Cody read multiple books in 2025, and here are his thoughts on the second half of the batch.
Book 27: SQUIRM by Richard Curtis
In 1978, author Richard Curtis used the pseudonym Curtis Richards when he was hired to write a novelization of the slasher movie Halloween – a novelization that is quite popular with a lot of Halloween fans. But two years earlier, when he was hired to write a novelization of writer/director Jeff Lieberman’s “worms on a rampage” horror movie Squirm, he kept his own name on the title page. One of my favorite movies, Squirm shows us what happens when “a storm causes some power lines to break and touch the ground, drawing millions of man-eating worms out of the earth and into town, where they quickly start munching on the locals.”
Curtis did a great job of fleshing the story out on the page – and if he felt like a story about man-eating worms was beneath him, it certainly doesn’t come through in his writing. He also adds a bit of depth to the story by dropping in a flashback to the events that caused one of the characters to develop a phobia of worms. Unfortunately for that fellow, his dad runs a worm farm... and by the end of the story, he has worms writing in his flesh.
This was a fun read, and classier than you might expect.
Book 28: ROBOT NINJA by Damien Casey
Although I have great respect for the career of filmmaker J.R. Bookwalter and love many of his movies, Robot Ninja is one that I have never really been able to get into. It’s a well-regarded movie, not even by the people who worked on it... but there are some interesting ideas in there.
Robot Ninja isn't exactly the sci-fi action flick that you might expect from the title. It's sort of a precursor to Kick Ass, in that it's a story about an average guy who gets the bright idea to become a superhero, and it doesn't go smoothly for him. The movie was made during the time when hype was building for the release of the Batman film directed by Tim Burton, and Bookwalter's idea was to make his character "the anti-Batman," someone who was a loser in their regular life and a failure as a hero. The lead character is comic book writer/artist Leonard Miller, who has had some success with his violent, black & white indie comic Robot Ninja and is not happy that his publisher at Amsco Comics has licensed the property out to be turned into a campy network television show that draws comparisons to the 1960s Batman TV series.
Miller lives in Ridgway, Ohio where a gang of youths led by Gody Sanchez have set out on a rampage of robbery, rape, and murder. A brutal encounter with Gody's gang not only gives Miller ideas for his comic book, it also leads to him deciding to become his own character. With the royalties from the TV show, Miller is able to hire his inventor pal Dr. Hubert Goodknight to build him a real, operable Robot Ninja suit. Amped up, popping pills to stay awake, Miller hits the streets. With his armored, clawed suit, he feels invincible, and believes that he can help the police bring the gang to justice. But he really sucks at it.
Anytime I start reading a novelization, I do so with the hope that the author will dig deeper into the concept, expanding scenes and bringing more depth to the characters. And if the movie didn’t work as well as it could have, I hope the novelization will find a way to improve the story.
That is not the approach Damien Casey took to writing this book. Since he was working from the script for a goofy, poorly-received movie, he took the opportunity to make things even goofier. The book, which is surprisingly short, comes off like it was written in a half-hearted, slapdash way, and it’s packed with terrible jokes, with references to viral videos Casey seems to assume we’ve all read and an odd preoccupation with Meghan Trainor. Since one of the characters in the movie was played by Linnea Quigley, Casey also has people make random references to other Quigley projects when they talk to her character.
I didn’t enjoy reading this very much. The way Casey wrote it was just not for me.
Book 30: BIG CHUCK!: MY FAVORITE STORIES FROM 47 YEARS ON CLEVELAND TV by Chuck Schodowski and Tom Feran
The movie hosts of my youth were Big Chuck and Lil’ John, a duo that broadcast out of Cleveland, Ohio. I always had a blast watching those two when I was a kid, as they not only tended to show movies that I enjoyed, but at the commercial skits they would drop in really amusing comedy skits. Although I didn’t come along until the end of 1983, they had both been doing this gig for a long time before I was a born. Lil’ John started hosting the show with Big Chuck in 1979, while “Big” Chuck Schodowski had been involved with movie hosting shows since 1963, starting with the Ghoulardi show – and if you’ve never heard of Ghoulardi (played by Ernie Anderson, father of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson), you should know that the guy is seen as royalty in Ohio, particularly the Cleveland area, even sixty years after his show ended.
