The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant

The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant: The late Charles L. Grant was a much-published anthologist, novelist, and short-story writer from the 1970's through the 1990's. He championed "quiet horror," a choice that set him vocally at odds with the rise of splatterpunk in the 1980's. He's probably most important now as an anthologist, especially as the editor of the long-running Shadows series of original horror anthologies.

The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's also meant that Grant published a lot of novels. More than I was aware of, frankly. While I was a major consumer of those anthologies back in the day and read a couple of his short-story collections, I hadn't read a Grant novel until I recently finished The Pet.

I'm of two minds about The Pet, though these minds are not mutually exclusive. Wait, does that make three minds? So confusing.

Anyway, The Pet may be a satire of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's.

Or The Pet may be an attempt to replicate the success of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's by putting their elements into a blender and pressing the 'On' button.

Or it may be both. It's certainly not of a piece with those Grant short stories and novellas I've read.

OK, that's really three, isn't it?

So we have a bullied, withdrawn protagonist of high-school age. That's Donald 'Duck' Boyd. His parents are both over-controlling and under-caring. He has a dead younger brother. His Mom is sleeping with a high-school teacher who hates Don and keeps marking him unfairly. His Dad is the principal of the school Don attends. This gets Don bullied even more, especially because Don's father doesn't believe him when bullies start framing him for various misdemeanors. His parents both preferred the dead brother. Three years after the death, his Mom still occasionally calls Don by the dead brother's name.

Whew! That's about 35 King stories and novels right there!

A mean chemistry teacher also singles Don out for unwanted persecution. We can tell this chemistry teacher is bad because he's a confirmed bachelor who watches porn movies in his basement. 

IN HIS BASEMENT! PORN! 

Sorry.

A super-hot, 17-year-old cheerleader seems to be making advances on Don. Ha ha, she's also making advances on his Dad! Yes, a teen-aged girl who is sexually aggressive and makes advances on her teachers. Is this Grant's salute to the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me"? Or is it just a really unpleasant part of the novel that has not aged well?

So so unpleasant.

Then a serial killer dubbed The Howler shows up in Don's small town of Ashford, New Jersey. The Howler has killed and partially eaten several teenagers in New Jersey and New York. 

You might think this would cause the formation of some sort of police task force or even an FBI presence. 

You would be wrong! 

Dealing with The Howler in Don's town devolves down to that town's small police force of what seems like three idiots, which does a whole lot of nothing. Boy, is this part of the novel ridiculously unbelievable! And it gets worse!

The town's two high schools are remarkably modest in their response to two students being murdered and eaten in a one-month period. And the police. Really, everyone. Don survives an attack from The Howler and his parents have him back in school within 36 hours. Seriously, Grant is just phoning in this shit.

So, as the back-cover blurb tells us, Don's encounter with The Howler unleashes a supernatural monster that makes The Howler look like a fart in an elevator. And that monster has a connection to Don, targeting those who've wronged Don in some way. It's sort of Carrie by way of Christine, except it's a giant super-horse sprung full-grown from one of the animal posters on Don's bedroom wall.

Oh, yeah. Don loves animals and wants to be a vet. His parents think being a vet is a road to financial ruin, which shows how stupid they are. This is definitely the only novel I've ever read in which parents resist the idea of their son becoming a veterinarian for financial reasons. I mean seriously, parents, you're school teachers. In the United States of America. Your salaries are not that big!

If Grant is trying to emulate King in the next 200 pages or so, he's hamstrung by his "quiet horror" approach insofar as the novel pulls away from the attacks of the monster at the moment of attack, returning to show the aftermath without too much explicit description. Grant also can't bring himself to give the novel a big climax (remember Carrie's death march through school and town?) or even a physical confrontation between Don and the super-horse (remember the garage battle in Christine?). 

At one point, Don hears the screams in the town football stadium and believes the monster has attacked the football game. If you think, as I did, "Bring it on!" at this point, forget it. The monster is not there.

Part of the problem with the novel is that Don is an odd but sympathetic figure, with so many problems heaped upon his head by Grant, with Don's tormentors (including his parents) consistently shown to be selfish, brutish, thoughtless assholes. 

Another problem lies in peculiar absences. The dead brother is the worst of these: our sum total of knowledge about why Don's parents prefer the dead son to the live one is that the dead one was obedient. OK! A flashback showing rather than telling about the brother never materializes. Even the trauma that would come with a dead son and brother is muted, barely considered by parents or Don. 

Once the horse starts killing people -- well, who cares, really? Grant's small town is such an abysmal place that it deserves to get leveled. Other than Don and Don's two best friends, Tracey and Jeff, there are no sympathetic characters. Well, OK, there's an old guy and his daschund. But even Jeff is a cipher, there only to form a potential romantic triangle with Tracey and Don, who also has a crush on Tracey. 

Tracey is drawn somewhat sympathetically until the last ten pages or so, when she does something that is completely unbelievable given what she's learned about Don and the supernatural in the previous hundred pages. Unless she's suicidal.

At the end (which isn't even really an end but more of a pause), I"m left again wondering if this was a failed attempt by Grant to write a Stephen King novel, or a failed attempt at parody. Or both. Its flaws, large and legion in number, are fascinating enough to make it worth reading. And frustratingly good moments of tension and character-building keep floating to the surface before being submerged again in the slurry. Just don't expect to feel satisfied at the end. Lightly recommended.

