Horror Movie
Published in June of this year, Horror Movie is the latest novel by Paul Tremblay. It’s one of several books published in recent years that seems designed specifically for horror genre fans. It’s the sort of story that makes us wonder, how healthy is this fascination? And how emotionally well are the people who create it?
The story
Our story revolves around, well, a horror movie. In the early nineties, a writer named Cleo and a director named Valentina tried to film their horrific creation. It was a movie about a group of friends trying to make a monster, and succeeding. Now, in the new millennium, the movie that was never finished has become a cult sensation and film companies are battling it out to see who can remake it.
The story is told out of order, with flashbacks littered throughout. Sometimes we’re with the Thin Kid in the past, making the original film. Sometimes we’re with him in the years between, going to conventions. Sometimes we’re in the present, as he meets with directors and agents about remaking Horror Movie.
The best part, however, is the pages of script littered throughout the book. This, of course, is the real story. The Horror Movie that no one ever got to see.
That no one will ever get to see.
What works
Horror Movie is literally a novel about people making a horror movie called Horror Movie. I’m not sure how anything gets more meta than that. And I thought that was hilarious.
This was no small part of the joy of this book. We get to read the script for the movie in the same way that the Thin Kid does. We are often put in the POV of a person watching the movie, even though it never really existed as a full movie.
Through one long scene, possibly the longest in the book, we read exceptional notes from the screenplay. There is a scene in the movie in which, well nothing happens for over five minutes. Which is, you know, a lifetime in a movie. It is a moment of anticipation before The Thin Kid sets upon his victim.
To stretch this anticipation out, the script goes on and on about how people will react to this. How people watching Horror Movie in a theater will react differently than the people watching at home. And how the people watching in a group at home will react differently than people watching the movie alone. They go on and on until you realize that Tremblay is doing exactly what Cleo was doing when she wrote the damn script, stretching out that moment of anticipation as long as possible.
And that’s honestly brilliant.
Horror Movie really is about art imitating life, and people getting wrapped up in their creations. Thankfully, most horror creators don’t put people in unsafe conditions or cut off parts of their bodies. But I think we’ve all heard enough stories about how Hitchcock treated his actors to know that some do.
That being said, the juxtaposition of the way the kids in the movie make a monster, and the way that a monster is made in the making of the movie is amazing. It’s so well done, beat by beat, that we don’t even realize what’s going on until it’s too late.
Finally, I want to shine some light on the main character. He certainly seems like a nice, likable guy. He seems like he cares about seeing this Horror Movie come to life because he put so much work into it. Because people that he cared about put so much of themselves into it. He is so kind, so likable, so endearing, that it’s easy to ignore the fact that we don’t even know, and will never know, his real name. He’s just the Thin Kid.
What didn’t work
My only real complaint for Horror Movie is that sometimes the language is a little too poetic. A little too artsy. And this is coming from someone who is also a writer who understands well the joy of a carefully crafted phrase. It isn’t that the phrasing is bad. It’s just that this sort of language feels out of place in a horror novel. Even if it is about a genius director struggling to see a genius writer’s work come to life.
Overall, Horror Movie was a spectacularly fun read. It was dark, disturbing and thrilling. If you haven’t read it yet, do it now. Though I will say, I hope they never make Horror Movie into a movie. That might be just a little too meta.
(5 / 5)
By the way, if you like this you might enjoy my haunted apartment novella, Quiet Apocalypse. The main character is a modern witch, and I share some real magic in this fictional story of an unexpected end of the world.
Book Reviews
The Twisted Ones
‘Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…’
‘Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…’
Published in October 2019, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher is a modern folkloric, occult horror. Better known for her fairytale retellings, The Twisted Ones is a retelling of Arthur Machen’s 1904 pulp horror classic, ‘The White People’. T. Kingfisher uses her creative license to delve into the myth of the twisted ones, who exist in a specific part of the woods in rural North Carolina. Everyone living near these woods knows something about the white people. Many have seen them, or one of their creations, but all know to stay away.
