The Wolfman

The Wolfman
by Jonathan Maberry

This might be the first time I've ever read a tie-in book (a book based on the film rather than the other way around), and the 'hollywood'ization of the plot is pretty obvious from the start. Things in this book happen in a formulaic way - they have to, because that's the way it happens in big budget films. The novel retains many elements from the 1941 film of the same name, but goes into new territory with Lawrence's history of mental illness and Sir John's role.

The Wolfman (and the Werewolf) is the major villain of the piece, and it suffers in my opinion from a common disease amongst Hollywood monsters, similar to the effects of gamma radiation: the monster is unusually large, impossibly strong, uncontrollable, and invulnerable to conventional attack. All it needed was green fur to complete the look. Maybe I'm being a purist, but the werewolf monster is meant to combine the predatory skills of a wolf (speed, superior sense of smell and hearing, and natural weapons in the form of teeth) with the cunning and intelligence of a man. Making the wolfman 8 foot tall with sharp claws, hyper-senses, and super strength was a departure from the myth, and felt unnecessary. If they'd reigned it in a little, the wolfman would be more about stalking and trapping his victims, and less about violent mayhem, and that's what I was expecting.

Werewolves occupy unique territory for me. The idea of a werewolf is compelling, particularly when it is not realized in the direct terms of wolf and man. I'm thinking of Jekyll and Hyde, or Norman Bates and his mother. A man and a monster occupying the same body. There's a lot of fertile ground there. Once the fur and fangs come in, though, it is easy to descend into the basic werewolf formula: unbeliever is bitten, transforms, becomes a believer, tries to kill a loved one, and dies.

One of the things that surprised me when I read this book was the character descriptions. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, so I had no idea that Sir John, described as  "tall and imposing", was played by Anthony Hopkins. Sir Anthony is 5'9" - hardly an imposing height. I was picturing someone more along the lines of Ian McKellan, or Peter O'Toole. And likewise to think that the "brutally handsome" Lawrence was portrayed by this man. It's amazing how even in a tie-in novel, the characters can seem vastly different in the reader's head than in the author's.

And may I also say, Maberry missed a real opportunity in that section by not describing Lawrence's hair as perfect.

Maberry has skill with description, setting and dialogue, but I think this particular book was severely hampered by the script he had to use. They hired a good writer to try to make a novel from an unwieldy plot. Consider Chapter 42, where Sir John appears in Lawrence's cell and explains away several questions about what has happened so far. A common tactic in films (I refer to it as "A Visit from the Department of Backstory"), but it comes off as an info dump in a novel. The love interest was forced and hollow - the two characters hardly exchange any dialogue before they inexplicably hook up.

Bottom line, I would have enjoyed seeing this story naturally develop in the hands of a skilled author without having to hold to the expectations of a blockbuster. I suspect it would have turned out much differently.

Alien

Alien
1979

Ridley Scott's masterpiece blends science fiction and horror, with an all star cast and some of the most stunning visuals presented in film. Though the titular monster deserves much of the praise for the film's success and eventual sequels and spinoffs, I think the setting is where this one really shines. Between the amazing set design by H.R. Giger and Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score this movie establishes and maintains a brilliant level of tension.

The alien itself was brazenly meant to represent sexual violence - specifically male rape, something that is not often touched on by the media. The image for the Alien was chosen from Giger's work for its sexual connotations, and its primary method of attack is overtly phallic. There are three stages to the alien life form (mirroring the life stages of some forms of insects): the face hugger, the chestburster, and the adult. Both the facehugger and the egg were designed to mirror the vagina - in fact, the egg had to be redesigned because it looked too much like one when it opened. 

The alien has no eyes - this was intentional, as the filmmakers thought it made it scarier to not know where it was looking. It also made it extraordinarily difficult for the actor in the alien suit to perform (interesting aside: the costume for Big Bird has the same problem. It uses a camera system and has a monitor in the stomach for the actor to 'see' out of). Part of what makes the alien work so well as a monster (beyond the pants-fouling terror of the whole concept) is that we hardly ever see it, even when it's in the shot. The scene at the end, with Ripley reaching for a something only to discover part of the wall is in fact the alien's head was amazing - we all knew it was in the room, and even after multiple viewings I forget where the arm is going to come from. 

I mentioned that the setting is one of my favorite parts of this movie, and that's because it's brilliant. The alien ship they find really tried to make the aliens seem otherworldly. The ship models were made from a mixture of organic and inorganic materials, and the result was something that's honestly difficult to describe. It doesn't look like something man made, but it is obviously something constructed. It hits just the right notes to seem functional, but extraterrestrial. The Nostromo, although it doesn't have the same wonderful architecture, got just as much attention. Although I am probably not the first to wonder why the intergalactic spaceship was 2/3 massive basement, it worked. The chains dangling from the ceiling, the tall shaft where water inexplicably fell constantly, the utterly delightful computer control room - it was all mysterious and strange, and none of the actors reacted to it at all and that made it work. It was normal for them.

I've rambled quite a bit, but I do want to end with a few notes about the sequels. Oh, the sequels. Aliens (1986) is probably the only of the three direct sequels I would advise anyone to watch. Alien 3 is notable only for having the alien hatch out of a dog instead of a person, and Resurrection is a pure popcorn flick. But my favorite spinoff isn't actually a movie. It's a comic book.

Superman versus Alien.

