Tag: Jack Ketchum

That’s Why God Made the Movies

I love nothing more than a good horror movie, unless it’s a well-written horror novel…and with his latest, the amazing Paul Tremblay has somehow managed to give his readers both.

Our little movie that couldn’t had a crew size that has become fluid in the retelling, magically growing in the years since Valentina uploaded the screenplay and three photo stills to various online message boards and three brief scenes to Youtube in 2008. Now that I live in Los Angeles (temporarily; please, I’m not a real monster) I can’t tell you how many people have told me they know someone or are friends of a friend of a friend who was on-set. Our set.

Like now. I’m having coffee with one of the producers of the Horror Movie remake. Or is it a reboot? I’m not sure of the correct term for what it is they will be doing. Is it a remake if the original film, shot more than thirty years ago, was never screened? “Reboot” is probably the proper term but not with how it’s applied around Hollywood.

Producer Guy’s name is George. Maybe. I’m pretending to forget his name in retribution for our first meeting six months ago, which was over Zoom. While I was holed uip in my small, stuffy apartment, he was outdoors, traipsing around a green space. He apologized for the sunglasses and his bouncing, sun-dappled phone image in that I-can-do-whatever-I-want way and explained he just had to get outside, get his steps in, because he’d been stuck in his office all morning and he would be there all afternoon. Translation: I deign to speak to you, however you’re not important enough to interrupt a planned walk. A total power play. I was tempted to hang up on him or pretend my computer screen froze, but I didn’t. Yeah, I’m talking tougher than I am. I couldn’t afford (in all applications of that word) to throw away any chance, as slim as it might be, to get the movie made. Within the winding course of our one-way discussion in which I was nothing but flotsam in the current of his river, he said he’d been looking for horror projects, as “horror is hot,” but because everything happening in the real world was so grim, he and the studios wanted horror that was “uplifting and upbeat.” His own raging waters were too loud for him to hear my derisive snort-laugh or see my eye-roll. I didn’t think anything would ever come from that chat.

Horror that is “uplifting and upbeat.” Oooo-kay then.

I’ve been a fan of Tremblay since I read his brilliant A Head Full of Ghosts, which was so real and believable and so original that it blew my mind. It was one of the more ambitious horror novels I’d read this century, and having enjoyed that thoroughly, delved more deeply into the Tremblay canon. I’ve yet to be disappointed in one of his novels–they are always very original, even when taking on a horror trope; they are hard to stop reading or put down at any point over the course of the narrative; and his characters are always believable, absolutely real, and completely relatable, even if they aren’t the nicest people around.

The “cult horror movie” trope is one that has been used before, of course, both in fiction and on film. The primary reason for the success of The Blair Witch Project back in the day was due to no one being certain whether it was a work of fiction or if the film’s conceit–found footage of something that actually happened–and that huge success resulted in the rise of the “found footage” trope. Tremblay plays a bit with this here–the original film in this book, Horror Movie, is also named Horror Movie. Five kids made the movie back in the day, with everyone participating and everyone having off-camera duties as well as their on-camera performances. The movie was never released, but about ten years earlier than the time of the novel, the director released some scenes on line and also published the script, posting links on every horror film board and horror fan board she could find. This has stirred up interest in the movie again…and the book is about the “reboot/remake” of Horror Movie, and the person telling the story is the only survivor from the original movie…but we don’t learn that right away. (Part of the lore of the movie is its “curse”.) He also played the monster the kids in the movie “create”, by isolation, torture and mind control–and the use of a mask that he (only known as The Thin Kid) is forced to wear.

The story has two timelines–the current day with the making of the new version, and his memories of making the original. There are also flashbacks to periods in his life between the bookends of the film being made–the film being made reminds me of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door–and as the book goes on, the timelines cross over and over again and once again, we have a completely unreliable narrator–but that doesn’t become very apparent until the book continues to move on and this blurring of fact and fiction is done so incredibly well that you can’t help but wonder how all of this is going to play out and what is real and what isn’t–while the tension keeps building and building as everything spirals out of control.

This book is utterly amazing, and I am so grateful I started reading Tremblay. Highly recommended, and will make a lot of Top Ten lists this year.

Straight from the Heart

Well, I tried to make pho last night and it was an absolute disaster. Heavy sigh. But hey, you gotta try sometimes, right? I’m not entirely sure what I did wrong–but it tasted terrible, and I overcooked the noodles, and yes, Gregalicious does have the occasional epic fail in the kitchen. I shall try again another time, of course, but I am certain it will most likely be a really long time before I try again. It was so disappointing, and I really wanted some pho last night. Ah, well.

