As we get right up on Halloween, here's a nice chunk of the horror-related books and toys and whatnot I like to accessorize with at home.
Three old-school Draculas guard the bookshelf...
Horror fiction in various states of read- and unread-ness. You got your King hardcovers that date from when I was in high school, and countless books good and bad I've collected (I do not recommend re-reading It as an adult, however Song of Kali remains perhaps the greatest horror novel I've ever read). I am particularly fond of '70s and '80s paperbacks, mass market/drugstore rack stuff long before it was reprinted at $14 a pop for a movie tie-in. Looking for a nice I Am Legend paperback, cheap, as well as the splatterpunk stuff I used to read nearly 20 years ago that I've since sold off. Wow, very little Straub and what, no Machen or Blackwood! Gotta get on that. Anybody remember the Dell Abyss line? This guy does.
"There is no delight the equal of dread," wrote Liverpudlian Clive Barker in the first lines of his 1984 short story "Dread," collected in Books of Blood Vol. 2. I believed him back then and I believe him now. Also, from the title story: "The dead have highways... Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity." Who could resist the promise of such a glimpse? I picked up Vol. 3 first (can't remember why I chose number three) for one reason only: the infamous quote on the cover from Stephen King. At the time (1986 or '87) that meant a lot to me; it was before King could be counted on to whore up a blurb for any writer (Bentley Little? Really?). "I have seen the future of horror," it went, "and its name is Clive Barker." (For you non-classic rock fans, that's a take on something said early in Bruce Springsteen's career). That was plenty good enough for me. King was right in some ways (the Hellraiser movies, Books of Blood) but wrong in others.
Barker proved to be a world-class talent as a novelist too, with ambitious, layered, magic-realist works like Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1990), and my absolute favorite, Imajica (1991). These books were long, ambitious, mythic, darkly fantastic, erotic, and metaphysical, evoking not just horror fiction like King, Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell or Poe, but also William Blake, Tolkien, kitchen-sink realism, surrealism, Peter Pan, Melville, Joseph Campbell, Jorge Luis Borges; a whole host of influences that most horror fans would (unfortunately) have little familiarity with. I can't recall Dean Koontz ever talking about the impact Les yeux sans visage, The Story of the Eye, or The Holy Mountain had on his fiction. Reading Barker improved my cultural literacy when I was just a teenager in a way no AP literature class could have.
He is also a wonderful and quite accomplished artist. You can see his dense, colorfully macabre paintings in Clive Barker: Illustrator I and II. And before he started his career as a published writer, he had written and produced crazy-quilt Grand Guignol plays, collected in Forms of Heaven (1995) and Incarnations (1996). And then children's books like The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (ongoing); and latter-day more mainstream, yet still visionary, novels like Sacrament (1996) and Galilee (1998). Whew.
Despite these incredible accomplishments, Barker's name is always associated with horror. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it puts Barker in a box (Lemarchand's box, one assumes) too confining for a popular artist. What else is new, right? Look at his stunning artwork for the UK editions of Books of Blood. Come on, what popular author can do all this? I have a print of Vol. III's cover framed and hanging in my bedroom, it looks awesome! And this is a seriously Gothed-out me meeting Mr. Barker in January 1991 at a Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in New York City. Here he's signing my Nightbreed (his 1990 "epic" monster movie) poster. Seems pretty excited to meet me, doesn't he?
I met him several times over the years at these conventions, and he was always terrifically engaging. During one Q&A I asked him why he thought horror should be "subversive," another time why we were so drawn to monsters and scenes of chaos and death. He answered my questions with enthusiasm, and suffered idiotic questions ("How do you get to the third level on the Hellraiser videogame?" "Will you and Stephen King ever write a novel together?" "What kind of shoes does Pinhead wear?") with smiling tolerance. One year we agreed that only David Cronenberg could adapt the then-upcoming movie version of William Burroughs's seminal Beat novel Naked Lunch; and then recommended I see Bernard Rose's Paperhouse (which has proved elusive). Barker is well-known for making hours-long appearances to sign whatever item someone has and meet his fans. Gracious, funny, patient, Clive Barker is genuinely a great and unique artist who truly enjoys interacting with the people who love his work and well understands the connection we have with him.
