As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been watching Mike Flanagan’s Carrie on Prime. I’ve made it through four episodes and to say that I’m not enjoying it would be an understatement. The miniseries is spending 8 hours on a story that Stephen King handled in about 200 pages and which Brian De Palma was able to tell in a little over 90 minutes. Of course, De Palma was smart enough not to give Carrie an invisible friend. He also didn’t introduce a psychic cult. De Palma knew the story worked as it was.
If you haven’t read Stephen King’s original novel, you really should. That’s especially true if you’re currently watching the Flanagan miniseries and you’re wondering what all of the complaints are about. Carrie was King’s first published novel and King himself has admitted that it’s a flawed work. It’s a mix of passages that are definitely the work of King and excerpts from government hearings, Carrie’s notebook, and Sue Snell’s autobiography. The split format shows that King still wasn’t totally sure how he wanted to tell the story. That said, when the book works, it really does work. King doesn’t shy away from Carrie’s anger and bitterness. He doesn’t try to make the story about anything more than what it is. And even the government hearings and Sue Snell’s autobiography show us that Carrie, the outcast with telekinetic powers, will never be forgotten.
For the record, I do know that King has endorsed Flanagan’s revisions. With the exception of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Stephen King tends to endorse everything and one gets the feeling that, much as was the case with Frank Darabont, King enjoys the fact that Flanagan is such a fan. That’s just human nature. That said, the novel, flaws and all, is infinitely superior to Flanagan’s miniseries.
Again, as I mentioned in my previous post, if you’re watching Flanagan’s miniseries but haven’t seen Brian De Palma’s film, that’s something you need to rectify. After you watch Brian De Palma’s film, be sure to check out Like Being On Mars: An Oral History Of Carrie (1976) by Lee Gambin. This book is all about the production of the film that changed horror in much the same way that Star Wars, a year later, would later change science-fiction. Gambin interviews the key players: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, William Katt, P.J. Soles, De Palma, Stephen King, and even Bill Paxton! (Paxton worked on the crew.) It’s a great book for lovers of both movies and horror.
The Convent of Hell is the kind of guilty pleasure that makes you admire the artwork while hoping nobody walks in and asks what you’re reading. Written by Ricardo Barreiro and illustrated by Ignacio Noé, it feels like what would happen if European exploitation films of the 1970s collectively decided they weren’t being exploitative or extreme enough. Whatever restraint those movies occasionally exercised gets thrown out the convent window, leaving a delirious collision of religious imagery, explicit adult material, and grotesque supernatural horror. It is definitely not safe for work, and that warning covers considerably more than nudity. Still, beneath the shock tactics sits an impressive piece of visual storytelling, presented with more artistic conviction than its premise might suggest.
The setup is wonderfully suited to this kind of lurid entertainment. An isolated Spanish convent conceals a mysterious door in its basement, and investigating what lies behind it proves spectacularly unwise. Religious discipline already exists alongside cruelty, repression, and compromised authority before the supernatural threat fully emerges. That matters because the horror does not simply invade an otherwise innocent sanctuary. It finds an institution with weaknesses already built into its foundations. The Mother Superior’s fascination with the forbidden doorway turns curiosity into catastrophe, giving the story a clear dramatic engine even when its increasingly outrageous content threatens to take over completely. You know opening that door is a terrible idea, but watching the inevitable disaster unfold is part of the appeal.
Noé’s artwork is the biggest reason the book rises above being a disposable exercise in provocation. His painted imagery gives the convent a physical presence that makes its corruption feel unusually tangible. The building looks oppressive rather than comforting, with an atmosphere of isolation that establishes unease before the demonic spectacle arrives. There is a strong contrast between the solidity of the setting and the impossible things that eventually occupy it. Instead of treating the backgrounds as empty space between bodies, Noé uses the environment to sustain the mood. The result is a comic whose visual atmosphere remains compelling even when the narrative is operating at its most ridiculous. You can question the taste involved while still admiring the craftsmanship.
