The Essential Geek Library: Stephen King’s ‘Danse Macabre’

Here’s another in my series of reviews of books that every geek needs to read. Check tags below for earlier entries.

And, as usual, these reviews are framed in the reality that most of them came out before the Internet, when fans bought books if they wanted to find out who played the second male lead behind Kevin McCarthy in the 1956 classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (It was King Donovan.)

Stephen King was my favorite writer when his non-fiction book “Danse Macabre” came out in 1981.

King classics like “The Stand,” “The Shining” and “Salem’s Lot” had helped King surpass even favorites like Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein in my estimation. So I was so ready for what King thought about horror and science fiction in books, movies and TV.

And I was not disappointed.

“Danse Macabre” mixed a little bit of autobiography and a whole lot of intelligent, thoughtful criticism between its covers. In densely-packed chapters, King skipped from a TV favorite like “Thriller” to a memorable short story with a few stops in between, but it all made sense.

“Danse Macabre” is like sitting down over a few beers with the most clever and amiable geek you could imagine and letting him entertain you with his opinions.

Like any book, “Danse Macabre” is a moment in time, a slice of history. It’s strange, after all these years, to read King talking seriously about now-nearly-forgotten horror flicks like “The Prophecy.” It shows that the genre wasn’t all made up of the milestones like “Bride of Frankenstein” that have withstood the test of time.

The Internets tell me that the book was reprinted in 2010 with an addendum. I haven’t read it, but it’s not surprising that more than 30 years later – via occasional columns in Entertainment Weekly and his Twitter account – King is still sharing his insight and love of the horror genre with us.

 

Essential geek library: ‘An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine’

By the time Ron Goulart’s “An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine” was published in 1972, the pulp magazine – the art form and industry that gave millions of readers cheap thrills on cheap pulp paper and gave us all such heroes as “The Shadow” and “Doc Savage” – was already more than two decades dead. In the 40 (!) years since the prolific Goulart’s book was published, “Pulp Fiction” has come to mean little more than a Quentin Tarantino film.

But in 1972, when Goulart’s book came out, it was a bible to me, a look back into a colorful world of avenging heroes and penny-per-word writers that had been eclipsed by comic books.

Here in Muncie, a bookstore – long gone now – had shelves and shelves of old pulp magazines, which were so named because of the rough-edged, cheap paper they were printed on. I never bought any, although I wanted to. But I couldn’t even begin to start.

By the 1970s, I was enjoying the paperback reprints of pulp magazine stalwart Doc Savage, with those great James Bama covers, and that helped me appreciate the pulps in general and Goulart’s book.

In a relatively slim volume, Goulart gives an overview of pulps but concentrates on the best and brightest, the pulps featuring Doc Savage – precursor to Superman – and the Shadow, one of Batman’s contemporaries and inspirations.

Goulart gives us Tarzan and cowboys and detectives and jingoistic Yellow Peril villains and, best of all, a glimpse of the (mostly) men who created all those characters, working anonymously under pen names and turning out literally hundreds of novel-length yarns that were eagerly consumed by adventure-seeking readers.

Goulart interviewed many of the surviving writers and artists and even devotes the last chapter to their unfiltered memories.

Goulart’s topic has no doubt been covered by others since then, but even 40 years later, his book remains my favorite look back to that time and the pulpy art of storytelling.

An odd note: An inside page notes that the original title of Goulart’s book was “Cheap Thrills.” Although the cover doesn’t include that title, folios throughout the book refer to it as such. Did publisher Ace take the cheap way out, slapping a new cover on the interior text of Goulart’s book?

Considering the on-a-shoestring nature of pulp magazines, it would be appropriate if they did.

The Essential Geek Library: ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’

As a young science fiction and horror movie fan, I watched every movie I could see, a challenge sometimes in those pre-home video days. So I spent endless hours checking out books about the genre. I’m noting a few of them here in this recurring space.

If Famous Monsters of Filmland was my favorite magazine, Denis Gifford’s “A Pictorial History of Horror Movies” was my standard reference, my bible.

Gifford’s book, published in 1973, was a scholarly but loving look at several decades of horror movies.

Gifford, a British writer of comic books and books about pop culture, apparently amassed what was considered one of the biggest collections of British comic books in existence.

But it’s his love for and knowledge of horror movies that endears him to me.

His book truly lived up to its name. “Pictorial History” is loaded with vintage photos from horror films from the 1920s to the 1970s. Even before I saw some movies, Gifford’s look at them gave me a good visual frame of reference. Some movies, like the silent version of “Frankenstein,” are completely represented in my mind by the pictures included in Gifford’s book.

As a young man who loved to draw, I would study those stills and try my hand at reproducing them with pencil and paper.

And Gifford’s book didn’t discriminate. He included movies from the Universal classics to low-budget movies made here and abroad.

Gifford passed in 2000. I’m hoping he knows what a milestone he left for all of us fans. I’m guessing he knew.

As a side note, by the way, the hardcover cost only a few dollars in 1973. In doing research for this, I found it for sale online as high as $199. I showed that to my son, who said, “You should sell it!” Never.

The Essential Geek Library: The Film Classics Library

It was 1974 and the videocassette recorder was, at least for home use, still on the distant horizon. If movie fans wanted to relive a favorite classic movie, they had few choices. The could wait for an art-house re-release. They could hope to catch it on late-night local TV.

Or they could buy Richard J. Anobile’s Film Classics Library.

Published by Avon and selling for the then-substantial price of $4.95, Anobile’s Film Classics Library was the closest thing to owning a copy of a favorite film that most of us fans could imagine … up until the time we could actually own a copy of a favorite film.

Looking back from the perspective of today’s instant access for movie fans – Want to see a movie? Pop in your disc. Watch it on On Demand. Stream it online. – Anobile’s books were ingenious and just what we needed back then.

Each movie was recreated in the pages of the oversize paperback through every line of dialogue and more than 1,000 frame blow-ups.

The books were, in a way, like comic books. Anobile took images and dialogue from the movies and reproduced them, in sequence, in such a manner that readers could relive the films.

Everything was included except for movement and audio. Opening and closing credits are included, as are lap dissolves and fades, which, Anobile noted, preserve the feel of the film.

I spent hours of my adolescence studying these books, looking at the still shots and reading the dialogue.

I still own two of the entries from the series, covering James Whale’s “Frankenstein” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” I remember but don’t own Anobile’s recapturing of “Casablanca.” Checking around online today, it appears editions of “The Maltese Falcon” and Buster Keaton’s “The General” were also released.

A few other movies and TV shows, including “Star Trek,” received a similar treatment before the advent of VCRs. None of those later books could match the classic appeal of the FIlm Classics Library.