I'm not going to say much about this other than that you should go read it and that I'm going to spoil the end (Superman wins), but here's a brief synopsis: Superman hears the language of Krypton (which he would have no reason to recognize, since he was raised on Earth) and flies into outer space to investigate. He finds a planet full of Kryptonians (who shouldn't exist, because Krypton was destroyed) who are fighting a war with the Aliens. Superman is depowered because the sun for this planet is the wrong color (Science!) but, in spite of the fact that he's now just a buff dude facing the galaxy's most ruthless rapemurder machines, he still refuses to kill. Except when he fights with a queen alien and he has to eject it from the air lock, which is the only proven way to kill an alien.

Except the queen is still in his chest. And Superman is his own space ship. So when I say blow it out the airlock, I mean . . .

World War Z

World War Z: An oral history of the zombie war
by Max Brooks

I first read World War Z when it came out, and re-reading it for class was a pleasure. I love this book. I loved the Zombie Survival Guide too, for that matter. I've said before in this class that zombies are a personal favorite of mine, and this book illustrates a lot of the reasons why.

Zombies can be anywhere. They're in the swamps, in the deserts, under the ocean. They're in the streets, in your house, all over the world and in every country. I'm amazed one didn't end up on the space station. The plague of zombies spread quickly, not so much because of the rate of infection, but because people refused to believe it was happening. Governments and hospitals were unprepared. The military was helpless (the battle of Yonkers is one of my favorite scenes because it seemed so very much like what would really happen). I loved how there really was no 'safe' place, not anywhere. Heck, even without a zombie on the ISS, the astronauts still came to a bad end because of the plague.

The zombies were pretty classic, George Romero types - slow moving cannibals that can only be killed by destroying the brain. The horror is two-fold: first off, the creatures attacking you used to be your friends, neighbors, and family; and secondly, once you get past them, there are like a million more waiting outside. One of my favorite details about the zombies is the different names given to them by different nationalities - zombies, ghouls, Gs, zedheads, zack. It was realistic (there's no reason to think they wouldn't get different nicknames) and a simple way to make the narrative seem more real.

Other blogs have talked about the fact that the book is more about people than it is about zombies, and I agree. But that's part of the fun, at least for me. I like this book partially because the humans actually win - which again seems realistic. Once people accepted that this was happening, they dealt with it, and that's probably what would happen. The fact that this book ended on a positive note was probably my favorite thing about it. Sure, awful things happened and lots of people died, but the world moves on. It was a hopeful message - at least, more hopeful than it could have been.

There were a lot of great characters in this book - a few favorites are Todd Waino, the 'average Joe' soldier, Darnell Hackworth and the K-9 units, the infamous Paul Redeker (side note: the version I got on my kindle had the footnotes messed up, and it wasn't until I googled Redeker to see if he was in the film version that I found out the guy who hugs him is Nelson Mandela), and Tomonaga and his shield society. Honestly, just about all the sections were exceptional in their own way. Given that he doesn't spend much time on any single character or setting, Brooks does an excellent job bringing people to life.

One last point I want to make about this book is that it is a stretch to call it just a horror book. I don't think this is a title that can be put into a single genre - too much happens, there are too many blends of ideas and concepts. I've read a lot recently in how-to books about horror genre vs. literary fiction, and this book illustrates that sometimes there's no simple distinction. You can have a horror setting and still get a "literary" novel.

The Yattering and Jack

The Yattering and Jack
by Clive Barker

The Yattering, essentially a poltergeist but described variously in the text as a demon and as a fury, is a small, invisible, demon sent from hell to drive Jack Polo insane. He fails.

Like Rawhead Rex, this story suffers a bit from character POV switching - in my opinion, the end effect is more problematic here than it was in Rawhead. Letting the reader know that Jack is aware of his antagonist and is ignoring him is amusing, but it is revealed far too early in the text. The second reveal, when the Yattering finally figures it out, is robbed of impact because Jack is no longer a 'victim'. He's been playing with the demon (and the lives of his family) all along. It'd have been funnier to save that for the end.

The Yattering itself is a low-level demon, presumably with limited powers. His situation reminded me strongly of the set-up in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, in which an older middle-management demon mentors his nephew. The idea of Hell as a bureaucracy is a fitting one - it is something most people will have to interact with at some point, and it will never be a pleasant experience. And we can all relate to the feelings of helplessness and the sense that we've been given an impossible task.

The Yattering is described as being fairly small, but also strong - he fantasizes about crushing Jack's head between his hands, which indicates that if he were able to touch people he could do some damage. The extent of his supernatural abilities isn't clear, but they include invisibility and telekinesis, and he doesn't seem limited in touching his environment. He is able to animate dead things, and can torture other living creatures. In a nod to Faust, he is surprised when Jack doesn't ask him to perform the same miracles as Mephistopheles - leading me to think he has considerably more power than he was able to use against Jack. He is cruel - three cats are slaughtered with increasing violence, the fish get boiled, and one of the daughters has her mind essentially broken. But with those strengths are key weaknesses - he is unable to touch Jack physically, and unable to leave the house. However, he breaks both rules, which leaves me to wonder if he could do so again and break away from his new master.

The Yattering wasn't terribly scary. The story plays him to a comedic effect rather than straight horror, and Jack ignoring almost all of it detracted from what would be terrifying if it actually happened. I wanted to sympathize with the Yattering but he was too cruel for me to really feel bad about the situation - if I felt bad for anyone, it was the two daughters. They've got nothing at stake and no idea what's going on. If Jack was any sort of a decent parent he'd have gone to their house for Christmas where they'd be safe - he knew the Yattering couldn't follow him. Then he and the Yattering could duke it out on New Years or something.

Besides which, the Yattering wasted a perfectly good turkey dinner. And it had bacon on it. BACON.