Book 1: CHRISTINE by Stephen King
Christine is one Stephen King novel that has always had a special place in my heart. For one thing, it’s built on an incredibly cool concept: the idea of a 1958 Plymouth Fury that is haunted by an evil force, can “heal” its damages, can drive on its own – and has homicidal urges. It’s a great story that was turned into a really cool movie by one of the most popular genre filmmakers who has ever lived: John Carpenter. And another reason why the book has a special place in my heart is that it’s dedicated to another one of the “masters of horror,” my personal favorite, King’s Creepshow collaborator George A. Romero. It’s also dedicated to Romero’s then-wife Christine Forrest Romero (was it named after her as well?), and to Romero’s adopted home of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And there’s more. Unlike most of King’s stories, which take place in his home state of Maine, this one is set in the Pittsburgh area – and there are even scenes set at the Monroeville Mall in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville, the mall where Romero made one of the best movies of all time, the original Dawn of the Dead!
While the film adaptation has the car, which is called Christine, already evil as she makes her way down the factory assembly line, the novel plays up the idea that she’s haunted by the spirit of a previous owner. When teenager Arnie Cunningham buys her as a dilapidated wreck and starts fixing her up, he starts to take on the style and personality of this deceased, hateful prick, transforming from a nerd to a guy who can get an attractive girlfriend – but also causes that girlfriend and his best friend, lead character Dennis Guilder, to become extremely worried about him. With Arnie changing – and with Christine chasing down his enemies with the ghoulish image of the previous owner at the wheel – Dennis and Arnie’s girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, try to figure out how to save the kid.
In the hands of many other writers, the idea of a haunted, killer car may have turned out to be really goofy and schlocky, but King brings an emotional and psychological weight to it. The book is well written – possibly a bit overwritten, as can be King’s way (did it really need to be 500+ pages?), but I enjoy the ride. I always find it a lot of fun to read this one; a good King story set in the world of Romero.
Book 2: I don’t want to name this one, because I thoroughly disliked it. I will say that I first heard about it in April or May of 2024 because a film adaptation was being released - and since it sounded like interesting subject matter, I decided to give the book a try before watching the movie. I only made it through about 33% of the book before I set it aside because I was not enjoying reading about the characters. But once I start a book I can’t just ditch it, so I picked it up again at the start of this year and finished reading the remaining 67%. My opinion didn’t improve. In fact, the more I read, the more the characters annoyed me, and the less I believed the “love story” the author was trying to tell me. Sure, they had sex a lot. They never seemed to stop having sex, but that didn’t convince me they really had an emotional connection. The book was written as a “mom porn” fantasy, with an emphasis on the word porn. The movie did it better.
Book 3: I SHOULD’VE BEEN NICER TO QUENTIN TARANTINO – AND OTHER SHORT STORIES OF EPIC FAILS AND SAVES by Kathleen Kinmont
When I first watched Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers as a young kid at the end of the '80s, I quickly developed a crush on cast member Kathleen Kinmont – a crush that carried on through the ‘90s as I watched Kinmont in the likes of Bride of Re-Animator, CIA Code Name: Alexa, CIA II: Target Alexa, the TV series Renegade, and others (not to mention repeated viewings of Halloween 4). Decades later, Kinmont has written a book called I Should’ve Been Nicer to Quentin Tarantino – and Other Short Stories of Epic Fails and Saves, an autobiography that digs into her life story, some of her work experiences, her tumultuous relationship with Lorenzo Lamas, her world view, and more. Including her time being in an acting class with Quentin Tarantino. While reading Kinmont’s book, which is very interesting and well worth picking up, I came to realize that my young self was right to have a crush on her, as she seems to be a really great person. Or, as she describes herself, she’s a “spiritual unicorn rainbow Skittle pooping human.”
Kinmont doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about movie productions in her book. There is a nod to Halloween 4, some talk about working on Bride of Re-Animator, and discussion of her friendship with Tom Hanks leading to a role in his movie That Thing You Do! and her friendship with Kristanna Loken opening the door for her to get the job as Loken’s stand-in on Terminator 3. There’s also talk of working on Renegade with her then-husband Lamas, a situation that didn’t turn out well. But for the most part, the book is about her life, not about her work, and I really enjoyed learning more about her.
