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I recently acquired this pressbook from eBay, mostly because the poster art is so 1970s exploitative gritty and cheesy-futuristic, you know?. Sadly, there are no "death machines" like the munching maw illustrated here. The story revolves around martial artists injected with a drug to make them killing, zombie-like, machines of death. Get it? I'm not sure if the audience did.
And now a Halloween treat from author Sally Bosco...eat up...
Kyle sat in his mother’s Lexus with his arms crossed over his chest. “I don’t see why you have to drive me. The other kids get to walk by themselves.” His parents were always trying to protect him from some imaginary evil they thought would get him, and it drove him crazy.
“Listen, you’re still too young to go trick-or-treating on your own. You don’t know what kind of wackos might be out there, especially on Halloween. Next year you can get a group of friends together and go on your own in the neighborhood.”
He sighed, opened the car door and put his booted foot onto the pavement. His Batman cape caught as he tried to get out, yanking him back, so he had to pull it out from being stuck between the seats.
His mom stood in front of the car, watching him. Her blond hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and she wore a matchy jogging suit. She leaned against the car, pulled out her phone and started texting. “Don’t take too long,” she reminded him.
He didn’t really want to be there. What good was it if your mom drove you trick-or-treating like when you were a baby? As he approached the small wooden house he noticed that it had a single flickering light illuminating it. The night seemed to grow darker as he approached. He knocked on the front door. A dour woman in a brown floor-length dress with a dirty hem peered out. She eyed the young boy and handed him a dried up biscuit with no wrapping around it.
The thing in his hand looked like a tiny shrunken head. “You gotta be kidding me. How about some chocolate?”
She scowled at him and yelled directly in his face with rancid breath. “If you’re a God-fearing child you’ll say prayers for the dead and be happy to get your soul cake.”
“What? Soul-what?” Crazy lady.
“Soul cake. Don’t act like you don’t know.” She grabbed his shoulder and tried to pull him into the house, but he wriggled away. That was it. He was outta there. He turned to run. When he got out onto the street, he saw a dirt road with no streetlights. The houses on the street were sparse, easily a quarter of a mile apart, and his mom’s car was nowhere in sight.
A feeling of panic overtook him like icy skeletal fingers wrapped around his throat. He wondered if he’d somehow gone out the back door of the house. No, this was so wrong. What was happening to him? He felt cold and confused. His eyes darted up and down the street looking for his mom.
Kyle stared down at himself. In place of his batman costume, he saw tattered rags. His hands should have been covered by Batman gloves but they weren’t; they were dirty and had jagged nails. He felt his face. It felt the same, despite the lack of the Batman hood he had on a few minutes ago, but when he wiped it with his hand, he noticed a dirty, sooty residue. His lips quivered as he tried not to cry.
An old hag wearing a tattered ankle-length dress and brown scarf tied around mousy brown hair emerged from the murky darkness. “Where’s the cake?”
Kyle looked at the dried up cake the woman at the house had given him. It was nasty and not even sealed. He threw it at her. “Here’s your stupid cake. Now where’s my mom?” He stepped around her and called into the murky night. “Mom?”
The woman snatched the cake off the ground. “You should have more respect for your elders.” She grabbed him by the ear sending a shooting pain through his head. “Stop this foolishness right now. Our family needs those cakes to survive. You will go into the next house.”
The woman pulled him down the dirt road. Where were the streetlights? The bright suburban houses had disappeared, replaced by an ominous darkness he’d never seen before. Even the glow of the nearby city was gone. He’d been thrust into some kind of nightmare world.
She shoved him up a muddy path toward a rough timber house that was little more than a shack and pounded on the coarse wooden door. “Now you will bring a soul cake home to feed our family.”
The inside of this house was even bleaker than the last. Two old people and five kids dressed in rags sat around a rectangular table that had something piled onto it. In the dim candlelight, he couldn’t tell what. Their faces illuminated by the single candle looked like Halloween lanterns. A terrible smell of something rotten with an incense scent masking it assaulted his nose.
As Kyle drew closer, he saw the outline of a head and small body laid out on the table, partially covered by a tattered sheet. When he realized that the people were sitting around a decaying corpse the vomit rose in his throat. He covered his mouth with his hand trying to block the horrible smell. The room spun as he stood there, so he grabbed onto a nearby post to steady himself.
“You will say your prayer for the dearly departed,” the older man demanded. Then his voice cracked. “Our dearly departed son, Joshua.”
Kyle wracked his brain trying to remember a prayer. The sooner he could remember one and say it, the sooner he could leave. “Our father.” His voice shook as he mumbled. “Who art in heaven.” He stumbled over the rest of the prayer, hoping it was right.