As promised in the name of the book, Big Chuck!: My Favorite Stories from 47 Years on Cleveland TV covers the decades Chuck spent working on Cleveland television – and as a result, this was one of my favorite reads of the year. I was fascinated to learn what it was like for Chuck to do the work that I have been appreciating since I was a kid, and the book is packed with great stories.
Unfortunately, it was Big Chuck’s passing last year at the age of 90 that inspired me to get around to reading his book. I wish I had read it sooner, but I’m thankful that he wrote his story down, with the help of Tom Feran, so all of us can continue to celebrate his accomplishments.
Book 31: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS by Christian Francis
When horror novelist Sutter Cane goes missing, insurance investigator John Trent is hired to retrieve an manuscript and figure out where the writer has gone. Accompanied by the novelist’s editor, Linda Styles, and disturbed by nightmares from reading Cane’s other novels, Trent journeys to a supernatural town in New Hampshire... That’s the set-up for the 1995 horror film In the Mouth of Madness, which was directed by John Carpenter from a script by Michael De Luca that was clearly inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the popularity of Stephen King. It’s a movie that has a massive cult following, but it’s also one that I have never found to be all that captivating.
So, as with the cult horror comedy Night of the Comet, this was a situation where I was intrigued to see if reading a novelization by Christian Francis might improve my opinion of the connected movie. I can’t say Francis’s take on In the Mouth of Madness left me eager to sit through the movie again, but he did have an interesting approach: he wrote the novelization as if it were a Sutter Cane manuscript. This was even marketed as a long-lost novel by the fictional author. That was an inspired idea, and it gives In the Mouth of Madness more substance than some other Christian Francis novelizations, which are sometimes a lot of fun but also sometimes feel like they had the bare minimum of effort put into them. This one doesn’t come off that way. Francis was clearly having fun doing something unique with this Sutter Cane tale.
Book 32: IT’S ALL GOOD!: A MICHAEL BERRYMAN MEMOIR... IN MY OWN WORDS by Michael Berryman
Michael Berryman became a horror icon by playing the terrifying and repulsive character Pluto in the 1977 classic The Hills Have Eyes – but if you’ve had the chance to cross paths with him, you know that, in real life, he’s one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet.
With his memoir It’s All Good, Berryman takes readers on a journey through the first couple decades of his life, telling us how he first started making his way out into the world. We hear about his family life, his school days, his appreciation for things like comedy, music, science fiction, and nature – and, of course, he discusses the struggles he has had with his birth defects. Berryman was born with hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia. He doesn’t have sweat glands, hair (although, he did at one point), or fingernails. This also gave him the unique physical appearance that helped him land some of the film roles he has played, but they’ve also caused plenty of troubles for him over the years, as you might imagine.
This is not a book about Berryman’s experiences in the entertainment industry. We do learn how we first got into the movies, but that’s not the focus, and Berryman has said that he hopes to write another book that will be about his adventures in filmland. But first he decided to write this book, one that gives us insight into the days before he dove into acting – and it’s written in such an appealing, conversational way, it’s fascinating from beginning to end. I know what movies Berryman has made, but I had no idea what his life was like before them, and I’m glad he decided to tell his story.
And when he decides to write his “Hollywood tell-all” book, I’ll be glad to read that one as well!
Book 33: THE HOUSE COMPANION by Simon Barber
Arrow Films included this 148-page book in the Blu-ray box set they put together for the four-film House horror franchise. Very reminiscent in presentation to the Friday the 13th series book Crystal Lake Memories, The House Companion takes the reader on a behind-the-scenes journey through the making and release of each House movie: House (1985), House II: The Second Story (1987), House III: The Horror Show (1989), and House IV: The Repossession (1992). I’m only a fan of half of these movies, but it was interesting to find out how they all came to be, whether I like them or not.