Books 4, 10, 12, and 30: My girlfriend and I both deal with a lot of stress, so this year we had a two-person “book club” where we would read books on how to get a better handle on our stress levels. STOP OVERTHINKING: 23 TECHNIQUES TO RELIEVE STRESS, STOP NEGATIVE SPIRALS, DECLUTTER YOUR MIND, AND FOCUS ON THE PRESENT by Nick Trenton was the one that gave me some advice I have been able to put to use. 10% HAPPIER: HOW I TAMED THE VOICE IN MY HEAD, REDUCED STRESS WITHOUT LOSING MY EDGE, AND FOUND SELF-HELP THAT ACTUALLY WORKS – A TRUE STORY by Dan Harris was more of an interesting memoir than an actual self-help book. BURNOUT: THE SECRET TO UNLOCKING THE STRESS CYCLE by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski and THE HAPPINESS TRAP: HOW TO STOP STRUGGLING AND START LIVING by Russ Harris were both interesting, although I found it difficult to make it all the way through The Happiness Trap.
Books 5 and 8: I have been a fan of Patrick Swayze since I was a little kid, the days when my sister would watch Dirty Dancing over and over and my parents took me to a drive-in showing of Road House. I wish he was still around to bring us new entertainment to this day, but sadly, he left us a long time ago, passing away in 2009 at the age of 57. Sixteen years later, I decided to check out THE TIME OF MY LIFE by Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi, the memoir he spent the final months of his life writing with his wife. It’s an interesting journey through the world from his perspective, and it gave me an even deeper respect and appreciation for him than I had before. The book was finished just a couple of months before he passed away – and after he was gone, his wife wrote her own follow-up, WORTH FIGHTING FOR by Lisa Niemi Swayze. This one is a chronicle of his battle with pancreatic cancer from the perspective of his closest loved one, and it is an absolutely devastating read. Worth Fighting For is the only time I’ve ever sobbed uncontrollably while reading a book.
Book 6: STONE COLD by Robert B. Parker
Author Robert B. Parker is best known for the 40 novels he wrote about a private detective named Spenser, a character who was played by Robert Urich in the ‘80s TV series Spenser: For Hire and by Mark Wahlberg in the 2020 movie Spenser Confidential. But Parker didn’t just write Spenser novels, and among his other works were a series of books that followed a cop with a drinking problem, Jesse Stone. And Jesse Stone has also been brought to the screen for several adaptations, where he was played by Tom Selleck. I decided to watch all of the Jesse Stone movies earlier this year – and since I was doing that, I also decided to read the book that the first movie was based on, which was the fourth Jesse Stone book.
Stone is a character who used to live in Los Angeles, but when his wife divorced him and he was fired from the homicide department of the LAPD, he made his way across the country to take a job as the Chief of Police in the small town of Paradise, Massachusetts. Nothing much happens in Paradise and the local police department is only inhabited by a few other people. Usually, the officers only have to deal with handing out parking tickets. But, of course, there’s more going on in Stone Cold. That’s why we’re getting a peek into these characters’ lives.
For one thing, a teenager was assaulted by some of her classmates, which include a football playing golden boy. For another, people are turning up dead around town with bullet wounds in their bodies.
If you like stories that follow interesting cop characters and deliver some thrilling moments, Stone Cold is worth a look, although I will warn that one of the storylines has a resolution that is not very satisfying.
Book 7: LEVON’S TRADE by Chuck Dixon
This is a book I learned about because a film adaptation was being released: A Working Man, directed by David Ayer from a screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and starring Jason Statham. Chuck Dixon, who is best known for his work in the comic book world (and best known to me for the comics he has written about The Punisher) has actually written a series of novels about a character named Levon Trade, a former special ops soldier who has left the military behind and gotten into construction – but, of course, bad things happen and he gets pulled back into action.
In this case, Levon’s boss tasks him with finding his missing daughter – and Levon’s investigation leads to him having violent confrontations with members of a criminal organization. The result is a decent action book, a quick and easy read that you can definitely tell comes from an author who has written comic books about The Punisher.
Book 9: THE GREATEST GANGSTER MOVIE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN: ABEL FERRARA’S THE FUNERAL by Danny Stewart
My review of this one can be read HERE.