“Hmmp. That’s a fine way to honor our Lord. Here’s hoping that you’ve properly eaten my boy’s sins.” He thrust the dried up biscuit into Kyle’s trembling hand. “Here’s your cake.”
He thought if he didn’t get out of there soon, he’d vomit, so he made a clumsy bow to the family and stumbled out the door. At the first whiff of fresh air, his insides relaxed, but his revulsion still caused him to vomit into the bushes.
Kyle wiped his mouth and tried to get his bearings. He took the dried up cake and stood up against a nearby tree, while trying to get his stomach under control. With his head down, he trudged up the path and held the biscuit out, handing it to the old woman. “Here. You can have your miserable cake.”
“What’s up with you? This is a Twix bar, your favorite.” He looked up to see his blonde mom in front of her Lexus. The streetlights shown brightly, the windows of the houses twinkled, and off in the distance the nearby city glowed.
He pressed himself against her and hugged her. “Mom, I love you so much. I’m sorry I gave you a hard time before.”
“What happened? Did you have some kind of life-altering experience?”
“I don’t know what happened? It’s like everything changed for a couple of minutes.”
“Hmmm,” she said stroking his bat-caped shoulder. “You should have these kinds of changes more often.”
Kyle sank into the soft leather seat trying to erase the outline of the small corpse from his memory.
This story is copyrighted by the author.
Sally Bosco (SallyBosco.com)
writes dark fiction. She is inexplicably drawn to the Uncanny, the shades of gray between
the light and dark, the area where your mind hovers as you’re falling off to
sleep. She loves writing young adult fiction because she strongly relates to
teenage angst, the search for self-identity and the feelings of being an
outsider.
Her published novels include: AltDeath.com, Shadow Cat (written as Zoe LaPage, her adult alter-ego), and The Werecat Chronicles, and she was a contributor to Many Genres, One Craft. She’s had short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies, including the Small Bites anthology and most recently Hazard Yet Forward, which is an anthology to benefit Donna Monroe, one of her Seton Hill classmates who is fighting breast cancer. She has an MFA degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.
Zombos Says: Good
It's funny that author R.L. Stine's first adult novel, Red Rain, still has two, single-mindedly evil, murdering kids at its center and dumbfounded adults on its periphery. Usually his Goosebumps scares come from good kids caught up in bad things and dumbfounded adults barely paying any notice, so not much has changed. Stine does add a short but memorable sexual encounter and describes the entrail spilling and throat ripping with clinical precision; however the pacing of his short chapters (2 to 7 pages mostly) and the slicing of the novel into 4 smaller parts, allows for too much breakage in the momentum once it actually gets going.
Lea, an amateur travel blogger visits Cape Le Chat Noir off the coast of South Caronlina, ahead of a potentially devastating hurricane. Her attitude is neither here nor there as to the danger (she's from Long Island), which perfectly suits her amateur status, but part of the allure for her are the mysterious stories told about the Cape's enfatuation with reviving the dead. Over a cup of tea she listens to how the dead were raised to help rebuild Le Chat Noir after the hurricane of 1935. Later she witnesses a Magic Hands ceremony and becomes spooked by her brush with the supernatural. Stine hustles through all this, eschewing suspense-building for expediently setting up context for the next chapter.
Of course, to be fair, another possible scenario is that Stine's editor took a hatchet to his longer prose and removed Stine's more carefully crafted work. For instance, compare Peter Straub's 416 page Double Day edition of A Dark Matter with his unfettered and more artful longer version, The Skylark, from Subterranean Press. Whatever the case may be for Red Rain, the book as it stands reads more like a second or third draft, leaving us with intriguing inferences of otherworldly things instead of making us experience them more fully; and the gist of horror is in the experience of it.
Beginning with a promising hint of magic and death, Stine doesn't provide enough backstory to spook us as much as Lea was. The chapters follow this same approach: a tippy toe's worth of depth, then out of the pool and into another scene. There are very effective moments of terror, but there are also many lackluster moments in-between, especially when the adults talk. His adults don't speak as well as the kids do, and when he reverts to the usual buddy cop banter, it never reaches beyond the locker room, towel snapping level.
Not surprisingly, his kids, both evil and victimized, are the strongest characters in Red Rain, with the evil blond-haired twins, Samuel and Daniel, taking the horror-edge lead. They appear out of the hurricane that Lea didn't fear enough, walking through the carnage and death, appearing to her like blue-eyed angels. In a smartly daring move (or neglectful one, take your pick) , Stine pulls out a gruesome killing-ability-gimmick for Samuel, which balances the whole tone of the novel between 1980s exploitation-cool and 1950s courageousness. The balance tips almost into absurdity when the evil twins plot to take over their new home and school, drawing blue arrows on themselves and those they convert over to their world-domination plans. It's silly, it's grotesque, and clearly a signature element of Stine's stories, which he uses quite well.
