The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), by Joseph H. Lewis

Lionel Atwill is resurrecting the dead, like a goddamn asshole. Won't you step into his lab on old Market Street?

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Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973), by Julio Salvador and Ray Danton

You asked for vampires...you can fang me later.
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The Ghastly Ones (1968), by Andy Milligan

LGBT PRIDE IS HERE!!! Get your gay on with Andy Milligan and his island of murder!

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Fog Island (1945), by Terry O. Morse

In my review for The Black Raven I mentioned the brief period of joy in my life where I would settle in after a late night shift to watch an hour-long George Zucco thriller. Now that I'm back to reviewing, I've been finding enough Crazy Shit to make me see the weaknesses of these clunky old mysteries, but I didn't want to leave such a significant portion of my life without paying it proper due--though I know there's at least one other piece of Zuccoana I want to get into. The Black Raven and Fog Island are rather similar, in that they feature George Zucco as a noble criminal who ends up both outplaying and being outplayed by the various other criminals who wash up at his mysterious isolated house. The Black Raven didn't have Lionel Atwill or Ian Keith, however, and that makes worlds of difference.

Leo Grainger (Zucco) is an ex-convict whose wife Karma was murdered by one of his former business confederates. In addition to killing Karma they also swindled him out of his money and got him thrown in prison. However, they know they didn't get the whole of the sum they helped him embezzle, and now, on remote Fog Island, where he lives with his stepdaughter Gayle, Leo is in the prime position to use that remaining money as a lure to get revenge on his wife's killer. The assembled goons are Alec Ritchfield (Atwill), John Kavanaugh, phony medium Emiline Bronson, Sylvia, who turned on Leo when he married Karma and not her, and Jeff Kingsley, whose father, the subject of Leo's invitation, has passed away. Also joining them is a prison buddy of Leo's named Lake, who is posing as a doctor to subvert the guests. Then it's on to some pure shenanigans, Old Dark House style.

The acting is great in this. Zucco is wonderful as a calm, sophisticated man nonetheless driven singularly by revenge. His final breakdown before his death, the splintering of his serenity, is hammy but convincing. He also spends most of his time passive-aggressively mocking his guests about their coming demises. Edward G. Robinson he ain't, but he's never as bad as everyone says he is. Then there's Lionel Atwill--sadly close to his premature death, he nonetheless fulfills his usual quota of stuffiness, now accomplished fittingly by the flabby chins which protrude over his collar. He makes lovely faces in this and shows no signs of slowing down even thirteen years after Doctor X. He can say "Tut, tut," to someone and make it seem natural. I love him. Finally, there is Ian "Ormond Murks" Keith--slimy as always, he gets a chance to murder someone (resolving a pointless red herring about Leo's butler being an ex-con in the process), and it's pretty great. I want to see all of Ian Keith's movies. Damn.

The rest of this review will consist of me simply naming the things I liked. There are definitely some oddities here that put flesh on the film's bones.

I have to talk about the character of Jeff. Jeff, like Creepy Guy from Pillow of Death, is a Creepy Guy. He used to date Gayle in college, which is kind of a huge coincidence if you think about it. He's one of those '40s movie "heroes" who continually steps on his "love" interest's toes, ignores her wishes, and then does something unspeakable to her at the end. In this case, he covers up that Gayle's stepfather has been murdered, with the implication being that he will never tell her. Presumably that means they'll share a lifetime of her yearning to return to the man who helped raise her, only for her husband to block her at every turn, until she's forced to conclude that he's died of old age. I extrapolate based on the weird humor that Jeff displays while performing the cover-up.

Then there's the fact that Emiline, who is played as a phony psychic all throughout the movie, accurately predicts her own death. Maybe that wasn't a coincidence that joined Gayle and Jeff--if psychic powers really exist in this universe, then maybe black magic does too, and Jeff cursed Gayle to link her to him. It all makes sense!

I have to comment also on the scene where Emiline and Alec are speaking, and she asks him to get her a book to help her sleep. Kavanaugh recommends "something light" and he picks out Crime and Punishment. Like, I get the joke, but when I think "light reading" Dostoyevsky is not the first guy to come to mind. Just an observation.

Finally, there is an odd scene between Gayle and Sylvia, which I read as being hella gay. Let's just say that when an older woman starts talking to a younger one about the quality of her skin and how she should take care of it, there's some coding involved...even though this certainly isn't positive representation. Fortunately it's not like "lesbians are predatory" is a theme or anything but it's a testament to the lowness the times these movies were made in stooped to at times.

All in all, however, Fog Island is probably the '40s mystery for me--nothing extraordinary by any means, but still a fun, cozy movie to curl up with. Long live Zucco.

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The Intruder (1933), by Albert Ray

Why are movies so weird? Well, I suppose because people made them that way. With movies like The Intruder I can get back into the psychosis of trash cinema--the strange neural lapses, the personality tics, that made people make these...things. The Intruder is a screwed-up little movie, a possible relic of that bizarre, magical era where filmmakers didn't really know the new medium they were working with, leading to clunky mismatches of genre that leave the whole affair just downright odd. Trying all at once to be a zany comedy, a mystery movie, and a horror thriller, The Intruder ends up being both implicitly and explicitly disturbing, hard to put into words and yet all the while, shockingly mundane.

We open in the middle of a Godzilla movie, by which I mean we open with a hilariously fake-looking toy ship that looks like it belongs, at best, in the third Blind Dead film, The Ghost Galleon. This ship is the titular Intruder, and not only is there a man aboard with half a million dollars in stolen diamonds, but a murder has been committed as well. It seems like an ordinary stagey '30s mystery, with the detective lining up and interrogating the suspects...and then the weirdness happens. A fire breaks out on the ship and the passengers are lost at sea. Here, they end up on a desert island (?) where they are threatened by a gorilla who makes horrible screeching noises (!) and a wild man with a Tarzan yodel (!!!). (The actual shipwreck scene is surprisingly harrowing, with dozens shown drowning, despite the apparent plethora of lifeboats.) Said wildman lives in a ruined cabin with the bones of his (wife? girlfriend? victim?) "Mary" and "Joe," the man who apparently stood between them. This movie features a wild man wrestling with an inanimate skeleton, screaming angrily. This is all treated very casually up until they get off the island and wrap up the murder/theft.

