Get it? Like the movie,
King Kong Lives? (Except let's be honest--this
bookstore sequel is
way better than that forlorn
Kong sequel could have ever hoped to be.
Way better.)
And if you're really interested, you can check out the original Bookstore Saturday (BS) posts
here and
here. Of course,
multiple BS's have happened since those posts were written--BS's happen on a regular basis in my world--this is just the first one I've
written about since those two.
And now you know more than you wanted to about Bookstore Saturday History. (You're welcome.)
On to the books.
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| "One's too many an' a hundred's not enough!" (Which forties film is that from?) |
Nice, huh? Just looking at that cover gives me the Warm Reading Feeling. (You know the one.)
The book was originally published in hardcover in 1975; my copy's a paperback from 1979, and it looks like it was reprinted up through 1990. Some books you worry if you don't have the latest print--what if you're missing out on some cool updated information only found in the newest one? But with a book like this--no worries. Films of the nineteen forties aren't changing after the decade is done and gone, no matter how many reprints a book gets. I suppose you could be missing out on some minor correction to a title or date, but I'm not letting my already overly-obsessive mind go there (iwillnotiwillnotiwillnottheeditionihaveisfinetheeditionihaveisfine).
So, the book itself is filled with exactly 100 movies, released (as you might expect) from 1940 through 1949, and pretty much every genre is covered. The films are in chronological order, which I like 'cause if you decide to actually read the whole thing in sequence, you have a nice flow as the decade progresses and you can make note of changes in tone, theme, etc. over time. Er, not that I'll likely read this thing cover to cover, but if I did. Oh. Actually there's a fair chance I will do that, so....
Anyway, here are some of the book's movies that are already jumping out at me from the contents pages:
Of Mice and Men,
Rebecca,
Suspicion,
Shadow of a Doubt,
The Phantom of the Opera,
The Lodger,
Double Indemnity,
Gaslight,
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
The Big Sleep,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (
ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa),
and
Sorry Wrong Number. Each film in the book gets two or three or four pages of text and photos, and covers technical details, cast and crew, a reasonably detailed plot summary, and the author's thoughts.
And speaking of author's thoughts,
Tony Thomas was quite a well-known film historian, who did most of his (book) writing in the 70s and 80s. His bibliography is well worth checking out--six or seven in the list I wouldn't mind owning, or at least having a good library-read-through....
 |
| Be still, my beating heart! |
Yep, my heart got going pretty quick when I saw this book on a
Powell's (that's where this particular BS happened) shelf. It was beating even faster when I neglected to slip it into my little "potential buys" basket and then couldn't remember what part of the store I'd seen it in after realizing I couldn't, in fact, live without it. I made a couple of circuits around that (really big) store before I thought to ask Helpful Bookstore Man to bail me out. ("I can't remember the title and I can't remember the author and I can't remember where I saw it but it's about horror paperbacks from the 70's and 80s....") He led me right to it and now it's mine.
I actually had a moment of weird-unreality-ness when I first picked the book up, because my immediate thought was "Oh, this
has to be written by Will Whatsisname over at
Too Much Horror Fiction." But then I looked on the cover and it wasn't. (I'd never heard of
Grady Hendrix, but now I totally want to give
Horrorstör a read.) Reality-ness was, however, quickly restored as I popped the book open to its title page and read "Grady Hendrix
with Will Errickson." "Well there you go," I thought to myself ("Errickson" being the "Whatsis" I was failing to remember).
But enough of my Head Rubbish (I feel like that should refer to dandruff or something, but it actually refers to my meandering thoughts), and on to the book.
Well, the book is a treasure. I mean it's the kind of book an Egyptian Pharaoh would've had buried with him, and then had the guys who'd placed the book in his tomb killed, so they could never tell anyone it was there so the book would never be tomb-robbed (technical term). That's how treasure-y this book is.
Check out these chapters:
- Hail, Satan
- Creepy Kids
- When Animals Attack
- Real Estate Nightmares
- Weird Science
- Gothic and Romantic
- Inhumanoids
- Splatterpunks, Serial Killers and Super Creeps
I know, right? At over two hundred and fifty pages, I'll be pulling weekend-reads from this tome for years and years (and years!) to come....
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| Me... show you... my new Wolf Man and... Godzilla... action figures! |
Okay, that's a clunky caption, but the moment I saw this book/magazine/bookazine, it looked to me like ol' Frank was proudly showing off his new monster action figures to us. (That's just how I roll.)
Is "bookazine" a real term? Even if it's not, that's what this thing is. It was
in the magazine rack at the bookstore, so I know it's not a bonafide book, but it reads like one (a good one), even if it only clocks in at 74 pages. It's written by
Dave Alexander, and is part of
The Rue Morgue Library, a series of similarly-formatted bookazines put out by Canadian horror magazine
Rue Morgue.
I'm handing it to author Dave: if this little offering is any indication of his abilities (and it is), he'd do well to put out a full-on book-sized book. Assuming his topic drew me in, I'd be all over it. As it is,
this wee little book-like thing is a great read. It does a nice job of wrapping academic information and historical tidbits up into an accessible and conversational package that's just flat out fun to read.
It groups its movies into chapters that cover:
- The Undead
- Demons, Witches and Folklore Fiends
- Nature's Nastiest
- Inhumans
- Aliens
- Misfits of Science and Technology
- Shapeshifters and Doppelgangers
Each (obviously short) chapter includes specific case studies and interviews, along with general yada-yada on the genre-at-hand. Good stuff.
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| Our plots will likely be identical, but our covers are so cool--buy us anyway! |
Sigh. If I had a buck for every beautiful woman who'd eyed me disdainfully, laconically pulling open her robe, while smoking and haphazardly holding a gun I'd be an
insanely wealthy man. (And I know it's probably much the same for you.)
Anyway, you don't pass up vintage
Perry Mason when you see it lying right there in the dollar bin, and that's exactly what happened to me here. Well, it wasn't a
literal dollar bin--not many of those around anymore--it
was the requisite rack in the corner containing a mish-mash of inexpensive buys, so same general idea.
I've got several of these old Mason books around the house. I enjoy the mysteries, even if they're a little on the formulaic side, and when I pick one up I almost always go for a vintage edition on account of the covers being so much cooler (plus you get those great vintage ads inside). These two were both later novels.
...Shapely Shadow was published in 1960/1963 (original hardcover/this paperback) and
...Screaming Woman was in 1957/1960.
Like a fair number of folks, I first got turned on to Perry Mason through that
excellent TV series from the fifties and sixties--that's one we revisit regularly, here in the deadmans household. The novels generally include a nice dose of "TV familiarity," but with plenty of differences in characters and tone so you get a unique experience with them. And of course it's always nice to get the expanded plot and characterization you can't fit into a sixty minute TV show. Not that all the shows were taken from Gardner's novels. But you know what I mean.
So yeah, these'll make good weekend reads, when I get around to 'em.
And that's it for this edition of Bookstore Saturday. More to come I'm sure, the next time me and a bookstore and a desire to write all coincide in the mystic ways these things sometimes do....
