The Overnight (2004) by Ramsey Campbell

The Overnight (2004) by Ramsey Campbell: Earth's greatest horror writer takes us into the first English franchise in the Texts big-box bookstore chain. There's friction between the go-get-'em American manager sent to show the English how it's done and the staff, many of whom have issues of their own with one another.

Located between Liverpool and Manchester, Texts and the surrounding strip mall have been constructed on long-unused ground in a place known as Fenny Meadows. Seemingly peaceful grassland while the mall was built, Fenny Meadows has started generating the pervasive fog and rising damp that it's infamous for. These are harbingers of what's to come.

The Overnight pleasingly combines satire with ancient horror and work-place dramedy. Campbell deftly weaves just enough exposition into the narrative to satisfy one's questions about just what is happening, all without having to drop a Basil Exposition-style figure into things. Indeed, the novel brings in what seems to be an Exposition Mouthpiece but then has him refuse to divulge more than a few snippets to one of the characters.

Instead, the most useful exposition both for the reader and for the characters comes from the fact that the Thing plaguing Fenny Meadows apparently enjoys taping over pre-recorded videocassettes. Or something does, perhaps as a warning.

Campbell divvies up The Overnight into third-person-limited chapters focused on one character. This ties into the novel's concerns with human empathy and social ties as the essence of civilization (indeed, being 'civil') -- the Thing of Fenny Meadows seeks to divide to conquer. What wakes in Fenny Meadows is the opposite of civility and fellow feeling  -- and the opposite of language itself as represented in all those doomed texts, and Texts. Winner of Best Novel of 2004 from the International Horror Guild. Highly recommended.

Solaris, but not the good one

So glowy

Solaris (2002): adapted for the screen from Stanislaw Lem's novel and Andrei Tarkovsky's previous adaptation and directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, and Viola Davis: 

Ostensibly adapted straight from Polish sf writer Stanislaw Lem's 1960's novel, this version of Solaris really seems to have been adapted from Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky's early 1970's adaptation. Its emphasis on family matters and its changed ending both reflect the film, not Lem's much more coldly rational novel. 

But at least Tarkovsky's Solaris deals with Lem's main focus -- the unknowability of the universe. This movie can't even be bothered to explain the reasons the alien planet Solaris so fascinates and disturbs humanity. We never even see the surface, instead seeing the planet only as a trippy lightshow around which the space station orbits. Of course, in neither the novel nor Tarkovsky's version does the station truly orbit -- it floats inside the atmosphere, above Solaris's mysterious world-covering ocean.

George Clooney does what he can, but the script is far from good and Clooney himself is too ironic a screen star to make the rational, skeptical main character believable. Viola Davis, Jeremy Davies, and Natascha McElhone do what they can, which ultimately isn't much. Soderbergh turns Solaris into a triumphant story about love conquering death, which is not the emphasis of Tarkovsky's ending, and is found nowhere in Lem's original. The mediocre Event Horizon is a better English-language adaptation of Solaris, and that's really saying something.

Soderbergh and company do accomplish something remarkable, though. This Solaris is half the length of Tarkovsky's meditative, glacially paced original. But it feels twice as long. Not recommended.

The Jugger by Richard Stark

The Jugger (Parker #6) (1965) by Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark: For once, Parker isn't planning a heist but rather trying to find out why a retired 'jugger' (slang for 'bank robber,' though the character in question is a safe-cracker by trade) has written him asking for help. Parker really, really isn't someone one asks for help. 

But when Parker arrives to find out what's going on -- and whether this retired, occasional partner in crime represents a threat to Parker's hard-won anonymity -- the man in question is already dead. 

The local police chief starts following Parker almost immediately, and another thief is already in town. Why has a safe-cracker who's been retired for five years suddenly the focus of all this attention? Well, there's the novel. 

The Jugger plays more like a mystery than most Parker novels, with Parker as the reluctant detective. The small-town, Midwestern police chief plays a lot like something from a Jim Thompson novel like Pop. 1280, corrupt and scheming. But getting one over on Parker is a very, very difficult thing to do. 

But Parker novels are also lessons in how even the most competent of men may be at least partially undone by unforeseeable circumstance. The trick is knowing when to walk away. Highly recommended.

Injury to Eye Motif

Justice League: War (2014): The second animated film in the just-completed DC Animated Movie Universe (the first was The Flashpoint Paradox) reimagines the origin of the Justice League. War mostly adapts the somewhat clunky, post-Flashpoint reboot in the DC Comics universe, though it substitutes Shazam (aka the original Captain Marvel) for Aquaman. It's actually better than its Geoff Johns/Jim Lee source, though it's still burdened with some of Lee's fussy, busy superhero costume re-designs, none worse than on Superman's high-collared, no-red-trunks look.

It's also better than the live-action Justice League movie, which also adapted that Johns/Lee graphic novel/first six issues of the new Justice League. That it also explains both the origins of the heroes who  need one (Cyborg) better than the movie AND deploys Darkseid rather than his lieutenant Steppenwolf in the invasion of Earth -- well, maybe the DC Movie Universe needs to hire more people from the animation wing to work on the live-action movies.

