Wanderreading...

My reading has been directionless and serendipitous lately. One of the movie channels ran a series of films based on great books and so after my stint with the Spanish Flu, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, (which was slightly disappointing compared to his great short story collections and the magnificent So Long, See You Tomorrow), and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, I let this cable station steer my literary rudder.

Triggered by the films I’ve seen, I read or reread E.M. Forster’s Howards End and A Room With a View, then Peter Carey’s wonderful Oscar and Lucinda. Merchant and Ivory managed to perfectly capture Forster’s spare prose and deceptively simple plots but Gillian Armstrong could not visually paint the magical language of the Booker Prize winning Oscar and Lucinda, despite starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett as the leads.

Into the Wild on HBO shamed me into finally reading a book I’ve been hand selling for years to parents of “boys who don’t like to read but like outdoors stuff”. Kind of funny, considering how I devoured Jon Krakauer’s other book about the fatal to climb Mount Everest, Into Thin Air, in my drafty third floor apartment in New Haven under a quilt during a bitter cold snap. Better there, than on Everest.

I had an advanced reader’s copy of Into the Wild, a prepublication edition sent by the publishers to reviewers and booksellers, which means I’ve been putting off reading it for 13 years. It was well worth it. Sean Penn’s adaptation really just focuses on Christopher McCandless’s journey across America and makes it look epic, but the book has a much larger scope and, of course, more material about the people McCandless met in his journey. It’s short, just under 180 pages - very non-threatening to some kid who thinks reading is agony - but it’s also very well written.

Then I stumbled across some very schlocky film adaptations of some H.P. Lovecraft stories, which drove me to reread from my collections of his schlocky works. Lovecraft is one of those writers whose ideas sound great on paper and are very influential in horror fiction, but whose images just look silly on film . Neil Gaiman said something once about how Lovecraft’s great monster, "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", part dragon, part octopus, part demon, Cthulhu looks absolutely ridiculous when depicted on screen. They sometimes look silly on paper too.

After this reading sherbet, time for a bigger project.

Scary Movie

When I was a kid, WPIX Channel 11 from New York would run Chiller Theatre from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday nights, playing sci-fi and horror movies. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this mix of schlocky 60s Japanese monster movies and the bloodier baroque horrors coming from Europe.



WPIX would always show a trailer at 10 p.m. right before the nightly news for a horror movie opening that weekend. I can distinctly remembering being absolutely scared out of my socks by the trailer for Dario Argento’s 1977 horror movie Suspiria. Evidently I could only stand to watch the first 20 seconds, probably running to hide under my bed once the woman brushing her hair turns around to the camera, as THAT is the only part I remember at all.



For some reason, I never did get to see the film. It had a reputation for being another of those misogynistic slasher films that is more about half naked women trying to escape some slow walking maniac with a knife than anything with intelligence. But last weekend Turner Movie Classics showed Suspiria on its TCM Underground program and I stayed up to the wee hours watching it and found myself actually enjoying it.

Aside from the gory, elaborate colorful deaths (this was the last film made using the Technicolor process) there is a fairy tale aspect to this story of a young dancer being sent to a ballet school run by a coven of evil witches. Think The Red Shoes by way of The Omen. It has a wild soundtrack by the group Goblin, gorgeous set design and some pretty horrific scenes, like a woman falling into a room filled with razor wire. The film ends up on a lot of best of lists and while I would not compare it to more dramatically tighter horror films like The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby, it has a certain loud originality and charm that cannot be overlooked.

Susan: this is not a film for you.

Books for the creeps

The Hallowe’en books are still on the displays and I can’t tell you how many people I’ve helped recently who said they were buying early Christmas presents. Like the overachiever who finishes the test way ahead of everyone else and cheerfully parades his paper to the teacher while the rest of us toil away, I meet these people with a mixture of envy and irritation. Perhaps it's only appropriate that our front table, the one you see when you first walk in our store, is covered with piles of scarlet red books: Lisey's Story by Stephen King (ISBN: 0743289412) and State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward (ISBN: 0743272234).

We have Hallowe’en displays galore and are selling everything from Stephen King’s more recent titles to It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (ISBN: 068984607X for the 35th Anniversary Edition). My two favorite books for this time of year are The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (ISBN: 0140071083 or 0143039989) and The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror by David J. Skal (ISBN: 0571199968).

The Monster Show is a wonderful critical analysis of the history of American horror movies and how the horrors and the anxieties of the real world were echoed on the screen. George Romero’s Living Dead films are often sited as having a racial or political agenda, but Skal also makes cases for how horror films like Tod Browning’s Freaks, It’s Alive, and other schlocky delights base their origins in real cultural fears.

The Haunting of Hill House is probably the most perfect haunted house novel you will ever read. Before you send me emails asking “what about The Shining (ISBN: 0743424425)?” just know that Stephen King freely admits he stole from Hill House to decorate the Overlook Hotel . It has qualities of a fairytale as Eleanor leaves her dull practically non-existent life as a spinster to join a trio of merry ghost hunters at this house whose malevolence overwhelms them. It is dreamy in parts as Eleanor meets her fellow researchers and then turns deadly serious when, in the middle of the night, something starts banging on doors and the hand that she clutches in the dark may belong to no one at all.

Hill House scared the HELL out of me! I first read it while I working an overnight shift at a creaky old house in the woods at a school for disturbed adolescents. I reread it once a year it or watch the very faithful 1963 film (ignore the 1999 unimaginative adaptation) and get creeped out again and again.