I'm sure the reasons behind this movie are much more ordinary than I'm imagining. I suspect that this began life as an ordinary mystery B-programmer, but a studio mandate told director Ray to throw in a jungle segment, with a wild man and a guy in a gorilla suit, and so that just had to happen. It all worked to Ray's benefit anyway, as the lengthy divergences we delve into on the island help pad out what would otherwise be a duller-than-cardboard mystery film. It still ends up just under 54 minutes. With the release of Ingagi two years prior, gorilla films and jungle films in general started their vogue. My Gods, this movie was probably trying to cash in on an exploitation movie that said that Africans have children with gorillas.

It was also still pretty popular at the time to have comedy be part of your mystery, and to cross over into horror wasn't unexpected either. That's why we get things like the comic relief drunk uncle, because alcoholism is so fucking funny. This is also why there are lines like, "Now I know why Robinson Crusoe called his Man Friday--they ate fish everyday," in the same context as a murderous caveman and a shitton of people fucking drowning. (Gotta love the shots of the people drowning intercut with several of our main characters standing on the most spacious lifeboat ever. Seriously, you could fit at least four more people into that thing!) This is where another old friend comes out to play: the fact that They Just Didn't Care.

Let's talk about our murderous caveman for a bit. There are several possibilities present in his little story, each more disturbing than the last. It seems pretty obvious that he murdered "Joe," but we don't know Joe's role in things. He could have threatened the Wild Man and "Mary," or maybe Mary originally dated Joe and the Wild Man wanted a different arrangement. The review for this movie on Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings puts forth the possibility that if the Wild Man still stabs Joe's skeleton like he's alive, what does he do with Mary's remains...? Ewww! Add in the fact that we don't know if Mary herself died a natural death and you have an entire secret horror movie packed away on this island.

I just really don't know what to say about this one. Aside from the sheer oddity of how far the script diverges from its original premise, there isn't much to write home about--it's clunky and stage-like, as I said, and the actor's voices sometimes barely rise above the set's sound effects due to the cheap, primitive recording equipment. It never perfectly holds my attention and really likes spinning its wheels, when already most of it is padding. But it's so unique and peerless even beyond its native era by sheer concept alone that it's worth at least one watch. At 53 minutes, how can you refuse?

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Book Club of Desolation #21: Spiridon (1907), by Andre Laurie

And so it is that Bookvember 2017 comes to a close with another book about unusual ants. The Ant with the Human Soul was one of three ant-related texts which I knew would turn up on the site sooner or later; Spiridon is the second of them, and I'm sure that at some point in 2018 I'll be cracking open The Ants of Timothy Thummel as well. This will be part of my new initiative, which is to feature Book Clubs of Desolation every third week of the month. In the meantime, Spiridon is a fun way to close out the year--a strange ethical fable by a man famed for collaborating with Jules Verne.

Spiridon tells the story of Dr. Aristide Cordat, a young French med student who, with the aid of his Asian friend Baron Tasimoura, has brought new medical miracles to Europe. Surgeries that heal terrible illnesses in minutes, drugs that induce swift recovery--there seems to be no limit to the talent of the Cordat-Tasimoura team. We find out why Tasimoura seems to possess superhuman knowledge: he is superhuman. Specifically, he is actually Spiridon, the Emperor of a race of ants living in the ruins of an old Phoenician treasure-tower on an Italian island. After nearly ending up as one of Spiridon's vivisection victims while exploring the tower, Cordat discovered the various wonders of the ants and realized how valuable the giant ant's scientific knowledge could be. Finding that the curiosity was mutual, he helped Spiridon disguise himself as a human so he could become a student of human ways. Unfortunately, human and ant morality differs substantially, and it isn't long before Cordat and the rest of France realize that ants have no compunctions about murder.

Like the best sci-fi, Spiridon is surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that expose how people in the early part of the century were adapting to the still-fluid genre; for example, Spiridon's human-like size and intelligence are not customary to his species, but are instead chemically induced when the Ant Emperor ascends to the throne. The rest of the ants on his island are normal-sized, though they seem to have above-average intelligence, as they are capable of vivisecting Cordat intelligently (as intelligent as vivisection can get anyhow). There's something about the setup that recalls Plato's philosopher-king--the Ant Emperor is given his enhanced abilities so that he is better equipped to govern. It's a system of elitism but it also ensures that the governing elite is best equipped for leadership; Cordat's response to Spiridon's explanation is a wish that intelligence-enhancing drugs were given to human leaders as well, which is hard not to sympathize with.

The way in which the ants' ethics manifest, too, defies a lot of the expectations I had for a work of this time. This book is gory as hell! In fact, this may be one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. I knew I was hooked the instant Cordat woke up in the ant tower next to a goddamn eviscerated corpse--the eviscerated corpse of the brother of one of the main characters, at that! When Spiridon is kidnapped by Joel le Berquin, one of Cordat's friends who becomes jealous of him and wants his secret to success, his threats to vivisect the ant are turned on him when Spiridon escapes; Spiridon straps le Berquin to his own operating table and cuts out his organs. All of this is because Spiridon, while possessed of emotions, is ruled primarily by cold insect logic--he was threatened, so of course it makes sense to turn that same threat around on the threatener...and learn more about human anatomy, to boot! Spiridon manages to come across as a being ruled by an alien sense of ethics without being a Vulcan, which is better than a lot of Laurie's successor would do when writing characters controlled by logic rather than feeling. And indeed, logic was applied to the creation of the character, as Laurie demonstrates a knowledge of ants that helps him guide the plot. Specifically, he knows about the various chemicals used by ants to control their social order and extrapolates that into Spiridon's wonder drugs and paralyzing venom. It just makes sense for ants to be master chemists, because from a certain perspective they already are.

Now, this book does have some noticeable shortcomings. I am concerned sometimes that I talk about bigotry so often that my words have become meaningless after a time, but I honestly don't care, so let's talk about how this is another book where ant class divisions = race. There is a...sigh...charming passage where Laurie mentions that, just as there are divisions in ethics and logic between man and ant, there are also "real gaps of conscience between men of different races." Now, it's certainly undeniable that people of different races are going to be culturally different, but to call it "gaps of conscience" implies that some have better consciences than others, and that, just as the differences between Spiridon and his human compatriots are largely irreconcilable, so too are the differences between races. It read too much like the arguments white supremacists make all too often about "incompatible" cultures, wherein they automatically dismiss the idea that "gaps" between cultures can be accommodated without destroying, assimilating, or prioritizing one culture over another. And I know that's because this is a book from 1907, but the white supremacists of today are using the same lazy excuses people were back then.