That craftsmanship also helps the horror retain some genuine ugliness. The demonic presence is not simply a glamorous fantasy figure with a few sinister accessories. Its animalistic design and exaggerated scale make it feel invasive, alien, and fundamentally wrong within the convent’s enclosed world. This is important because the book constantly moves between erotic spectacle and disgust, sometimes refusing to give the reader a comfortable distinction between them. Noé makes that collision visually forceful. The imagery can be excessive, but it rarely feels timid or accidentally awkward. Whether a particular page fascinates or repels you, there is usually little doubt that the artist knows exactly what kind of reaction he is trying to provoke.
Barreiro’s writing deserves some credit for giving the excess a framework. The discovery of the door, the growing mystery surrounding it, and the escalation into outright supernatural disaster create a recognizable progression rather than a completely shapeless collection of adult scenes. There is anticipation, a threshold being crossed, and a widening sense of consequences. The opening stretch gives the setting time to acquire some menace, which makes the later chaos feel like a release of pressure rather than an arbitrary change of subject. That does not mean the book becomes a deeply layered psychological drama. It simply means its exploitation elements benefit from actual pacing, and pacing makes a considerable difference when the premise is this aggressively overblown.
The characters are less convincing as complicated individuals than as participants in a nightmare about repression and corrupted power. The Mother Superior is the most important figure because her authority and transgression become inseparable, but the book is not especially interested in patiently exploring everyone’s interior life. Its religious imagery supplies an immediate vocabulary of purity, temptation, punishment, and desecration, then twists those ideas into spectacle. There is potential for a sharper critique of institutional hypocrisy here, yet the comic generally prefers another outrageous escalation to a sustained argument. That limitation is worth acknowledging. A reader looking for an insightful examination of faith or convent life will probably find the book much thinner than its elaborate artwork initially promises.
The biggest obstacle, however, is not the thin characterization. It is the sexual violence. Calling this a cheeky naughty-nuns comic would badly undersell how cruel and confrontational parts of it become. Its explicit content includes nonconsensual acts, so the guilty-pleasure label needs a serious qualification: the pleasure comes from the feverish horror, visual skill, and sheer audacity, not from pretending the disturbing material is harmless. For some readers, that combination will be an immediate dealbreaker, and understandably so. Even readers comfortable with extreme horror may find the balance between eroticism and brutality unpleasant rather than entertaining. This is a book whose content warnings are genuinely useful, not merely promotional shorthand for something mildly scandalous.
What ultimately makes The Convent of Hell memorable is the mismatch between its disreputable subject matter and its committed execution. It has the instincts of a midnight exploitation feature, but Noé gives those instincts a richly realized visual identity, while Barreiro supplies enough structure to keep the descent into chaos moving. It is excessive, uncomfortable, occasionally absurd, and unmistakably adults-only. As a guilty pleasure for readers who can tolerate its extreme content, it delivers a distinctive collision of supernatural horror and sacrilegious spectacle. As a recommendation for the average graphic-novel reader, it comes with enormous reservations. The artistry is real; so are the reasons to leave it on the shelf.
X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills was the fifth Marvel Graphic Novel. It was first published in 1982. It’s 44 years old, and it still makes an impression. When I was a kid, there was a copy of it hidden among the periodicals and magazines at Waldenbooks. When I was in the store, I’d find it, open it, and pick up where I had left off. I knew there was no way I could get away with buying something called God Loves, Man Kills, but that’s because the story wasn’t for kids.
Two children are shot and killed in a playground and left hanging from a swing set. Why? Because they were mutants. Magneto, who until that point had been presented as a villain, is the one who gives them a proper burial. From the beginning, X-Men was a comic book that was actually about prejudice and racism, but God Loves, Man Kills made the message clear. The opening of the story wasn’t something you’d find in a normal monthly Marvel comic.
