Two books of TV horror, two pulps: recent reading

THE TELEVISION HORRORS OF DAN CURTIS: Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker and Other Productions by Jeff Thompson is an exhaustive look at Curtis’ career from his early days selling syndicated shows to local stations (Thompson speculates his awareness of syndication is one reason he made sure we had a complete run of DARK SHADOWS) to producing golf shows to Dark Shadows, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the reason I bought this—movie review soon), adaptations of other horror classics (The Turn of the Screw, Frankenstein, Dracula) and non-horror work such as The Winds of War, based on Herman Wouk’s epic novel of America before Pearl Harbor. Even as a Dan Curtis fan I learned a lot here.

I kept watching Peacock’s Teacup partly because I like Robert McCammon’s horror novels and I knew it was based on his book STINGER. If I’d known how little the series kept of the book — alien refugee in child’s body, alien hunter, everyone trapped inside a force field, nothing else — I doubt I’d have made it to the flaccid finish. The much more entertaining 1980s novel has a lot in common with the decade’s TV miniseries like Winds of War — a huge, sprawling cast, epic action, and unlike the TV show, solid entertainment.

The book takes place in Inferno, a southwestern town slowly wasting away, which doesn’t stop the remaining populace from engaging in personal feuds, power struggles and occasionally love. Then a refugee from a crashed spaceship transplants her consciousness into a child until she can find a spaceship to go home (she’s shocked we don’t have any); worse, a scorpion-like alien bounty-hunter shows up looking for her and he doesn’t care how many humans die if it gets him what he wants. Worse, as Stinger kills people, he resurrects the corpses as cyborg agents so the numbers rapidly shift in his favor. If nothing else, at least Teacup prompted me to read this.

Now, the pulps: CRIMSON STREETS: The Devil Inside is the last of the six Crimson Street anthologies I got from the publishers and a good one to go out on. Mostly hardboiled mysteries or crime dramas without much of a fantasy element, but with that caveat it’s a solid set of stories. A beautiful dame doublecrosses her gang. A PI becomes a wraith. A beautiful dame assures readers her encounter with this shamus will follow the tropes they expect. And more. Good neo-pulp stuff.

I enjoyed Talking Toad, the first volume of Lester Dent’s Gadget Man series, but not as much as I’d expected. To my surprise I had more fun with THE DEVILS SMELL NICE: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Vol.2, probably because I know what I’m getting: low-key adventures with a strong comic element, much more down to Earth than Doc Savage.

In the first book, the mysterious Bufa hired inventor Clickell Rush to use his crimefighting gadgets (he hoped to sell them to the police and get rich. The police laughed) and take down the crooks Bufa pointed him towards. With a $10,000 bill for each mission accomplished, Clickell can afford to take it easy and stop putting his life on the line. Bufa, however, keeps pushing him into more crime-solving peril. If only Click could figure out who he is …

In the second volume, Rush discovers Bufa pays various PI firms to tip him off to impossible crimes (one of the firms, the Continental Detective Agency, comes from Dashiell Hammett’s stories — Dent was a huge fan). Surely he can work back through the agency to find Bufa. Instead he finds a strange egg containing a hairless animal, an innocent man facing the electric chair and killers who smell really good. The screwball stories that follow the opening hook are fun, though as with V1, the women are interchangeable eye candy, much less impressive than the women characters who show up in Doc Savage’s adventures.

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