a version of The Breakfast Club where there’s a firearm in the room and everyone speaks like the characters in Stand by Me. An appealing combination if there ever was one.
Rage being out of print makes sense, but I’m glad I still have access to it, because I still enjoy reading it.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by John A. Russo
It seems an odd thing to say about a movie that has been called one of the scariest ever made, but George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead is my most-watched movie because it’s my default choice for relaxing comfort viewing. The black and white cinematography, the sound quality, it’s all very soothing to me. I also love the characters and the story, so I like being immersed in that world over and over again. And as part of my quest to be enveloped in Night of the Living Dead as much as possible, I decided to check out the 1974 novelization, which was written by Romero’s co-screenwriter John A. Russo.
This novelization delivered exactly what I wanted from it: it’s the movie, but in longer form. It sticks to the story we saw on screen and doesn’t go off in many tangents. It also doesn’t dig much deeper into the characters – our likeable but hot-headed lead Ben is really the only one we learn any new information about. (Ben has kids at home that aren’t mentioned in the film.) It’s also interesting to see that, while there’s reference to Ben being African American like the actor (Duane Jones) who ended up being cast in the role, he speaks like the character he was before Jones was cast. Jones brought class and intelligence to the role. On the page, the character was a poorly educated truck driver, so in the book he’s still talking like a yokel.
Russo only branches away from the housebound action of the film to add in some moments with the zombie-hunting posse that’s making its way across the countryside. These were nice, interesting additions. He also softens the tragic ending a bit by adding in a zombie bite we didn’t we in the movie... which leaves me wondering if that was ever in the script, or if Russo just decided the ending of the movie was a bit too harsh.
Since Night of the Living Dead is public domain, other authors have written their own novelizations since Russo released his. Judging by their page counts, it doesn’t look like they did a whole lot of adding to the story, either. Although I have heard that one author gave names and back stories to some of the zombies, which doesn’t seem necessary to me. There is room for a novelization that would expand the stories of everyone who’s trapped in the house with Ben, to give us insight into their lives before they ended up surrounded by zombies... but Russo’s version is the novelization I was hoping it would be when I picked it up. A straightforward telling of one of my favorite stories.
SAUSAGES: THE MAKING OF DOG SOLDIERS by Janine Pipe
2022 marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of Dog Soldiers, which I rank highly as one of the best werewolf movies ever made – and which happens to be the favorite film of author Janine Pipe. To mark the occasion, Pipe interviewed Dog Soldiers writer/director Neil Marshall and several members of the cast and crew so she could assemble the book Sausages: The Making of Dog Soldiers. As Pipe says in the text, Sausages was written as a 300 page celebration of the film, taking us from the days in the mid-’90s when Marshall first had the idea, through the long process of trying to find funding, the production (which sounds like it was a lot of fun), all the way to the release. If you’re wanting to hear gossip or dirty laundry, this isn’t the place to look for it. We haven’t seen a Dog Soldiers sequel yet because Marshall didn’t own the rights and disagreed with the rights holders on how to proceed with a follow-up, but the details aren’t in this book. This one is all about positivity.
Pipe's enthusiasm for Dog Soldiers is obvious on every page of Sausages. She wrote this book as if she were telling a friend about how awesome the movie is, complete with personal asides about how her time as a police officer makes her connect with it even more. It’s always nice to see someone display this much passion for a movie they love, especially when it’s a movie you happen to love as well, so I really enjoyed reading Sausages.
The 300 pages include a 100 page breakdown of the film moment-by-moment, with Pipe's commentary and behind-the-scenes information, and the full text of multiple interviews.
IT CAME FROM THE VIDEO AISLE! INSIDE CHARLES BAND’S FULL MOON ENTERTAINMENT STUDIO by Dave Jay, William S. Wilson, and Torsten Dewi
I’ve been on a literary journey through the life and career of producer and Full Moon Entertainment founder Charles Band off and on for the last year and a half. It started with Band’s own memoir Confessions of a Puppetmaster, continued with Nat Brehmer’s Puppet Master Complete and the book Empire of the ‘B’s from the team of Dave Jay, Nate Shumate, and Torsten Dewi... and now we’ve reached It Came from the Video Aisle!, from a couple of the same writers as Empire of the ‘B’s. While Empire covered the beginning of Band’s filmmaker career through his time running a company called Empire, It Came from the Video Aisle starts when Empire crumbled and Band moved on with Full Moon.