Book 11: THE ALL-NIGHT VIDEO GUIDE: SLASHERS, ‘70S & ‘80S by Rob Freese
Slashers are my favorite type of movie to watch, so few books about movies could appeal to my interests as much as author Rob Freese’s book The All-Night Video Guide: Slashers 70s & 80s did. I even provided a review blurb that ended up being featured on the back of the book, alongside quotes from the likes of The Mutilator director Buddy Cooper and author Armando Muñoz, who has written novelizations of some slasher classics (Silent Night, Deadly Night; Black Christmas, My Bloody Valentine, and Happy Birthday to Me.) My quote: “A fun journey through the most entertaining of all sub-genres: the slasher. Even die-hard fans might have missed some of these movies!”
With a page count of 215, the book covers a whole lot of slashers, going in alphabetic order from Absurd to X-Ray. There are some notable exceptions (I was shocked to see that not all of the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street sequels released in the ’80s made the cut), but there were also some movies in there that I haven’t seen yet. So if you love slasher movies, I recommend that you add this book to your collection.
Book 13: PET SEMATARY by Stephen King
Pet Sematary is a novel that's so gut-wrenching, author Stephen King kept the manuscript in a drawer for four years before deciding that his readers might be interested in it. It was inspired by two incidents in his own life: the death of his daughter's cat and a day when one of his young children nearly ran out onto a high-traffic road. King avoided tragedy that day. The characters in his novel do not - and, of course, there's a supernatural element in play that will make the situation even worse. More troubling, more heartbreaking.
At the center of the story is the Creed family: Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, and their two young children, Gage and Ellie. The Creeds have just moved from Chicago to the Maine countryside because Louis is a doctor who has gotten a job on the campus of the University of Maine. Unfortunately, their house sits by a road that is heavily trafficked by speeding semi trucks. Ellie's cat is the first victim of these trucks. And on one terrible day, toddler Gage also gets killed on the road. The neighbor across the street, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, is a lifelong resident of the area who's aware of a burial ground out in the wilderness that will resurrect anything that's buried there. Jud's story is proven true when Louis buries Ellie's cat in that ground and it comes back to life. Despite being aware that nothing comes back the same as it was before it died, Louis can't help but be tempted to bury his son in that burial ground as well... And everything falls apart from there. This is truly one of the most disturbing stories I have ever come across, and it's been troubling me ever since the first movie adaptation came out when I was a little kid.
Since I had read this book before, I revisited it this time with a reader on YouTube - and the experience was made all the sadder when I discovered that this YouTuber had passed away since her Pet Sematary reading sessions. Unfortunately, her entire channel appears to have been taken down since her passing.
Book 14: RUNNING BLIND / THE VISITOR by Lee Child
I've been reading my way through the Jack Reacher novel series in chronological order over the last few years, and while Running Blind (a.k.a. The Visitor) was the fourth book author Lee Child wrote about the Jack Reacher character, it's the fourteenth story to come along in the chronology. In this one, the hulking former U.S. Army MP Jack Reacher has settled down with lawyer Jodie Garber-Jacob... but civilian life doesn't suit him very well, so it's kind of refreshing when the FBI comes around to question him about the murders of two women whose cases of sexual harassment he investigated during his time in the Army. Reacher is a suspect in the case, but ends up working with the FBI to figure out who's really responsible as the murders continue.
Somehow, each victim dies with no bruises or injuries. They're just found naked in their bathtub, which was filled with army-issue camouflage paint. It's a great mystery, despite being overwritten in that familiar Lee Child way. (The story shouldn't have taken 512 pages to tell, and yet Child managed to stretch it out to that length.)
The answer to the mystery is questionable, but the ride there is interesting.
Book 15: FLETCH AND THE WIDOW BRADLEY by Gregory Mcdonald
When I'm looking for a quick, fun read, the Fletch franchise by Gregory Mcdonald is one of my favorite sources to turn to. I love almost every book in this series, and they're all incredibly fast and easy to read, flying by with a series of excellently written dialogue exchanges. Fletch and the Widow Bradley, which was the fourth Fletch book to be published but comes third in the chronology, preceding the three books that were published before it, is another solid entry in the series, although it's not quite as interesting or amusing as the best ones.
The story takes place during Fletch's journalism career and begins with him getting in trouble with his managing editor, as he has been accused of quoting a dead man in a recent article. Fletch didn't care about the article, but he swears he didn't make up a quote from a person who's no longer around to give quotes, so he starts digging into the issue.
The mystery of the quote-giving dead person isn't as interesting as some of the other situations Fletch gets mixed up in other books, but Mcdonald's dialogue never disappoints.