The book struggles tonally, oftentimes unsure of whether this is all supposed to be fun and whimsical or dark and bleak. Characters will sometimes speak like they're in a comedy and act extremely aloof about the situation, but there are several instances of people being butchered alive, with their remains left to be found by their friends, family, and coworkers. There is also the character of Pia, whose brother Cordat finds at the beginning of the book, and who swears a vendetta against Spiridon as such. She loses her life trapping Spiridon in a burning building and her death is treated as a tragedy, but the book--spoiler alert--ends with Cordat using the ants' chemical secrets to bring Spiridon back from the dead. He completely invalidates the lives of an entire family who died horribly thanks to a creature who has killed and could kill again not only with a lack of compunction, but with a biological inability to generate compunction in the first place! Keep in mind--Pia and Cordat have romantic chemistry together! The ending admittedly reveals that Spiridon is effectively lobotomized as a result of his death and resurrection; still cognizant and intelligent for an ant, but with a broken will, and therefore unlikely to go around cutting people up again. But it's really unclear who's supposed to be the victor here. At this point our sympathy for Cordat has vanished, yet he dances away into the sunset clicking his heels over all the scientific secrets he's unlocked.

I mentioned at the beginning that Andre Laurie (born Paschal Grousset) was a collaborator of Jules Verne's. When researching Laurie I was surprised to find out that one of the Jules Verne books from my childhood, The Begum's Millions, was written almost wholesale by Laurie! In fact, it's entirely possible that The Begum's Millions' relationship to Jules Verne was simply that the more famous author's name was stamped on the front cover by the authors' mutual editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, while Laurie was in political exile. Spiridon is often described as the work wherein Laurie broke away from Jules Verne's mold, and I take that to mean that maybe this book was something of a rebellion against Verne's scientific optimism. Neither Cordat nor Spiridon give science a good name, and I feel that almost has to be intentional. Maybe Cordat is supposed to be a colossal asshole, consumed, just as Spiridon is, with his own curiosity, rather than the human consequence that can arise from experimentation. It wouldn't be an unusual statement for a book at the time to make.

Then there's the detail that Spiridon spends most of the book in a wax mask and fake gloves. I know it's fiction, but unless Cordat's colleagues were 90% blind I can't imagine them mistaking wax prosthetics in 1907 for real human flesh. These people are goddamn doctors! They should know what a person looks like!

Problems aside, however, Spiridon is by-and-large an entertaining work, managing to avoid being boring despite some rather substantial deviations from the main plot thread at times. It is snappily written for a book from the dawn of the 20th Century, and Michael Shreve's translation-adaptation with Black Coat Press has a good flow to it. In fact, there's more drive to this than the usual Jules Verne novel. I just hope Timothy Thummel doesn't try to say that the ants represent race again.

Speaking of Black Coat Press, December sees the release of my short story "The Curse of Orlac" in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol. 14: Coup de Grace, which stars and references a number of fictional characters who have been mentioned before on this site. For next year's volume I have a story planned which involves Spiridon in some capacity.

In any case: this is kinda it for 2017, then. Man, what a shitty fucking year. But at least the movies were good, and the books were mostly good, right? I hope I've helped make your life a little more bearable in these trying times. I've been watching movies this whole time to get prepped for 2018, and I'll tell you now: it's gonna to be a fucking party. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself yet. We've still got a Top Ten Movie List to do, plus we have to crown Book of the Year!

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Serpent Island (1954), by Tom Gries

I'm going to level with you: outside of Daughter of Horror and a few others, there aren't many 1950s horror movies appropriate for the site that I enjoy. That's why I'm sort of cheating with this one--finding material for both the '20s and this decade will be a challenge next year, assuming I pursue the same format for our Spookyween celebrations. My one justification for including Serpent Island on the itinerary is that it features a voodoo subplot, plus a killer creature sequence at the end. Other than that, this movie is a sailing drama about adventure on the high seas, featuring a scurvy underdog hero who gets the girl at the end. Call me a sucker for voodoo, no matter how mild it is, but there's something about this one that feels like October to me.

Peter Mason is an old marine engineer working dockrat shifts out in San Pedro, CA. One day a woman named Rikki Andre comes up to him asking use of his sailing services; you see, her ancestor was Michel Andre, a gold fence who hid a million dollars in treasure out near Haiti. Using the ship called the Constellation, belonging another sailor she's hired, a rival of Mason's by the name of Kirk Ellis (Captain Kirk, huh?), they set off, traveling to the Seas of Padding. This includes things like gut-punch brawls, shark attacks, and the lamest stock footage hurricane ever. When they land, Mason and Rikki consummate their romantic tension in a surprisingly explicit scene for 1954, but of course, there's voodoo afoot. Pete is captured by the voodoo cult where he learns that their leader is an old flame of his, a woman named Ann Christoff, and she's bound to protect the gold--after all, it constitutes the mass of their sacred idol. Rikki is allowed to see the idol, but is attacked by a boa constrictor; Pete saves her, Kirk is killed by the snake, and the two lovebirds escape the island safely.

Serpent Island is largely notable because it's the first movie that Bert I. Gordon had a hand in producing. As is easy enough to point out there are no giant monsters in this one, even if that boa is pretty big. In a sense, this is one of the most successful monster movies Gordon made--not in terms of monster content, of course--because I actually found some horror in the scene where Rikki is attacked by the snake. They managed to make the actress being choked to death look strangely real. I found it grotesque, but maybe I'm a big sissy--or maybe a crusty print does things to me.

I was pulled into this movie because it has a strange self-awareness about itself that makes it and its characters charming. Pete is well-acted as an aging former sailor with extreme cynicism about life at sea. Rikki is strikingly convincing as a young woman who is figuring herself out. And Kirk is a true bastard like any evil ship captain in a sailing adventure film worth his salt should be. We get this sense of winking from the oddities the script insists on indulging in. For example, after Pete stops a thief from stealing the letter that will lead Rikki to the treasure, he says, "We never did find out who the uncommon thief was; I still have my own ideas on the subject." Yet we never learn those ideas; moving on. How about his later zinger: "My dad always said to never fight a man in his own territory. I never listened to him and that's how I became a success in life." Pete has a sentimental sort of narration over the whole of the film, with pseudo-poetic reflections on all they come across, which seems to be a fixture of sailing segment in these types of adventure flicks. Some of these bits of narration reminded me of Infrasexum in their own way. He also makes jokes which appear to be at the expense of the Republican Party, which earns him a thumbs up in my book.

One last note on the dialogue before I move on. Kirk comes up behind Rikki one night and looks her up and down like a creep. She knows he's there without looking and he asks how she knows. She says, cheerily, "You're real quiet, and so when it gets real quiet I know you're around. If that sounds confused, that's because I'm confused. About a lot of things." Wow! You know you're a master scribe if you've got that in your screenplay, folks.

