Book Review: Golgotha Falls

Book Review: 'Golgotha Falls' by Frank De Felitta

0 / 5 Stars

'Golgotha Falls' (341 pp) was published by Pocket Books in September 1985. The stepback front cover art was done by Lisa Falkenstern.

Frank De Felitta (1921 - 2016) wrote a number of well-known Paperbacks from Hell during the 70s and 80s, among them Audrey Rose (1975) and The Entity (1978). 'Golgotha Falls' was the first of his novels that I've ever read. It's pretty awful. I'm not all that excited about reading any of his other novels.

The premise of 'Golgotha' is not without promise. The narrative is set in the eponymous small Massachusetts town, a town fallen on hard times. The modest Church of Eternal Sorrows, constructed in the 19th century to serve the townspeople, has a troubling history of priests gone mad; whisperings of ghosts and spirits; and a thick atmosphere of entropy and decay. It has been abandoned for decades.

As 'Golgotha' opens two parapsychologists, the shapely Anita Wagner and the broad-shouldered Mario Gilbert, have come from Harvard to conduct a scientific investigation of the rumored supernatural phenomena said to haunt the Church. Their expedition happens to coincide with the arrival of a Jesuit priest named Eamon James Malcolm, who intends to reconsecrate the church and purge it of its evil reputation.

As events unfold, the trio will confront strange signs and wonders, and their own inner demons.  And the evil that resides in the ruined church in Golgotha Falls will rise to strike at the Catholic Church itself.........

I struggled to finish 'Golgotha Falls', coming to close to giving up on it altogether numerous times.

One reason the book is so bad is the prose style. Author De Felitta belongs to the Ramsey Campbell School of Horror Fiction, and encrusts every paragraph with empty sentences and purple prose:

In the shadows of collapsing buildings, the dogs moved as though underwater, with a lolling, doll-like swaying of their heads.

The priest was blond, and his hair trembled in the night breeze while the crickets screamed an abominable and indifferent derision.

Red ants fled the heat, like animated drops of blood fleeing into the soil. 

Along the bottom of the church, the red-brown dirt oozed like soft feces.

Golgotha Falls had split them like living wood from dead.

The jet droned on, sleepily, bouncing into stormy night clouds.

I could perhaps tolerate the purple prose if the plot had sufficient momentum to compensate, but the reality of 'Golgotha Falls' is that the plot is worst thing about the book. All of its melodramatic and overheated prose can't conceal the fact that nothing happens. 

There are all sorts of what may be hallucinations, or visions, or actual physical manifestations of Evil, but the author's refusal to assign these things a unambiguous presence means the the book reads more as a labored psychological thriller than a horror novel. 

In its closing chapters 'Golgotha Falls' tries to inject energy into the narrative by venturing into 'cosmic' territory, but even here, the final confrontation between Good and Evil is so drawn out and overwritten that the novel ends on a decidedly flaccid note.

Summing up, 'Golgotha Falls', for all its great cover design, is a dud. Those seeking the most rewarding entries in the canon of the Paperbacks from Hell will want to pass on this novel.

October is Spooky Stories Month

October is Spooky Stories Month

Well, it may have been over 90 degrees today in Central Virginia, and they're calling for another 90 degree day tomorrow. But it is October, and with it Fall should be arriving, along with Halloween.

Here at the PorPor Books Blog we always celebrate October and Halloween with reviews of horror novels and short story compilations. For October 2019 we have some promising selections, including some Paperbacks from Hell; some Brit Horror; and a collection of short stories from the well-known Belgian author Eddy Bertin. Look for reviews to be posted in the coming weeks !

Comics of the American West

Comics of the American West
by Maurice Horn
Stoeger Publishing Co., January, 1978

Comics of the American West first was published in hardcover in 1977. This Stoeger Publishing Co. trade paperback version (224 pp) was published in 1978. It is one of a number of overviews, encyclopedias, and histories of comics and comic books that Maurice Horn authored during the 70s and 80s. 

Now 88, the French-born Horn has retired from writing on comics. An argument could be made that he has never gotten the appreciation that he has deserved, appreciation and praise that has been liberally bestowed upon other critics or observers of comics and comic books, most notably Scott McCloud. In my opinion, Horn remains one of the more perceptive chroniclers of the topic, and his books - although necessarily dated - retain their value to the present day.

An informative overview of Horn's contributions to comics is available here. 

Comics of the American West is divided into five chapters; Chapter One is an Introduction to the western comic strip; Chapter Two covers the Western comic book; Chapter Three, The West in Comics, is an overview of the depiction of the west in other genres of comics.

Chapter Four covers Westerns Around the World, while Chapter Five deals with Themes and Inspirations.

The book has copious black and white illustrations, although these are often low-res and not reproduced very well. There is a an eight-page color insert section.

It's no big revelation to say that the Western was the touchstone genre for the early days of both comic strips and comic books, all the way through the 50s and early 60s. Horn's first two chapters provide a good overview of chronicling the massive amount of cowboy and western material generated in these glory days, including the advent of franchises centered on real-life personalities like Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers. 