"Lewis turned on the radio and dialed until he found the Ramones belting out 'Rockaway Beach.' He turned it up and sang along - not well but with lusty enjoyment." from Pet Sematary by Stephen King, p. 52
When I was a teenager in the mid- to late-1980s, two of the biggest stars in my personal universe were punk rock kings the Ramones and bestselling horror writer Stephen King. I couldn't get enough of either one, and spent plenty of time and money getting my hands on everything related to them. Didn't matter that I had to be at school in the morning; I'd be up until 2 a.m. with Night Shift or 'Salem's Lot or Different Seasons listening to Rocket to Russia or Pleasant Dreams or Animal Boy. Weren't those the days?
King had referenced the Ramones in several of his books, and King is name-checked in a Ramones song or two, but it wasn't until 1989 that these two mighty heroes of mine joined forces in what at first seemed improbable: the Ramones would perform the title track for the movie adaptation of King's gruesome 1983 novel, Pet Sematary.
Since their debut album in 1976 the Ramones had never been shy about incorporating their love of horror movies; songs like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Pinhead," and "I Don't Want to Go Down to the Basement" are charming tunes influenced by the genre. Alice Cooper they were not, but performing in the Lower East Side throughout the '70s brought them in close proximity to the original grindhouses. The influence couldn't help but rub off. Here they are on MTV. Jeez, something about the Ramones on MTV in 1989 just seems wrong.
Written by Dee Dee Ramone and Ramones collaborator Daniel Rey, "Pet Sematary" appeared on their 1989 album Brain Drain. While the movie itself leaves much to be desired in many respects, I think "Pet Sematary" is one of the band's better latter-day songs. I particularly love how they incorporated their patented "don't wanna" sentiment into the chorus.
Performing with World's Most Dangerous Band on Late Night with David Letterman reveal a not-too-uncomfortable-looking Joey and Johnny without, oddly, Dee Dee or Marky. Check out Paul Shaffer's look of utter befuddlement at 1:54! Awesome. And half of the Ramones on Letterman just doesn't quite fit.
But the Ramones, who should have been the most popular punk rock band of all time, performing one of their greatest songs on behalf of Stephen King, pop-horror's greatest practitioner? That seems most right of all. And yet...
"In the night when the moon is bright, Someone cries, something ain't right..."
It's practically October and it's time for my yearly ritual of watching (virtually) nothing but horror movies all month long. I know, I know, you're saying, "Will, you always watch horror movies, tell us something we don't know." Well, I go by the old William Burroughs adage that you can't tell somebody something they don't already know, and hence, this post. Monday night I trudged through 1972's The Other, a sloooow-moving period piece about young twin brothers, based on an interesting, pre-Stephen King horror bestseller by Thomas Tryon.
Tryon's a minor figure in the annals of '70s horror fiction. Once a pretty-boy actor in B movies and television, he ended up leaving that field for literature, and produced two bestsellers in the "show don't tell" school of quiet horror in the very early 1970s, long before Stephen King came along and revolutionized the genre. (His other horror novel was Harvest Home, and both books are long out of print, although you can buy them for probably like a quarter at any decent used bookstore).
Director Robert Mulligan, who also directed that masterpiece of idyllic--or not-so-idyllic--childhood, To Kill a Mockingbird--doesn't nearly reach the heights of that film (it would be unfair to expect him to) but does a decent job here. Actually the film is more like a made-for-television movie, and indeed, it only had a very short theatrical run before being relegated to TV reruns throughout the decade, which is where it gained status as a minor cult film. And I'm fairly convinced I saw The Other when I was a kid (thanks mom!), because certain images and revelations filtered through a recurring nightmare I used to have, and watching The Other the other day I was surprised and bemused to find that the major twist of the story was my nightmare exactly. Forget the movie, remember the nightmare. Niles and Holland Perry are twins in the country town of Pequot Landing, Connecticut, running about their family's farm during the long hot summer of 1935. You remember how it was: apple cellars, hay lofts, jalopies, knick-knacks like amputated fingers, secret treasures, old Russian grandmothers, dead fathers, the Lindbergh baby. Just need the Pepperidge Farm man and some Country Time lemonade. And you know you have to ask: just what is it with the Perry twins? Something, as is so often said, ain't right.