There's a lot to riff here, because it's a '50s exploitation movie. For example, we see what might have been some of the film's raison d'etre during a scene where Rikki runs out on deck in her nightie, and gives us a big face full of hot lingerie'd booty. There's something for the androsexual, as well, as there's no shortage of Pete's weirdly-shaped shirtless torso. I never really thought I'd get a chance to see Rob Liefeld's interpretation of Captain America extrapolated into real life, but I was not disappointed. Finally, we have Jacques, Ann Christoff's voodoo enforcer, who I like to headcanon is a zombie, just 'cause then I can claim this is a zombie voodoo movie. Every time he makes his sudden appearance I remark on his stunning resemblance to a shaved Mr. T. Because it's a '50s voodoo movie, there is trace racism, including white people being afraid of burly black dudes just 'cause they're burly black dudes. Fortunately, it's not even in the same galaxy as West of Zanzibar.

Serpent Island may be one of those movies which can only be appreciated so idiosyncratically that it's almost not worth it. It may also be a movie I enjoy exclusively because I had to go to surprising lengths to find a copy. If you like sailing dramas with a touch of killer creatures and the threat of human sacrifice, this one's for you. Give it a try.

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Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976), by Jack Weis

This is another one which sometimes seems to have a life of its own. Whenever I watch Crypt of Dark Secrets, I always feel like it's the right time; whenever I try to watch this movie when the day doesn't make time for it, it feels flat and empty. But when it's my time to watch it--when the movie lets me watch it--then suddenly every frame seems to gain its own weird inner light. I feel like this sensation goes well in hand with this movie's occult themes, which somehow always scratch my Magic Itch. There's a certain way that I like seeing magic done in movies, and this movie has got it. however that happens to be. Keep in mind that this movie does not contain a crypt.

There are legends of old Haunted Island out in the bayous near New Orleans--with a name like Haunted Island, that's basically a guarantee, ain't it? It's the supposed home of a woman named Damballa, an "Aztec" girl whose alternate form is a rainbow snake that is the bridge between life and death. Vietnam veteran Ted Watkins lives out in a small house on Haunted Island with an extensive fortune, and when he is visited by two cops who are curious about the legends of Damballa, they accidentally spread word of his money to a trio of crooks named Earl, Max, and Louise. The three are surprisingly eager to murder Ted and take his money, so they drown him and take all they can carry. But Ted isn't dead, at least not the way we know it--a beautiful naked woman appears and restores his spirit, explaining that she is Damballa, and that their souls must fuse together to fulfill their respective destinies. Ted is pretty cool with this idea (Ted's cool with basically everything), but he needs to avenge his death before he can move on. But temptation alone will bring fate to its conclusion: for there's a voodoo witch in the swamp who is willing to give the murderous trio the treasure of Jean LaFitte. They should have figured that there are no promises when voodoo dolls are involved.

Returning to the beginning of this review for a bit--almost more than any other movie, save for perhaps The Witches' Mountain, is this film like a dream. Everyone in it acts as if they aren't real, or like they're stoned. Every time I show this movie to someone (because sometimes this film wants me to bring it an audience), they say of Ted, "Is he high?" When I watch this alone, my question is, "Is everyone high?" People are in a strange headspace in this one. It goes beyond Ted's dull, blank stare, and his denim short-shorts. It's not just bad acting. But it's not anything deliberate, either. It's almost like they just aren't aware of what they're doing, like it doesn't matter. I wish I could put my finger on it but I can't.

Because this film takes it easy, generally speaking, it's a relaxing watch. And it manages to have a plot without the conflict being overly stressful. I'm someone who can get stressed out by movies. Even movies that I like can raise my cortisol levels if they contain too much conflict. On my thin-skinned days, this movie can pass over me with no trouble. Like, Ted dies, but he's revived immediately after--he needs to take revenge, but the voodoo cult does it for him, because they want him to succeed--and in the end he and Damballa are united to love each forever in the spirit world. Sure, there's the small detail that they hardly know each other, but there's a dreamy romance to Damballa, and not merely because she's hot. I watched this movie on the same day I did my Divine Emanuelle review and Maureen Ridley, who plays Damballa, is an eerie doppelganger for Laura Gemser. She reappears in Jack Weis' Death Brings Roses, one of the few known films that Weis directed. He also made Quadroon, which I watched for the first time before rewatching this. I don't know if I'll ever review it, but let me say for now that it's as essential as this one...

And Crypt of Dark Secrets is essential. It has a scene where a stack of dollar bills start bleeding ketchup. I was worried that the shortness of this review would detract from my implicit recommendation, but then I remembered that that was one of the details I wanted to mention. There are more, but Dark Secrets are best learned firsthand. Find the time for this film to find you.

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The Flesh Eaters (1962), by Jack Curtis

Famous firsts are important in movies. Every great moment had its start somewhere: The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the first of the proper giallos, while Halloween led the way for the American slasher--The Lost World in 1925 was the first giant monster movie, and 1932's Doctor X was the first horror film in color. Now, these are all inaccurate in their own way, as I'm sure a lot of you already know; there were plenty of mysterious maniacs stalking and offing teenagers in American films prior to Michael Myers' debut, for example. Every genre has its roots, and while you can only go back so far, it seems there's always a movie that crops up that beat such-and-such to the punch. And that's largely due to the simple fact that history records events and happenings that most easily float to the surface. Halloween was the first slasher that people who weren't genre fans heard of in a big way, so consequently it is the "first" slasher. Talking about the prospect of a first gore film is a more nebulous matter, simply because there are many films that contained blood prior to what most people would cite as the most obvious contender, Blood Feast. Hell, there are even some which feature dismemberment: people get their heads lopped off in Intolerance from way back in 1916. Yet Intolerance is not a gore film, because while its violence can certainly be interpreted horrifically, it is not a horror film. If you're thinking of movies that feature blood and guts for the sake of horror, you probably do have to go to the early '60s, as anything truly graphic prior to then would have probably been some long-lost underground presentation. Volume, too, is important: there has to be a lot of blood in order for it to count, not just someone nicking their finger on a knife in a shot the censors were cool with. There has to be so much blood that the movie is borderline about the blood. That's what makes it a gore flick.