Baby Boomers who grew up with Marvel's Kid Colt, Two Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid and other heroes will see these characters covered as well.

Horn chronicles the slow but inexorable decline of the Western genre in U.S. comics and comic strips as the 70s unfolded, when Marvel began filling up its Western titles with reprints from the 50s and 60s.

During the early 70s both Marvel and DC made some half-hearted efforts to introduce new concepts to the genre, such as Marvel's Red Wolf, which featured an American Indian protagonist, but during the 70s and 80s the only established Western comic, for all practical purposes, was All Star Western and its spinoff, Jonah Hex.

In Europe and South America, of course, the Western remained a flourishing genre and Chapter Four, Westerns Around the World, does a good job of covering all of this material. Horn gives mention to all the major characters known to the European readership: Lucky Luke, Fort Navajo / Lieutenant Blueberry, Jerry Spring, Tex Willer, and Gun Law.

Reading through this chapter of the book, it's quite apparent that there is a substantial body of quality material that, sadly, has not been translated into English and presented to the American comic book readership. 

Summing up, while inevitably dated, Comics of the American West remains the only overview of the topic, and thus continues to serve as a very useful resource for those interested in the genre. If you are a fan of Western comics, or just comics in general, it's worth picking up this book; used copies in good condition can be obtained for very reasonable prices.

Big Mac Tonight, September 1987

Big Mac Tonight
McDonald's advertisement 
September 1987

When the clock strikes
Half-past six, babe
Time to head for
Golden Lights

It's a good time 
For the great taste 
(dinner !)
At McDonalds.........
It's Mac Tonight !

(come on make it Mac Tonight !)

In September, 1987, I was in grad school and renting a room in a brick rowhouse on South Potomac Street in the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore.

The rowhouse didn't have central air, and the muggy Baltimore heat turned it into an oven. I had recently moved up from the South so I was accustomed to the heat to some extent, but still, there wasn't much relief to be had from a window fan when the temperature inside the second floor of the rowhouse was in the high 70s.

Then, as the second half of the month finally arrived, there would come a night when the temperature would get down to the 60s, and life got a bit more comfortable. And when the end of the month came, the daytime temps slowly would get milder and more bearable.

Along with the arrival of Fall, airing in September 1987 was a cool commercial for McDonald's and its Big Mac sandwich. A man - who would come to be known as 'Mac Tonight' - wearing a quarter-moon mask sang a jingle based on the old 1959 Bobby Darin hit Mack the Knife.

It was sufficient motivation for me to step out into the cooling night air and walk to the nearest McDonalds. Not for a Big Mac - I think it's their worst burger - but a Quarter Pounder with cheese was fine for me and my grad student budget.

Now, some 32 years later, as those first cooler days and nights of September come I think back again to that commercial. And I will head for the 'Golden Lights' ! 

For an interesting look at the commercial, and the 'Mac Tonight' character, there is this YouTube video.

The Banana Splits Movie: review

The Banana Splits Movie: Review

3 / 5 Stars

I decided to rent The Banana Splits Movie from amazon for $2.99. It's barely 90 minutes in length, so if you don't intend to purchase the DVD, then renting is recommended.

It's scheduled to air on the Syfy Channel on October 12, if you are unwilling to rent.

The film was shot in Capetown, South Africa, which gives it a strange sort of familiar-but-foreign visual sense.

The plot isn't overly complicated: little Harley Williams loves The Banana Splits, and is thrilled when his Mom and prick Stepdad Mitch announce that his gift will be attending a taping of the show.

But even as Harley shrieks with delight along with the others in the studio audience, backstage, unfolding developments will jeopardize the lives of everyone in the building. 

Because the Splits are not happy..........and when the Splits are not happy, they like to kill people...........

The Banana Splits Movie does some things right. The seedy, rundown studio lot where the show is taped, and the visibly decayed costumes of the Splits, create a suitably creepy 'retro' vibe that tells the audience that the show is a misbegotten leftover from the early 70s.

The script provides plenty of opportunities for satire, as well as a cast of odious characters whose deaths at the hands of the manic Splits will evoke cheers and laughter.

These deaths, by the way, are quite gory - this is not a movie for kids.

Inevitably, given its low budget, the movie starts to drag by its midpoint (all of the action takes place within the same studio in the same day) and I watched it more out of a sense of duty (and to see just how many more people the Splits would gruesomely dispatch) than fervid enjoyment.

Summing up, if you're a Baby Boomer who would appreciate a mocking, postmodern sendup of a long-ago kids' TV show then The Banana Splits Movie may be worth watching. But if you're under 30, then much of the irony and facetiousness likely will come across as underwhelming.

Book Review: The Misfits

Book Review: 'The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders' by Colin Wilson

3 / 5 Stars

'The Misfits' first was published in hardback in 1988 in the UK by Grafton; this trade paperback version (271 pp), also from Grafton, was published in 1989.

Colin Wilson was always happy to use titillation to sell his books. Who can forget the immortal title: The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme (1963) ? Or Sex and the Intelligent Teenager (1966) ? 