Given more pages describing the eerie background for Le Chat Noir, more of the destructive hurricane of 1935, more of the bizarre Magic Hands Revivification Ceremony (which, if tourists like Lea can so easily attend it how much of a mystery can it be?), and more on the origin of the twins' evil nature (here's a hint: Wake Wood), this novel would be more of a nail-biter. Instead, Stine holds back much and explains only enough to provide his plot points movement to get us to the next short chapter. For Red Rain, the goosebumps do not come often enough, but when they do, Samuel and Daniel make the most of them.
I vaguely remember seeing this movie on television as a toddler. It scared the hell out of me. I had nightmares. The costumes are creepy and the whole concept bummed me out. Professor Kinema was kind enough to rekindle my bad memories with this Mexican lobby card.
Uncle Robert sends along this cool news clipping from the New York Times on the 94 year-old monster kid, and forever cool ghoul, Zacherley.
From Professor Kinema's collection comes this lurid, action-filled Mexican lobby card for The Scarlet Pimpernel. The American poster artwork is noticeably more staid and I don't recall a quillotine lopping off anyone's head being prominently touted in any of it. Of interest, the artist signed his work, appropriately enough, "Dela Mort."
PIFF! POW! BAM! Dont' touch that mouse! It's the Batman pressbook from Tony Rivers.
Zombos Says: Very Good
The Walking Dead magazine debuts today. Newsy bits on everything you can stuff a Walking Dead survivor or zombie into abound. Both the comic book series and the AMC television series are covered. Toys, games, events (like the 2012 San Diego Comic Con), you name it, it's all here, published quarterly. Here are some highlights of what I enjoyed reading the most in this first issue.
Stuart Barr's The Story So Far...covers the comic book's storylines up to the present. Don't read it if you're skittish on possible spoilers for the television series (or the comic book if you're a spotty reader), but here's your chance to come up to speed on the Walking Dead comicverse. And just when you come up for air the third season preview does tempt you with spoilers; I love spoilers, especially the who-lives-and-who-dies kind. Just keep in mind the television series and the comic series don't always jive, so expect surprises and fresh takes on characters and their travails. Looks like the Governor and Woodbury will be popping up, though, sooner than later.
Tara Bennett takes us to the West Georgia Correctional Facility set (Raleigh Studios, Atlanta) to provide us with some insight on the design, like how the prison cell lighting is toned to create just the right mix of gloom and despair, and there are a horde of interviews covering a wide range with Charlie Adlard talking about drawing the Walking Dead comics and Glen Mazzara, the show's executive producer and showrunner, giving us his daily grind on making the television series. Of course there's an interview with Danai Gurira and her new role as Michonne, the Katana-wielding zombie slayer with her two leashed, and defanged, walking buddies. Gurira talks about her prep work for the role.
A quick read but very informative is the article, Anatomy of a Story. In this first installment, A Larger World (a storyline which played across comic issues 91 through 96) is examined. Storyline insight is not only useful to writers looking at how key elements of character development drive successful plots, but it also can be fun for any Walking Dead fan who's interested in knowing why they are a fan. Sure, the zombies are cool, but it's the walking living that keep us coming back for more.
Speaking of cool, there's a shot of Gentle Giant's The Walker Horde, a scrumptious set of little plastic zombie figurines, due on toy shelves sometime in 2013. Here's my plan: I take these little terrors and pile them up around my Clone army. Yeah, baby, now that's what I'm talking about. Lightsabers, Clones, and zombies! George?
For completists, here are the variant covers:
What drew my attention to this colorful Mexican lobby card was the leering devil. Honest. But look at the balance overall: looking from left to right, you know exactly what this movie is about without looking at the title or other text.
Here's a nifty Halloween treat from Tony Rivers. He notes: "This one's a little tricky...I used to have the press book for ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN and photocopied several pages. I also have the Philip Riley script book, but he only had 11 of the 12 pages. At one time I did take photographs of each page with a camera so I had to use the photo I took of page 10 to have the complete press book but the image is small and you can't really read what it says on page 10....so until I can find a better version, here's the "complete" 12 page ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN pressbook."
A coloring contest for The Face of Fu Manchu? Sure, the cover of this pressbook is fantastic, but I'm not sure using a coloring contest (see next to last page) is a suitable promotional gimmick. I think Tsai Chin as his daughter stole the show. This series left quite an impression on me when they originally appeared in the theaters. I read the Sax Rohmer books after seeing Christopher Lee's sinister performance.