Book 34: THE MAJORETTES by John A. Russo
In 1986, Night of the Living Dead co-writer John A. Russo teamed with director Bill Hinzman (who played the Cemetery Ghoul in Night of the Living Dead) to bring us a low budget slasher movie called The Majorettes, about a masked killer targeting high school majorettes in a small town, with many locals suspecting a local gang is responsible for the murders. Although I read a lot of novelizations in 2025, Russo’s The Majorettes was not one of them, as Russo wrote this novel in 1979, years before he wrote the screenplay adaptation for Hinzman’s film.
That movie has some wild twists and turns in it, and the same can be said for the book – and what’s interesting is that Russo changed the identity of the killer when writing the screenplay adaptation! He made some other changes here and there, including the fact that one of the prominent characters in the film isn’t in the book at all. So if you read the book and watch the movie, you get slightly different stories from each medium.
Either way, it’s an interesting story, lurid and creepy. The book has some especially unsettling chapters in which Russo digs into the mind of the killer.
Book 35: A WHOLE BAG OF CRAZY by Pete Chiarella
I have a strong fascination with the films of the grindhouse era, but I was born in small-town mid-Ohio in the days when the grindhouse era was coming to an end. I never actually experienced the grindhouse world itself. That’s why I’m very thankful for Pete Chiarella, a.k.a. 42nd Street Pete. He was there during the grindhouse glory days, actually seeing these movies in the legendary theatres that stood on 42nd Street in Manhattan.
Pete shares stories from that time, and the story of his life, in the pages of A Whole Bag of Crazy, “sordid tales of hookers, weed, and grindhouse movies.” That story begins with him becoming a “monster kid,” catching creature features on TV even though they were forbidden by the Catholic school he attended. He acquired an appreciation for film that he has carried with him throughout his entire life, and he discusses many films of a variety of genres in the pages of this book – mixed with chapters that are about him getting into drugs and alcohol, visiting prostitutes, selling porn, and doing business at flea markets.
A Whole Bag of Crazy is not only a journey back in time, following Pete through decades I wasn’t even alive for, but also a journey into a world that’s very different from the one I’ve known. Because of that, and because I’m very interested in the grindhouse movies that Pete talks about, this book had me hooked from beginning to end. I didn’t want to put it down, and when I had to take a break, I was always eager to return to the world of 42nd Street Pete.
Book 36: BENEATH PERFECTION by Christian Francis
Beneath Perfection is a novelization of the 1990 creature feature Tremors, and the fact that it exists at all is something of a triumph. For four movies in a row (and a season of a TV series), the Tremors franchise was the brainchild of one group of creatives, the folks at Stampede Entertainment. But then, the studio behind the franchise (Universal) made the baffling decision to shut Stampede out of the making of three additional sequels. Those shenanigans came to an end when Stampede was able to regain their copyright to the screenplay of the original film – a screenplay that bore the title Beneath Perfection. Now, they have the rights to everything that was in that script, and Universal can’t make any more Tremors projects without their involvement.
One of the first things Stampede did once they had the copyright was to give the greenlight to Christian Francis to write a novelization of the Beneath Perfection script.
Francis did a fine job adapting the script into prose... but that’s part of the problem. Tremors is one of the greatest creature features ever made; it deserved a novelization that was better than “fine.” This is one of the cases where Francis wrote out the action and the dialogue, but missed the opportunity to dig deeper into the situation, to spend some time in the minds of the characters. Scenes that add any depth are few and far between, with one of the rare moments of that being a nice nod to a character from the prequel Tremors 4.
Beneath Perfection is a “good enough” book, but I really wanted it to be great.
Book 37: DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE? by Eric Powell and Harold Schechter
The true crime case of graverobber and murderer Ed Gein has inspired some great horror stories, including Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Deranged – and it has also inspired some not-so-great horror stories. The recent Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story was presented as if it would actually be telling the true story, and a lot of viewers were convinced that it did. But I have had an interest in the Gein case for decades, and I was appalled by the way that show approached its largely fictionalized presentation of Gein. (And don’t even get me started on its awful presentation of Alfred Hitchcock, or its completely unnecessary detour into the private life of Anthony Perkins.)