The Story.
When Mouse is asked by her father to clean out her deceased grandmother’s house, she packs her lovable coonhound Bongo into her truck and heads to the house she has not visited since childhood. Entering the house though, she discovers the job may not be as easy as she thought. Grandma appears to have become a hoarder before she was placed in a care home. There is an entire room of dolls and the stairs are completely blocked by boxes of who knows what. Mouse decides she is up for the task and so begins filling garbage bags. She needs money from the house sale after all.
While emptying her step-grandfather Cotgrave’s bedroom, Mouse uncovers his journal and decides to give it a read. Mouse is a freelance editor and cannot help herself. The journal discusses the existence of the twisted ones, the white people, earworms, and a strange green book that Cotgrave once possessed. There are direct quotes from this book, as he remembers them, and his ideas about interpreting it. Mouse puts the journal aside, writing it off as the ramblings of a man suffering from dementia with racist leanings.
After finding what she calls an effigy hanging in the woods, and then stumbling upon a bald hill that shouldn’t exist, Mouse is drawn back to the journal. Further reading however does not help her. The eerie lines from the journal begin to repeat themselves in her head and unnatural-looking things start to tap at the windows late at night.
Highlights.
Bongo. Enough said. Named after the antelope, not the drum. Mouse’s loveable, sometimes brainless but very charismatic coonhound won my heart. T. Kingfisher has done such a wonderful job characterizing this animal and setting up the bond between Mouse and Bongo, this adds to the overall tense feeling of the story as they both enter risky situations. It is not a spoiler that the dog survives. Mouse makes sure to tell us that all ends well for both of them in the first chapter.
Another highlight are T. Kingfisher’s effigies, descriptions of which are both horrifying and beautiful. The idea of being able to tie, nail, or string together organic and inorganic parts and have a moving creature is bone-chilling (pun intended). But it is the way she describes their movement, the staggering and swaying. There is a strange sadness about them, whilst they still come across as sinister and threatening.
Drawbacks.
It is hard to fault this story, perhaps the slow build of the beginning half of the book is the only thing worth noting. T. Kingfisher takes her sweet time discussing the state of Mouse’s grandmother’s house and Mouse dwells on the fact that she has to clean the place up. There is a lot of complaining and the trips to the truck and the dump become repetitive. That being said, this slow build adds to the overall sense of foreboding in the story and should be expected by readers familiar with folkloric horror.
The Final Take.
This book left me feeling unsettled and getting to the ending was the only way I could resolve that feeling. I couldn’t put the book down simply because I needed closure so the sense of dread would resolve itself. I will never hear the children’s rhyme, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones’ again without chills.
(5 / 5)
If you have been searching high and low for a book in which a devil named Rick, who is the spitting-image of Billy Zane, impregnates a male porn star so that his spawn can finally get into heaven for once, then I’ve found the book for you. From the opening pages, The Devil’s Gunt, by Gerald Dean Rice, launches action sequences, body parts, blood, guts, cum, and vomit at the reader faster than they can dodge, and Dean’s constant clever innuendos (“temptation reared its mushroom-shaped head”) had me laughing out loud at multiple points throughout the book.
What Exactly is The Devil’s Gunt it About?
The Devil’s Gunt follows Median, a current-day porn star, after he finds out he was impregnated with the devil’s spawn. With the help of his roommate Joe, his estranged wife Mary, and a disembodied head in a box, they investigate out how and why the pregnancy occurred while dodging Rick and his demons at every turn. Interspersed throughout this story, we follow Alfred and Milo, from their origins as two supernaturally-gifted boys enslaved on a plantation, to their mysterious involvement in the current day devil-baby debacle.