"I'm not the creepy one! Honest I'm not!"
The twins are played by Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, who never, ever made another film. This lends them a timeless quality in The Other that makes them creepier than if they'd grown up in the public eye, although of course [insert obvious Olsen twins joke right about here]. Their acting is a bit wobbly, and the rest of the cast is just so-so, although the great theater actress/teacher Uta Hagen does a nice, just slightly-hammy job as Ada, the twins' grandmother. Guess what happens to her! That's not very nice.
"I'm the creepy one! But it'll be our little secret."
I'm not even going to get all into it; I cheated and fast-forwarded through a lot of the DVD with the subtitle function on. You know how it goes: mysterious deaths, accidental "accidents," lanterns in old barns filled with straw. Someone noted it was like "The Waltons meet The Omen." Still and all, it had its moments of slow, creeping--well, not horror, exactly, but I'm of the firm mind that children are... horrible. So this movie confirms my favorite prejudice. It's not a bad film by any means; the DVD looks great, the cinematography has some really nicely done aerial shots of the farmland, and the tension between the psychological/supernatural aspects of the story is provocative. But the pace is so languid, even tepid in places, so dated to the early '70s that it can be tough going.
If you're interested, you could just watch the trailer, which does an excellent job of mashing the 2-hour film into three minutes, and with a menacing voiceover and eerie music to boot!
Two points if you can figure out just what Holland did with the baby!
Since the death of Tom Snyder several weeks ago, I got to thinking again about "the irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison," who Snyder interviewed famously many times over the years. One of my most favoritest writers ever of all time, I was introduced to Ellison's writing when I was around 14 or 15, when I borrowed Strange Wine from the local library after reading about Harlan in Stephen King's Danse Macabre. And in those many years since, I've amassed nearly 30 copies of his books, most all of which are long out of print but can be found through diligence and patience scouring used bookstores.
Deathbird Stories, a collection of his early ’70s works, is one I had not read in some time. It's essential Ellison. It contains some of his tightest, most controlled works: moody and enigmatic, laced with an existential dread while displaying an unnerving knack for an ugly, yet appropriate, climax, like a crack of the whip—or a snap in the neck. The collection is subtitled “A Pantheon of Modern Gods,” which is the height of irony—is there anything less modern than a god? That’s exactly the point: people are still desperate to worship, to prostate themselves before some imagined superior power or any strange artifact that can somehow impart meaning upon this random and unexplainable life. And Ellison, despite his compassion for such poor souls, spares none in these moral fables.
"I am a religious man," states the melancholic protagonist of "Corpse." "One would think that would count for something. Apparently it does not." Then there's the gut-wrenching "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," in which Ellison recreates the chilling murder of Kitty Genovese as an act of sacrifice to a new and terrifying god. "The Deathbird," the final story, is an emotionally exhausting reimagining of the origin of evil—in the form of a multiple-choice final exam.
I can still remember the first time I read these stories, a hot summer in 1988 sitting in the stifling office of the gas station I worked at, filling my head with Ellison’s rants and ravings and obscure references that didn’t make me feel stupid or inferior—no, it was exciting, it made me feel like I had a lot to learn, and I had better get caught up fast. As he states in the intro, “As the God of Time so aptly put it, It’s later than you think.”
I collect vintage horror paperbacks. Co-author, with Grady Hendrix, of the Bram Stoker Award-winning PAPERBACKS FROM HELL: THE TWISTED HISTORY OF '70s AND '80s HORROR FICTION (2017) from Quirk Books
Some of my beloved Sideshow monster toys!
A stack of horror movie books. You cannot go wrong with The Overlook Horror Encyclopedia, The Book of the Dead, Nightmare Movies, or Immoral Tales! Get your Netflix queue ready.
And Clive Barker's demonic ladies guard over his works below.
"There is no delight the equal of dread," wrote Liverpudlian Clive Barker in the first lines of his 1984 short story "Dread," collected in Books of Blood Vol. 2. I believed him back then and I believe him now. Also, from the title story: "The dead have highways... Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity." Who could resist the promise of such a glimpse?