After watching that show, I turned to Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? as a palate cleanser. A collaboration between writer/artist Eric Powell and Harold Schechter, who wrote the true crime book Deviant about Gein, this 224 page graphic novel is a dramatization of Gein’s life that hews closer to the facts as we know them. If you want to know “The Ed Gein Story,” take a look at Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?, but stay far away from Monster.
Book 38: WAXWORK by Christian Francis
In some cases, it seemed like the more I loved a movie, the more I would be disappointed with the Christian Francis novelization of the movie. That was never a danger with Waxwork. While I think writer/director Anthony Hickox made an entertaining movie, it has never been one of my favorites. Although it does have a brilliant set-up: a group of youths visit a mysterious wax museum and discover that, if they come to close to the exhibits, they will be transported into the horrifying world the wax figures represent. So within one movie we get werewolf attacks, vampires, mummies, the Marquis de Sade, zombies, and more.
Waxwork has a goofiness to it that Francis was able to bring to the page as well, making this a horror story that just breezes by.
Book 39: PREDATOR by Paul Monette
In 1987, director John McTiernan and screenwriters Jim Thomas and John Thomas brought us one of the best and coolest sci-fi action movies ever made: Predator, in which the badass members of a paramilitary rescue team are sent on a mission in a Central American jungle and run into something they are not prepared to face. Something they wouldn’t even have believed exists. An alien creature that hunts people for sport.
When a publisher was tasked with finding an author to write a novelization of that story, they turned to an unexpected choice: Paul Monette, an author, poet, and activist best known for his books about gay relationships. This wasn’t the sort of thing he was known for (although he had previously written novelizations of the then-recent updates of Nosferatu and Scarface), but Monette took a respectful and thoughtful approach to the material – and actually made it much wordier than necessary.
Here’s an example, an excerpt from the first chapter, in the moments of Arnold Schwarzenegger arrives on a helicopter: “The shivering red-orange burn of the humid sun throbbed like a fever along the Pacific rim of the Conta Mana coast. The beach and shallow harbor at Balancan, deadly still in the late afternoon heat, nonetheless looked pristine as a travel poster with its limpid emerald water and white powder sand. The thatch huts of the fishing village were simple as an urbanite’s dream of Eden, though inside every one was like an oven, stinking of rotten grass, the air thick with the whine of green-headed flies.
You never lost the heat in Conta Mana in September, even at night, especially at night. It hadn’t rained on the coast since June, and no one in Balancan was holding his breath. The heat was a given like being poor, or being shot by guerrillas.
Inland from the village, darkness was already thick in the trees, and the coastal jungle hissed and seethed like a pot of boiling water. A hungry cougar began to flex in his lair in anticipation of the chase, the rip of a boar’s hide, the thick-clotted heart sweet as wild honey. Everything small and succulent—the mice, the ferrets, the blue-hair monkeys—plunged into their burrows and nests, giving over the night to a thousand snakes, a thousand kinds of venom. Nothing tender would still run free by morning.
Tangles of exotic flowers groped for the last of the light. Rotten orchids fell into jelly, trampled by sunflowers two feet across. Whatever bloomed exploded, aching with pollen. Jasmine ran riot like weeds, looped with snags of vines and reverberating with the screams of macaws and parrots, who flew in a green blaze of magic, erasing time. In every rush of their wings were conjured images of blood-soaked Mayan priests and nobles a thousand years gone, praying at their zigzag temples beyond Lake Panajachel.
And beyond the lake, at the humped spine of Conta Mana, the ominous black bulk of a dead volcano’s peak pierced the last clouds of a thunderstorm riding east toward the highland jungles and out to the pale Caribbean.”
Wow, Paul. That’s quite an opening to a book about a bunch of action heroes fighting an alien. And he keeps that sort of writing going for the entire novel.
The most interesting thing about the Predator novelization is that it was written before the film team had figured out exactly what the alien in the film was going to be like. The iconic design of the creature didn’t come along until they were in the midst of production, so the alien in the book is completely different from the one in the movie, shape-shifting into various different things along the way. We're lucky we got the Predator we did instead of the thing described in these pages.
