Books and Magazines • FROM PAGE TO SILVER SCREAM

 
         I could have titled this book It Came from My Back Porch, if I wanted it to sell even less copies than it probably will sell.
         First, before I explain that title, a little about me. Actually, a lot about me. Before you begin reading this intro, be aware that you can skip it, move ahead to the regular chapters and not miss a blessed thing. This intro contains no explanatory notes or anything else that might enhance your experience with this book. It’s just me bloviating about why I wrote it. Consider yourself warned.
 
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     As a kid, I enjoyed reading novels; I consumed many (most?) of the Hardy Boys adventures before moving on to other age-appropriate yarns. But little by little, my passion for movies and TV series pushed novels to the side. In fact, over time, I lost my interest in reading novels. When assigned to read a novel and do a book report for grade school, I hoped that reading the Classics Illustrated comic instead would suffice. I worried that the teacher would somehow know what I had done, but my shortcut always went undetected. If not for my innate modesty, I would add here that my book reports always got excellent grades. I wonder if I got better grades by relying on Classic Illustrated. Surely some of the actual novels would have gone over my youthful head.
         Once I got out of my teens and became an adultolescent, my desire to read returned. The desire returned. The reading didn’t. There just wasn’t time. Throughout my twenties, I had a 9-5 job which, with travel, was 8-6. In my off-hours, I began interviewing the oldtime Hollywood folks who made horror and science fiction movies. On top of that came gigs writing magazine columns and monster movie history books. I was also a film pirate, with 16mm prints passing through my hands every week. When I did have a little time to myself, my idea of fun was to run a 16mm movie just for pleasure, a movie I did not need to write about or interview someone about. Who had time to read War and Peace? (A novel that probably would still, today, go over my head!)
         Then came laserdiscs and DVDs, and next thing I knew, I was writing bonus features (production histories and cast bios) and doing audio commentaries, in addition to all my interviewing and magazine and book activity. During all that time, I’d feel guilt every time I watched a terrific old movie and knew that it was based on a novel … that I’d never read. And, the way I was going, would never read, much as I wanted to.
     I was especially bugged by the fact that, despite my reputation as an expert on the horror and sci-fi oldies, I had never read Dracula … or Frankenstein … or The War of the Worlds or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or 90-plus percent of the other horror–sci-fi–fantasy literary classics. Made me feel like a phony, like a lowbrow. But the love of money was the root of this lowbrow. When the editor of Starlog magazine would ask me to write an article about some movie or some individual near and dear to my heart—deadline, next Friday—it wasn’t in me to say, “Pay someone else to do it, I want to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” I always took the gig. During a visit to Fangoria’s office, they’d hand me the new DVDs of such movies as Kraa! The Sea Monster and Mosquitoman and ask me to watch and review them over the weekend, for the “Video Eye of Dr. Cyclops” column. Was I going to tell them, “Hire someone else to do this, I want to read The Sea Wolf”? I didn’t. I knew that many of the Hollywood vets who made my favorite horror and SF oldies were already living on borrowed time and I needed to get a move on if I ever wanted to interview them; was I about to let a dozen die while I spent weeks binge-reading Robert Louis Stevenson? Sorry, Bob.
 
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     But then IT Conquered the World … the InterneT. Everyone now had a thousand favorite websites where they could read as much as they wanted, for free, and the magazine world went belly up—starting with just about all the ones I wrote for. For the first time in my adult life, at age 60, I could now, without guilt, occasionally pursue non–work-related interests even when they were time-consuming.
     My new routine: The last thing I did every night was to repair to my screened-in back porch and take another bite out of a novel. In my Adirondack chair, with an LED headlamp lighting up a few paragraphs at a time, I sat on that otherwise black porch, 15 feet above my completely black backyard, reading. Here in New York, I could do this nine or ten months out of the year (the nice-weather months). Unless a neighbor got an occasional split-second flash of my headlamp, no one with a sightline to my house ever knew I was there in the darkness. With an electric fan near me on warm nights, a blanket on cool nights, and my dogs asleep nearby, I immersed myself in the worlds of the abovementioned Huckleberry Finn and The Sea Wolf. Nightmare Alley. Farewell, My Lovely. A Tale of Two Cities. Robinson Crusoe. Oodles of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dozens more.
     I could have borrowed these novels from the public library, but that’s not how I roll. When I read a book, I like it to be mine, so I can write big question marks near words I don’t know and want to look up. So I can circle colorful phrases that I’ll want to steal someday when I’ve got my Author hat on. Practically every novel I read was bought used and ultra-cheap from Amazon or AbeBooks. I didn’t care that they looked a little ratty; they’d look a lot rattier by the time I got through with them. Especially when I’d leave the book on the porch when I went to bed, and it unexpectedly rained. When I read the horror–sci-fi classics, the page margins would quickly fill with notes—things I wanted to be sure to remember and mention, if ever I wrote about the movies inspired by that novel.
     Then came an eye-opening development: I found that some of these genre novels were quite different from the movies in ways that, to the best of my knowledge, no movie fan covering the movies ever mentioned. Throughout my life, I’ve read everything that crossed my desk about the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man; why had no one ever mentioned that in Richard Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man, Scott Carey goes through a rather despicable phase? In fact, rather loathsome, when the highlight of his day, every day, is to spy on his little daughter’s 16-year-old, frequently underdressed or naked babysitter? I’ve seen all three movie versions of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger and read quite a bit about them; how is it that no one writing about the movies ever mentioned that the novel’s main character is the lodger’s landlady, who knows that she’s boarding a murderous fiend but wants his regular rent money enough to cover for him?
     There was surprise after surprise as I devoured these genre novels. For several decades, I had lived with the guilty secret that, amongst Monster Kid movie experts, I alone had never cracked their covers. Now here I was finding out: It sho’ looked like most of my Monster Kid colleagues never cracked those covers either!
     And from there, I got the notion that a book with detailed, chapter-by-chapter synopses of these novels, each novel reduced to the length of a lively short story, could be pretty interesting and even useful on a Monster Kid’s bookshelf. And it might inspire the Monster Kids reading this book, to now read some of those novels. After about ten seconds of wishing that such a book existed, and wondering who ought to write it, I realized that the answer was … me. And also that I would enjoy the heck out of the experience.
     In fact, I’m actively rooting for this book to do sufficiently well that BearManor permits me to do another (and maybe another). Hoping that this will happen, I will temporarily stop reading horror–sci-fi novels as I wait to find out what the future holds: Will I be poring over the genre novels in my STUFF TO READ stack strictly for my reading pleasure, or will I be back to synopsizing them for publication? Now beckoning to me from that pile: the novels adapted into Macabre, The First Men in the Moon, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, On the Beach, The Hands of Orlac, The Spiral Staircase, Hangover Square, Zotz!, The Power, I Saw What You Did, The Undying Monster, Haunted Harbor (Republic’s 1944 sea-serpent–starring serial) and a whole bunch more.
         But I must wait for the reaction to this book (and for the coming of spring, and warmer weather) before I can return to the back porch. Atop my pile of non-genre books, to be read while Monster Kid book-buyers render their verdict: The Curse of Capistrano and Beau Geste will help me pass the time.
 

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