Book 16: UNMASKED: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST PROLIFIC CINEMATIC KILLER by Kane Hodder and Michael Aloisi
As of this writing, Kane Hodder – who got his start in the entertainment industry as a stuntman – has over 150 acting credits to his name, most of those credits coming on movies where he was also a stuntman or the stunt coordinator. Most importantly to me, Hodder spent four movies bringing to life my all-time favorite cinematic icon: Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked slasher in the Friday the 13th franchise. (Hodder played the character in the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth films.) So his memoir was a must-read for me, and a great read it was.
The book tracks most of Hodder’s life up to the point when it was published in 2011. It covers his childhood in California, where he was subject to some horrific bullying, and the better days of his youth that were spent on the Kwajalein Atoll. Adulthood brings his journey into stuntwork – which hit a major obstacle early on when a fire stunt went wrong. That accident, and the torturous recovery process, is covered in excruciating detail. Finally, the man gets some much-deserved success and gets to play Jason again and again.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t sure about Hodder before reading this book, because he has been known to display some abrasive behavior from time to time. (In these pages, he even calls himself an asshole.) But by the time I finished Unmasked, I saw him as a really good guy... One who does a great job playing killers.
Books 17, 18, and 19: There’s no denying that, when it comes to the books I read, 2025 was The Year of Christian Francis. The author has recently been going on a mad spree of writing novelizations of as many classic genre properties as he can get his hands on, and over the course of the year I read twelve of his novelizations.
I started off with his adaptation of the MANIAC COP slasher trilogy.
Back in 1988, director William Lustig and late, great screenwriter Larry Cohen joined forces to bring us the awesome slasher movie Maniac Cop. They made a follow-up two years later, and Maniac Cop 2 is one of the rare horror sequels that’s generally considered to be even better than its predecessor. Things got questionable with 1993’s troubled Maniac Cop 3, where Cohen’s script received extensive rewrites from producer Joel Soisson and Lustig was so disinterested in the whole thing that he took his name off the movie.
With the first two books, we get the entertainment of reading novels that are directly based on Cohen’s original screenplays, so things don’t play out in exactly the same way we see them on the screen. Nearly every act of violence is enhanced in the books, while some stunts Lustig and his crew came up with on set aren’t on the page. (So, for example, the killer reaches a different end in the Maniac Cop novelization than he does in the film.) I’ve been a fan of these movies since I was a little kid (and have always felt like they deserved more attention than they’ve received), so I really enjoyed seeing the stories play out on the page, with some differences here and there. Francis did a great job fleshing out the moments for prose – although the fact that he lives in the UK did come through in some lines of dialogue that I found jarring, considering the late ‘80s / early ‘90s New York City settings of the story.
When a character is asking if she should go back to her home, she says, “Do I go back to mine?” When another woman is asked if her boyfriend stays at her place, it’s worded like this: “Does he stay at yours?” I didn’t even know the Brits shorten “my place” and “your place” to “mine” and “yours,” and had never heard anyone do that, until I watched an episode of the British show Doctor Foster in 2018 or so, so New Yorkers were definitely not taking that approach in their conversations back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Something that didn’t sit well with me in the Maniac Cop 2 novelization involves a serial killer named Turkell, who befriends the title character, undead former cop Matt Cordell. In the movie, Turkell says he has a psychic connection with Cordell – but he’s crazy, and he and Cordell are not actually on the same page. Yet the novelization confirms that there is some kind of mental connection between Turkell and Cordell, even if Turkell is reading it wrong.
The novelization of Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence is very different from the film because it’s based on Cohen’s early script, before it got an extensive rewrite that changed the characters. While the film involved Cordell taking an interest in a comatose female police officer named Kate Sullivan and crossing paths with Maniac Cop 2 hero Sean McKinney again, Cohen’s version had Maniac Cop 1 and 2 character Teresa Mallory as the cop who was in a coma, with a new character, Detective Lieutenant Stan Moonjean, as the hero. Cohen saw Maniac Cop 3 as a take on The Bride of Frankenstein, and his script – as interpreted by Francis – goes deeper into that concept, building to a point where Cordell and an undead Mallory go on a killing spree together. It was interesting to get an idea of “what might have been” through this novelization... although, I have to admit that I prefer the troubled and messy movie over what was on these pages.
Of all the Francis books I read last year, the Maniac Cop books were my favorites.
Book 20: THE FIRST POWER by Christian Francis
The 1990 supernatural horror film The First Power has been one of my favorites ever since I rented the newly-released VHS back when I was six or seven years old. It was creepy, intense, it stuck with me. I loved it. It’s a great horror movie that doesn’t get referenced nearly often enough, so I was glad to see that it was getting honored with a novelization decades after it was released.
