Johnathan Schaech was nice enough to write and say that NBC has picked up the movie version of my novel The Poker Club. Johnathan of course starred in, co-wrote and produced the film and did a great job on all accounts.
Johnathan isn't sure which NBC channel it'll be on. We're both pretty sure it won't be on the Saturday morning cartoon fest.
--------------CALL HIM DEMON
I ran cross the piece John D. MacDonald wrote about pulp writer Norbert Davis and how JDM tried to duplicate the opening of a Davis story. He admitted he could never match it.
I was asked to select a horror story for an anthology so I went with Call Him Demon by Henry Kuttner, one of the finest story tellers, to me, who ever came out of science fiction and fantasy. Call Him Demon is a terrifying story, especially when you consider it deals with an incident that changes the lives the four children forever. What I love about it is how gently Kuttner gets into it, capturing an experience many of us have when we revisit places of our youth. The opening of Call Him Demon:
A long time ago she went back to Los Angeles amd drove past Grandmother Keaton's house. It hadn't changed a great deal, really, but what had seemed an elegant mansion to her childish, 1920 eyes was now a big ramshackle frame structure, gray with scaling paint.
After twenty-five years the--insecurity--wasn't there any more, but there still persisted a dull, irrational, remembered uneasiness, an echo of the time Jane Larkin spent in the house when she was nine, a thin, big-eyed girl with the Buster Brown Bangs so fashionable then.
Looking back, she could remember too much and too little.
Ed here: You may not agree but for me but Kuttner's melancholy tone and the smoothness of the of the writing is the perfect way to introduce horror, a lesson not lost on Ira Levin for one. And boy do I wish I'd written it..
You know, I don't thing anyone has done a definitive collection of Kuttner horror fiction...or even one that focuses on that work, though I could well be wrong there...some small-press or MacFadden-Bartell collection issued in 1954 0r 1967 respectively...half of a 1961 Ace double...
ReplyDeleteWell, Stephen Haffner didn't do a Best of so much as an As Much Of As Possible...Terror in the House:
ReplyDeleteThe Early Kuttner, Volume One
http://www.haffnerpress.com/9781893887473.html
Damn, Ed, did I miss the post where you mentioned THE POKER CLUB was out on video? I just put it at the top of my Netflix queue. But I would have preferred watching it the day after it came out.
ReplyDeleteTL
I thought about a Kuttner Horror Best of, but I decided that if I had to slog through all of Kuttner's weird-menace output just to find a gem or two, then I might as well pull them all together with the early Weird Tales stories and let it all flow into two 680-page volumes. Plans call for Volume One, TERROR IN THE HOUSE to launch at World Fantasy with Volume Two to follow in 2012. 2011 should see a similar-sized tome collecting Kuttner's early Space Opera stories. And . . .Dr. Michael Gray, anybody?
ReplyDeletecongrats, Ed. I'll be looking for it.
ReplyDeletePoker Club is too good a movie to watch around commercials. Get the DVD from Netflix.
ReplyDeleteI liked the book way better anyway. Congrats, Ed.
Terry Butler
Congrats, Ed. I admire Schaech as an actor.
ReplyDeleteAs noted elsewhere on the blog, on 3 July on the Sleuth channel, at 4pm ET.
ReplyDelete