Book Reports.
Below are five book reports. Well, sort of.
They’re books I care about, or at least books with personal stories attached to them. If you were expecting me to write serious critiques, I should remind you that I’m poorly educated and pretty lazy.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the film, I mean) came out in November of ’92, signaling an interest boost in All Things Dracula. I was in the eighth grade at the time, and I picked this baby up from my junior high’s book fair.
I was going through my “depression phase,” phoning it in with all-black outfits and a bad haircut. It had as much to do with fashion as feelings, but it’s also true that I felt like a goofy nobody. Going “mock goth” at least made it seem intentional.
I didn’t buy this book to read it. I bought it as an accessory. Something to casually leave on my desk during class. Hey, only the deepest kid in school would carry around a Dracula book! Yes, I imagined my fellow students viewing me with great intrigue! Dracula cost $4.50 at that book fair, and it seemed like a small price to pay to be fucking interesting for once.
I can laugh about this now, because even if I never outgrew misfitdom, it’s not like I really wish I had. At the same time, those memories mean that I’ll never stop having empathy for dorks. I believe we can find the best opportunities to build ourselves when we’re at our most hopeless, but you can only appreciate that kind of silver lining in retrospect.
So, if Dino Drac has any especially young readers on the fringe: You’re reading a guy who once believed he’d become popular by pretending to read Dracula. In the end, you’ll be fine.
You’ll be almost fine.
The Deaths of Cindy James, by Neal Hall (1991)
Notice the wear-and-tear? It’s because I’ve read this book over a hundred times. And that’s a very conservative estimate.
I learned about Cindy James on an Unsolved Mysteries segment. She was a divorced nurse who was brutally murdered after years of incidents involving an unknown assailant. At least, that’s how it seemed on the surface, if you hadn’t heard the whole story.
Unsolved Mysteries stayed pretty neutral, but the other theory – the one based more on facts than feelings – is that Cindy staged all of her previous “attacks,” ultimately committing an elaborate suicide.
I became obsessed with this case. Hell, I’m still obsessed with it. You’ll find tons of information about it online, but nothing compares to the books. (There were two, but this is the better one.) No matter which theory you end up subscribing to, the story is absolutely creepy. It’ll seem weird to say, but the things that happened in Cindy’s final years were even scarier than her ultimate death. (In fact, they’re all the more unsettling if you imagine Cindy doing it, whether purely for the attention, or because she – as some have speculated – suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder.
Scouring the Internet will get you the broad strokes, but if you want the whole story without the thousand uninformed opinions from people who only saw the Unsolved Mysteries episode, find this book!
Tales from Jabba’s Palace, edited by Kevin J. Anderson (1995)
Disney takeover and future plans aside, these last few years have been pretty rough for Star Wars fans. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there’s been a big shift in how “outsiders” view the franchise. We fans have gone from deflecting nitpickers to defending our very right to like it.
If you don’t get the “Star Wars thing” because you didn’t like the movies, I think this book helps illustrate what it’s really about. Whatever flaws the films may have had, they created an awesome and basically endless universe, filled with unbelievable things of every conceivable type. No matter what you think of the filmmakers’ talents, that universe has since been exploited by too many talented people and in way too many ways for anyone to ever write the whole thing off as “garbage.”
Star Wars fans love the movies. Of course we do. But it goes so far beyond that.
Take this book. Tales from Jabba’s Palace. Each chapter is about a different character from Jabba’s dank abode, as seen in Return of the Jedi. All of the major “aliens” you saw in the film – the ones who barely had two lines, and the ones who had no lines at all – finally get a chance to tell their stories.
The chapters and characters are handled by different authors, but the book still has consistent threads. Even if it isn’t a hundred percent canonical, it doesn’t interfere with anything that happened in the movie. The various plots work around the film, beautifully.
One of the chapters is about Oola, Jabba’s “original” slave girl. Remember their little tiff before Jabba kicked her to Rancorland? The book explains that tiff and gives it so much more meaning than the film did. Tales from Jabba’s Palace is full of that. It makes kickass mountains out of the smallest molehills.
This book is just one of a thousand things I could name to better explain fans’ fascination with Star Wars. Really, at this stage, I mainly view the movies as a “style guide” that set the tone for so many other things that I’ve become even more interested in.
Also: If you’re a Star Wars fan who never really went beyond the movies and possibly a few video games, Tales from Jabba’s Palace could not be a more perfect introduction to the “expanded” universe.
To Be The Man, by Ric Flair and other people who are not Ric Flair (2004)
I’m such a sucker for wrestler autobiographies. They’re my weakness!