Crafted with so much support from the film’s writer/director Robert Resnikoff and star Lou Diamond Phillips that they even wrote an introduction and foreword, respectively, Christian Francis’ take on The First Power is a fun read with an interesting approach: while Phillips played a young man in the movie (he would have been in his twenties during filming), Francis writes the lead character – Los Angeles police detective Russell Logan – as someone who has been around a while. Someone who’s probably closer to Phillips’ age now than the age he was during production.
The age of the character aside, Francis sticks to the story that was told in the movie: Logan takes down a serial killer known as the Pentagram Killer, but when the murderer is executed it just makes him more powerful. He becomes an evil spirit that can possess and act through the bodies of other people. Now, Logan has to take him down all over again, and he’s aided in this endeavor by a psychic.
Resnikoff had trouble figuring out the ending of the movie, so it’s no surprise to find that the novelization of The First Power doesn’t wrap up in the same way the movie did.
Book 21: SESSION 9 by Christian Francis
Directed by Brad Anderson from a script he wrote with Stephen Gevedon, the 2001 psychological (or is it supernatural?) horror film Session 9 has been a favorite of mine ever since I caught a theatrical screening of it at a 24-hour horror marathon in ‘01. When the movie reached DVD, I watched it over and over. So I was hyped to hear that Christian Francis had written a novelization, and that he had been given not only the original script for the film to work from, but also had access to a treatment for an unproduced prequel. I thought this novelization was going to really dive deep into the story... but that’s not how it turned out. Session 9 was the first time I was disappointed by a Francis novelization.
The story of the film is covered: a group of men working for an asbestos abatement company take a one-week job to remove asbestos from the closed-down Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts. As the days go by and one of the workers gets obsessed with a batch of left-over tapes of therapy sessions with a former patient that had dissociative identity disorder, the situation gradually falls apart. By the end of the week, most of the men are dead.
Francis tells that story, but the book doesn’t really go any deeper than what was shown on the screen. I don’t know what was in that prequel treatment, but it didn’t amount to much content in the book. To me, the Session 9 novelization came off as too much of a simple transcription of the dialogue and description of scenes. The author missed the opportunity to dig in any deeper than what we already saw in the movie.
Book 22: THE INCREDIBLE HULK: CRY OF THE BEAST by Richard S. Meyers
The “Marvel Novel Series” launched in March of 1978 with The Amazing Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan, and the Incredible Hulk novel Stalker from the Stars followed in October of that year. Just five months later, another Incredible Hulk novel hit store shelves: Richard S. Meyers’ Cry of the Beast. And this was an odd one.
Bruce Banner, the scientist who often transforms into a giant, raging, green monster, is walking the streets of New York City when he witnesses the beating and abduction of radiation specialist Dr. Maxwell Wittenborn by an African dictator known as the General. Not even the arrival of the Hulk is enough to stop the abduction from being carried out, but that’s not Banner or the Hulk’s last run-in with the General. Banner gets roped into the CIA’s investigation of the case and before you know, he – along with Wittenborn’s son Tony and daughter Rosanne – has been swept off to Africa.
The General wants Wittenborn to create a weapon of mass destruction for him so he, along with his “secret army” that’s made up of mercenaries from around the world, can use it to gain power. Hulk doesn’t care about any of this, but of course, Banner gets involved with trying to stop the General from carrying out his plans... Eventually. For a large portion of the book, Banner and Rosanne are left to wander in the jungle, where they start to fall for each other, witness the massacre of a tribe of pygmies, and the Hulk fights a rhino.
Cry of the Beast has its fun elements, but the story and the style of writing doesn’t really seem to fit the Marvel-Hulk world. As others have said, this seems to have been aimed more at those who were mainly familiar with the Hulk from the ‘70s TV show, which was airing at the time of its publication, rather than fans of the comic book. I wouldn’t recommend this to young viewers who like the Marvel Comics version of the character. (And anyone who reads it now should brace themselves for some '70s-era insensitivities.)
Book 23: THE TALISMAN by Peter Straub and Stephen King
When horror authors Peter Straub and Stephen King teamed up to write a novel together in the early '80s, the result was, surprisingly, not a horror novel. The Talisman is a fantasy story that feels like it's set in the world of King's epic Dark Tower saga - which, at the time when The Talisman was published, only consisted of the first book: The Gunslinger. But, it makes sense that King would think of integrating his Straub collaboration into the Dark Tower world, since a lot of his work is tied to that world.
