Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry

 

(pb; 1995: first book in the Jane Whitefield series)

From the back cover

“Jane Whitefield is a Native American guide who leads people out of the wilderness—not the tree-filled variety but the kind created by enemies who want you dead. She is in the one-woman business of helping the desperate disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork. Jane knows all the tricks, ancient and modern; in fact, she has invented several of them herself.

“So she is only mildly surprised to find an intruder waiting for her when she returns home one day. An ex-cop suspected of embezzling, John Felker wants Jane to do for him what she did for his buddy Harry Kemple: make him vanish. But as Jane opens a door out of the world for Felker, she walks into a trap that will take all her heritage and cunning to escape.”

 

Review

Vanishing is an excellent thriller, one of the best works I’ve read from Perry thus far. His slick, well-edited action and usual solid characterization is on display, the latter taken to a new level through a touch of mysticism and his deep-dive, main-protagonist’s knowledge of her multi-tribal-integral knowledge of her peoples’ history, practices and skills (thus making Vanishing an edutaining and effectively heartfelt-but-not-sappy read). Standout novel from a standout writer, worth owning. Followed by Dance for the Dead.

American Neo-Noir: the movie never ends by Alain Silver and James Ursini

 

(oversized pb; 2015: nonfiction)

From the back cover

“After scores of books and commentaries on film noir and its classic period, experts Alain Silver and James Ursini turn their full attention to neo-noir—the self-conscious, occasionally mannered, sometimes ersatz, and often surprising genre that sprang from the original movement. This volume surveys the full breadth of American neo-noir—its style and substance, its evolution over succeeding generations of filmmakers from activist through post-modern to millennial and onward—with extensive illustrations, black-and-white and full color, that capture the genre’s dramatic and visual essence.”

 

Review

American is a great entry in neo-noir nonfiction in that it functions as an educational, sometimes entertaining primer for those unfamiliar with the genre and as an entertaining read, possibly reminder, for those already well-versed in its plays of shadow and light. If Silver and Ursini sometimes come off as cinematic snobs in their tastes (they especially disparage, with moralistic zeal, Brian DePalma and his work), it’s almost something to be expected from critics and not people who’ve created anything (fictional) worth noting—I don’t write this to be mean, but as something for readers to be aware of. I give them credit for their often on-target takes and focused, narrowly defined analyses, but every viewer has their filmic opinions, so don’t let theirs compel you to avoid certain filmmakers’ works just because Silver and Ursini don’t like them. Worth reading, this.

Raylan Goes to Detroit by Peter Leonard

 

(hb; 2018: fourth book in the Raylan Givens series)

From the inside flap

“Plato o plomo. These are the last words Special Agent Frank Tyner hears before getting dealt the business end of a .22 Sport King, a gift from known drug trafficker and murderer, Jose Rindo. Nora Sanchez, to track down Rindo and bring him to justice before he slips across the Mexican border. Further complicating things, she’s got some unwanted help from the US Marshall fugitive task force—the kind that’s quick on the trigger and always shoots to kill—in the form of recently reassigned Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens. The duo follows Rindo’s bloody trail through the dusty plains of the Midwest, across the deserts of Arizona and El Centro, and deep into the heart of Mexico.”

 

Review

Set a few years after the events of the show Justified (2010-15) Peter Leonard’s Detroit maintains the same burn-through, tightly written, humor-, character- and violence-driven feel of his father’s previous Raylan Givens novels and stories, making this a worthwhile legacy read, one worth checking out.

Metzger's Dog by Thomas Perry

 

(pb; 1983)

From the back cover

“A soldier of fortune. His cat. His ex-lover. With a clean shot at 10 million.

“All they have to do is read the want ads. Blackmail the CIA. Shut down a major American city.

“And get away with it.”

 

Review

Metzger’s is a fun, action-punctuated and relatively light-in-tone heist and blackmail tale, one that sports a 1970s-cinematic, semi-loose-in-telling (but always focused and character-centric) feel, especially in comparison with Perry’s four-book, tightly edited Butcher’s Boy series. This touch of the offbeat in this ambitious, animal-friendly heist/ransom story makes Metzger’s and its characters a joy to read (about, particularly Chinese Gordon, a.k.a. Leroy Charles Gordon). Worth owning, this, especially for fans of Charles Willeford and his creative ilk.

The Folks by Ray Garton

 

(hb; 2001: novella. Published by Cemetery Dance Publications.)

From the inside flap

“Welcome to Pinecrest, an isolated mountain village halfway up rural Mt. Crag. . . a place of natural beauty and solitude. . . a place where village life has remained unchanged for decades. . . but also a place where dead bodies have a strange way of showing up every couple of years. . . ravaged, mutilated bodies.”

