(pb; 2025)
From the back cover
“A cursed film. A haunted
past. A deadly secret.
“The Baroness, an infamous [1935] exploitation film long thought
destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist
Ellen Kramer―deeply closeted and pathologically repressed―begins restoring the
hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her.
“As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is
real and is happening to her―and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its
occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control.
“Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question
Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind: Do you want it? More than anything?”
Review
Set in New York (Staten island, Brooklyn), New Jersey (Clifton) and Delaware (Dover) in 1983, this only-for-die-hard/gorehound and LGBTQ+ friendly readers is a fiercely feminist, button-pushing read that slips seamlessly between Ellen Kramer’s nightmares and reality, rife with antisemitism, body horror, rape and sexism, bringing to me (at least for this reader) Poppy Z. Brite’s (aka Billy Martin) 1996 queer- and body horror-centric Exquisite Corpse as well as Clive Barker’s early to mid-career works.
Making Black even more
horror-giddy, truly-cinematic fun is Felker-Martin’s love of film—explicit,
fond mentions of Alien (1979), Halloween
(1978), director/screenwriter David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby.
Black’s finish brings to mind the following films: Demons (1985),
Knife + Heart (2018), The Lords of Salem (2012) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). Real-life piece-of-fecal-matter
Sen. Strom Thurman and a delightful Rodney Dangerfield (he’s filming Easy Money) make an appearance in this nunsploitation-flirtatious and tightly
written, ambitious work, one worth owning.
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