The Flesh Eaters almost beat H.G. Lewis to the punch with a 1962 production date, though the film would not see release until 1964, several months after Blood Feast emerged. While it is properly described as a mad scientist monster movie, its emphasis on graphic injury is so prominent, and so totally unlike other monster movies of its time, that it has to be described as a gore film. Indeed, massive amounts of blood turn out to be what our heroes need to survive the film, so my prior comment about gore films being about the gore turns out to be true from a story perspective too! What's great is that The Flesh Eaters isn't just entertaining for gore hounds. No, it's an engaging and dramatic little slice of tight cinema that will leave you wondering why so many other monster movies from the time ended up being comparatively tedious.

Jan Letterman is a woman with a mission--she's got to get her boss, alcoholic actress Laura Winters, to her next gig ASAP! To this end she hires undergrad pilot Grant Murdoch to fly them to where they need to go, but Murdoch is forced to land on a small island due to a storm. Here, they meet Germanic scientist Peter Bartell, who eventually makes it clear to the group that the waters around the island are infested with macrobacterial creatures that devour living flesh. In case the Team Fortress 2 Medic accent wasn't enough, we the audience swiftly learn something the characters don't (at least not right away): Bartell has his own agenda, and his own unique relationship with the Flesh Eaters. The group is eventually joined by an incredibly strange character named Omar, who is subjected to one of Bartell's tests involving the Flesh Eaters after Bartell ostensibly succeeds in killing the creatures with electricity. Unfortunately, unbeknownst even to Bartell, electricity is the strength of the Eaters as well as their weakness. If the palm-sized individuals can kill a person in moments, imagine what they'd do if they got any bigger...

Like I said above, The Flesh Eaters is actually a pretty well-made movie. The performances are all wonderful, and help bring what is already an awesome script to life. These characters become realistic by way of their cynicism--the dialogue stings in places, and consistently hints at the variety of troubles the characters have faced in the past. And it's not just that they're "realistic" too--our trio of protagonists are all likable in spite of, or perhaps because of, their faults. The performances that accomplish this depth and likability blend with some really impressive cinematography; take, for example, one of our earliest hints of Bartell's shadiness. The group discusses the strange events they've witnessed since arriving on the island, all framed in the background but still perfectly audible. Bartell is nearer to the camera, in profile, listening to the conversation. The focus is on him, and on the significant glances that flash across his eyes as he studies the castaways' words. It implies so much, and it makes us curious because all throughout the film, Bartell is generally a nice guy. It's been awhile since I've seen framing that has worked that well, and the movie is littered with it--it really has to be seen to be believed.

Speaking of that which must be seen to be credible: yes, we're gonna talk about the gore. I don't know if it's the black and white leaving more to my imagination or what, but the grue in this movie could compete with Lucio Fulci for sheer visceral nature. As much as I hate to overuse the "twin beds" metaphor, this is a movie that revels in showing us chunks of meat being hacked off of someone's leg in pretty good detail, coming from an era where it was still considered not done to show a married couple sharing a bed. It shows a close-up of a face with its eye blown out! Blood Feast caused literal rioting, and I only wish I knew what happened when The Flesh Eaters hit screens in '64. Perhaps the audiences had been inoculated--but I can't imagine that everyone took it well. The scene where Omar meets an unfortunate gastric demise by drinking water with a "dead" Flesh Eater in it will draw comparisons to Alien, but honestly, I gripped my seat tighter here than I did while watching Ridley Scott's film. Add in the fact that there are nude women as well. As in Blood Feast, there are no crotches or nipples allowed, but the context around these nude women will probably make you thankful that this isn't being played to be sexy.

I do want to talk about Omar a little bit. When I say a character is strange, that's by my standards--Omar represents the uncomfortable cinematic transition between beatniks and hippies, at a moment in time when neither really existed. The closest thing was the sort of hipster epitomized by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and even then, those wouldn't become as recognizable as their hippie descendants and beat forebears until 1968, when Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Omar talks like a beatnik, but is clearly on something significantly stronger than marijuana. He's also something of an evangelist, though it isn't made clear if the "weapon of love" he keeps referring to is meant to be Christian. It seems to be some sort of idiosyncratic micro-faith that Omar alone practices, loosely based on Christianity but loaded up with a lot of generic hippiness. Whatever it is, it doesn't keep him from trying to convert people. I wish we found out why, exactly, he's drifting on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. I also wish we knew why he's weirdly content with this situation, since he seems to lack both food and drinkable water.

There's just one last detail I want to talk about before we wrap this up. The Flesh Eaters was Jack Curtis' only directorial credit--most of his work in film involved doing dub work for Japanese productions, including Mothra vs. Godzilla, the first Gamera film, and Prince of Space. Anime fans probably know him best as the voice of Pops Racer from Speed Racer. The film's screenwriter Arnold Drake, meanwhile, is generally remembered for his comic book work, where he created such wonderful characters as the Doom Patrol and Super-Hip. And also some nobody named Beast Boy, who I'm told never went on to join significant teams or garner any fans. I just think it's interesting that this movie is put together by two people who had such backgrounds.

The Flesh Eaters shatters the mold for '60s monster movies in a way I've never seen before, even if sometimes it resorts to belting out lines like, "You've created a monster...something beyond belief!" It's fun to talk about movies that have some noteworthy place in history, but it's even better when those movies are awesome even outside of being a first. I can only hope that in time we'll uncover something from 1961 that once more forces us to question our knowledge of the movies of the past.

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Book Club of Desolation #11: The Ferocious Fern and Other Stories (1943), by C.B. Pulman

One of the most indispensable sources of knowledge I've found in my quest to fill out the meetings of the Book Club of Desolation has been Chris Mikul's Biblio Curiosa, a zine dedicated to exposing the weird writings and weird lives of some of the forgotten writers of this world. I encourage you to look into it when you have a chance, if you're interested in seeing a good hard look at some unjustly--and sometimes justly--forgotten regions of literature. Through Biblio Curiosa I came across Clement Barker Pulman's The Ferocious Fern, a book apparently composed of plant-themed stories. I had no idea what to suspect when I found a copy, and suffice it to say that it delighted me. The Ferocious Fern is a lost minor classic, deserving a wider distribution than it ultimately obtained...I don't know if I can do the book justice in this review alone. In celebration of Bookvember I've decided to fill in the otherwise scanty information on this book for an Internet audience--I hope to be informative more than anything else!

Some brief notes before I talk about the individual stories, one at a time. The book does have something of a plant theme to it. Many of the stories have references to nature and natural themes, which ties in with its status as a regional work. I'm told the label of "regional literature" is kind of considered to be literary poison, and indeed, the thick Britishness that Pulman employs, along with the tedium he sometimes invokes in his lengthy description of rural English life, can be a bit of a deterrent. But Pulman's charm is intoxicating and you recognize quickly that he is a writer very much in charge of what he's writing. The regional/rural quality of his stories suggests a peace that he craves, in refuge from some of the horrors this world presents. To some degree, the book has some indescribable qualities, so perhaps it's best that I simply disclose my notes about the stories.

