Happy Halloween!

If, November 1959

Back issue from AbeBooks

Tie-Ins: Halloween

It would take a scientist to explain the branches of reboots and canon for the Halloween movies.  You can ignore most of that since the only good Halloween movie, Part III, is a standalone.  All of the below easily go for 3 figures online.

The novelizations:

1979: Halloween by Curtis Richards
1981: Halloween II by Jack Martin (Dennis Etchison)
1983: Halloween III: Season of the Witch by Jack Martin
1988: Halloween IV by Nicholas Grabowsky
2018: Halloween by John Passarella

Young adult tie-ins by Kelly O'Rourke:

1997: The Scream Factory
1997: The Old Myers Place
1998: The Mad House

Colt 38 Special Squad

Colt 38 Special Squad
1976


Probably the dullest poliziotteschi I've seen, notable only for a weird, out of place car stunt on top of a train and a swinging disco with a very normal looking Grace Jones.

DVD from Amazon.

Author Overview: John Byrne

John Byrne is mainly known for his comic work, as artist/writer on legendary runs of X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Superman, as well as for being an occasionally bigoted loudmouth.

He also made a brief foray into the world of horror prose fiction:

1988: Fear Book - featuring a haunted mail order catalog

1991: Nocturne in Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

1992: Hide in Plain Sight in Shock Rock

1992: Whipping Boy

TV Obscura - Letters to Laugh In

Daytime quiz show spin-off from Laugh In.  Contestants mailed in jokes that were read by Laugh In regulars.  Probably as funny as the original show.

Tie-Ins: Resident Evil

It all started with the 1989 film Sweet Home


which had a video game version, which was the basis for the video game Resident Evil, which was the basis of the film series, both of which had series of tie-in novels.

The first prose installment was the novella Biohazard: The Beginning by Hiroyuki Ariga, included in the preorder bonus The True Story of Biohazard.  A version of this was released in English titled Resident Evil: The Book, which doesn't seem to be available commercially.  There are additional Japanese novels that haven't been translated to English.  As of this writing, all of the below are available for Kindle.

S.D. Perry wrote a series of novelizations of the video game, with a couple of tie-ins between installments:

1998: The Umbrella Conspiracy - novelization of the original Resident Evil
1998: Caliban Cove - between 1 & 2
1999: City of the Dead - Resident Evil 2
1999: Underworld - set after 2
2000: Nemesis
2002: Code Veronica
2004: Zero Hour

There are novelizations from each movie except for Afterlife:

2004: Genesis by Keith DeCandido (novelization of Resident Evil)
2004: Apocalypse by Keith DeCandido
2007: Extinction by Keith DeCandido
2012: Retribution by John Shirley
2017: The Final Chapter by Tim Waggoner

Things I Didn't Finish: The Strange and the Unknown

The Strange and the Unknown

Fate Magazine

Paperback Library, 1965

I grew up devouring unexplained phenomena books from the 60s to 80s - not particularly believing it but wishing it was true, and at least entertained by the reading.  These tales are so dull they probably are true.

We open up with a defensive screed against mainstream science, the corrupt industry that famously makes billions of dollars by not ever discovering anything new.

A book falls off a shelf.  Is it a poltergeist or a banshee?

A man dreams about something other than his wife.  Weeks later he dies.  Explain that, science!

I've become considerably less tolerant of pseudo-science since I stopped being an idiot child, but there's not even enough here to bother scoffing at.

TV Obscura: Dusty's Trail

Bob Denver in a carbon copy of Gilligan's Island set in the Wild West

Tie-Ins: Blair Witch

I'm a bit lukewarm to the actual films, but I appreciated the expanded mythology around the series from the "documentaries" and website.  There are no straight novelizations, but there are two fictional non-fictional companions written by D.A. Stern:

1999: The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier

2000: Blair Witch: Book of Shadows

D.A. Stern also wrote two tie-in novels about cases in the mythology's past:

2000: The Secret Confession of Rustin Parr

2000: Graveyard Shift

There was a young adult series by Cade Merrill that followed the cousin of the first film's lead:

The Witch's Daughter
The Dark Room
The Drowning Ghost
Blood Nightmare
The Death Card
The Prisoner
The Night Shifters
The Obsession

Chamber of Horrors

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

A madman forces a priest to complete a wedding ceremony with a corpse, then goes into hiding at a brothel where he orders women to lie very still - more explicit  shades of necrophilia here than the hints in the Poe based film this draws from.