 

Review

Told from the point of view of polite, non-religious twenty-one-year-old Andy Sayers, whose fire-scarred face scares many of his fellow Pinecrest residents, Folks details what happens when a mysterious benefactor offers Sayers a scholarship to the nearby College of Hand of God, and he’s seduced at a Halloween party by a mysterious, wealthy Amanda Bollinger whose familial, vine-covered house is hidden within neighboring Mt. Crag, hotbed of unyielding Christianity (and the aforementioned college).

Folks’s hybrid horror tropes and set-up may likely be familiar to those longtime genre readers but that’s a moot in point in this Old School 1980s, 130-page novella, given Garton’s excellent, tightly edited play-with-cliches writing, quick-but-effective characterization, and equally effective pacing. For Garton fans, the author’s fondness for well-written (brief in Folks) sex scenes and effective/cringe-worthy ickiness may further sell the tale to them. This is a great, hourlong read, with a finish that brings to mind the ending of King Diamond’s Conspiracy (1989) album. Folks is worth owning if the above description appeals to you.

George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead: Dissecting the Dead by various authors

 

(hb; 2020: nonfiction/essay collection – the 156-page book is included in Second Sight’s seven-disc Dawn of the Dead Blu-Ray/CD set)

From the back cover

“George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has long been considered one of the high points of the zombie genre. Like its predecessor, Night of the Living Dead [1968], it blends extreme horror with broad, social commentary. Much has been written about Dawn of the Dead as a critique of consumerist society. However, as this collection of contemporary writing demonstrates, it much more than that. Here, leading voices from both genre film publications and academia bring a diverse range of new perspectives to Dawn of the Dead. In addition to fresh takes on the gender, race and class aspects of the film, there are also essays which explore the Gothic roots of Dawn of the Dead, its rocky reception in cinemas and home video in the UK and how it spawned an entire sub-genre in Italian exploitation cinema. . .”

 

Review

If you’re a big fan of Romero’s Dead series and/or the zombie genre in general, this is an overall interesting read. Not all the essays thrilled me, but for the most part they were interesting, and lent themselves to a more intriguing, deeper understanding of Dawn, creation, design, and influence-wise. Standout essays, at least for this reader, include:

Kat Ellinger’s “Romero’s New Gothic,” Jon Towlson’s “Superschlock!,” Martin Conterio’s “Combat Shock: Reflections on Vietnam and the War Movie Genre in Dawn of the Dead,” Daniel Bird’s “A Form of Punk: The Production and Distribution of Dawn of the Dead” and Jim Cironella, from his essay “Needle-Drop Nightmares.” Worth owning, this.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino

 

(pb; 2021: movie tie-in)

From the first inside page

“RICK DALTON—Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick’s a washed-up villain-of-the-week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it?

“CLIFF BOOTH—Rick’s stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he’s the only one there who might have gotten away with murder.

“SHARON TATE—She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream and found it. Sharon’s salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills.

“CHARLES MANSON—The ex-con’s got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he’s their spiritual leader, but he’d trade it all to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.

“HOLLYWOOD 1969—YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE.”

 

Review

More an expansive, structural rework companion piece to Tarantino’s 2019 character-centric, plot-rambling and world-building film, Once is best read as a screenplay without a script structure. (When I write “rework” I mean it—e.g., the film’s climactic finish is lacking in the book, mentioned in almost-conversational passing early on. And when I write expansive, that’s equally true of Once, especially when Tarantino details Cliff Booth’s immediate post-WWII years (considering becoming a “man of leisure” in Paris; the details of his stateside homicides, once in Cleveland, the other his wife’s on-boat demise). As with the film, there’s a lot of sly mixing of real-life history and often-wistful, sometimes meta-humored, wish-it-happened Hollywood fantasy.

Mostly, Once works as an alternate-version, well-written book, though Tarantino, true to form, sometimes lets his love of cinema, his characters, and world-building run long (e.g., chapters where he details the plots and characters of his fictional television shows as well as the passages detailing the foreign films that Cliff likes and dislikes).

Once is an impressive, sometimes exasperating (excessive detailing of films and shows) read, one worth checking out, perhaps owning, if you’re looking for something more than the usual, rigid-to-the-film movie tie-in book, and/or a Tarantino fan.

The Shadow Murders by Jussi Adler-Olsen

 

(hb; 2022: ninth book in the Department Q series. Translated from the Danish by William Frost.)

From the inside flap

“On her sixtieth birthday, a woman takes her own life. When the case lands on Detective Carl Mørck’s desk, he can’t imagine what this has to do with Department Q. Copenhagen’s cold cases division, since the cause of death seems apparent. However, his superior, Marcus Jacobsen, is convinced that this suicide is related to an unsolved case that has been plaguing him since 1988.