The titular story, "The Ferocious Fern," is an interesting choice for opening the collection. For readers unfamiliar with Pulman--i.e. everyone--it's a fantasy story, and as we'll learn, Pulman is good at genre fiction when he chooses to do it, and it's a shame that the rest of the stories in the collection aren't like this one. But it's also probably a bit of a good thing, since I found "Fern" to also be charmingly awkward from a writing perspective. My first thought was that Pulman was someone who read often but wrote rarely, probably a botanist or gardener. Later stories shot up that opinion because he really does show that he's someone who refined his craft, but "Fern" is a little clunky here and there. Plus, it doesn't have an entirely original premise: an unseemly fern turns out to be sentient and evil (or at least misguided), and kills a man. (Don't be mad that I spoil the ending, as Pulman himself does it on the inner flap and back of the book.) However, Pulman manages to have an interesting theme, one of conflict between magic and science. Two vague explanations are given for the fern's behavior, one being that chlorophyll and blood are not dissimilar (therefore allowing for predatory plants just as there are predatory animals), the other being that the plant figures into a 17th Century prophecy involving the Eve of St. John. The scene where the mysterious backwoods landlady talks about the prophecy explanation is effectively chilling, because Pulman suggests a secret, creepy world that exists far beyond the secure bubbles of our precious cities. It's very much like the quiet-but-real magic of The Witches' Mountain. I loved it.

"Murgatroyd has his Dinner" lacks horror or fantasy elements, but carries on the plant theme, and is one of his feel-good pieces to boot. Murgatroyd gets the wrong dish served to him at a restaurant, with unexpected results. Like many stories in the collection, it's more a scene or vignette than anything else, and thus really needs to be experienced for itself.

"The Speck" is a return to horror, albeit without paranormal elements. A man trapped on an island begins to hallucinate that the specks on his furniture are moving around. It was this story that made me realize why I was so quick to label Pulman as amateurish when I started the book: this is the sort of horror story I wrote when I was ten. When I first decided to be a writer, I was obsessed with deriving terror from subtle emotions. Being probably more bored than anything else, I had this habit of observing my emotions and my reactions to quiet observations, like looking at patterns in furniture. My conception of horror at the time was something "loud," or at least obviously horrific. The stories I could come up with for the patterns of my furniture and how I felt about them was sort of an untapped market, I felt. I think a lot of that must have been the fact that I was reading a lot of British literature at the time, which is usually "quieter" than what we see in America. To see that emotional obsessiveness put on paper by another writer was pretty awesome.

"Nothing Much in the Post" is another psychological horror story, of another kind. What the story ends up coming down to is what is surely a firsthand account of the London Blitz. The descriptions of bombs dropping puts this story among some of the best war literature I've ever read, period, and if for nothing but the account of the Blitz contained in this story, this book should be remembered. This is also a platform for Pulman to examine some of his views on class. Most of the time it seems like he's one of the good guys--the poor are sympathized with more than the rich, usually.

Next is "The Sound of a Voice," a story where unfortunately Pulman loses a bit of his pace. It is a ghost story with some of the leftover regional creepiness of "Ferocious Fern," but it is also overwhelmed with a sort of Dickensian sentimentality that I feel has aged poorly. There are a lot of descriptions of men's choirs choosing the songs they want to sing, and they are all supposed to be old favorites to the reader, and yet modern readers are unlikely to recognize or know the words to most of them.

"The Maid Goes Out" is another story about classism, though it is more optimistic than "Nothing Much in the Post." One of those ones that you have to read to experience. Brace yourself for some cheese--but otherwise know that this is a good one.

"Audience for an Exile" is another feel-good piece, albeit a somewhat complicated one. The exile of the title is an Eastern European refugee named Vestrovic, who is a wizened master piano player. One of the locals of the English village he lives in asks him to play a piece that no one else in the village can--playing the piece causes Vestrovic to walk back through his life, including to visions of a concentration camp. I assume that Pulman was aware of the Holocaust and this is a reference to it. The finale has an air of victory to it, but it's a fascinating avenue to travel down. I want to reread this to make sure I get everything out of it.

"The Road" is less optimistic and less interesting. In essence, an old roadman is called to plow a mountainous road so a doctor can reach a sick man in time. As the roadman plows his path through the mountain, he reflects on how hard his life has been. I may have missed something, but I find that unlikely: this one is as tedious as plowing a mountain, which may have been Pulman's intention--but it doesn't make the story very good.

Regrettably, "Tale of an Idiot" is another one that doesn't hold up well to time, and it suffers from perspective issues. It centers around Daft Davie, a mentally handicapped man who ends up helping to save a burnt town due to apparently being able to talk to water and use divining rods to dig wells. The story's theme, in essence, is "mentally handicapped people are useful too!" but repeatedly referring to a disabled person as "daft," "mad," "crazy," "stupid," or "an idiot" will probably bring about some cringing. As I said, the perspective jumps around too much as well, making it difficult to make sense of the events. And the usual vagueness as far as the supernatural events is a weakness rather than a strength in this case: I was left wondering if Davie did have some sort of superhuman ability, but not in the way that I felt that Pulman knew the answer. The story felt hollow or unfinished.

Thankfully, we're on solid ground from here on out. "The Great Quiet" is the story of Hamlin, a tortured poet whose desire to work in silence leads him to the realization that the mortal realm will never be quiet enough for him. It has a first person narrator, which is a nice departure from the norm, and through this narrator we have some interesting subtexts here. The narrator is ostensibly Hamlin's butler in his spooky old house on the hill, but there is something beyond just a desire to serve in him. I seriously read the narrator and Hamlin as lovers, and I have a bias, being queer myself, but there's something about how the narrator reacts to being shoved out of Hamlin's life by his obsession that screams "jilted." And there's a mutual connection between them that's not entirely a boss-employee sort of thing. And no, the narrator is not Hamlin's maid, because Hamlin has a maid whose femininity is always put in a different context from that of Hamlin and the narrator.

