Wet Work by Philip Nutman (1993): Too Tough to Die

In 1993, in my early 20s, I was working in a giant chain bookstore known as BookStar in Cary, NC. It was basically a Barnes and Noble (who eventually bought, rearranged, and then closed down the store), guys had to wear ties and dress pants, like it was fucking church. Several of my coworkers were horror fiction fans, both of the modern and classic variety, and we wasted many a working hour talking about the genre while ignoring our shelving duties. At this time the horror mass-market paperback boom was beginning its downhill swing, although I well recall the publication of many a serious title around then: Animals by John Skipp & Craig Spector, Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, After Age by Yvonne Navarro, Skin by Kathe Koja, Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti, The Golden by Lucius Shepard, as well as the continuing, final titles from the Dell/Abyss line. And in June came Wet Work, published by Jove Books, the first novel from young British author and journalist Philip Nutman.

I already knew the author's name from various Fangoria articles as well as a few of his short stories. They were good, smart, effective, and I remember shelving fresh new copies of Wet Work and thinking it might be worth a read. The critical blurbs came not from, you know, the newspaper reviewers but from fellow horror scribes like Clive Barker, Kathe Koja, Douglas E. Winter, Nancy A. Collins, Skipp n' Spector themselves, and Stephen King as well (although we've  learned how unreliable a King quote can be). All a good sign to me!

And yet—I didn't read it. My taste for the genre was waning some; sure, I was rereading some favorites but not really keeping up any longer. Like I said, I could tell the boom was slowing down, despite some interesting works arriving. This was when I was getting into my hardboiled/crime/noir phase, James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Woolrich, Cain, Chandler, James Lee Burke. Tastes change, you gotta go where your heart leads you.

So when I finally got around to Wet Work last week, I wasn't sure if it was gonna read like a last gasp or a fresh breath. Turns out, it was neither, and it didn't need to be: it's simply a briskly-told horror novel of a zombie apocalypse. Ignore the "epic terror" comparison to The Stand on the cover; compared to King's mammoth-sized tome, Wet Work is a wee little rodent, scurrying about busily while getting the job done in a fraction of the pages.

It's radiation from a comet that sets things off, akin to the space probe origins of the zombies in the original Night of the Living Dead. Sections of the first half resemble the early parts of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, although these characters don't know yet that they're dealing with the undead. All this is no ripoff or plagiarism, however: Wet Work is an expansion of a Nutman short story of the same name, and it was first published in 1989 in the essential undead anthology Book of the Dead, borne upon us by Skipp n' Spector. A major work of the splatterpunk movement, it featured stories all written in the ghoulish universe of Romero's (then-) trilogy of zombie horror movie classicks.

2005 reprint by Overlook Connection Press

Any consumer of popular entertainment, horror or not, will be right at home in the familiar environs of Nutman's various characters and settings: secret military assassins, rookie cops, seasoned cynical cops, adults with dying parents, the lovelorn, the alcoholic, the teenage dirtbag, the cheating rich, the drug dealer, the junkie, DC/NYC, the airport, the strip club, the lab, the White House. Nothing to criticize, really; Nutman fills in color and detail no matter where he's describing. It's all as immediate as any movie or TV show, slick but not shallow, but not overladen with heavy meaning or a desire to upend tradition. His prose is lean, cynical, our tale starting off with the whitehotwhiteheat italics and ...ellipses... so beloved of the splatterpunks, what better way to get to the meat of the matter?

Skipping in well-played rhythms, Nutman shuffles his plotlines well, not lingering too long on any one locale. This is a skill I wish more horror writers had mastered: the thrust of narrative, the propulsion of story, the ability to convey movement in time forward while invoking a sense of impending doom overall. Nutman's background as a film historian has to account for his crisp, capable hand at this task, as the novel is cinematic as hell. Horror violence and gunplay action mingle here expertly.