“At Marcus’s behest, Carl and the Department Q gang—Rose, Assad, and Gordon—reluctantly begin to investigate. And they quickly discover that Marcus is onto something: Every two years for the past three decades, there have been unusual, impeccably timed deaths with connections between them that cannot be ignored, including the mysterious piles of salt at the scenes. As the investigation goes deeper, it emerges that these ‘accidents’ are in fact part of a sinister murder scheme.

“Faced with their toughest case yet, made only more difficult by COVID-19 restrictions and the challenges of their personal lives, the Department Q team must race to find the culprit before the next murder is committed, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the killer is far from finished.”

 

Review

A year or so after the events of Victim 2117, Carl Mørck and the rest of Department Q are still haunted by their pasts, particularly Assad’s family (his wife and children are still fragile after an extensive stint as a terrorist’s hostages) and Mørck, whose 1988 nail-gun case (with others’ planted drug and money evidence) still excites certain police investigators who still want Mørck to turn in his badge. The case that Department Q eventually finds itself investigating is one of manners, murder, manipulation and obsession, and is not initially gripping as previous cases, but the writing is still top-notch and eventually the case becomes more interesting as the tale goes on.  As with previous Department Q novels, this is an immediately engaging (with its familiar-in-a-good-way characters), steady-build and excellent police procedural thriller.

Skin Crawl magazine (issue 2) by magazine creator/writer/illustrator Skinner and various artists

 

(pb; 2022: second issue of Skin Crawl illustrated magazine, created by artist/writer Skinner)

Overall review

The second issue of this EC/Creepy-inspired illustrated horror magazine sports lush, wildly imaginative artwork as Old School as similar, also exciting genre comics that came before it. Two of the storylines in this issue are more ambitious than those seen in issue 1 of Skin Crawl (but just as moralistic and twisty), e.g. “The Seven Geases” and “A Case of the Morbs”. As with its first issue, this is a magazine that’s delivering on its vividly drawn and written promise and more. Worth owning, this.

 

Review, story by story

“Welcome Back”: A swamp creature is drawn from her primordial muck on an annual, special date. Poetic, pulpy, humorous, and completely engaging.

 

“The Seven Geases”: Cody Goodfellow scripted and adapted Clark Ashton Smith’s 1943 Weird Tales-published story, where Lord Ralibar Vooz, “high magistrate of Commorium and third cousin of King Homquet” and twenty-six men venture into the horribly storied Black Eiglophian mountains to hunt arcane game. Things go awry and soon Vooz, with a winged creature guide (Raphotontis), must pass through seven bizarre territories if he is see his terrestrial domain again.

Ambitious in writing, overall scope and sumptuous, detailed visuals, this adaptation of Smith’s work is wow-worthy in the best way and an illustrated tale that warrants revisiting at some future date.

 

“A Case of the Morbs”: Psycho-analytical and vividly illustrated (like all the stories in this issue) tale about two creatures escaping a horrible, monster-populated cave. Quotes from Carl Jung’s “The Shadow—Carl Jung’s Warning to the World”, which talk about balancing one’s light and dark aspects (in themselves and on a societal level), make up much of “Morbs”, making for a stellar, if especially intense work.

 

“Game of the Gods”: Two arrogant deities (The Lord of Instinct and The Lord of Strategy), using mortal alien armies on Scyorax like ongoing chess pieces, make grim and bloody sport to best each other. When a lesser god is allowed to join their game with only one warrior, it could prove to be Instinct and Strategy’s undoing.

Film Noir Reader 2 edited by Alain Silver & James Ursini

 

(oversized pb; 1999: nonfiction/essay collection)

From the back cover

“In the wake of the remarkable success of Film Noir Reader, this new collection further explores a genre of limitless fascination—and one that continues to inspire and galvanize the latest generation of film makers.

“Again heavily illustrated, with close to 150 stills, Film Noir Reader 2 is organized much like the earlier volume. It begins with more ‘More Seminal Essays,’ including a New York Times attack on crime pictures, written more than half a century ago, before the French had even given the genre a name; a look at its early development by the noted French director Claude Chabrol; and an analysis, by the American critic Stephen Farber, of how film noir reflects the violence and ‘Bitch Goddess’ values of contemporary society.

“Part Two, ‘Case Studies,’ covered specific films, with Robert G. Porfirio comparing the 1946 and 1981 versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice, editor Alain Silver exploring ‘Hitchcock’s Noir Landscape,’ Grant Tracey’s reading of ‘Samuel Fuller’s Tabloid Cinema,’ and Francis m. Nevins tracing the transformation of Cornell Woolrich’s fiction into such movie classics as Rear Window and Phantom Lady.

