Untouchable (2019)

Untouchable (2019): directed by Ursula Macfarlane: Harrowing, revelatory documentary on disgraced Hollywood powerhouse Harvey Weinstein's decades of predatory behaviour before revelations started to come out in articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker. 

Weinstein's alleged behaviour included alleged rapes, sexual assaults, and various forms of 'retribution' aimed at any and all whom he viewed as having offended him or denied him in any way. Employees, victims, and journalists testify to Weinstein's malevolence and his power in the film industry and the larger culture. 

Untouchable actually made me think of a book on the Manson murders I'm reading right now in which the author notes that the standard construction of the Manson murders as having marked the end of Hollywood's "innocence" is complete crap: Hollywood isn't, wasn't, and never was "innocent." The list of Weinstein's enablers is a Who's Who of Hollywood Elite. Hey, Roman Polanski just won a major award at Cannes! Maybe it's not Hollywood. Maybe it's just everything. Highly recommended.

Identity and Loss

Lost Angels by David J. Schow collecting the following stories: Red Light; Brass; Pamela's Get; The Falling Man; and Monster Movies (Collected 1990): The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's helped make the 1980's and early 1990's the Golden Age of horror short-story collection released in mass-market (as opposed to specialty house) paperback. This continues to be something of a boon to this day, as used copies of some of the finest collections in horror history still show up in used bookstores and on-line for purchase in situations where the collections haven't been re-published.

David J. Schow has been immortalized as one of the founders of the Splatterpunk sub-genre of horror that came to prominence over the course of the 1980's. He's a writer of diverse interests, however, and this collection doesn't feature anything in the Splatterpunk genre. Instead, it features four novellas or novelettes that are indeed described in different ways by the collection's title, and a concluding non-horror story that's nonetheless deeply concerned with horror, its history, and those who love it in its many forms.

Overall, Lost Angels is a dynamite collection. Schow sets all the stories in Los Angeles (another reason for the title). The city insinuates itself into every narrative in all its weird, night-bright oddness. Hollywood players, hangers-on, and bystanders populate the stories. Schow integrates the supernatural with this Hollywood Babylon in sinister but sometimes comic ways -- one supernatural being wants its story told on film, for example.

The thematic concerns of the stories firmly place Schow within the legacy of Fritz Leiber. Like Leiber, Schow searches for supernatural situations that fit the contemporary world, or even grow out of it, per Leiber's seminal 1940 story "Smoke Ghost." Indeed, one story here is a brilliant companion to Leiber's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" -- or an inversion, in some ways.

Aside from that search to create new ghosts and monsters, Schow explores the loneliness of the modern urban and exurban world through romantic and familial relationships, quests through bars and parties and decaying sections of Los Angeles, and keenly observed set-pieces in very specifically imagined locations that include strange, junk-filled warehouses, topless bars for ruthless businessmen, studio offices, and occult shops with sarcastic clerks. Love, identity, and loneliness inform much of this collection. It's not that Nothing Is What It Seems...it's that Some Things That Seem, Aren't. Highly recommended.

Your Own Republican Vampire: Night Life by Ray Garton (2005)

Night Life by Ray Garton (2005): In 1987's Live Girls, nebbish Davey Owen ended up battling  vampires in New York -- and becoming one. In this sequel, the story picks up 18 years later, with Owen and fellow vampire (and lady love) Casey Thorne living in Los Angeles, making a nice living as screenwriters of romantic comedies, and staying on the straight-and-narrow as 'good' vampires who neither kill nor exploit humans. 

But the bad vampires of Live Girls -- 'brutals' -- still have it in for Davey and Casey. When a millionaire horror novelist enlists private investigators Gavin Keoph and Karen Moffett to find out if vampires are real, the trail leads to Davey and Casey and fellow (though non-vampiric) Live Girls survivor Walter Benedek. Thus, a dirty little war breaks out.

Garton's vampires aren't supernatural. Though they can shapeshift, they're not affected by religious icons. They're hard to kill, but sub-machine-gun fire will do the trick, as will anything that destroys the head, or separates it from the body.

The rhythms of this novel resemble those of a thriller or a hard-boiled detective novel. The stakes are relatively intimate, the battles relatively small in scale. The thematic concerns here lie both with the cost of taking a stand, and the larger societal cost of NOT taking a stand: the brutals operate mostly with impunity while the good vampires try to stay out of their way unless directly attacked by them. It's a situation that's morally unsustainable for the good vampires; pragmatically speaking, the status quo can't be maintained forever anyway. The brutals are rapacious and invasive: they want theirs, and they also want yours. Really, they're almost perfect capitalists.

Night Life deftly and concisely sketches out the parameters of this vampiric sub-society, connecting it to more 'normal' human vices while making the brutals live up their nickname: they are indeed brutal, creatures indulging in their desires without worrying about the consequences for others. They're like neo-conservative hyper-capitalists, though at least the brutals were infected by something real, and not simply an idea -- and they're not hypocritical about their sub-Darwinian struggle to devour everything. Highly recommended.

Hollywood Undead

They Thirst by Robert McCammon (1981; this edition 1988): McCammon may have been the most Kingian (Kingesque?) horror novelist of the late 1970's and early 1980's, probably because of sensibilities shared with Stephen King and not out of simple imitation. He was good at creating sympathetic characters and then running them through the grinder, and most of his 1970's and 1980's output seems to echo one Stephen King novel or another, and sometimes two or three at the same time. They Thirst seems to have been bounced off both Salem's Lot and The Stand as well as Dracula. Certainly the Vampire King -- Conrad Vulkan, a Hungarian prince who 'died' in the 14th century -- recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula more than he does any of King's vampires. But this vampire has specific, on-stage help from Satan, or at least an adequate stand-in, as a powerful supernatural being referred to as the Headmaster (a name that doesn't really work in the 'Inspires Dread' category) is backing the Vampire King's play for earthly dominion with some heavy magical mojo.

McCammon's cleverest idea here lies in his choice of location for the Vampire King's D-Day: Los Angeles. McCammon's vampires can't tolerate sunlight, but Los Angeles appeals to the Vampire King because he/it, having been 'turned' at the age of 17, is forever obsessed with youthfulness. Los Angeles, home to both gleaming, artificial youth and a sordid, violent underbelly, is a perfect match for this vampire. No old people need apply for admission to this army of vampires. I'd guess no fat chicks either.

The vampires herein exist within a supernatural framework: they are most definitely not viral in origin. Set against the vampires are a ragtag but plucky mismatched group of heroes (is there any other kind of group in popular culture?) who must work together to save the planet from becoming a scrumptious, bloodsoaked buffet: a terminally ill Roman Catholic priest; an 11-year-old boy who loves monster movies; a successful but troubled young comedian; a middle-aged cop who escaped from vampires in his childhood home in Hungary; a mystical young woman; and a handful of other supporting characters. The last third of the book sails straight into the epic, recalling King's The Stand in its elevation of the stakes of the battle. The climax is apocalyptic: McCammon doesn't back down.

I can see why McCammon withdrew this, his fourth novel, from publication for nearly 20 years, citing the idea that his early novels, while good, marked a writer who was still learning. There's much that's derivative in They Thirst, and a bit that's silly, but McCammon's strength at propulsive plotting and at sympathetically drawn characters makes this well worth seeking out. Recommended.