"The Apple Thief" is essentially a thriller, and it is a good one. Fate has constantly forced two men, Cawthron and Hemingway, to fight each other, ever since Cawthron stole an apple from Hemingway years ago. Hemingway is now the dictator of a small island called Tierra, while Cawthron has decided to pose as a socialist rabble-rouser to incite a rebellion and get Hemingway killed. I will not say anything further because this story is excellent and really shouldn't be ruined. Again, it is a testament to the fact that, at least for me, Pulman was better at genre fiction than he was at his literary vignettes, if anything because I feel like his conflict is better presented and more interesting when he tries something like a fantasy story or a thriller. But that's just me.

"Faltering Furrow" is another regional vignette but has more depth than some of the others we've seen so far. A farmer strives hard to cut straight furrows on his father's farmland so that he can prove to his father that he's worthy of inheriting the property. The twist to this one is almost cruel, and that's why it warrants attention.

"Wind Struck" ends up slipping a little again, because not only is it a love triangle story but it is a love triangle story that uses weather metaphors. It really doesn't help that the female love interest that the triangle sides fight over is presented in a flat, sexist fashion. Fortunately, the prose is some of the best that the book has, so it's worth checking out for that.

"The Square Watch" may well be the best in the collection, if anything because it shows how much imagination Pulman possessed. He was a good recorder of a life that probably doesn't exist anymore, save for in Britain's deepest depths, and "Ferocious Fern" showed that he could conjure up fantasy worlds, but this one takes the cake. As the title suggests, it may be a time-travel story. At its very least, it's a philosophical, pseudo-scientific reflection on the nature of time, written in a compelling and fascinating way. Professor Oughtershaw seeks the last of a set of thirteen Roman coins, because they may be the key to solving his model of time--and the personal stakes he has in it.

And finally, we have "Love and Mr. Portway." Dull, depressed Mr. Portway encounters his double, the robust, trophy-wife-marrying Mr. Forthergill, and relates to him the story of the only real excitement he's had in his life: an encounter with a beautiful young woman in the woods during a rainstorm. The twist at first is a comedic one, before a second twist unleashes the most hilariously depressing final sentence I've seen in a book in a looong time. It is a great way to end the collection and it's a great story in general.

I hope that provides some insight into a book that I hope reaches a wider audience. In fact--hm. I'll stay quiet for now.

If you have the chance to find this book, give it a shot. It's a tough thing to love, as you may have seen, but it doesn't disappoint.

Now, as you may expect, I've saved the best for last with Bookvember...the very best. The Ferocious Fern is a holy grail of sorts, but there's magic in our futures. Till next time...

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Image Source: Kearn's Rare Books

I Eat Your Skin (1964), by Del Tenney

Voodoo charts a perfect timeline of my life. If you want a voodoo movie that shows me at the ecstatic, youthful, hectic middle of my relationship with these sorts of movies, check out Trash Canon gem Crypt of Dark Secrets. If you want to see me at the far limits I've found now, where I'm largely just reflective and need something really tremendous to whet my appetite, managing a blog of memories more than having true, exciting adventures, check out Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. This is the voodoo movie--and indeed, the movie, period--that started it all. I Eat Your Skin is the first trash movie I ever saw. I watched it when I was ten, with my eight-year-old brother and my aunt and uncle. My aunt got the 50 Chilling Classics collection of public domain horror movies from another of my aunts. The four of us went in blind and it was up, up, and away from there.

I had never before imagined that acting, as a thing, could be bad, before laying my eyes on this. It was a goddamn blast. We didn't really riff it--it riffed itself. We laughed a lot and even got a few chills here and there. Well, my brother and I did at least, probably. After that, we tracked down Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space and all that. We'd been watching '50s monster movies for years, like Them! and The Giant Gila Monster, but we began to learn there was something new. Something alien. We met a lot of strange movies when we finally bought 50 Chilling Classics for ourselves. I Eat Your Skin came back time and time again, to be joined by Medusa, Cathy's Curse, Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon, The Alpha Incident, Demons of Ludlow, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Horrors of Spider Island, Driller Killer, Oasis of the Zombies, Revenge of Dr. X, The Witches' Mountain, and probably everything else in that damn box and all the other collections like it. A veritable smorgasbord of weird, shitty horror. I needed more--I found MST3K and it still wasn't enough. (Even as Laserblast, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Deadly Bees, Boggy Creek II, and Space Mutiny flooded into my awareness, and my heart.) Fortunately, I Eat Your Skin was historically double-billed with I Drink Your Blood. Figuring I'd be running into another black and white zombie movie, I was stunned by the display of rabies, gore, and hippies that unleashed itself into my eyeballs. I began to comprehend these "exploitation movies," and as teenhood dawned, I came across the annals of I-Mockery, the Cinema Snob, and Bleeding Skull. My formative years were shaped and stirred as I witnessed a bottomless sea of gore, nudity, and monstrosities beyond imagination.

I shared my movies, with some hits (Troll 2 nearly killed everyone) and some misses (King of the Zombies does not a good sleepover make). I even got the high school to have a One Night Only event for some of these movies, which is where Troll 2 knocked 'em dead, along with Don't Go in the Woods. I am proud to say that for two years, I was the Captain of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, or BMC for short. If there are any veterans of it out there, you know we saw both glory...and horror. It was our war, our private little war, and there were heroes as there were sacrifices. But what I mean to say is: it all started here. Some of the best days of my life started with I Eat Your Skin. So what better place to carry on the SPOOKYWEEN horror extravaganza from here?

Writer Tom Harris is in the soup with his editor, Duncan Fairchild. "Harry" Harris has been spending too much time helping lonely young housewives cheat on their husbands and not enough on composing his next Haydock-'n'-Harmon style potboiler. Duncan is forcing Tom and his own wife, Coral (which everyone always pronounces as "Carl"), to go to a Pacific island so that Tom can get some inspiration and make them more money. The island in question? Voodoo Island, home of snakes, zombies, and beautiful women. After an attack by one of the zombified locals, featuring the most hilarious decapitation set to film, Tom learns of the voodoo sacrifices of the island, and the mystery only deepens from there. As he falls in love with Jeanine, daughter of the local scientist, he'll need to solve it before their island Heaven becomes a Hell.

Does I Eat Your Skin hold up after all this time? Or have I grown too cynical with age to enjoy its cheesy, clumsy charms? I can say that fortunately I continue to enjoy the experience. I have perhaps moved on in some regards--for example, the mere presence of voodoo doesn't bring chills to me simply by merit of being some mysterious foreign religion. Now I know more about voodoo and I understand that there's not really such a thing as a "weird" religion (well, I mean, besides Scientology--excuse me, Sci***ology). There's almost certainly something racist in I Eat Your Skin, with the black pagan islanders trying to sacrifice a Blonde Caucasian Virgin™ and everything, something which I didn't pay attention to as a kid. It kills the mood a little bit, but of course the true evil behind the voodoo cult turns out to be a white man. His alias's name, though, is Papa Negro. That brings it back to uncomfortable a little bit.