Two somewhat perverse elements may amuse or freak out the casual viewer. For one, Alan Tudyk voices Superman, one of the most baffling voice-casting choices ever (Tudyk voices the Joker in Adult Swim's Harley Quinn series, as a point of comparison). Of course, the voice-casting here, as in the Young Justice series, deliberately establishes this as a different universe than the DC Animated shared universe of Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League [Unlimited].

The second involves a lengthy climactic battle in which the heroes' goal is to poke out Darkseid's eyes. I shit you not!!!! In any event, recommended.

It Follows... Again!

It Follows (2014): One of the ten great horror films of the past decade, It Follows rewards multiple viewings with new observations and revelations. This time around, I wondered if the Creature had problems with water because of Its behaviour during the climax.

As the 'expert' exposition about the Creature's capabilities comes from a very fallible source, one whose knowledge of the Creature is purely anecdotal and personal, his explanation of what the Creature can do must remain suspect. Everyone comes to believe that the Creature only moves at a relatively slow walking pace. 

But while it does indeed so while near its prey, it is intelligent and it isn't a ghost. There's no reason to believe the Creature can't use public transportation, as funny as that seems. Indeed, there's no reason to believe that it's incapable of faster movement when its prey gets too far away. 

Otherwise, from what we see, It is only capable of traveling about 72 miles a day as the crow falls. That doesn't seem to work all that well in terms of its arrival at a cottage about midway through the film. 

Though I did give myself a bit of a laugh when I realized that Its slower return to the suburbs of Detroit from the cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan may be attributed to It not being able to secure a ride. And as it can open doors, It could also hop into the back of someone's car or truck. Unless one has been infected by the Curse, one cannot see it -- though one can hit it, shoot it, or get clobbered by it. Oh well. Highly recommended, as always.

Previous reviews are HERE and HERE...

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

The Book of the Damned (1919) by Charles Fort: Charles Fort is an important figure in both paranormal circles and in the science-fiction and horror genres. Financially able to not work, Fort decided to work at compiling strange stories from journals and newspapers and historical accounts during lengthy days spent in New York's public libraries. The result was what sometimes reads like The Book of Lists: Early 20th-Century Paranormal Edition.

Buried under a mountain of metaphysical gobbledygook is a fairly simple thesis: things are not what the experts tell us! The 'Damned' of the title are any 'facts' either excluded from theories of the way things work or explained away as being explicable.

Unfortunately, Fort's writing is often tedious at its best and almost incomprehensible at its worse. The book falls into a fairly consistent tripartite pattern:

1) Metaphysical and philosophical theories that slide rapidly into endlessly repeated Fortean platitudes.

2) Lists of hundreds of items, most of which could profitably be moved to an appendix because once you've read about ten things that were reported as falling from the sky, the list of another 700 things that fell from the sky gets pretty boring.

3) Rinse. Repeat.

What saves the material is Fort's almost throwaway gift for specific science-fictional speculation. These speculations are the stuff that many stories can and have been made of. Do alien spaceships jettison spent fuel into Earth's atmosphere? Is Earth's atmosphere partially covered by a gelatinous dome? Does Earth occasionally pass through the debris fields left by ancient space freighters? See, that's great stuff!

Fort tries to pass himself off as a bold iconoclast. However, while he has oodles of derision reserved for scientists, he seems to accept that stories from newspapers and journals of the 19th century and earlier are for the most part reliable. 

Another problem is that Fort perplexingly begins this, his first of four forays into the paranormal, with perhaps the most boring of topics -- weird stuff that purportedly fell from the sky. About 200 pages of it. This rapidly loses its interest long before the 200 or so pages Fort devotes to it is over. Frogs, fish, red rain, black rain, slag, cannonballs, thunderstones, rocks... on and on and on. You can almost taste the boredom -- and Fort's desire to get all that research he did into the book.

This is an important book when it comes to various genres. But if you read it, you will skim long sections. There's only so many strange rains of the 19th century one can find interesting. Recommended.

Demon Knight !!!!

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995): written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, and Mark Bishop; directed by Ernest Dickerson; starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, CCH Pounder, Gary Farmer, and Thomas Haden Church: 

Based on a  script that had been floating around Hollywood for years, Demon Knight isn't a typical Crypt offering insofar as the main story isn't terminally jokey. It also has a solid cast and good, stylish direction from long-time Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. 

It also seems refreshingly colour-blind in its casting. While protagonist William Sadler and demon antagonist Billy Zane are both white, the remainder of the cast is a very mixed bunch -- and its most heroic members are all African- or Native American.

Demon Knight also takes advantage of Billy Zane's always slightly off presence, slightly off whenever he's played a hero (as in The Phantom or even Twin Peaks). He's much better as a villain than he ever was as a hero.

A young Jada Pinkett Not Yet Smith is spunky, William Sadler is his always good self as a long-lived warrior for good nearing The Final Round-up, and CCH Pounder, John Schuck, Dick Miller, and Gary Farmer all do what they can with a few lines of dialogue and a whole lotta shooting and exploding.

Indeed, if only they'd cut the jokey, punny Cryptkeeper frame story from the film and let it stand on its own, it might find more of an audience even now. It breaks the knee-jerk racism of Hollywood casting just enough to be more interesting and involving than the sum of its parts would suggest. But Jesus, the Cryptkeeper is the worst. Recommended.