The villain is a white-haired televangelist named William Stryker. He preaches against mutants. He secretly leads the Purifiers. He kidnaps Professor X and attempts to use his powers to destroy the X-Men. The X-Men and Magneto team up and face an enemy so obsessed with their destruction that, for once, Magneto no longer seems like the fanatic. Even Professor X is tempted to give up his dream of coexistence.
Stryker appears to die, shot by a human security guard who fired to keep Stryker from killing a mutant. It’s a powerful ending. In typical Marvel fashion, the ending was ruined when they decided to bring Stryker back. Stryker died multiple times and somehow came back to life repeatedly. Eventually, he went from being a televangelist to being a Satanist. Marvel never knew how to leave well enough alone.
God Loves, Man Kills remains powerful, though. It was a true graphic novel, with a plot and themes worthy of a novel and graphics that were far more mature than anything to be found in the comics. I read it at Waldenbooks, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Hello, fellow readers! I’m doing today’s book review while Lisa gets some well-earned rest.
Today, it seems like everyone is an expert on the history of Marvel Comics, but if you actually talk to them, you discover that the majority seems to think that history started when the first Iron Man movie came out in 2008. They should definitely read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, which begins when Marvel was known as Timely Comics and ends right when the MCU is on the verge of taking over pop culture.
The history of a comic book company might not sound that interesting, but Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is surprisingly compelling. We follow the company from the Timely years through the modern era. We see how Marvel changed comics forever in the 1960s. We see how they continued to challenge conventions in the 1970s while also becoming the type of big business that sold a lot of comics and left behind a lot of angry readers and creators. We feel as if we’re watching as Stan Lee becomes a minor celebrity and struggles to get a foothold in Hollywood. Howe spends as much time discussing the bad times as the good ones. In the 1980s, Jim Shooter burns a lot of money with the New Universe. In the 1990s, Marvel goes from being the upstart company that took risks to being a symbol of the moribund establishment. With the success of the MCU, it’s easy to forget how bad things got at Marvel before the movies gave the company a new life.
The book doesn’t shy away from the controversies, in particular the question of whether Stan Lee took credit for the work of others. Lee comes across as an exuberant force who was tireless in his efforts to promote Marvel but who also could be prickly and egotistical. Artists and writers like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko are profiled as the talented men who never got the credit they deserved for Marvel’s success. Chris Claremont is described as someone whose ideal X-Men story would be the characters just hanging out in New York and talking. John Byrne is described as using unsold New Universe comics to start a bonfire. Todd McFarlane fires Rob Liefeld by telling him, “We don’t like you no more.” The book is full of memorable moments.
Howe’s book is at its most interesting when it discusses Marvel in the 1970s. That was when a new crew of artists and writers, many of whom were young hippies who had recently graduated from art school, joined the company and discovered that Marvel was a business first. The comics may have dealt with current events, but they were still largely being drawn and written by veterans from the 1940s and 1950s. (In the 1970s, Stan Lee tried to attract female readers with Ms. Marvel but the first issue, written and drawn by men whose career stretched back the Golden Age of Comics, is described as being a series of crotch shots.) The book examines the conflict of artists trying to create in a corporate environment where the one rule is that nothing can ever change.
It’s a must-have for anyone who claims to be a fan of Marvel.
Whenever I browse through Half-Price Books (and yes, you can order from the store online, but a used bookstore really is someplace you should visit in person), I always hit the Film, TV, Music aisle immediately after checking out the American History section. That was where I found The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies. I purchased it. I can’t remember how much it cost, but I didn’t care. It was an encyclopedia of movies. I had to have a copy.
It’s a great collection of reviews. The films are listed by year, so you can actually chart how the genre developed, and flipping through this book definitely helped me develop a better understanding and appreciation of science fiction movies. (And, of course, quite a few of the films reviewed were also horror films that happened to have science fiction elements.) Now, of course, I should mention that this book was published in 1986 and, as a result, it ends with the year 1985. But you know what? I don’t really need a guide to recent films. I’ve either seen or heard about most of the recent science fiction films. What I do need is a guide to the films that were made before I was even born. This book has introduced me to films that I otherwise would never have heard about. That’s the most important thing that a film guide can do!