But the movie is groovy, the shadows and zombies are creepy, and the dialogue is amazing. Any movie that uses the word "praytell" as part of its snark is going to be top of the charts for me. The acting, especially from the lady playing Coral, almost reaches self-parody at times. Did I mention, too, that this was the first movie I saw to have a sex scene in it? It was the early '60s, though, so nothing gets shown, and I wouldn't realize what it was until years later, when the sheer comedy of the scene wore off. There's also a wonderful zombie transformation sequence when some poor asshole is injected with the zombie drug and starts becoming one of the flesh-eating fiends with some Larry Talbot-style dissolve cuts. 

On top of all this, the movie doesn't drag, unlike most of the movies which I adored in my childhood that I've tried to rediscover over the years. That, more than anything else in my life right now, is important. I run a magazine, I write books, I work a day job. I have finally reached the stage of maturity where I cannot afford to watch movies without merit. Thankfully I have some solid luck these days, in these matters. And I have a great and bountiful past behind me to examine anew. Every scene in I Eat Your Skin flows well into one another, and while there is some dwelling (especially on the voodoo dancing), usually forward kinetic motion is a thing. There was some degree of care behind this, from the man who also brought us The Horror of Party Beach. There was enough to hook me. Just as easily, I could've slipped away from this path forever in the moment of watching this. Imagine if I had watched fucking Cathy's Curse instead of this. I would probably end up just watching Casablanca for a living. Assuming such a thing is tenable. (You'd think people would stop paying for reviews of Casablanca after awhile.)

Whatever. Be cautious but know that I Eat Your Skin is a party in your living room. Beget a trash legacy of your own with what you find in it.

Book Club of Desolation #8: Kuru; or, the Zombies (1990s?/2011), by Yaubus Redford

We live in a magic world. Do you ever think about it? Do you ever think that every day on the streets we brush by hundreds of people, and consequently, hundreds of stories, each of which break into their own kudzu threads thousands of times over? Statistically, you have met a serial killer, a costumed vigilante, a practicing witch, and perhaps even, if you are lucky, a writer. Perhaps that writer was Yaubus Redford.

I don't know anything about Yaubus Redford, and it's doubtful I ever will. He passed away in a plane crash in 2011, and I ended up editing his last notes and photographs (getting access to them in a trip to Britain over the summer) into a self-published book called Devil Skull Takes London. Earlier this year, Amos Berkley published a book that is probably the only complete omnibus of Redford's surviving work, again through self-publishing means, called Much Ado About Kuru. I recommend checking out both if you want a serious examination of a mysterious, improbable man--he was involved with the occult, and seemed dedicated to the art of writing to a point that is a little alarming at times. That is his life; however, if you want to see what his heart looked like, look no further than Kuru; or, the Zombies. By merit of its own experiment, Kuru should destroy some of the magic of the world. But because it was attempted, I like to think it added to it.

Here's where I'd ordinarily jump into a plot synopsis, but the issue is that Kuru is written in a...particular style. That is to say that Kuru is written almost like some of the famous bad fanfictions of modern myth, but with some intriguing subversions. It's worth noting that by the end of this no character has the same name as they did at the beginning, because names slowly drift into other names throughout the story as Redford seemingly forgets what he called everyone. Similarly, the spelling mistakes are a sincere issue, to the point where it's easy for the reader to have no fucking clue about what is going on. For example, if we did not have the contextual assumption that the words "how ounlicky" are supposed to read as "how unlucky," that we would not be able to assume that the rest of the sentence, "vrey kunkukiing inded," is supposed to read as "very unlucky indeed." And yet, there was something else at work here--a cerebral sublayer. If you read Berkley's book, you'll find that Redford almost certainly knew what he was doing. And that's why this book is an important find.

Chuck Landauze is a reporter for the Daily Magnet, in a city just referred to as "The City." He is in love with his boss's secretary Amanda and good friends with Potato the Janitor. The editor of the Magnet, Edward T. Shturngart, receives a scoop that a scientist named Dr. Ghibourkei (!) is conducting newsworthy experiments on Death Island. The team's journey to Death Island is cut short by several tangents, including Shturngart's heart attack and the revelation that Potato has leprosy. Slowly it is revealed that the love our hero chuck has for Amanda is obsessive and violent, though he never harms her in the course of the book. Dr. Ghibourkei is an amicable man at first, revealing that his invention is a healing ray that can cure all injuries and diseases (!!). But the reporters (and secretary, and janitor) quickly learn that the ray actually turns people into zombies, and that Ghibourkei has a zombie horde all ready to go. The story from here is a struggle to survive in the face of zombies, infighting, and the ghosts of all the U.S. Presidents.

...(!!!)

And now that I have dealt with the plot, I have to return again to the style. I have done my best to apply rationality to the synopsis, but there are several threads I have to leave out in order to make this book look even somewhat respectable. Plus, I don't want to spoil too much of the events of it. The same style that causes Redford to cover page after page with nothing but the letter R, or with increasingly disturbed descriptions of potato sacks, is invariably tied to the plot and how it is structured. That is to say that the book is designed to be offensively opposite to what a reader expects from a book, in terms of regard for literary tropes in the plot and stylistic norms in the text itself. It is, I think, an attempt to make a tropeless work, by smudging and broad-stroking the tropes we know until they are absolutely meaningless. But maybe I'm reaching.

Like I said, I do think Redford was trying for something here. Consider the following:

He was sad. She was sad. It was sad.

He was crying. She was crying. It was crying.

Kind of an analysis of English grammar if you think about it. We can use a general, neutral pronoun to refer to implicit circumstances ("it" meaning the sad situation in this case) which can't be used in parallel structures (the situation cannot cry). This sort of broken parallel structure is right at home in a book that also contains bits like "HELP HIM HE IS CHOCKING!!!!!!!!" Refuge in Audacity may be relevant here--Redford attacks tropes and grammar by completely wrecking all of them.

Or maybe I'm just a pedantic asshole.

Pretentiousness aside, it is hard not to enjoy a book where a zombie has had his arms--arms, not hands--replaced with Desert Eagles.

That's magic, I think--or, I guess. I wish I could have bumped into Redford on the street. If someone's been a featured writer on this site, it's likely I'd want to meet them face-to-face.

But to have met them through their work: that's just as good, if not better.

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Image Source: Lulu