Nutman didn't write another novel, I'm not sure why and couldn't find out, but did write comic books and more short stories, collected in 2010's Cities of Night. He died just over 10 years ago; it's a little sad to see all these encomiums from his colleagues praising his talents and to know he wouldn't add to his bibliography. Maybe with the end of the paperback era he just couldn't get another publisher interested in a full-length horror novel? I also feel bummed because in spring 1994 I attended a comic book convention in Durham with a coworker pal, and saw Nutman himself engaged in a lively conversation with one of the movie memorabilia sellers, and I thought, hey, you should go chat with him, tell him you liked his stories... but I did not! Damn.

Overall Wet Work is a short sharp shock of splat fiction, never dwelling too long on any character(s), moving at a brisk pace as the end of the world approaches. Not that the story is shallow or insipid, it's just that Nutman knows that we know how the story goes, and isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. His fresh take on zombie myth isn't exactly mind-blowing, but it is interesting enough to keep even a seasoned horror fic fan reading to the bleak, downbeat ending. Who'd want it any other way?

The Orpheus Process by Daniel H. Gower (1992): Death Machine Infest My Corpse to Be

Occasionally I read a horror novel that buggers my critical facilities, and I must ask myself that age-old question: is it so bad it's good, or is it so bad it's simply terrible? I know what I like and what I don't, but what if those things are wrapped up together? Which aspect outweighs the other? Is it so important that I know? Take the first novel by Daniel H. Gower, a paperback original from the fabled Dell/Abyss line entitled The Orpheus Process (Feb 1992). A story of medical horror and reanimated corpses, it features one cliche after another, with impossible dialogue, unbelievable motivations, iffy characterization, leaden attempts at black humor, tasteless over-the-top gore, wonky "science," and an exhausting climax that seems to go on and on. But. But.

I cannot tell you the last time a novel kept me reading more (I kind of agree with the various blurbs on the paperback; it is compulsively readable!). I enjoyed the hell out of it, good and bad alike. Gower's style has energy, conviction, and forward thrust, even accounting for lapses into amateur psychology, weak analogies, telling and not showing: first-novel flaws all present and accounted for. Orpheus Process goes to dark places of nihilistic blasphemy, and often what it finds there is unbearably silly, other times it touches on real existential dreads, plumbing deep into nightmare psyches. I loved the over-the-topness of it even when wrong-headed, its death-in-the-midst of life scenario, and all the sickening metaphysics of a biochemist playing God with his "reanimants." Welcome to the abyss indeed.

Dr. Len Helmond turns his family life into a hellish hash and the reader is along for the ride. There's lots of family drama in Orpheus Process, believable on the face of it but Gower's depiction of conflicts strains credibility. Helmond's relationship with wife Janice is somewhat rocky; his teen daughter Ally is going through a Goth phase; his beautiful lab assistant Sharon has the serious hots for him; and his experiments with reanimating animals in a university lab have been gross failures. Then one rhesus monkey, all-too-obviously named Lazarus, comes back seemingly normal...

Laz is so normal in fact Helmond does then what any good scientist would do and takes the creature home to his family. I mean what. His two younger children, seven-year-old Eunice and five-year-old Andy of course love the monkey. But its mind, its incomprehensible little monkey mind, has seen things on the other side that will destroy its sanity, and its body is changing in all kinds of incomprehensible ways due to that fancy violet amniotic fluid Helmond's created. Things take a turn for the worse: Ally is involved in a car accident with her boyfriend; we meet deranged Vietnam vet Cully Detwiler; and Helmond reanimates Osiris (duh!), a chimpanzee. None of this, you can expect, goes well at all. I mean, it all turns to absolute shit. There's even an impossible decapitation!

