Read Fatal Beauty by Horror Novelist William Schoell Boobs
Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstör, and Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction are digging deep inside the Jack o'Lantern of Literature to find the best (and worst) horror paperbacks. Are y'all strong enough to read THE Encarmine BOOKS OF HALLOWEEN???
During the horror boom of the 70s and 80s the aesthetic was fast, cheap, and out-of-control. Covers were lurid, titles were embossed in gold that dripped reflective ruby-red claret, back cover re-create was pumped into delirious word poetry that oversold whatever was inside. High concept was king, and publishers were glutting the marketplace with product. Good writers towered over the landscape, just for every Ghost Story or Cujo there were a million B-books, churned out to plug publishing schedules with lurid thrills.
Some of these were from writers who were accomplished hacks, enthusiastically delivering schlock with gusto, while others were written past frustrated literary novelists who pinched their noses and couldn't quite comprehend the game. Today we're talking almost one of each: William Schoell and Tabitha King.
Two books about killer worms hit in 1990/91: Matthew Costello's Wurm (1991) and William Schoell's Fatal Beauty (1990). They're both gleeful gut-crunchers, only for sheer perversity I'll take Schoell every time. A dedicated worker in the literary sausage mill, he turned out 6 paperbacks for Leisure Books between 1984 and 1989, each carefully wrapped in a deliciously lurid cover, each a kinky update of monster movies from the Roger Corman school of exploitation, garnished liberally with gore. The Dragon, for instance, featured pregnant men giving birth to giant slugs. Afterwards, Schoell jumped ship to St. Martin'south Press merely by the fourth dimension they had two of his stories ready to go the horror boom was whimpering out and they tossed the books onto the marketplace with no fanfare. One of these literary throwaways was Fatal Beauty.
Schoell cheerfully describes Fatal Beauty every bit his "cheesiest" novel, saying that information technology was nigh a parody of the genre. That is not a bad thing. The outcome is as if a man who loves classic Hollywood decided to write a Jacqueline Susann novel set up in the jetset earth of New York City's plastic surgery scene, then added killer breast implants. This is the poppers of lurid fiction: a heady, giggly, oxygen-deprived headrush that leaves you with a dizzy comedown.
In it, the improbably named Peggy Antonicci is an intrepid freelance reporter who stumbles onto the story of a lifetime when her onetime college buddies, siblings Ronica and Romeo Barrows, allow her to encompass the global launch of their new beauty product, Beautifique, the ultimate in living brand-up. Apply it to burn victims, supermodels, women who want a little more in the bosom department, men who want more than in the hair department, and it'll soak into your skin, becoming part of your body, reshaping your basic and flesh to make you a sexier, younger, more beautiful you lot. It'south telepathic (!?!) and as long as you think expert thoughts while it's soaking into your body nothing can possibly get wrong. What no i knows—except the mad scientists at Barrows Cosmetics and the reader—is that Beautifique is actually putrid snot harvested from the multiple anuses of mutant, bio-engineered, giant worms with razor-precipitous teeth, an clamorous appetite for human flesh, and ESP.
Reading like horror's answer to The Best of Everything, Schoell gives each of the Beautifique exam subjects their own chapter, probing their Jackie Collins-ready private lives: 1 is a pedophile, one is an aging lothario addicted to hookers, one is a vain male model whose face has been split in half, and ane is a fire victim whose husband and children died in the fire that disfigured her. Everyone gets covered in soap opera suds, and when the plot slows down Schoell throws in S&Thousand antics, nymphomaniac biologists, or deliciously catty scenes with Peggy Antonicci's pimp boyfriend. Only nothing stays tedious for long, because by the time this book is over, people have been transformed into behemothic, castrating venereal, breast implants are squeezing off cop'southward heads, and women are flaying themselves alive in front of the mayor. Throughout, Schoell remains a gleeful Uncle Fester, not only delighting in showing u.s. the ooky wounds, but sticking his fingers in and wiggling them effectually. Mama e'er said "Love your work," and Schoell is clearly having a boom.
?Tabitha King, on the other mitt, is not. Wife of Stephen King, her first novel, Small World, published in 1981 with a nice encompass blurb from Peter Straub, took in $165,000 for the paperback rights and expectations were loftier because, face up information technology, the logline is amazing: a mean old DC socialite obsessed with dollhouses decides to settle scores with her social enemies by shrinking them to four inches alpine and forcing them to live in her miniature replica of the White Firm. That correct in that location is pure gold. Merely Tabitha King isn't the gleeful dealer of schlock that Schoell is, and while she's written several widely admired novels in her career, this isn't one of them.
Dolly Hardesty Douglas is the daughter of a former president and now she'south in her late 50s, obsessed with dollhouses and all things tiny. Her daughter-in-police, Lucy, is a "genius" who is the "number one miniaturist for dollhouses in America" and Dolly employs her to restore her White House dollhouse she got as a child, turning information technology into an verbal replica of the original, which is apparently so amazing to anybody that it becomes the star attraction of a dollhouse exhibition at the Dalton, the country's number i dollhouse museum run by Nick, who'south in beloved with Lucy (but who one time slept with Dolly). There's also Roger Tinker, a misfit who invented a shrink ray, and Nick's dad, a famous painter. Also, all of these people are sleeping with each other, or take slept with each other at some point in the past.
Male monarch takes afterwards her husband in a lot of ways: her African-American characters are impossibly folksy, in that location is a lot of vomiting, people'southward stomachs are ever upset, and bad guys are sexually kinky (Roger likes cross-dressing and Dolly loves chains). Only Male monarch spends most of her book shying away from the sex and violence that lurks only offstage in the wings, waiting to exist called on for its turn in the spotlight. For a book that features a sexually aggressive adult female shrinking her enemies to four inches tall and then physically assaulting them, it'south a surprisingly chaste read. Sure, a miniaturized reporter tries to commit suicide by driving her tiny sportscar off a table, and yes, Dolly prods the microscopic genitalia of one of her victims, but really simply two characters in the enormous cast do anything: Dolly, who wants to compress people, and Roger, who does the shrinking. Everyone else spends all their their time talking nigh feelings and inventing scratch n'sniff miniature fruit that smells like existent bananas.
If you'd ever told me that I would be bored by a book nigh a middle-anile socialite and S&M enthusiast shrinking people and forcing them to live in a dollhouse-sized White House, I would slap you across the face and call y'all a liar. And Rex's book isn't boring, exactly, just with a premise and so outrageously over-the-tiptop that any execution might accept fallen short, you proceed wanting the writer to cease being so darn polite, throw her inhibitions to the wind, and let her freak flag wing.
Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to Globe Literature Today and his latest novel is Horrorstör, about a haunted Ikea.
citation
Source: https://www.tor.com/2014/11/07/bloody-books-of-halloween-fatal-beauty-and-small-world/
0 Response to "Read Fatal Beauty by Horror Novelist William Schoell Boobs"
Enviar um comentário