Book Club of Desolation #3: Blood Feast (1963), by H.G. Lewis

Blood Feast may not have been the first trash movie I watched in this life. That honor goes to the ever-amusing I Eat Your Skin. But it was just a few short years after my first trembling, awkward encounter with the subgenre that would define my entire rueful, piteous existence that Blood Feast became another famous first. It was my first naive intimation with trash literature. While I only recently embraced the idea that trash literature could really exist, a hunger was born in me on those lazy high school days where nothing seemed bigger than being harassed by my teachers for reading a book with a cover and title like that. In those days, trash movies filled me with a vim and vigor that has maybe faded a little. Day jobs, bills, and mental instability have caught up with me, and now it seems like there is so little time--or energy--for movies. But there is a new chase now, and Blood Feast: The Novel started it all. My descent into trash books has just begun, and just as Blood Feast: The Movie is a great starting destination for the fecund road trip of cinema's most grotesque and bizarre, Blood Feast: The Novel will be show you that your local library can host sideshows too. In H.G. Lewis' prose, you'll be prepared for greater guardians of the deeps, like Ron Haydock. And from there, you'll maybe--just maybe--be safe in making the jump to Harry Stephen Keeler...

The plot of the Blood Feast book is essentially the same as the Blood Feast movie. "Essentially" being the key word. Fuad Ramses is still getting up to the ol' sacrifice-body-parts-to-Ishtar racket, and the police are still chasing him as he schemes to host his deadly Egyptian Feast. The book knows that you know the movie. And so that's why Blood Feast decides not to focus on the plot of Blood Feast at all, instead building intrigue in the world in which the film was set. That's why we spend a solid couple of pages learning about how the police chief killed his brother by accidentally stabbing him with a heroin needle, or how one of Ramses' murder victims once employed a secretary whose boobs were so big that she couldn't use a typewriter. (I assume she was Liliana "Chesty Morgan" Wilczkowska, taking a rest from crushing gangsters' skulls.) By the time we reach twenty pages, we've encountered so many sub-subplots and characters that it reaches DC Universe levels of continuity management. Just as every sentence is backstory, every line of dialogue is a joke of "that kind" of '60s humor:

"'What's that?' Squigg said quickly.

"'My mother's wart,' Thornton said uncomfortably. 'She had one like yours. She had it taken care of.'

"'What's wrong with a wart, Mr. Thordown?'

"'Thornton, Mrs. Squagg.'

"'Squigg, Mr. Thordown. Get it right.'

"'Yes, ma'am.'"

Name mispronunciation! Subtler and funnier here than it ever was in Godzilla '98.

Or how about the list of evil books Fuad Ramses keeps on his shelf: Wyer's De Prestigious Doemonum, Leloyer's History of Spectres, and...Voegtle's Dennis the Menace. (Wait, who's Voegtle?)

There is a new central plot in this one. Thornton and the other police spend a great deal of the book pursuing not Fuad Ramses, but a Mr. Karl Snarling, Cat Hangman Extraordinaire. Indeed, Snarling has committed the horrible crime of putting a poor pussy (a literal cat, I should say) to the gallows, and for that, society must punish him. Never mind the insane cultist with a machete, who was an actual character in the movie

Even as the police ignore Fuad Ramses, we learn much more about him than we ever could have previously hoped for. Fuad Ramses is elevated to the level of pulp villains gods that also hosts Doc Savage's John Sunlight or The Shadow's Voodoo Master. You see, years ago in Egypt, little Fuad's father was a drug dealer for Sphinx Cigarettes, which offer such "brands" as Half-and-Hashish and Cocaine-Cocakola. Fuad was addicted to these sickly cigs for much of his youth, and because the drugs in Sphinxes fuck up your blood pressure, all of his hair fell out. Thus he was known to the criminal underworld as "the Elliptical Egyptian," for the shape of his head. Evidently his floury hair in the movie was a wig, then. In addition to murderously worshipping Ishtar and being a drug dealer, Ramses is also a practical joker, though he pursues these "jokes" out of pure belligerence. The pranks range from scaring housewives with fake ghosts to throwing smokebombs into crowded movie theaters. All in the name of being eeeevil. It is mind-blowing. Indeed, Blood Feast is a pulp novel of the highest caliber, and that exposes a deeper level of its beauty...

Blood Feast serves as a fascinating glimpse into a fascinating man. This is the mind of the man who changed trash-horror and exploitation forever. A mind nourished on the weirdest of yesteryear's pulps, mixed with carny nostalgia and a cartoon sense of humor. The sort of stuff that cannot be properly conveyed on film, not for the sort of money Herschell Gordon was working with. Lensed through a paperback market that barred no content as long as there were books on the shelf and cash flowing in. This wasn't the last of Lewis' expeditions into the world of printed fiction, but sadly later entries were toned down. The director also penned novelizations of his ludicrous Two Thousand Maniacs, as well as the less entertaining duo of Color Me Blood Red and Moonshine Mountain, before reverting strictly to filmmaking guide books. I've yet to find copies of the latter two novels, even if they, like the Maniacs book, don't stray as much from the source material as Blood Feast. If you've got 'em, I'll buy 'em...!

Blood Feast: The Novel reminds one of the essential truth of trash's beauty--it contains splinters of the creator's soul. Stream-of-consciousness has never been purer or stranger, because the consciousness in question has already proved its owner's talent on film. It's still hard to believe this one exists, all those years after high school. Let it take you away.

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