I picked up Vol. 3 first (can't remember why I chose number three) for one reason only: the infamous quote on the cover from Stephen King. At the time (1986 or '87) that meant a lot to me; it was before King could be counted on to whore up a blurb for any writer (Bentley Little? Really?). "I have seen the future of horror," it went, "and its name is Clive Barker." (For you non-classic rock fans, that's a take on something said early in Bruce Springsteen's career). That was plenty good enough for me. King was right in some ways (the Hellraiser movies, Books of Blood) but wrong in others.
Barker proved to be a world-class talent as a novelist too, with ambitious, layered, magic-realist works like Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1990), and my absolute favorite, Imajica (1991). These books were long, ambitious, mythic, darkly fantastic, erotic, and metaphysical, evoking not just horror fiction like King, Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell or Poe, but also William Blake, Tolkien, kitchen-sink realism, surrealism, Peter Pan, Melville, Joseph Campbell, Jorge Luis Borges; a whole host of influences that most horror fans would (unfortunately) have little familiarity with. I can't recall Dean Koontz ever talking about the impact Les yeux sans visage, The Story of the Eye, or The Holy Mountain had on his fiction. Reading Barker improved my cultural literacy when I was just a teenager in a way no AP literature class could have.
He is also a wonderful and quite accomplished artist. You can see his dense, colorfully macabre paintings in Clive Barker: Illustrator I and II. And before he started his career as a published writer, he had written and produced crazy-quilt Grand Guignol plays, collected in Forms of Heaven (1995) and Incarnations (1996). And then children's books like The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (ongoing); and latter-day more mainstream, yet still visionary, novels like Sacrament (1996) and Galilee (1998). Whew. 
I have a print of Vol. III's cover framed and hanging in my bedroom, it looks awesome!
And this is a seriously Gothed-out me meeting Mr. Barker in January 1991 at a Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in New York City. Here he's signing my Nightbreed (his 1990 "epic" monster movie) poster. Seems pretty excited to meet me, doesn't he? 
When I was a teenager in the mid- to late-1980s, two of the biggest stars in my personal universe were punk rock kings the Ramones and bestselling horror writer Stephen King. I couldn't get enough of either one, and spent plenty of time and money getting my hands on everything related to them. Didn't matter that I had to be at school in the morning; I'd be up until 2 a.m. with Night Shift or 'Salem's Lot or Different Seasons listening to Rocket to Russia or Pleasant Dreams or Animal Boy. Weren't those the days?
King had referenced the Ramones in several of his books, and King is name-checked in a Ramones song or two, but it wasn't until 1989 that these two mighty heroes of mine joined forces in what at first seemed improbable: the Ramones would perform the title track for the movie adaptation of King's gruesome 1983 novel, Pet Sematary.
But the Ramones, who should have been the most popular punk rock band of all time, performing one of their greatest songs on behalf of Stephen King, pop-horror's greatest practitioner? That seems most right of all. And yet...
It's practically October and it's time for my yearly ritual of watching (virtually) nothing but horror movies all month long. I know, I know, you're saying, "Will, you always watch horror movies, tell us something we don't know." Well, I go by the old William Burroughs adage that you can't tell somebody something they don't already know, and hence, this post. Monday night I trudged through 1972's The Other, a sloooow-moving period piece about young twin brothers, based on an interesting, pre-Stephen King horror bestseller by Thomas Tryon.
Tryon's a minor figure in the annals of '70s horror fiction. Once a pretty-boy actor in B movies and television, he ended up leaving that field for literature, and produced two bestsellers in the "show don't tell" school of quiet horror in the very early 1970s, long before Stephen King came along and revolutionized the genre. (His other horror novel was Harvest Home, and both books are long out of print, although you can buy them for probably like a quarter at any decent used bookstore).
"I'm not the creepy one! Honest I'm not!"
"I'm the creepy one! But it'll be our little secret."
Since the death of Tom Snyder several weeks ago, I got to thinking again about "the irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison," who Snyder interviewed famously many times over the years. One of my most favoritest writers ever of all time, I was introduced to Ellison's writing when I was around 14 or 15, when I borrowed Strange Wine from the local library after reading about Harlan in Stephen King's Danse Macabre. And in those many years since, I've amassed nearly 30 copies of his books, most all of which are long out of print but can be found through diligence and patience scouring used bookstores.
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