I’ve read all of the big ones, and I’m wholly convinced that it takes a MIRACLE for a wrestler to escape his book without looking bad. No matter what you think of pro-wrestling, these guys are passionate and absurdly driven performers, in a huge business that exists in a very small world. Emotions naturally run high, and unfortunately, these books often exist as much as for defenses and indictments as they do for fun stories about life on the road.
I don’t know how much of Ric Flair’s book was “editorialized,” but it’s no different. There are so many great stories and true feelings in here, but they’re easy to miss when surrounded by blanket praise for the provider of the paychecks, and blanket scorn toward everyone Flair had axes to grind with at that exact moment. This certainly isn’t exclusive to his book. Many times, I’ll read these things and wonder if the opinions inside wouldn’t have been entirely different had the books been published, oh, six months later.
Of course, I’m focusing on the negatives. Once you cut through the bullshit, the best of the wrestler autobiographies are just plain gripping. In some ways, the warts only add to them.
Even if you care nothing for pro-wrestling, you have to admire the sacrifices these athletes make do so something that ends well for approximately .0005% of ‘em. Most of us will never love anything that much.
Arachnophobia, by Nicholas Edwards (1990)
This is just a catch-all shout-out to movie novelizations. I freakin’ love the things. I own tons of them, and many are based on unbelievably “small” movies. I don’t envy the author who had to turn Jaws: The Revenge into a 400-page tome, but somehow, someone did.
This Arachnophobia novel is much shorter by comparison, and fairly by the numbers. It just turns the movie into a novel, though I suppose that’s all a “novelization” is really supposed to do. On the bright side, it has the always-welcome eight-page photo spread in the middle. Ditzy novelizations really aren’t complete without them.
But the best of these books do so much more. A good example is the Gremlins novel. I haven’t read it since I was a kid, but I still remember it so clearly. The author went inside the minds of the mogwais, turning Gizmo and Stripe’s strife into a ballsy, creepy, extremely dark thing. I already knew that Stripe spat at Gizmo, but now it had subtext.
These novels aren’t always written by hacks. Actually, most aren’t. Many are penned by hungry and capable authors who won’t let the fact that their first big gigs are “this” keep them from bringing their A-game. If you’ve ever stopped short of buying one because “who needs book when I have movie,” please reconsider. On their best days, these novelizations pitch us our favorite films as if they’re eight hours long and with limitless budgets.
Plus, neat photos in the middle!
Wrestler Bios I have read: Flair, Bret Hart(who was a wife cheating lout who is on wife No.3 according to wiki) 3 of Mick Foley’s Hogan, Lawler, Chyna, DDP,Roddy Piper(4 dollars at borders in 2009)Austin’s which was a huge yawn fest, Shawn Michaels, The Rock(another ho hum) So sad that Macho died before he could do one…I read Mark Mero’s too I think. Bischoff’s was kinda neat…
I read a lot of celeb auto bio’s…Davy Jones, which was signed, and I sold on ebay last July, for 325 dollars…Ozzy’s was just awesome and awesome…Kathy Griffin was a good one too.
I really want the Cindy James book…another one, if you are looking for cool murders, is Blind Faith( a rich man stages his wife’s murder so he could marry her friend…his name is Robert Marshal, and his son married Tracy GOld from growing pains) Still looking for a decent one on the Menendez Brothers.
I don’t have a long history with pulpy trash, but one of my absolute favorites was purchased from a grocery store about 15 years ago. I believe it was called “Strange Tales” (yes very specific) and was a collection of creepy stories. It included Sawney Bean, among others, in graphic detail. My favorite story was the last one in which a father wrote about his son’s decent into Satanism and a party where they planned to open a portal to hell. And thus began my lifelong fascination with hell, cannibalism and such.
That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to track down the novel of Batman Forever. I must be the only person in America who still enjoys that movie…
The Cindy James case is one I barely remember from UM. I can recall it to a degree, but I’m sure there was very little in the way of detail regarding it. My interest in this is piqued by your description of the book.
Hoverboard, you’re not the only one who still likes “Batman Forever.” That’s the only “Batman” film I ever got into, and the only one I currently own. For me, it’s just the right blend of Burton-creepy and 60s-campy.
I’ve cleared out a LOT of books lately. I got rid of almost my entire “Star Wars” book collection…except for the novels based on the original movies from when they first came out, an “Empire Strikes Back” reprint of the comic books (what we’d now call a “graphic novel”), and a collection of three Han Solo novels written between the first two movies. The tie-in novels go way back. I got “Return of the Jedi” from my elementary school library during my “Star Wars” obsession phase in the late 80s. I took it out so much (and it was in such lousy shape anyway), the librarian said I could keep it. The other two came from library sales and thrift shops.