The reviews are short, well-written, and opinionated. Because the book was published in the UK, a lot of American films that were made for television are reviewed as feature films, because that’s what they were in Europe. It’s an entertaining book, one that you can happily flip through with the knowledge that you’ll find something worth examining on each page.
This book can be ordered from all the usual suspects. I’ve seen it going for as little as $4. Don’t look for it at Half-Price Books. I grabbed the last copy.
“We are not enemies. We are the agents of change. To that end we are bound together.” — Hecate
By the time Hellboy: Wake the Devil begins, Mike Mignola has already made clear that Hellboy’s world is not one where the dead stay buried or where ancient evils remain confined to history. Building on the groundwork established in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, this graphic novel moves deeper into the peculiar mixture of pulp adventure, Gothic horror, occult conspiracy, folklore, and apocalyptic myth that makes Hellboy so distinctive. It is a darker, stranger, and more confident continuation, one that expands Hellboy’s world through vampires, witches, ancient ruins, Russian legends, Nazi occultists, and the ever-present suggestion that the past is not buried so much as waiting to rise again.
Where Hellboy: Seed of Destruction had to introduce readers to Hellboy, the B.P.R.D., Rasputin, and the ominous question of the hero’s intended destiny, Hellboy: Wake the Devil benefits from being able to assume some familiarity with the larger premise. It does not waste time reintroducing every concept or explaining Hellboy’s origin in exhaustive detail. Instead, Mignola plunges directly into another supernatural crisis, trusting the reader to follow the fragments of history, prophecy, and folklore that emerge along the way. That confidence gives the book a more distinctive identity than the first graphic novel, which was highly entertaining but still carried some of the structure of a traditional early-1990s superhero adventure.
This difference also reflects Mignola’s greater control over the material. While Hellboy: Seed of Destruction was co-plotted and scripted by John Byrne, Wake the Devil feels more purely shaped by Mignola’s own creative instincts. The writing is leaner, stranger, and more willing to leave mysteries partially unresolved. The plot remains accessible, but it is not interested in handing readers a complete guidebook to its mythology. Rather than explaining every occult reference, historical figure, or supernatural artifact, Mignola presents them as pieces of a much larger hidden world. That approach gives the story a dreamlike quality, as if Hellboy has stumbled into a folktale that has been unfolding for centuries without him.
The story begins with a stolen corpse, an opening that immediately establishes the book’s grim tone. This theft is connected to Vladimir Giurescu, an ancient vampire whose resurrection becomes the central threat of the graphic novel. Giurescu is not presented as a familiar, romantic version of Dracula, nor is he simply another monster for Hellboy to punch through a wall. He is an old-world figure tied to European violence, occult ritual, aristocratic power, witchcraft, and death. Mignola makes him feel ancient in the best sense: not merely old, but connected to a past so deep and cruel that modern people cannot fully comprehend it.
Giurescu’s presence is one of the book’s greatest strengths because he embodies the kind of villain Mignola handles especially well. He is frightening not because he constantly performs elaborate acts of violence, although the story has no shortage of monstrous imagery, but because he carries the weight of history with him. His return does not feel like the arrival of a single antagonist. It feels like a buried nightmare opening its eyes. Mignola’s supernatural villains often possess this quality. They are dangerous as individuals, but they are even more dangerous as evidence that Hellboy’s world is built over ancient horrors that have never truly disappeared.
The plot also brings back Ilsa Haupstein, one of the Nazi occultists introduced in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Her involvement gives Wake the Devil a direct link to the previous story without making the book feel like a repetitive sequel. The Nazi occult material remains important, but Mignola wisely expands the scope beyond it. The conspirators and occultists are no longer the entire center of the story. They become one part of a wider mythology involving vampires, witches, old relics, secret histories, and supernatural forces that existed long before the twentieth century. The result is a story that feels more expansive without becoming bloated.