Book 40: WITCHBOARD by Christian Francis
That thing I said about the more I loved a movie, the more I would be disappointed by the Christian Francis novelization of the movie’s screenplay? It held true with the Witchboard novelization. Writer/director Kevin Tenney’s 1986 film Witchboard is one of my all-time favorites, and has been ever since I rented the movie on VHS when I was a kid. It’s one of the cornerstones of my horror fandom. So, this was just like Francis’s Beneath Perfection / Tremors novelization for me: Francis turned in a “good enough” book for a property that I felt deserved something truly great.
The set-up is creepy as hell: a young woman falls under the spell of a spirit that has been communicating with her through a Ouija board. She thinks it’s the spirit of a child who died in an accident, but it’s actually the evil spirit of a serial killed named Carlos Malfeitor. As Malfeitor starts to possess the woman, her boyfriend tries to find a way to save her.
Again, I was hoping for more than just a surface level novelization. I was hoping for something inspired that would dig deeper into the scenes and characters. I was hoping for a great horror novel. But, it’s a fine novelization.
Book 41: PREDATOR 2 by Simon Hawke
Author Simon Hawke is best known (to me and a lot of horror fans, anyway) for writing novelizations of the slasher classics Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part 2, Friday the 13th Part III, and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI. A massive fan of the F13 series, I really enjoyed reading Hawke’s take on those stories – and his Predator 2 novelization was exactly what I was hoping it would be: an entertaining prose extrapolation on the film that was directed by Stephen Hopkins from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas, presented in a much more reader-friendly way than Paul Monette’s over-written Predator.
Hawke has a straightforward, action-focused approach that I really enjoy. For comparison, here’s an early paragraph from his first chapter: “The television news van came screeching over to the curb, only a short distance from the blockade of police cars positioned end-to-end across the road. The sounds of explosions, sirens, and automatic weapons fire filled the air as the driver turned off the key and slammed on the emergency brake. Even before the van had come completely to a halt, Tony Pope had the passenger door open and was leaping out onto the sidewalk, impatiently shouting to his two-man crew to get their asses in gear.” No poetry, just action.
He brought the story of Predator 2 to the page in a way that made the book quite fun to read.
Book 42: THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES AND MOTHRA by Shin'ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga and Yoshie Hotta, translated by Jeffrey Angles
My review of this one can be read HERE.
Book 43: NOPE, NOTHING WRONG HERE: THE MAKING OF CUJO by Lee Gambin
In 1981, Stephen King brought the world a novel called Cujo, about a mother and her small child getting trapped in a broken-down Pinto by a rabid dog. Two years later, Cujo got a great film adaptation that features a performance by lead actress Dee Wallace that many, including King himself, believe warranted an Oscar nomination.
If you’ve ever wanted to know every single detail about the making of the Cujo movie, I think author Lee Gambin might have dredged them up and put them in this book. Filled with interviews with people who were involved with the movie – including director Peter Medak, who was either fired or quit after a few days of filming and replaced by Lewis Teague (since we’re relying on people’s statements and memories, not all of the details are entirely clear) – Nope, Nothing Wrong Here takes us through the entire production of Cujo. Along the way, Gambin proves himself to be the biggest fan of Cujo there is, because I have never seen anyone else write about the movie with this much adoration.
If you love Cujo, this book should be in your collection.
Book 44: A WHOLE BAG OF CRAZY PART DEUX: ONE LAST TOKE by Pete Chiarella
“42nd Street Pete” Chiarella told a large portion of his life story and told us a lot about the glory days of 42nd Street and grindhouse movies in his book A Whole Bag of Crazy – but there was still plenty of story left to tell and a lot more movies to talk about, leading to the follow-up, A Whole Bag of Crazy Part Deux: One Last Toke.
This book contains “more stories of weed, hookers, conventions, and grindhouse movies,” and there seems to be even more to it than there was to its predecessor. It is around 350 pages, compared to the first book’s 224 pages, but the font is also a bit larger, so it’s difficult to gauge how the word count might compare. And while we’re on the subject, I prefer the font size in Part Deux.
Again, Pete takes us on a tour of 42nd Street and covers a lot of grindhouse movies of various genres, interspersed with chapters that discuss drugs, debauchery, friends, fights, business deals, marriage, and more.