This horror-comedy-sex-thriller explores almost every subcategory of horror: body, supernatural, family trauma, historical, medical, action, and more. For example, when we first meet Rick the devil (there’s many devils in hell, apparently), he’s impersonating a pony-tail-wearing abortion doctor with a cache of menacing medical tools. Or, after this initial run-in, the trio must flee from demon-shadows that atomize any person they come in contact with. There’s even an interlude in which Alfred and Milo disguise a violent encounter within a mob stampede after the 1929 stock crash.
The only place where The Devil’s Gunt seems to hold back is in the details of the cursed pregnancy itself. How, exactly, is there a baby in there? Where does it come out? How did it get there in the first place? Perhaps in the vein of Frankenstein, Rice leaves the most scientifically confounding, humanly gruesome aspects of the situation up to our imagination.
The Devil’s Gunt is chock-full of subversions of ideas about angels, devils, possession, heaven, and hell. So if you are curious about concepts such as robot-devils or “Scooby-doo Court”, you’ll have to read it for yourself.
(4 / 5)
“It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
‘The Werewolf.’
Published way back in 1979, Angela Carter’s short story anthology The Bloody Chamber is now considered a classic by many people. It is also thought of as one of Carter’s more, if not most, controversial fictional works. It is common knowledge that fairy and folk tales of old are a lot darker than the cartoon versions we are familiar with. Carter takes this darkness to a new level. These stories contain common themes of sexual desire, violence and love. Many of these stories depict explicit sexual descriptions. If you are a person who takes note of trigger warnings be aware. These stories contain scenes that discuss and depict abuse, bestiality, rape, incest and paedophilia.
The Stories.
Each of Carter’s ten stories in The Bloody Chamber collection are based on fairy or folk tales. In several of these stories this is obvious. For example, the collections eponymous story, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, is undoubtedly based on the tale of Bluebeard and Carter’s Puss-in-Boots keeps its original name. We see Beauty and the Beast represented obviously in both ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’.
There are other stories here that only pull at the loose threads of existing fairy or folk tales; taking a single thought or idea and running with it in another direction completely. There are actually several that seem to mashup a combination of stories in one. For example, in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, the plot as a whole feels like a take on Sleeping Beauty, but there is an obvious reference to Jack and the Beanstalk. The Countess reciting the ‘fee, fi, fo, fum’ rhyme of that story to her victim.
Highlights.
I am a sucker for both fairy and folk tales and as such the highlight here for me was seeing characters and parts of plots that are somewhat familiar in a different light. This sort of ‘re-telling’ (for want of a better word) invites the reader to ask ‘what if’ and I think that that is a very powerful thing to do.
There was a certain dark, wintery aesthetic to all of the stories in this collection that was also big highlight for me. The rain, the wind, the snow, I could feel the chill rising off the pages. The repeated images of birds and birdcages, mirrors and roses created ominous feel and really ticked all of the gothic horror boxes.
Drawbacks.
There were two issues that I had with reading this anthology that really made me struggle to get through to the final pages.
The first was the style of Carter’s writing. Yes, I understand that these are adult fairy tales and there is a level of flowery, descriptive writing that is expected to encounter as a result. But I just felt like I was drowning in dense description in several of these stories. So much so that my brain zoned out several times and I had to stop and rewind, turning back to reread several pages at a time.
My second issue was that it often felt like the violence was skimmed over due to the length of some of the stories, one being only two pages long. The reader barely has time to process what has happened before the story had ended and a new one begun. It often felt like getting punched in the face. For some this point might land in the highlights section, but for me it was a big drawback.
Final Take.
The stories in The Bloody Chamber anthology are divisive. Some love every single one of them, others have a strong aversion. For me, I liked a few. My attention was held by ‘The Erl-King’ and the story of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ itself was an enjoyable read.
Overall though, I think this one missed the mark for me. It might only be because the prose was so heavy with description that I had trouble concentrating on the stories themselves. Despite this, The Bloody Chamber is one of those books that everyone should read at least once in their life.
(2.5 / 5)