Paul went to see a local play production last night, so I was left to my own devices. After I trashed the pho, I went on to make tacos–always so reliable–and sat in my easy chair and finished reading Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door.

Well, THAT was disturbing.

the girl next door

You think you know about pain?

Ask my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.

She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting–her own and a neighbor’s–and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her things and breasts and belly that you can still see today, scared her so badly she fell back against her mother’s turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its way back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.

My second wife says that’s pain.

She doesn’t know shit, that woman.

That’s a pretty amazing image for the start of a book, don’t you think?

I was on a panel with the divine Megan Abbott several years ago where she mentioned that the suburbs are incredibly noir; I’d never really thought of it that way before, but I soon realized she was absolutely right (as she so frequently is). One of the major disconnects in our culture and our society is our idealization of children and childhood; as well as the time when children are at the in-between stage between childhood and adulthood, hormones raging and passions and emotions are their height; she has explored this beautifully in novels like The End of Everything and Dare Me. Stephen King writes beautifully about children; idealizing the innocence of childhood against the very real terrors that exist in that time; nowhere is this more evident than in his novel It. That idealized world is partly because of 1950’s sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Make Room for Daddy; a sanitized, unreal world that everyone seems to look back on and thinks was real–when it was anything but.

Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door is also set in that time; 1958, to be exact, in a small suburb/town in New Jersey, a tranquil world of fairs and carnivals and playing pick-up games of baseball in the park; of trying to catch crayfish in the creek and beginning to wonder about the way your body is changing. But this ‘idyllic’ world has some dark edges–there’s a sociopathic bully up the street, beaten by his alcoholic father who also beats his mother and sister; and the three boys next door don’t seem quite right in the head, either. Their single mother, Ruth, is the “cool mom” of the neighborhood, who lets the kids drink beer and smoke in her presence. The death of her brother and his wife brings two more kids–girls–into her home, Meg and Susan. And then the dynamic begins to change…and Ruth’s own sociopathy begins to reveal itself…and soon Meg is tied up and being tortured in the basement…and the other kids in the neighborhood also soon are slowly drawn into the terrifying game in the basement.

And the main character, whose first person POV this is told in, is not exactly innocent. Told in reminiscence; looking back on what happened as an adult, exploring why he didn’t blow the lid off what was going on and how he himself got roped into helping in the torment, is as terrifying as what is going on. The descent of these kids into monsters, how easy it is for that thin line between being decent and moral as opposed to criminal and animalistic to be crossed is what truly makes this horrifying. The fact that it is based on a true story makes it even worse…because this may be fiction, but things like this happen in the real world. Every day.

And it is written beautifully; Ketchum is a great writer, knowing how to build suspense and unease, able to use words and construct sentences and paragraphs to create a chilling mood; and you keep turning the pages not only to find out how the story is going to resolve itself–obviously, it has to–but to see how the main character, Danny,  resolves his own inner conflict about what’s going on…and it is clear, just from the way the story is told, that adult Danny is still damaged by what happened, what he witnessed, what he was involved in.

The book is classified as horror, but it’s more suburban noir than anything else.

It’s also a pretty chilling indictment of how powerless children are.

And now, back to the spice mines.

All Right

It’s gloomy this morning, and my heart is heavy upon waking to the news from Las Vegas. Yay, Monday.

I have a lot to get done this week, as ever. Bouchercon and our trip to Toronto looms on the horizon; I went to work on the stuff in the storage attic over the laundry room this weekend. Cleaning out the storage spaces, of course, is an exercise in letting go; I donated three boxes of books last week and will probably donate that many more this week.

I want to get at least three more chapters on the Scotty book done this week; I also want to revise a short story one final team before sending it out into the world; and I am going to get the WIP whipped into final shape so I can start sending that out to agents. It should work, as long as I don’t get sidetracked or distracted or lazy. Tonight when I get home from work I am going to make pho, for the first time; I’ve found a ‘quick” recipe that should only take about forty minutes to make.

I started reading another book yesterday that didn’t pass the first fifty page test; into the donate pile it went, and I started reading another, The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. I’ve never read Ketchum, but I’ve know who he is for years. I met him at Stokercon in Las Vegas; and since he was one of the guests of honor, I arranged for his travel and so forth. What an absolutely charming man! I bought my copy of this book that weekend, but never ran into him again after I’d bought it. It’s quite excellent so far.

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me for the rest of the day.

Here’s a hunk to slide you into the week.

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