The title carries an interesting irony, since Hellboy himself is constantly associated with the devil because of his red skin, horns, tail, and demonic appearance. People who encounter him often assume that he must be monstrous, dangerous, or connected to evil. Yet Wake the Devil again makes clear that Hellboy’s appearance has little to do with his moral character. He may look like a demon, but he is still the person trying to stop the resurrection of an ancient vampire and the spread of occult evil. The real devils in the story are the people and creatures who seek power through murder, ritual, resurrection, and the exploitation of forbidden knowledge.
Hellboy’s moral simplicity is one of the series’ most enduring strengths. He is not simple in the sense of being a shallow character, but he is direct about what matters. He does not spend pages agonizing over whether monsters should be stopped. If something evil is threatening innocent people, he goes after it. He complains, gets irritated, takes a beating, delivers a dry joke, and keeps moving. That makes him an ideal protagonist for Mignola’s world. The setting is filled with cryptic prophecies, ancient names, hidden archives, and supernatural mysteries, but Hellboy gives the reader someone grounded to follow through it all.
His humor remains especially important. Wake the Devil is a dark book, full of graves, corpses, ruined buildings, occult rites, and creatures whose existence seems to violate the natural order. Without Hellboy’s blunt attitude, the material could become overly solemn. He does not make light of the danger, but his presence keeps the graphic novel from collapsing under the weight of its own mythology. Hellboy has the energy of a hardboiled detective dropped into a nightmare, even though his methods usually involve a massive stone fist rather than a revolver and a fedora.
The B.P.R.D. supporting cast also becomes more meaningful in this story. Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman are not merely background teammates, even if Hellboy remains the main focus. Abe’s intelligence and aquatic strangeness make him a natural fit for a universe filled with lost civilizations, secret knowledge, and evolutionary mysteries. Liz, meanwhile, carries a more tragic and dangerous presence because of her pyrokinetic powers. She is not simply a character who can shoot fire at monsters. Her abilities are tied to fear, isolation, and trauma, which gives her a vulnerability that contrasts sharply with Hellboy’s more durable and outwardly confident persona.
The relationship between these characters reinforces the unusual nature of the B.P.R.D. It is not a brightly polished superhero team assembled to save the world in matching costumes. It is an organization of people who have been pushed outside ordinary society, whether by their appearance, their powers, or the bizarre things they have experienced. Hellboy, Abe, and Liz are united less by traditional comic-book camaraderie than by shared alienation. They understand dangers that ordinary people would struggle to believe, and that creates a quieter emotional bond beneath the monster fights and supernatural investigations.
Visually, Hellboy: Wake the Devil is a major achievement. Mignola’s artwork is not built around realism or dense anatomical detail. Instead, it relies on dramatic shapes, bold shadows, exaggerated silhouettes, and a masterful sense of composition. His pages can make a single doorway, tomb, hallway, or distant figure feel ominous. A black shape against a pale background becomes threatening because Mignola knows precisely how much information to withhold. His art frequently suggests that the real terror is not necessarily what readers can see, but what might be waiting inside the darkness beyond the panel.
The book’s use of architecture is especially striking. Castles, crypts, underground chambers, cemeteries, churches, and ruined interiors are not just places where the action happens. They feel like extensions of the story’s ancient dread. Heavy stone walls, towering doorframes, deep corridors, and massive areas of black create the impression that Hellboy is moving through a physical landscape built by history itself. The settings seem to contain memories. Every abandoned room and buried chamber implies that something dreadful once happened there, and perhaps never truly stopped happening.