I do still make occasional trips into the realm of pulp fiction and classic literature from time to time. Two of my favorite novels are beloved swashbucklers – “The Prisoner of Zenda” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” both of them well-worn. I have a soft spot for gothic romances with dark castles and ill-tempered, rugged, mysterious lords who clash with spirited governesses. I also like 60s and 70s spy novels – I own some of the original James Bond stories and a similar series with an American agent, Sam Durrell.
Talking about novel adaptions of movies, probably the weirdest one I’ve read has to be Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the one and only Star Trek novel written by Gene Roddenberry. The canon rule for Trek has been that it only counts if it’s onscreen, but even that rule only applies to TV and movies. Some fans feel that it should be canonized because it was Roddenberry’s work. However, if you do canonize it, it means accepting that Starfleet secretly puts electronic implants in the brains of its’ captains (with their knowledge, but kept secret from everyone else), that The Original Series was a loose (and not entirely truthful) adaptation of real events in its’ own universe, and probably the first implication that Kirk and Spock were lovers.
as of late i been reading the old Friday the 13 tales from campy crystal lake and Freddys tales of terror novels
The Terminator 2 novelization is actually one of the finest novels I have actually read. Being friends with Cameron really paid off for the author, who filled that thing with so much nuance and depth that made it amazing.
Another great post! I’m catching up a little bit today and hate that I missed this earlier. Man, there are so many good ideas here for movie novelizations, something I’ve always wanted to investigate, but never bothered. Just from the comments alone, it looks like Gremlins would be a good place to start.
I dig Dracula out every few years and give it another read and I love it every time. I’ve always been a sucker for all the horror classics. It’s funny though, because aside from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I’ve yet to see a movie adaption that was fully faithful to the novel, and even that missed the mark in a few places, most notably the end.
I kind of consider myself lucky because I’ve never delved too much into the Star Wars EU, and I really want to. Tales From Jabba’s Place looks like a good place to start. Anyone else have any other suggestions? I love the fact that people have taken the groundwork of the original trilogy and have ran wild with it. I’ve been saying for a while that the stuff I’ve seen lately that Lucas was not directly involved in (i.e. The Clone Wars) is some of the best SW stuff out there. I’ve read a few comic book miniseries here and there and have enjoyed those too, but never jumped into the novels because I just didn’t even know where I would start. I was at a Wal-Mart the other day looking through some of the current toys and I think it’s so cool that they’re still issuing toys based on characters just seen in the background of the Mos Eisley Cantina, each with their own name and back story. I’m a total sucker for stuff like that.
“As of late i been reading the old Friday the 13 tales from campy crystal lake and Freddys tales of terror novels.”–J
Yes! I knew that a few publishers over the years have put some of these out but have never been able to find them. Which ones do you have?
That is totally how I feel about wrestling & wrestlers. I get really bored & turn it actually watching wrestling, but I love reading weird stories about wrestling.
I had the novelizations of both Gremlins films, and yeah, they were great.
My favorite bit was when the book of Gremlins 2 actually included a literary version of the “gremlins take over the theater/your VCR” thing. The Brain Gremlin locks the author up and starts writing the book for a few pages. It’s awesome.
But believe it or not, my favorite was actually a novelization of famous cinematic turd “Howard the Duck”. I actually am fond of that film, and I can only assume that the author was engaging in some sort of subtle rebellion against having to write a book version of THAT movie.
It keeps going off on weird tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. There’s an actual comedic ESSAY on what a species’ chairs says about their culture, and a real estate pitch for the weird dimension the villain comes from. It’s bizarre.
I read the Gremlins novelization in fourth grade, way before I was brave enough to watch the movie! Come to think of it, I don’t think I actually saw the whole movie until I was an adult. The book was on the “classroom library” type shelf, which I always devoured. I also read a novelization of something called C.H.O.M.P.S., about a robot dog (Canine HOMe Protection System). I never saw the movie.
I still go read movie spoilers on the internet because while I hate being startled, I love creepy things. I get very curious about the plot and outcome of movies I’m not willing to actually watch.
I know I’ve read the Gremlins novelization, too, and I liked how the author went into detail about where the mogwai came from in the first place.
Another good one is Ghostbusters if you haven’t read that one yet.
FangsFirst: Hey, man, I’m just now seeing your question to me. No, I’ve never read Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” I might have to do that sometime.