“‘The Evolution of Noir,’ the book’s final section, focuses on the neo-noir of our own time: ‘Son of Noir’ (Richard Jameson), and such timely subjects as ‘Noir Science’ (editor James Ursini) and ‘Girl Power: Female Centered Neo-Noir’ (William Covey). It also considers British film noir (Tony Williams) and the cross-cultural movement of ‘Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir’ (Kent Minturn). . .”

 

Review

This multiauthor essay collection, like many anthologies, is hit-and-miss, depending on who’s writing and what they’re writing about. The essays I didn’t enjoy were largely über-academic and pedantic, as if written to impress (hoped for) peers rather than edutain/educate laymen readers like myself (which is fine, if that was their intent; that said, this is a volume largely intended for the public at large, not an purely academic journal). Also, some of the essayists seem perfectionist, almost snide in their assessments/tones (e.g., Claude Chabrol, who’s made some good films, but has his fair share of less-than-stellar works). Some readers may well disagree with my reaction to those oh so lofty, high on intellectualistic language writers, and that’s fine—I’m guess that’s why Silver and Ursini included such a mix, to appeal to a wider audience. At any rate, the following essays stood out in their overall, straightforward excellence, relative conciseness, lack of five-dollar words (when fifty-cent words would do the trick), and worthwhile observations:

“Three Faces of Noir” – Tom Flinn (1972)

“Violence and the B**ch Goddess” – Stephen Farber (1974)

“Whatever Happened to Film Noir? The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946-1981)” – Robert G. Porfirio (1981)

“Creativity and Evaluation: Two Film Noirs of the Fifties” – Robin Wood

“Translate and Transform: from Cornell Woolrich to Film Noir” – Francis M. Nevins

“Film Noir and Samuel Fuller’s Tabloid Cinema: Red (Action), White (Exposition) and Blue (Romance)” – Grant Tracey

“Son of Noir” – Robert T. Jameson

“Writing the New Noir Film” – Sharon Y. Cobb

“Girl Power: Female-Centered Neo-Noir” – William Covey

“Noir 101” – Philip Gaines

Ultimately, Film Noir Reader 2 has enough interesting, generally worthwhile essays in it to make it worth reading and buying, particularly if you’re not familiar with the genre and looking to fix that—even its bordering-on-obscurantist works are an educational, in the sense that it warns film noir neophytes the kinds of [censored] they might have to deal with while wading through the murky shadows of noir cinema.

Elvira: The Boy Who Cried Werewolf by Elvira with John Paragon

 

(pb; 1998: YA novel. Third novel in the Elvira trilogy.)

From the back cover

“I thought I had bad hair days!

“I’ve dealt with wolves before, but never like this. The kind I’m used to are all bark, no bite. They howl, they drool, and who do you think gets stuck with the check? I mean fangs a lot, fellas!

“Now my young friend Whitney keeps trying to convince me he’s a werewolf. As if, I mean, I like a good practical choke as much as the next ghoul. But if this kid doesn’t give it up soon, he’s off to his tomb with no supper.

“There he is now. Look at him. What’s with all the fur? And those fangs—hasn’t he heard about caps? Still. . . the blood looks pretty real. That arm in his mouth, too. You don’t think. . .

“Jeepers creepers! I better give Whitney a yelping hand before the neighbors scare up some silver bullets. I tell ya, a ghoul’s work is never done!”

Review

Caveat: (possible) reference spoilers in review. 

The third and final Elvira novel, not linked to the 1973 or 2010 films, is my favorite book in this bunch. In Boy, a rest stop trailer gypsy curses one of Elvira’s adolescent, easily influenced friends (Whitney Benedict) with lycanthropy just as a string of bloody (briefly but not gratuitously described), full-moon murders terrorize Elvira’s chosen town, Beaver Hills. Is Whitney the furry killer, or is it the craven Dmitri Ouspensky (son of the gypsy) or Officer Paul Tanner (the wolfishly aggressive and charming cop who’s won Elvira’s heart)? As the body count mounts, Elvira, with help from Kimberly Henning (Whitney’s girlfriend), investigates, risking their lives and the lives of those around them.

Like the first two standalone books, double-entendres and horror film references/set-ups are seamlessly, often hilariously baked into the deftly paced storyline, a work suited for older teens who are familiar with the horror host’s work. Appropriately, references are made to The Wolf Man (1941), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), and The Howling (1981) as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Stephen King (specifically his 1983 novel Christine, which resulted in a same-year John Carpenter-helmed film). What elevates the Elvira novels above other “light”/young adult books is that it balances horror and humor in equal measure, an excellent terror-flick introduction work worth owning (if you can find it for a reasonable price, it’s an out-of-print book).