Little Eunice is killed on Halloween night when Detwiler goes on a maddened shooting rampage at an ice cream shop. Improbably Helmond is able to grab up her bullet-riddled body and toss her in the trunk... then zooms off to his lab to reanimate her. But of course! The rest of the family is away visiting grandma so isn't that convenient? Helmond successfully revives Eunice, the energized solution heals her wounds, and Helmond hopes his wife won't notice anything amiss with her reanimant daughter. This is not to be: Eunice's necromorphosis, however, is not into living death, but into hyperlife. She is becoming a totally new kind of life-form...

In her new state Eunice has gone beyond madness after peering into the reality that lurks beyond death; she out-Goths her sister Ally with her disturbing sketches (She must be watching a lot of horror movies the older sister muses) and Helmond finds the little girl's notebook, filled with mind-chilling philosophy:

I have experienced the unity and tranquility of nothingness, the absolute knowledge of the universal abyss... I have tasted the annihilation of all human feeling... I have been on that darkest of all levels of existence, the complete void of mind and soul... I know that supreme unbearable truth, have seen the agonizing revelation when the thin veil of materiality is pulled back, when the skin of the night is torn open to expose the pulsing primal core of the universe...

Gower doesn't quite seem to realize the enormity of his own creation; a few moments of levity or a better understanding of the horror and taking it even more seriously would've been welcome. When confused, horrified townspeople and police confront Helmond about, well, all the blown-up zombie parts outside his house, his response is "Look folks, it was an accident." That kind of incongruity—and there are plenty—really grates on me as a reader. After Laz the reanimated monkey nearly kills Janice, she says to her husband "You almost killed me, you know?" and he responds "It was an honest mistake." I mean WTF: this is not how humans in extremis talk, think, or behave (an all-too common flaw in the genre). For horror to work, the characters have to react realistically; otherwise it is all just a barrage of nonsense.

But I loved the lair Eunice builds for herself in a graveyard, a necropolis of noxious fog and reassembled corpses beneath the earth:

It was a chapel... dozens of empty caskets arranged like pews, and against the far wall Eunice luxuriated on a throne made of human bones surrounded by an altar constructed of the decomposing parts of a hundred corpses, torn apart and jumbled together in a collage of carnage... "Nothing in the world seems quite alive, but nothing in the world seems really dead, either." 

To emphasize her point, she casually waved the back of her right hand at the mural of twisted, decaying shapes behind her, momentarily infusing them with a violet corposant glow, and several eyeless skulls chattered like novelty teeth while intestinal tendrils flailed around them.

French paperback, accurate cover art

I've still only summarized about half of the events in the novel. The climax is so over-the-top it's proto-bizarro, evoking the nightmarish landscapes of Lovecraft's darkest fantasies, the cosmic nihilism of Ligotti, but with a dour tone that some may find off-putting (his appropriation of Ligottian themes is unsubtle, crude, even banal in places: "Did God fall asleep and have a nightmare?"). Eunice's reanimated monstrosities, demented and deformed, could be out of Barker but are described without his deft touch; ideas about death and resurrection read like Pet Sematary on cheap speed and weed (was Jesus the Nazarene a hypervital reanimant?!); Helmond's weapon of choice when attempting to kill Eunice is played straight by actually belongs in an Evil Dead sequel.

In spite of all the novel's faults, I feel justified in recommending it. There's just something so batshit crazy here, reminding me of that Masterton style of not letting plausibility factor into the storytelling. Ambition is part of it; Gower goes for broke, unleashing a farrago of grotesqueries parading by in an endless loop of madness (you won't forget Janice's midnight walk to find Eunice). As the title implies, elements of Greek tragedy are shoehorned in, as are references to Frankenstein and Repulsion. The final chapter, how could it compete with what's gone before, but I think it kinda worked in a redemptive manner: Her father had been an ingenious, doomed man, and she still loved him in spite of everything...

Gower, who published only one other novel, Harrowgate, also from Abyss, in 1993, now apparently self-publishes science fiction on Amazon with hand-drawn cover art.