Matt Hollingsworth’s color work adds enormously to this atmosphere. The palette is often muted and moody, dominated by dark blues, sickly greens, faded browns, purples, and deep black shadows. This restraint makes the bursts of red more powerful, whether the red comes from Hellboy himself, blood, fire, or supernatural violence. The colors give the pages an aged, almost storybook texture. It can feel as though the reader is looking at a collection of old illustrations from some forbidden European folktale rather than a conventional comic book.
Mignola’s pacing is equally important. Wake the Devil knows when to pause and let the mood settle. There are moments where a character simply stands before an open grave, explores a silent corridor, or confronts an object that hints at a terrible history. Those quieter scenes make the action scenes more forceful. Hellboy does not fight with the slick agility of a typical superhero. He crashes through doors, falls through floors, gets thrown into walls, and responds to impossible threats with the stubborn endurance of someone who has spent his whole life being sent into terrible places.
That physicality helps make Hellboy feel vulnerable even when he is clearly superhuman. He is powerful, but he is not untouchable. He gets hurt, overwhelmed, deceived, and placed in situations where brute strength alone is not enough. The Right Hand of Doom is visually iconic, but it is not a solution to every problem. Hellboy survives because he is resilient, practical, and unwilling to give up when the supernatural situation becomes more complicated than expected.
The story’s deeper theme is the danger of seeking power through forbidden knowledge. Nearly every major threat in Wake the Devil grows out of someone trying to revive, exploit, or control something that should have remained lost. Characters pursue immortality, occult strength, revenge, or access to secret history, only to discover that ancient evil does not become manageable merely because someone has learned its name. Mignola draws heavily from Gothic vampire fiction, but the story also has the broader cosmic unease that defined Seed of Destruction. The horrors here are not merely monsters with weaknesses. They are fragments of a much bigger darkness.
At times, the book can seem deliberately cryptic, particularly for readers unfamiliar with the expanding mythology of Hellboy. Mignola introduces artifacts, historical references, mystical forces, and supernatural figures without always providing a detailed explanation. Yet that ambiguity is largely part of the appeal. The comic does not make its world feel small enough to be completely explained in a few captions. Instead, it invites readers to feel the weight of a hidden history that Hellboy can only partially understand.
Ultimately, Hellboy: Wake the Devil is an essential chapter in Mike Mignola’s larger saga. It confirms that Hellboy is not merely a clever premise about a demon who fights monsters for a government agency. It is a singular world of pulp adventure, folklore, Gothic horror, vampire mythology, wartime conspiracy, and dark fantasy, all filtered through Mignola’s unmistakable visual imagination. The graphic novel deepens the mythology while preserving the straightforward pleasure of watching Hellboy enter a supernatural disaster, trade a sarcastic remark with a monster, and refuse to let ancient evil dictate his fate.
If Hellboy: Seed of Destruction introduced a hero resisting the destiny imposed upon him, Hellboy: Wake the Devilreveals the scale of the haunted world surrounding that struggle. It is eerie, violent, funny, mysterious, and visually beautiful. Most importantly, it shows that Hellboy’s greatest strength is not the Right Hand of Doom or his ability to survive battles with creatures from nightmare. His true strength is his refusal to let monsters, prophecies, occult conspiracies, or his own infernal appearance determine who he is.
First published in 1976, John Farris’s The Fury tells the story of two teenagers whose powers could change the world. Robin and Gillian both possess potentially devastating psychic abilities. Robin is the son of Peter, a government assassin. Peter’s boss, a demented film lover named Childermass, eventually learns of Robin’s power and kidnaps him. Peter is led to believe Robin is dead; Robin is led to believe the same of Peter. Gillian, meanwhile, is Robin’s psychic twin. The book implies that Robin and Gillian have lived several past lives, always connected and always returning after death. Robin realizes this. Gillian does not, and is genuinely confused by her powers.
While Robin and his growing abilities are manipulated by a doctor ordered to keep him placated through sex, Childermass spends his time trying to track down Gillian. Peter, having discovered that Robin isn’t dead, is now searching for Gillian as well.