Writing a book about the output of Full Moon was a monumental undertaking. Band has been running various iterations of the company for nearly 35 years now, producing a few hundred movies in the process. But Jay, Dewi, and William S. Wilson did an impressive job here, covering a staggering number of movies in the book’s 480 pages. For the Empire era, they were able to dedicate full chapters to each movie. There are too many Full Moon movies to do that, so some of the films are covered with quick mentions – but they dive deep into the making of more movies that you might expect. The Paramount era, the Kushner-Locke days, the Tempe days, the sub-labels, the start of the streaming service, it’s all in here. There are chapters on individual franchises, and interviews with many of the writers, directors, and other crew members who have been involved with Full Moon over the decades.
I was blown away with what the authors were able to accomplish with It Came from the Video Aisle, and going through its pages was an enjoyable reading experience for this Full Moon devotee. Of course, Full Moon has made a lot more movies since this book was wrapped up for its 2017 publication, so now I’m left wondering: will there be a follow-up sometime down the line, to cover what they’ve missed? If they do it, I’ll read it.
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS by Joe Hill
It’s common knowledge now that writer Joe Hill is Joseph Hillström King, the oldest son of Stephen King. The kid with the voodoo doll in Creepshow. But when he started his writing career, he used the pen name Joe Hill as a way to step out of his father’s shadow and fail or succeed on his own merits. He got a couple books out into the world before his parentage was revealed – and while I have to admit that a large part of my interest in his work is due to who his dad is, I had also seen and enjoyed a couple Joe Hill adaptations before I decided to check out his writing.
Hill’s first book was the collection of short stories 20th Century Ghosts, so this is where I started. Sixteen stories were packed into this collection, and I enjoyed a good number of them. Some were disturbingly twisted, some were bizarre, some felt like old school horror tales, some were simply dramas... and a couple didn’t seem to have much point, but it’s rare for a reader to like every story in an anthology. At times, Hill’s writing was eerily reminiscent of his father’s. And sometimes his unusual childhood experiences shone through. One story takes place on the set of a George A. Romero film, with Tom Savini providing the makeup effects. It’s not Creepshow, though. It’s Dawn of the Dead, and it’s a story of love, loss, and reunion that centers on a couple of the zombie extras. As a Romero fan, I really liked that one.
There’s the story of a haunted movie theatre, which the collection gets its title from. The story of nuclear mutation is where the King style came through most of all. The story that inspired the film The Black Phone is in here. One story is about a man who can fly – and I really wanted it to end in a different way than it did, but I should have seen the actual ending coming the whole time. My favorite story wasn’t horror, but a coming-of-age tale about a boy who’s friends with a living inflatable being.
20th Century Ghosts had its ups and downs, like any short story collection, but I had a good time reading it overall and will definitely be reading more Joe Hill.
NIGHT SHIFT by Stephen King
Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, Night Shift also happens to be the short story collection I have read more times than any other collection out there. It’s a book I remember reading and being traumatized by when I was a young kid. It gave me restless nights. Maybe me afraid of the thing that lives in the closet – a creature I thought I had stopped believing in by the time I read the book. But King made me believe in it all over again.
The majority of the twenty stories in this book are awesome, and many of them have received TV or film adaptations. Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, The Boogeyman, Trucks, Sometimes They Come Back, and Children of the Corn have all become feature films. Trucks received two feature adaptations; the first time around it was Maximum Overdrive, the only movie King has ever directed. The Ledge and Quitters Inc. became segments of the anthology Cat’s Eye. Jerusalem’s Lot served as the basis for the TV show Chapelwaite. Battleground was an episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Gray Matter was brought to the screen in the Creepshow TV series. The list goes on.
The stories feature rat/bat creatures, cults, trucks that drive themselves, possession, killers, vampires, nasty people that have come back from the dead, just plain nasty people, aliens, mutation, a whole lot of strangeness... and yes, the Boogeyman himself. There are also a couple non-horror stories in the mix, but they still deal with devastating loss. King did a great job of writing each one, drawing the reader in and telling them all about these disturbing, creepy things. That’s why I have read the book multiple times since that traumatic read-through when I was a bit too young to be reading about all this.
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