You Know I'll Always Be Your Slave Till I'm Buried in My Grave

The Zombies of Death

Armies of the Hungry Ones

No, this is not the VHS box cover art for a forgotten Italian zombie flick! Gloriously depraved and aglow with the green-grey hue of putrescence, this cover for the horror novel Disembodied (St. Martin's Press, 1988) is one of the most graphic I've seen. I snatched it up on that basis alone! But one glance at the back cover to see what's the haps and we're in trouble:

"Psychic adventurer"? "Astral self"? Ugh. My least favorite horror fiction involves these dopey old hippy tropes. Is the cover a bait and switch, promising extreme zombie mayhem but not delivering? Anyone know? Alas, Disembodied joins the ever-growing legion of the unread. 

Guy N. Smith Sucks

Well, he doesn't really. But you know what I mean.

I had such high hopes for October - a classic King review, a classic Bradbury review, some vintage pulps and '80s anthologies - but alas, they will not be. Instead, I'll postpone them till after the Halloween party the GF and I are preparing, which is occupying most of my time this month. So for now, enjoy these lurid and lovely Guy N. Smith covers!

RIP Philip Nutman, 1963 - 2013

Horror writer and journalist Philip Nutman died yesterday. Read a wonderful memoir of him by Fangoria editor Tony Timpone here. I really enjoyed the short stories he wrote in the early '90s, published in the anthologies Book of the Dead, Splatterpunks,and Borderlands 2. He also wrote the screenplay of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, and was one of Clive Barker's earliest champions. I've had his only novel Wet Work (1993) for years but it remains unread. Rest well, brother...

Ripped Up Like Shredded Wheat

A Sort of Human Picnic

I don't think the cover artist had a real good grasp of just what a zombie was.

Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite (1993): Being Nothingness

Horror's purview is one of good versus evil, obviously, but that's one battle which doesn't interest me much in fiction; I do not think art has to be didactic or proselytize to be effective. In Poppy Z. Brite's first stories, collected in Wormwood, there is no real sense of good or evil, just the aesthete's pose of worldliness and boredom. She was concerned not with morality but with sensuality and brought a sort of fin de siecle decadence to the genre just as its paperback popularity seemed to be fizzling out. This approach was something horror mostly lacked in the era, concerned as it was with middle American families, or children and teenagers.

A teenager herself when her stories were being published in The Horror Show magazine in the mid 1980s, Brite's characters were the misfit kids, part of subcultural movements that I was familiar with and sympathetic to—punk and goth and whatever the mixture of the two beget. They hung out in filthy, ill-lit clubs, wore black rags and had messy hair and crashed in abandoned houses and churches, sleeping on stained mattresses and consorting intimately with a variety of partners, usually all in a New Orleans of perfume and rot. Certainly to an audience used to the familiar comforts of Koontz, King, or Saul this wasn't going to go over well at all, but it didn't need to; Brite's first novel, the highly anticipated Lost Souls (1992), was part of Dell's line of innovative and edgy horror novels not geared towards a mainstream audience. Published in hardcover, Lost Souls made Brite the hot horror commodity of the early 1990s. And it didn't hurt that her two earliest champions were Dan Simmons (who wrote the introduction for this collection) and the mighty Harlan Ellison.

When I first read most of these stories it was late 1993 and the collection was entitled Swamp Foetus, a limited-edition hardcover from Borderlands Press. This paperback edition from Dell did not come out until 1996, and then retitled Wormwood probably because someone took offense at the original. Still, it's a good title, evoking the poison and delirium of absinthe, then still a more or less obscure liqueur beloved of true arty decadent types. But it's also relevant since it refers to "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," which was the first story I ever read by Brite, in 1990's Borderlands. I was hooked immediately. This story always reminded me of Lovecraft's minor tale "The Hound," yet it is undeniably Brite's own. Two young men, jaded and bored beyond belief by their excesses in art, sensuality, drink, and drugs, turn to grave-robbing for ghoulish kicks. Then, in a dank punk rock nightclub, they meet another boy who may offer them their greatest and most final thrill.

Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain... the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.

Original limited-edition hardcover, 1993

As the above passage might attest, much of Brite's fiction was populated by gay or bisexual young men; homoerotic overtones were the norm for her and definitely gave her work a true "outsider" edge. Her darkly elegant conflation of sex and death, usually so clumsily done in paperback horror, owes more to Baudelaire or Gautier than Barker or Rice (with whom she was often, and erroneously, compared). This is best seen in the later stories, both from 1991, the marvelous "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" (which I wrote about here) and "The Sixth Sentinel," which show Brite maturing as a stylist. They are poisonous confections, two of my favorites from the time, and ripe with the beauty of putrescence and the stink of sex. In "Sentinel" she lovingly describes a flooded, ancient graveyard:

Some of the things that have floated to the surface are little more than bone. Others are swollen to two or three times their size, gassy mounds of decomposed flesh... silk flower petals stuck to them like obscene decorations... Yawning eyeless faces thrust out of stagnant pools, seem to gasp for breath. Rotting hands unfold like blighted tiger lilies. Every drop of water, every inch of earth in the graveyard is foul with the effluvium of the dead.

1992 hardcover, Delacorte Press

Two friends from her first novel Lost Souls (1992), Ghost and Steve, appear in "How to Get Ahead in New York" and "Angels," adrift and wayward, on their own for the first time. The sleazy environs of 1980s New York comes right to life in the former tale while the latter evokes the circus-freak setting of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989). Unkempt, doomed musicians play large roles in "A Georgia Story" and "Optional Music for Voice and Piano," depicted sympathetically and believably. "The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire" is set in the restaurant industry - many years later, all her novels would be - in a brutally modern world that has little need for love or flesh. Certainly the earlier stories, like "The Elder" and "Missing," may be a little slight, but it's obvious they were written with passion and care and intensity.

All in all, I feel Wormwood is a must-read; it's been good, rewarding fun revisiting it. Are the stories scary? Not really, no. This, as well as the brooding teenage characters and sensual depictions of death, might be a turnoff off for some readers. But with their strange and compelling visions of a world populated by the outcast, the marginalized—indeed, by the dead themselves—Poppy Z. Brite's short stories show that true horror, facing it and embracing all its woes, may be bravest, most beautiful, the most rewarding thing of all.

Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1983): And Jesus Said Unto Lazarus, "Hey-Ho, Let's Go"

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience... and the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.

This passage from Pet Sematary makes me think of the famous opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu," as well as Eliot's dictum that humankind cannot bear very much reality. Too, Shirley Jackson's description of Hill House. In his 10th published novel - the one he's famously said frightened him so much he wasn't sure if he should finish it - Stephen King tests those beliefs by subjecting an all-American family to the single worst horror a family can suffer... and then pushes further into taboo realms that reveal the blinders many people live with when it comes to death and dying. And whatever comes after.

Back cover of original 1984 Signet paperback

I don't suppose I need to recap the plot - young doctor Louis Creed and his family moves to delightful country house in Maine, befriend old-timers, meet destruction - since the strangely long-lived, decidedly mediocre 1989 film adaptation is rather faithful to its source (although of course this book-appropriate meeting of geniuses is perfect). Actually I can't recall if my favorite sequence is in that movie, and I really don't care; I just want to say two words to those of you who've read the book: Timmy Baterman. Timmy Baterman. I've read lots and lots of horror and one of its stylistic "tricks" that I find unfailingly terrifying is the old tale-within-a-tale. Like most things are in genre fiction it's practically a cliche, but damn if this one doesn't get at my soft vulnerable places and flay them wide open.