De Palma, Late and Early

The Black Dahlia: adapted by Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy; directed by Brian DePalma; starring Josh Hartnett (Bucky Bleichert), Scarlett Johansson (Kay), Aaron Eckhart (Lee Blachard), Hilary Swank (Madeleine Linscott), and Mia Kirshner (Elizabeth Short) (2006): Apparently, postmodern crime-fiction writer James Ellroy, who wrote the novel this movie was based upon, really liked the 3-hour cut director Brian De Palma showed him. Unfortunately, the studio subsequently trimmed the movie by a full hour. What's left, Ellroy wouldn't comment upon.

Based on a real-life unsolved Hollywood murder mystery of the 1940's, The Black Dahlia looks great and contains solid performances by everyone involved, though Scarlett Johannson sounds way, way too modern for a period picture. De Palma gets in some of his signature camera movement, most notably in a long POV shot at a dinner party. But he's not overtly showy -- the more involved pans and tracking shots all serve the story, and there's a great, lengthy bit involving the discovery of the murdered, partially dismembered body of Elizabeth Short, the so-called 'Black Dahlia.'

What seems to have been cut are most of the scenes involving actual detection, along with at least a couple scenes fleshing out Detective Bleichert's growing obsession with the case. His partner, played by Aaron Eckhart, does become obsessed -- but Bleichert's later obsession seems to occur off-screen. And the revelation of the killer or killers falls somewhat flat, given that scenes introducing and explaining the role of that character seem to have been cut from earlier in the movie.

So instead we're left with a weirdly off-balance detective film more focused on the love triangle between Hartnett and Eckhart's detectives and Johannson as Eckhart's live-in love interest. The mystery comes and goes. In attempting to trim the multiple plot lines of a novel, the studio chose the wrong ones to trim. Lightly recommended.

Carrie: adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Brian De Palma; starring Sissy Spacek (Carrie White), Piper Laurie (Margaret White), Amy Irving (Sue Snell), William Katt (Tommy Ross), John Travolta (Billy Nolan), Nancy Allen (Chris Hargensen), and Betty Buckley (Miss Collins) (1976): Wow, is there a lot of female nudity in Carrie. I'm pretty sure there won't be in the remake because in many ways Hollywood (and America) is far more prudish now than in 1976, at least when it comes to mass-market film releases. Nudity needs to stay in hardcore, niche pornography, where God intended it to be!

One of the quintessential movies about high-school alienation and bullying, Carrie is really cut to the bone from the novel. We see scenes of Carrie's traumatization by fellow high-school students and by her Jesus-Freak mother (played with eye-popping, scenery-chewing gusto by Piper Laurie). Then things seem to get better. Then all Hell breaks loose because some bullies never seem to know when to stop.

It all works, pretty much, and only the red filter for some of the concluding scenes comes across as dated in terms of actual film-making (as it does in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver from the same year). And there's a real, chilling, accumulating horror to the scene directly before the fireworks start at the end, as the camera circles around a fairy-tale ending lurching inevitably towards horror. The editing in these concluding scenes is top-notch. De Palma could give good montage when he wanted to.

What of Carrie? Sissy Spacek is way too pretty for the novel's version of Carrie, and with Chloe Moretz playing her in the (second) remake, this doesn't seem like a trope that's going to change any time soon. In Hollywood, pretty people get bullied too because no one's putting one of the less-pretty ones at the centre of a movie. So is the dominant ideology reinforced and reinscribed. Here endeth the lesson. Recommended.

Carrie by Stephen King (1974)

Carrie by Stephen King (1974): King's first published novel still has zing. Or zip. Or whatever. It's not particularly representative of his work as a whole, though its telekinetic namesake is representative of a lot of King novels from the first ten years of his novels.

Carrie gives us a powerful telekinetic; The Shining gives us a boy and a man who are both telepathic and precognitive; The Dead Zone gives us a precognitive man; Firestarter gives us a pyrokinetic girl. King's interest in psychic abilities seems very much a product of the similarly interested 1970's America. I'm surprised he didn't do a novel involving pyramid power.

Carrie also features atypical King narration, a combination of third-person omniscient and 'clippings' from fictional books, magazines, and letters. It works, though just barely: some suspense is leeched out of the text by our knowledge that something extraordinarily dire is going to happen from pretty much the first page onwards. Of course, the movie strips these documentarian elements away, leaving only the high-school narrative that is Carrie's greatest strength.

King himself noted that in going back to Carrie after Columbine, he found her much less sympathetic than he remembered. Pitiful, perhaps, and warped by persecution and a loopy, homicidal mother, but not sympathetic. Anyone who has been an outcast can feel pangs of horror at Carrie's sad life, but she's ultimately no more sympathetic than John Gardner's Grendel, and much less so than Anthony Burgess's Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

This is still a tight, fascinating read (it may be King's shortest novel). Separated from high school as a student by a few short years and as a teacher not at all, King conjures up a world that's a nightmare for students who are low in the pecking order, where even a good deed can lead to horrible consequences. Recommended.