To escape police custody, the madman chops his hand off with a hatchet.  Underwater.  He then seeks revenge, using different deadly accessories on his stump.  Amateur detectives associated with a wax museum investigate.

Originally a pilot film for TV series, it was padded out to be released theatrically.  It has William Castle style gimmicks, such as the Fear Flasher and Horror Horn to warn of impending implied off-screen violence.

Crime and the Psychic World by Fred Archer

Crime and the Psychic World
by Fred Archer
William Morrow 1969

Say "Murder Most Foul" and the instant response is "Jack the Ripper!"

I would have thought of Macbeth seeing how it's Macbeth, but Archer spends the first paragraph of his book defending the assertion.  The perfect introduction to the writing style of Fred Archer.  Rambling, anecdotal, impenetrable attempts at wit, name-dropping obscure figures, and I guess a little psychic stuff.

Most claims of psychic skill demonstrate the uncanny ability to predict things after they happen, but Archer's psychics can't even manage that.  In the first two cases, involving Jack the Ripper and the Brighton Trunk Murders, the psychics claim facts shown by Archer to be wrong, and each case remains unsolved.

Most of the cases are even more vague than that, and Archer's rambling style doesn't help.  Several times I had to go back a few paragraphs to try and match the psychic phenomena to the outcome of a criminal case, and it still didn't make it any clearer.

Happily, there was very little of the full-time con artists that manipulate grieving families.  Most of the stories involved mediums or prophetic dreams.  The whole affair seemed horribly outdated even by the 60s.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille

Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille
1928

Bataille was a French intellectual and philospher, influential to the school of poststructuralism.  Story of the Eye is a rambling porn of two teens doing increasingly nasty sex stuff.  No fancy French philosophy, just peeing and fapping and screwing.

Two teens fool around, involving another teen girl who goes insane and is institutionalized.  They break into the asylum, do more sex stuff, and drive her to suicide.  The couple go to Spain where they get horny on bullfighting and hook up with a sugar daddy.  They bang a priest to death and sail off into the distance, the end.

It's pure nastiness with no philosophical message beyond maybe "screw your morality".  It's as philosophical as GG Allin.  This doesn't stop eggheads from declaring it's not porn and worthy of deep critical analysis, because there's a central theme of soft round stuff, from eggs to bull testicles to eyeballs.

Let me put some patches on my tweed jacket, grow out a goatee, and light my pipe.  Yes.  Yes, those things are similar, and are all in the story.  Mostly as ben wa balls.

TV Obscura: Masquerade

Kirstie Alley and My Second Dad B.J. star in this "Mission Impossible meets Love Boat" series, the fourth time this concept was attempted.

Tie Ins: Amityville Horror

The Amityville Horror franchise is based on the alleged haunting experienced by the Lutz famiy, and the real life murder of the previous tenants by Ronald Defeo Jr.  We begin with:

1977: The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson (presented as non-fiction, filmed in 1979)

There are a few branches off this tree, as books become movies with sequels with novelizations and book sequels have movie made from them.  I'm only going through the early 90s with this one - since you can't copyright a town's name, there's been a glut of self published books (some by sequel writer John G. Jones) and indie horror films over the last couple decades.

1982: The Amityville Horror Part II  by John G. Jones (presented as non-fiction)
1985: Amityville: The Final Chapter  by John G. Jones (still "based on" but with even less connection to the Lutz' account)
1985: Amityville Horror: Untold Stories by John G. Jones
1988: Amityville: The Evil Escapes by John G. Jones (presented as fiction. TV movie made in 1989 and Direct to Video movie Amityville 1992: It's About Time released in 1992)
1989: Amityville: The Horror Returns by John G. Jones
1991: Amityville: The Nightmare Continues by Robin Karl

A separate branch of books written by Hans Holzer concentrated on Ronald Defeo Jr.

1979: Murder in Amityville (re-released as Amityville: Fact or Fiction?; filmed as Amityville II: The Possession)
1981: The Amityville Curse (filmed in 1990)
1985: The Secret of Amityville

And the only novelization of a film:

1984: Amityville 3-D by Gordon McGill