The Fury is a tawdry, pulpy mix of psychic horror and over-the-top espionage, a collision of the entertainingly sordid and the shockingly vulgar. (Let’s just say the novel goes into a lot of detail about how Robin is seduced by his psychiatrist.) If the plot seems familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen Brian De Palma’s film adaptation. Farris wrote both the novel and the screenplay. As over-the-top as De Palma’s version was — he was still riding high on Carrie, so he got to indulge every trademark flourish — Farris’s novel is somehow even more flamboyant, stuffed with odd characters and action sequences that sometimes seem to erupt almost at random. That actually works in the book’s favor. It creates a secret world of psychics, assassins, and pervy doctors living in the shadows of ours.
It’s very much a book of the ’70s, and as with any work that epitomizes an era, whether that’s a problem depends on how easily offended the reader is. It mixes Watergate-era paranoia with telekinetic mayhem and even a hint of New Age nonsense. It also features sex scenes that almost read like a parody of ’70s swinger culture — though it’s harder to laugh when you remember Robin is meant to be 14 in the novel. (When De Palma made the film, he was smart enough to cast actors in their twenties and keep the characters’ ages ambiguous.) It’s sordid and trashy in a way few authors could get away with today.
Sordid and trashy, but undeniably entertaining. That’s The Fury.
First published in 1972, David Morrell’s First Blood tells the story of two men who go to war in what was then contemporary Kentucky.
Police Chief Wilfred Teasle runs Madison, Kentucky. He’s a Korean War veteran trusted with keeping his town quiet. When he spots a young, long-haired drifter, he harasses him and tries to run him out. When the drifter keeps coming back, Teasle arrests him. What Teasle doesn’t understand is that the young man is Rambo, a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret still carrying the PTSD from his time as a POW. Triggered by a claustrophobic cell and the deputies putting hands on him, Rambo escapes into the mountains. One deputy dies in the station. Three more die on the first pursuit. Teasle becomes obsessed with taking him down even as his own injuries mount. Rambo knows he could slip the net and keep walking. The fight feels too good to leave. Many more people die before the novel reaches its tragic conclusion.
First Blood the novel is not a novelization of the film it later inspired. Rambo is not the misunderstood victim of the movie. He’s a mentally unstable man who kills numerous deputies and National Guardsmen. Teasle is not the snarling cartoon sheriff of the movie. He’s a stubborn, decorated chief who develops a strange respect for Rambo and feels a kinship because both of them served overseas. The difference is that Teasle was welcomed home. Society treats Rambo as a pariah, the walking symbol of an unpopular war.
Before we get into why this belongs in the horror column, First Blood is a very well-written novel. The chapters cut back and forth between Rambo and Teasle; both men are vividly drawn. The ending is dark and feels earned. Readers who expect the Stallone movie on paper will be surprised, and hopefully pleased.
As for the horror: you can read First Blood as Vietnam brought home. The same way Last House on the Left dragged overseas atrocity onto American porches, Morrell imagines the war fought in Kentucky hills. Rambo uses what the jungle taught him. Teasle becomes the stand-in for generals who cannot understand the enemy they created. The deputies and Guardsmen Rambo kills become the local version of the bodies left in the trees. Rambo is a monster. Like Frankenstein’s creature, he was shaped by the arrogance and carelessness of the people who made him.
If you’re looking to get into spirit of Halloween with the help of zombies, allow me to make two reading recommendations.