Told by Jud Crandall, the crusty old Maine native who lives across the road (or, rather, the rud, ayuh) from the Creeds' new home, this singular tale of a very young soldier killed in WWII and shipped home is one of sheer wrongness. A mountain walked or stumbled. A dead man lives again. That image of zombie-like Timmy Baterman, fresh from being reburied beyond the pet cemetery in the woods (an Indian burial ground, can you dig it?) by his grieving father ("So fuck the army, and fuck the War Department, and fuck the United States of America, and fuck you boys too. I got him back"), stumbling around town or screaming horrible secrets about the men who've come to kill him, is one I haven't ever been able to shake since I first read it in, oh, 1985. Nor, honestly, would I want to.

Of course the novel has its vulgar homespun moments, as one would expect; what King fiction would be complete without 'em? My, uh, favorite is when Louis's friend and colleague Steve Masterton, one of the few sane people in the entire narrative (and even he suffers, but survives, a bad shock at the end), tries to comfort him but can only cry out desperately in true King style, "Oh, Christ, Louis, what a cock-knocking, motherfucking mess this is!" Cock-knocking indeed, sir.

But what I find most effective about Pet Sematary - even after countless readings - is that its most unsettling scenes aren't necessarily the ones of gruesome supernatural horrors from beyond the grave; they're the simply observed and detailed moments of overwhelming grief, loss, regret, and numbness. The fight at the funeral home? Brutal. But later, when Louis awakens from a dream in which his son was not killed only to find his pillow soaked in tears brought on by that part of his mind that will always know the truth? Damn.

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rock back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.

Nope, nothing can beat the original hardcover/paperback cover art

With its effortlessly bleak depiction of a normal home rent asunder not only by death but by weakness, neglect, and failure, not to mention a true resurrection of the dead ("Resurrection... ah, there's a word (that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it)"), Pet Sematary can be a dispiriting and unhappy read. And some have compared its denouement negatively to a similar scene in 'Salem's Lot. But how else could this story have ended? You tell me.

So maybe think of this as King channeling Kubler-Ross with a(n un)healthy dose of "The Monkey's Paw," as directed by George Romero. With a soundtrack by the Ramones. Honestly I don't know where Pet Sematary sits with King fanatics, but for me it's about the top of the heap. Or the cairn, as it were. That useless, useless cairn. Because I don't wanna be buried in a...

Why am I not wearing this right now?

Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon (1989): Rockin' Bones

Now we get into the realm of the truly ridiculous horror fiction cover art. Let's parse this one a sec, shall we? Where do we begin? There is a skeleton driving a car. Not a rotting, pustulant, zombified corpse driving a vintage badass hot rod, but a simple, goofy, grinning Halloween-y skeleton, bared phalanxes at a sharp 10 and 2, careering off in a late-model sedan from what looks like a bordello of fellow active skeletons. And one of those skeletons has hair, quite feminine hair. Do you see the woman in the window? Second floor, middle. Ooh-la-la! Also, a skeleton pondering a noose and one swinging an ax. Huh. Skeletons are not scary; they're silly. And what about ol' mom jeans giving our skeletal pal the once-over twice? I do believe the fates have something in store for these two, putting them on a cover of a fairly lame '80s horror novel like Resurrection Dreams, Richard Laymon's agreeable but ultimately underwhelming and underwritten 1989 novel.

Laymon, who died in 2001, has had most if not all of his old novels republished in mass market paperback editions due to his growing posthumous cult status in the field. I do not belong to this cult. He was the type of author I avoided in my horror-reading heyday of the late '80s and early '90s and this book confirms my suspicions: I was seriously judging his books by their covers and the only story I'd read of his, "Mess Hall" in Book of the Dead, seemed to me an artless mess of sexual violence and gore.