If you have any interest in grindhouse movies and any curiosity to know what it was like to be in and around New York City during the grindhouse era, both of Pete Chiarella’s A Whole Bag of Crazy books are essential reading.
Book 45: THE EYES OF THE DRAGON by Stephen King
When you read through Stephen King's bibliography in order of publication, you get back-to-back fantasy novels with The Talisman and The Eyes of the Dragon. This one was written specifically because King's then-teen daughter Naomi didn't read books because she didn't like horror. She did like dragons, so we got this story, which is basically a 326-page fairy tale.
It takes place in the Kingdom of Delain, where King Roland's magician Flagg (a nod to The Stand) schemes behind the scenes to take control. This scheme includes causing the death of the King's wife and, years later, frames the King's noble first-born son for the King's murder so the lesser second son can take the throne and carry out Flagg's wishes. The reader then roots for the wrongly imprisoned son to escape and save the Kingdom with the help of his supporters.
The Eyes of the Dragon isn't a book I would have read if it wasn't written by Stephen King, this kind of story and setting isn't really my thing, but it's a decent read.
Book 46: PAPERBACKS FROM HELL: THE TWISTED HISTORY OF ‘70S AND ‘80S HORROR FICTION by Grady Hendrix
Author Grady Hendrix can usually be found crafting his own stories, but with Paperbacks from Hell he takes readers on a journey through the racks and stacks of cheap paperback horror novels that were written long before he sent his first book out into the world. There are a lot of these books, so Hendrix helpfully broke them down into multiple categories: the ones where Satan is the villain, creepy kid books, animals attack books, real estate nightmares, weird science, Gothic and romantic, those that deal with inhumanoids, and splatterpunks, serial killers, and super creeps.
This is a really fun read – but beware, you could end up compiling a very long “to read” list as you go along. Many of the books Hendrix covers seem like they would be fascinating to read, and it helps that he gives them amusing summaries that make them sound like the greatest things that ever existed. Here’s one passage from the “Creepy Kids” section, for example: “Never be home on Halloween. For some reason, that’s when the little cherubs absolutely lose their minds. Disregard these warnings and end up like the town of Elliot, Pennsylvania, where, in Piper (1987), hundreds of children under the age of thirteen, dressed as adorable witches, pirates, and cowboys, murder three thousand adults one All Hallow’s Eve. On the glass-half-full side, the whole town works together and brings their psychotic progeny under control, with local Vietnam and Korean War vets teaming up to machine-gun the little ankle biters into kibble. As they say: it takes a village.”
If you’re like, that description will leave you wondering if Piper, by Brett Rutherford and John Robertson, might be the best book ever written.
Book 47: THE GREATEST STORIES OF THE OLD WEST EVER TOLD by Jonathan Hunt
When I was a youngster, I took an interest in stories about the outlaws of the Old West, reading up on the likes of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, etc. This 124-page book wasn’t published until 2023, but if it had been around in 1993, I absolutely would have been reading it while sitting in my grade school classroom.
Billy the Kid and Jesse James are among the legends covered in these pages, and Hunt doesn’t just tell the stories of outlaws. Here you’ll also find out about George Custer, Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and Geronimo. As you can tell from the page count, these aren’t the most in-depth write-ups, but they cover the major points of the stories.
Book 48: THINNER by Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King)
Stephen King wrote books faster than publishers could send them out into the world, especially since the publishers were hung up on the idea of only putting one new King book on shelves per years. His work was stacking up, so he decided to start having some books published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman - and for four books in a row, it worked. Although there were some elements that readers might recognize from King's writing, the Bachman books tended to have a grittier, harder edge, and more grounded subject matter. They involved a school shooter, a middle-aged man having a mental breakdown, kids participating in a contest where they had to walk until they dropped dead one by one, and a man participating in a life-or-death reality show. But with the fifth book, Thinner, the line between King and Bachman blurred too much and the Bachman cover was blown.
King still wrote this one with grit and a harder edge, but it's still too obviously King. When a morbidly obese lawyer accidentally runs his car into an old Romani woman and escapes punishment thanks to his connections, the woman's ancient father curses him to a slow death of getting thinner until he wastes away. Understandably, a bookstore employee was able to deduce that the writer of this story was King within the first few pages.