First published in 2006 and edited by Jay Slater, Eaten Alive is a book that has played a huge role in developing my own horror sensibility. Whenever anyone asks me how I managed to learn so much about Italian horror, this book is one of the sources that I always cite. The film features reviews of films that are both well-known (like Fulci’s Zombi 2 and The Beyond trilogy) and obscure (like 1979’s I’m A Zombie, You’re A Zombie, She’s A Zombie). The book features a wonderful list of guest reviewers. Lloyd Kaufman writes about Cannibal Holocaust. Ramsey Campbell demolishes Nightmare City. Giovanni Lombardo Radice both reviews a cannibal movie and is also interviewed throughout the book. Catriona MacColl discussed what it was like to work with the notorious Lucio Fulci. Ian McCullough, star of Zombi 2 and Zombie Holocaust, is also interviewed and he comes across as being just as eccentric and British as one could hope for. This is the book that really introduced me to filmmakers like Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco, Ruggero Deodato, and Michele Soavi. I would not be the horror fan that I am today if I hadn’t stumbled across it at Recycled Books all those years ago.
Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead is another book that definitely helped to shape me as both a reviewer and a horror fan. The book takes an in-depth look at the development of the horror genre, from the cheap B-movies of the 30s to Romero to the Italian zombie boom to the rise of SOV filmmakers and Resident Evil. Along with providing a fascinating history, this book also includes a comprehensive appendix that lists and reviews hundreds of zombie films. If you’re searching for a previously unseen zombie film to watch, this book is essential.
In 1980, Dean Koontz was hired to write a novelization of The Funhouse. At the time, he was not yet a household name. He still regularly worked as an author-for-hire under a string of pseudonyms; for this book, he originally published as Owen West. While Tobe Hooper was in pre-production, Koontz was assigned to turn Larry Block’s screenplay into a fast, accessible novel. He was not particularly impressed by Block’s story, but he liked the idea of writing about a carnival. Production delays meant the novelization reached stores in late 1980, months before the film. It sold well at first. When the movie finally opened in 1981 and did disappointing business, the book’s sales collapsed. Years later, after Koontz had become a bestselling author in his own right, The Funhouse was reissued under his real name.
The first thing that stands out is how little the novel has in common with Hooper’s film. The movie, of which I am a fan, is a fairly straightforward, atmosphere-heavy slasher. Teenager Amy and her three friends hide in the funhouse after the carnival closes, witness a murder, and find themselves hunted by a carny and his son. Those elements are all present in Koontz’s book, but he adds a large amount of backstory, most of it centered on Amy’s alcoholic mother, Ellen.
In the novel, Ellen is the ex-wife of Conrad the carny. A runaway, she married him without realizing he was a Satanist who hoped she would give birth to the Antichrist. When their demonic infant attacked her, Ellen crushed the baby. Conrad swore revenge: he would let her go so he could hunt her down later and destroy whatever family she built. What plays as random bad luck in the film becomes something very different here. Over the years, Conrad and his second son, the deformed Gunther, take their carnival from town to town in search of Ellen and her new family. The other carnival workers are drawn as sympathetic figures, people on the margins who have formed a family of their own and have no idea how depraved Conrad and Gunther really are.
Family is the novel’s real subject. Ellen has remarried and has two children, Amy and Joey. In the film, Amy is a typically naïve final girl, and Joey is an annoying brat who sneaks out to the carnival. Ellen appears only briefly and makes little impression, though she is seen drinking as Amy leaves the house. In the book, Ellen hits Amy when her daughter says she is pregnant, then pays for the abortion because she fears Amy might give birth to the Antichrist. Joey is terrified of Ellen and runs away to the carnival because, like Ellen before him, he wants an escape from a dysfunctional home. The contrast between the carnies’ supportive found family and Amy and Joey’s abusive “respectable” household is easy to spot, but it still works.
Koontz’s eye for detail and his gift for vivid characterization lift The Funhouse above the usual horror novelization. The plot is occasionally stretched thin. Conrad’s revenge scheme never quite makes sense. What if Ellen had stayed unmarried and never had another child? Even so, Koontz keeps the action moving and is smart enough to lean into the melodrama without apology. He even lands a surprisingly moving final scene.
This is a case of a novelization that diverges sharply from its source. I like both Hooper’s film and Koontz’s novel. They are both wonderfully macabre. The film is true to Hooper’s aesthetic. The novel is pure Koontz.