Evoking the film version of Lovecraft's Re-Animator, with a madman trying to resurrect dead bodies, Dreams is hackwork of the most inoffensive kind. Melvin Dodds is the high school nerd (you can tell that by his name) who, in a completely unbelievable moment just a few pages in, shocks the town with a horrifying experiment he displays at the school's science fair: trying to resurrect the body (with jumper cables!) of a popular female classmate, recently killed in a drunk driving accident. He ends up locked away in a mental hospital for 20 years; after he's released he heads back into town and operates a gas station. One of his former classmates, now Dr. Vicki Chandler, returns, and Melvin realizes he's loved her all along. The resurrection techniques he began in high school are now perfected, and if Vicki won't love him willingly, well....

I am certainly a fan of ladies resurrected from the dead and the unholy passion that will thus occur, but Laymon really misses out on a chance to explore this taboo. There are a couple rom-com moments when Melvin realizes he's in a relationship with a zombie woman, Patricia, his first victim, rather than the woman of his dreams; Laymon is too poor of a writer and scenarist to make something out of this. Resurrection Dreams is ham-fisted and obvious, gory in the dullest manner, lacking the wit or passion or intensity that could have made his somewhat intriguing premise memorable. Let's just turn off the lights and close the door, shall we, and never speak of this again.

Living for the Screen: The Bastard "Art" of Horror Movie Novelizations

You won't find me collecting too many horror movie novelizations. While horror movie fans might find them exciting, I think novelizations are a strange and thankless art for the reader. I suppose they're not even art, they're simply commercial artifacts designed to sneak more money out of a film fan's pocket. Initially as disposable as a movie-theater popcorn bag, they have, like so much other pop culture detritus, turned into kinda cool collectibles. I read many as a kid before moving on to, well, actual books. I certainly don't think I'm alone in that, and I remember devouring the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien and Superman novelizations of the late '70s/early '80s.

Most novelizations probably aren't worth much, but some have turned into decent collectibles thanks to, of course, covers that either reproduce the awesome poster art - as in Nosferatu (1979) - or features more characterization - as in The Wicker Man (1978). And I must say, I was pretty jazzed to snag that copy of Night of the Living Dead (1981), even though the guy peeking out from - well, whatever it is he's peeking out from - looks nothing like a zombie.

Novelizations are different from movie tie-in editions, which are when novels written first are then repackaged later with the movie adaptation poster on the cover. A good example is Stephen King's 1982 collection of four short novels, Different Seasons. This baby got re-released half a dozen times as a total of three of the novellas were adapted into popular movies. It's not just double-tripping; it's quadruple dipping, and more, in some cases. Check them all out here.

The literary merits of the novelization are next to nil, probably even closer, but often they are based on early or discarded drafts of screenplays and can therefore offer different or more in-depth details not in the finished film (see Jaws 2 for a great example). Often the books have pseudonyms or ghost-writers, and in the case of Nosferatu, have authors who became rather well-known in the literary world. Paychecks were pretty much guaranteed for this type of work, so many burgeoning young authors put aside notions of artistic purity and cranked 'em out on the side.

Even the estimable Ramsey Campbell, under the incredible and incomparable pen name of Carl Dreadstone, had a payday with 1970s novelizations of 1930s Universal monster classics, which actually go for a fair penny on eBay and such. I have so far been unable to track these down for a price I'm willing to pay. Which is like a buck.

Others who turned to novelizations include Dennis Etchison - actually, a major editor/short-story writer of the 1980s who I've not yet written about on this blog - who, as Jack Martin, penned Videodrome, David Cronenberg's bizarre cult masterpiece from 1983. Etchison worked from an early screenplay of the director's and therefore some of the alien quality of the movie is alleviated. John Skipp and Craig Spector, just before the height of their popularity, wrote one for Fright Night, the charming 1985 homage to horror movie hosts of the 1970s.

While I have here and there picked up some of the above novelizations, they're not really my collecting focus; I won't be filling my shelves with all the Friday the 13th novelizations, for example (an exception would be made for the novelizations of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Martin). But for anyone really interested in this aspect of horror fiction, I mean really and sincerely, you have to go here; this guy has an astonishing thread going, albeit from four or five years ago. The covers are mostly amazing. Imagine that!