to avoid hitting a single note repeatedly until a good migraine roosts, i tried to broaden so-called cinema horror past obvious haunted theatre stories, to include stuff about grind houses, 3-for-1 flea pits, porn castles, werewolf circuit drive-ins, snuff films, peep shows, fly-by-night video rental shacks, has-been actors, never-was ingenues, tinseltown burnouts, movie cults, immortal stars, film school dorks, media mutants, and even that bastard ‘lil bro, television. ”silver scream is a themed book, but that’s the only conventional thing about it. and several of these writers were entirely new to me, meaning i’d never even heard of them, and i’ll seek them out. paul wilson, but i’d never gotten around to reading them-but now i will, and soon. sure, i’ve collected novels by chet williamson and john skipp and ray garton and f.
best part of the deal is most of these authors were new to me. Truth is, i could talk about every story here, because i loved them all that much. or there’s ray garton’s stomach-churning and shocking “sinema”, and joe lansdale’s classic “night they missed the horror show”, and. Who could forget john skipp’s “film at eleven”, a dirty little grimy portrait of a battered woman who’s simply given up-this one was inspired by the publicly aired suicide of budd dwyer. it’s this collection’s most daring entry, its most go-for-broke, and i can understand why it’s the finale. i almost lost my dinner at three young girls playing catch with a dying man’s still-conscious brain. i’d never never read, or even heard of, this author, but his longish story about the “intersection of two belief systems” features a whole lot of carnage and batshit insanity to rival anything clive barker put to paper. Is it possible to pick a favorite story, then? how about chet williamson’s “return of the neon fireball”, the bittersweet and horrifying tale of a washed-up loser buying the drive-in of his high school days in a cursed effort at reliving his glory years? this one’s penchant for 1950s americana and its exploration of nostalgia’s dark underbelly make for a gripping little haunt of which stephen king would be jealous, or proud.Īnd there’s the finale (before schow’s rambling-but-amusing afterword), “pilgrims to the cathedral,” by mark arnold. has that ever happened before? hell fucking no. no “filler” here to speak of: every story gets a 5-star rating from this reader. schow, he who coined the term “splatterpunk”-reads like a rock ‘n’ roll show where every act should be the headliner. An anthology i genuinely hate to finish reading, silver scream was produced in ‘88 by dark harvest press and later republished as a mass market paperback and is now, woefully, out of print and hard to score for less than twenty or thirty bucks-still worth that price of admission, though, because this is a horror film marathon you won’t soon forget.įilled to the brim with dark fiction superstars and newbies alike, this anthology-edited by none other than david j.
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