The story centers on a 12-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer, who learns that his mother is dying of cancer... but he might be able to save her life if he retrieves a magical item called the Talisman from a parallel world called the Territories, which he is able to "flip" over to. So Jack sets out on a journey through the Territories that also takes him across the United States, and Straub and King throw all sorts of obstacles in his path. Jack gets stuck working in a bar for a while, meets a werewolf, gets captured and put in a home for delinquent boys, and is tracked the entire way by the evil Morgan Sloat, the business partner who may have caused the death of Jack's father.
It all builds up to a large-scale confrontation between Jack and Morgan and his lackeys. I feel like the book goes a bit off the rails toward the ending, but the trip there is quite interesting and emotionally engaging. The first time I read The Talisman, I was closer to Jack's age and found the book to be fascinating. I probably would have ranked it as one of King's best books (I haven't read enough Straub to do any ranking there). I didn't enjoy the book as much during this read, but it's still impressive.
Book 24: THE GATE by Christian Francis
Directed by Tibor Takács from a script by Michael Nankin, the 1987 cult classic horror film The Gate tells the following story: Best friends Glen and Terry stumble upon a mysterious hole in Glen’s backyard. At first, it seems harmless. Then, strange things begin happening. Terrifying visions, shadowy creatures, and unexplainable events escalate quickly. By the time they realize the truth, it’s too late. They’ve opened a portal to a demonic realm. What starts as a harmless discovery turns into a nightmare beyond imagination. With their parents away and the forces of darkness closing in, Glen and Terry must fight to close the gate before the demons consume their world.
It’s a creepy, gateway horror movie that can scare the hell out of a kid while also turning them into a genre fan – and I should know, because The Gate was released when I was a child, and it has been one of my favorites ever since I first saw it.
Christian Francis wrote a fun novelization of the story, and I was surprised at how closely the novelization matched the movie. That’s because these tend to be based on early drafts of the script, and I had heard that Nankin’s earliest version of the script was quite different from the movie. The first draft was said to be dark and nasty and packed with death. Demonic creatures emerge from the hole and get out into neighborhood, where they invade homes and attack people in their beds. Nankin was able to sell his script to New Century Entertainment and the Vista Organization, but they didn’t like idea of a movie starring children if it wasn’t going to be for children. So they had Nankin rewrite the script to be more family friendly – and rather than being based on that first draft, the novelization of The Gate is based on a softer, post-rewrite draft.
It’s a good read, though, and I’m glad The Gate finally got a novelization.
Book 25: NIGHT OF THE COMET by Christian Francis
Up to this point, all of the Christian Francis-written novelizations I had read had been based on the scripts for movies that I at least liked, if not loved. This one was something different: a novelization of a movie that I have never really been able to get into.
Written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, the 1984 horror comedy Night of the Comet has a large cult following, and it sounds like something that should be right up my alley: the story of two sisters who survive a comet that has turned most people into either dust or zombies, and stop by the mall for supplies. That sounds like a blast, a comedic ‘80s twist on Dawn of the Dead. I have given it multiple chances, but Night of the Comet has never managed to draw me in during my attempts to watch it.
So I figured I would see if reading the story would give me a better understanding of why so many horror fans love Night of the Comet so much – and it actually worked, to some degree. I haven’t tried to watch the movie again since reading the book, but I did like the story better on the page. The book held my interest more than the movie ever has.
Now I need to watch the movie again and see if it has grown on me.
Book 26: GIMME SKELTER: THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY by Scott S. Phillips
A few years after making the awesome micro-budget zombie movie The Stink of Flesh, writer/director Scott Phillips made another cool horror movie: Gimme Skelter, which tells the story of a man who claims to be the son of Charles Manson and his small group of followers as they enter the town of Banion Cross, New Mexico with the intention of murdering every single person who lives there. (That’s a population of 67.)
Gimme Skelter is, unfortunately, much more difficult to find than The Stink of Flesh is, which is a shame, because it’s a really good movie. As with his zombie movie, Phillips released the full script for Gimme Skelter, and it’s much easier to get your hands on a copy of this published script than it is to get a copy of the movie.
It’s a quick, entertaining read, filled with the very specific brand of quirkiness that you can only get from Scott Phillips.
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