Startling Stories for All Ages
Originally, “Big Trouble” was posted in five PDFs that needed to downloaded to be read. No longer. Just click on the first image below and flip through the gallery.
Went looking to Netflix for the Gonzo doco the other day and found this.
Here’s the plot summary from Wikipedia:
Eddie “Gonzo” Gilman is the head geek at his high school—and determined to do something about it. When Gavin, the popular editor of the school paper, fires him, Eddie obtains revenge by establishing an underground paper of his own. He gains popularity and makes a new friend, Evie Wallace, and it soon gains the attention of the principal, escalating to a bombshell crisis.
The movie was decent; well worth a watch. I may watch it again in a few months. It hit many of the notes that Hunter played: truth, outrage, getting the bastards, and what we like to think of as his total commitment to the cause — whatever it is and damn safety and the consequences. Though I somehow think that the kid in the movie had the greater courage of his convictions. Maybe it’s because he’s in high school and that kind of high-contrast worldview, the absolutism, comes naturally with the age. Or not. I’m still a fairly hard-core absolutist, which can be miserable to live with, sometimes. My wife is a saint.
Still and all, the movie stuck very close to Hunter’s philosophy and the overall Gonzo ethos, if not strictly to Gonzo Journalism.
When watching, keep an eye on how Gillman’s wardrobe evolves throughout the film.
Welcome back, everyone! It’s been too long — and I’ve missed you all too much for words.
But enough about me and you. Let’s talk about books.
David Huyck was just one of the creators I got to talk with this summer at the first-ever Chicago Alterative Comics Expo (CAKE). (It doesn’t spell out, I know. Just go with it.) One project he was excited about was his upcoming children’s book, THAT ONE SPOOKY NIGHT. There were no galleys of it available, but he was able to score me an advance copy. NICE!
After I read it, young Kidzilla, (A.K.A., “Grace”) got her eyeprints all over the pages. When she was done, I put her on the record and asked her what she thought:
Brad: You ready? Because I’m really recording now.
Grace: Yeah.
Brad: You want to say anything first?
Grace: No.
Brad: You want to get right into it?
Grace: Yeah.
Brad: OK. We’re talking about THAT ONE SPOOKY NIGHT, a new Halloween book for young readers written by Dan Bar-el and Illustrated by David Huyck. Grace, did you like the book?
Grace: Yeah.
Brad: Did you ‘like’ it, did you ‘like-like’ it, or did you ‘love’ it?
Grace: I ‘like-liked’ it.
Brad: What made it better than just a ‘like’ book?
Grace: How it’s written . . . and the pictures.
Brad: So the story and the art. The first time we were recording this — and that didn’t work — you said that of the three stories, you liked one better than the others and you didn’t like one as much as the rest. Which one didn’t you like?
Grace: The first one.
Brad: The story about the little girl who mixes-up her costume broom with a witch’s real, flying broom. Why didn’t you like it?
Grace: I just didn’t like it.
Brad: Was it not an exciting story?
Grace: Yeah.
Brad: Would you say it was the weakest story of the three?
Grace: Yes.
Brad: Which one did you like the most?
Grace: The last one.
Brad: The one about the four human girls who meet the four vampire girls. Why?
Grace: Because one of the human girls and one of the vampire girls got to be friends. And they didn’t like blood.
Brad: Would you give this book to your friends to read? And why?
Grace: Yes. Because it’s funny and scary at the same time.
Brad: Is there anything you would tell them about it? Anything about the story or the art?
Grace: No. I would let them be surprised.
Brad: What did you think about the art?
Grace: I think it was excellent.
Brad: What about the writing?
Grace: The writing was pretty good.
Brad: So you think the art is really the strong point in this book.
Grace: Yeah. Can we be done now?
Brad: Ah . . . sure.
And there you have it.
Since there were no comments for THAT ONE SPOOKY NIGHT up on Amazon, I was prompted to post my thoughts in my first Amazon review. Short but sweet. Check it out here — then order yourself a copy!
It was a nightmare, getting out of L.A. . . . The desert would be bad enough all by itself.
Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again.
To the squares, this was Damnation Alley.
Damnation Alley is a really awful book with an impossible cult following. Published in 1969, it went on to be made into an even worse film staring George Peppard, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Jackie Earle Haley which as gained an even stronger cult following than the book.
How I acquired first-hand knowledge of these matters is a story too horrible to tell, at least right now. All will be revealed when I’ve made my millions and adoring fans hang on my every word. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if this shitty little book was in some way an influence on Hunter’s conceptualization of Bat Country and the fearful run from L.A. to L.V.
Zelazny’s novel is a post-apocalyptic version of the 1925 “Great Race of Mercy” — when 20 sled dog teams raced 1085 miles to bring diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska. This time it’s a suicide run from the nation-state of California across the nuke-ravaged, monster-filled wasteland with some Haffikine anti-serum — because they gots the plague way over in Boston.
Leading the a three-car team of recidivist goons is Hell Tanner, last of the West Cost Hell’s Angels. (Seriously. I wouldn’t make that up.) Tanner is a hard core sonofabitch who’s been in jail for any number of dirty deeds — including smuggling candy to the Mormons. The carrot for Tanner and the rest of the screw heads to make the trip is that they get full pardons for their crimes. . . .
This plot synopsis is somewhat beside my point.
Like with B. Traven’s Death Ship, John Bainbridge’s Super-Americans and a few other texts I’ve run across, Damnation Alley feels like it might have suggested something to Hunter and in some way informed his writing.
Everybody knows about the influence of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Donlevy on the good doctor’s work. But Hunter’s approach to reading seems to have been , in the best sense, a shotgun affair. There is a list of books in a 2006 Harper’s article by William Kennedy (that I can’t link to because you need to subscribe in order to view it), that only hints at the breadth and depth of Thompson’s literary tastes. One might be inclined to think Hunter was indiscriminate, reading at random, but that doesn’t seem to fit. Omnivorous, certainly — with a purpose.
Traven’s writing in Death Ship has amazing rhythms and a personal, wrong guy/wrong place/wrong time sensibility mirrored in some of Hunter’s best work; Super-Americans is about Texas being the last bastion of the American Dream; Damnation Alley describes the desolation, danger, gila monsters, and high desert weirdness between Barstow and Vegas.
What else is out there he might have read and pulled from?
It’s time to finish Gonzo Republic to see if Stephenson’s worthy examination of Thompson’s writing and themes includes any intertextual analysis of the canon.