Thinner doesn't fit in with the other Bachman books very well, but it's an entertaining King book with a soul-crushing ending.
Book 49: CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG by Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming’s writing career primarily consisted of novels and stories that focused on the globe-trotting spy he created, James Bond – but occasionally, he would drift away from Bond adventures to write something else. One of his last works was the children’s story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which he conceived as a bedtime story for his son, Caspar, and wrote while convalescing after a major heart attack. By the time the book was published, Fleming died of another heart attack.
Inspired by, and named after, a series of aero-engined racing cars built by Louis Zborowski in the early 1920s, the book centers on the Pott family, headed up by retired military man turned inventor Caractacus Pott. He buys an old car for his family to tool around in... and while he works on fixing it up, he’s surprised to find that the car starts doing improvements of its own while he’s not in his workshop. When the family hits the road for a day out, the car shows off some of its self-made improvements, demonstrating the ability to fly over traffic and then become a hovercraft to cross the sea.
Fleming was used to writing thrills, and he didn’t completely abandon his usual material here: the Pott family eventually crosses paths with a gang of gun-runners and thieves, who attempt to cause trouble for them. Of course, these villains are thwarted with the help of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
Originally published in three volumes before being collected into one book, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang is a short and cute story, and it’s interesting to see Fleming work in a more kid-friendly manner.
Book 50: FLETCH’S FORTUNE by Gregory Mcdonald
Fletch’s Fortune was the third book Gregory Mcdonald ever wrote about journalist I.M. Fletcher, but over the years he went back and wrote so many prequels and “mid-quels” that it falls in at #7 if you read the series in chronological order. However you approach it, it’s a fun read.
The events of the previous books have left Fletch with a fortune to play with, as the title says. Problem is, the U.S. government is aware that he has a fortune, and also, of course, that he hasn’t paid taxes. So a pair of CIA agents approach him with a way out of trouble. They want him to go to an American journalists convention and spy on his fellow writers. And wouldn’t you know it, Fletch arrives at the convention to find that a newspaper tycoon has been murdered there, so he’s going to have to solve the case.
Fletch books are always a breeze, moving along at a quick pace and overflowing with fast, clever dialogue. Fletch’s Fortune is no different – and it’s a good step up from the second book in the series (Confess, Fletch), which is one of the rare ones that I don’t get a lot of enjoyment out of.
Book 51: STRANGELAND by Christian Francis
Strangeland is a 1998 horror movie that was written by and stars musician Dee Snider, and I’ve always had an odd affinity for it. The story follows a police detective as he tries to thwart an online predator who believes he’s bringing "enlightenment" to the youths he abducts by having them endure ritual pain, and it takes some interesting twists and turns. For example, that predator – who was played by Snider and goes by the handle Captain Howdy (a nod to The Exorcist) gets apprehended and rehabilitated as the movie goes on, but when vigilantes don’t buy that he has changed and attack him, he reverts to his old ways.
Snider has always hoped to be able to make a sequel to Strangeland, but one has never made it into production. Instead, after decades, we now have a novelization of the original script – and Francis did a fine job bringing the events of the film to the page.
Strangeland has always deserved to be more popular than it is, so I hope this novelization will help it have something of a resurgence in some way. I've always wanted to see that sequel Snider has been talking about.
Book 52: BADASSTRONAUTS by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is said to be the second-best-selling horror writer in the world, behind Stephen King, but one of his first works was a comedy novella. Originally published under the title Occupy Space, the novella BadAsstronauts centers on rundown former astronaut Walter Reddie, who puts together a team of ragtag underdogs to build a homemade rocket on his property in South Carolina and launch it into orbit to rescue his cousin, an astronaut who’s stranded in space, alone on the International Space Station.
This is a really entertaining story, written in a wonderful comedic tone. There’s reportedly a film adaptation in the works, but I could envision this turning out even better as a limited series – and, aside from the initial description that says he’s “as ugly as a donkey’s asshole,” Walter Reddie reads like a character the legendary Bruce Campbell was born to play.
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