'The Misfits' is a nonfiction work that takes Wilson's philosophical concept of The Outsider and applies it to various historical figures, in turn using these historical figures to make observations about attitudes throughout Europe towards sex, during the interval from the 1700s to the 1970s.

But strangely, Wilson opens his book with two chapters devoted to a drag queen (?!) named Carl Harjdu (Karoly Hajdu) who regularly intruded into some intellectual circles in London in the 60s and 70s as 'Charlotte Blair'. Despite his better judgment, Wilson allowed himself to be co-opted into becoming a supporter of Hajdu / Blair. By the time 'The Misfits' was published the two had become estranged over Wilson's growing dismissal of Blair's 'science' of 'human ethology'. These opening chapters in 'The Misfits' therefore provide Wilson's rationale for rejecting Blair's eccentric notions.

Once the two initial chapters are done, Wilson begins his recounting - in successive chapters in chronological order - of the lives and times of representative Sexual Outsiders, beginning with the Marquis de Sade, followed by Lord Byron, Nikolai Gogol, Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Walter' (the author of My Secret Life), Havelock Ellis, a somewhat obscure composer named Percy Grainger, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Other luminaries from the worlds of literature (such as Pushkin, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence) are referenced.

To keep the reader's attention from wandering during these recountings, these chapters are liberally sprinkled with excerpts from all manner of pornographic works.

It quickly will become clear to the reader that the individuals profiled in 'The Misfits' aptly deserved this labeling; they all were quite nasty to their female companions, and were quick to take offense at any questioning of their innate genius. Wilson shows that these Outsiders had their own peculiar quirks and deviancies (James Joyce, for example, was erotically charged by the sight of the yellow and brown stains in his wife's underwear). 

Where 'The Misfits' fails to cohere is in Wilson's purpose in surveying the Sexual Outsider: yes, these writers, artists, poets, composers, and philosophers all were screwed up in some way or another; but what is the point of analyzing their actions ? 

Nowhere in the pages of 'The Misfits' does Wilson invoke his own philosophy of New Existentialism, nor does he ever make reference to 'Faculty X' as he does in his 1975 book The Occult: A History (1971). 

Presumably, the Misfits profiled in the book represent men who failed to recognize their innate ability to use Faculty X to free themselves from their sexual problems and self-destructive behaviors, and thus missed the opportunity to attain more fulfilling lives (and romantic relationships). But Wilson never comes out and explicitly states this, giving 'The Misfits' a rather purposeless character (aside from titillation, of course).

Summing up, 'The Misfits' contains enough Juicy Bits to reward those 99% of purchasers who picked it up in those long-ago days of the late 80s, when the internet and its vast reserves of pornography did not exist, in the hopes of gaining some measure of Stimulation. But those 1% of readers who are hoping for additional insights into Wilson's New Existentialism will find this book to be disappointing. 

The Trip poster

The Trip
film poster, 1967
from the Melts in Your Mind blog

Wisdom for the Ages

Wisdom for the Ages
from Harry Fairfax
from The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
Issue 7, November 1990, Dark Horse Comics

According to Bryan Talbot's website, a brand-new, 220-page black and white graphic novel, titled The Legend of Luther Arkwright, is scheduled for publication in 2022.

Book Review: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Book review: 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' by Philip K. Dick

2 / 5 Stars

'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' first was published in 1974; this UK Granada / Panther paperback (204 pp) was published in 1976. The cover artist is Richard Clifton-Dey.

I'm going to start this review by cheerfully stating that I consider Philip K. Dick to be one of the most over-rated sf writers of the 20th century. 'Flow' does nothing to alter that judgment.

The novel is set in a dystopian USA in October, 1988. Protagonist Jason Taverner is a popular crooner whose records sell in the millions; the host of the highly-rated weekly variety program The Jason Taverner Show; the lover of the beautiful redhead Heather Hart; and a wealthy man. For Jason Taverner, life is very good indeed.

Until he wakes up in a bedroom in a seedy hotel in Los Angeles's Skid Row. With a wad of cash in his wallet........ but none of the identification cards that are necessary to function as a legitimate member of society.

Bewildered, Taverner makes phone calls to colleagues and acquaintances.......only to discover that they've never heard of him. 

Adrift in what seems to be a living nightmare, Taverner finds himself forming a precarious alliance with the fixers and document forgers who operate outside the law. But as Taverner learns more about the disturbing world in which he has found himself, a disquieting possibility arises.

Which 'reality' is 'real' ? Which reality is likely a hallucination: the reality of the Jason Taverner of fame and fortune, or reality of the Jason Taverner who is wandering Skid Row, dodging police checkpoints ?

Jason Taverner needs to find out. But can he evade General Felix Buckman of the L.A. Police Force long enough to discover the truth ?

I'm sure that someone, somewhere, at some time has rhapsodized about how 'Flow' forces the reader to confront his or her understanding of the Nature of Reality. Or something like that. 

But the 'reality' of 'Flow' is that, while the narrative is reasonably engaging, and succeeds in inducing the reader to persevere in order to learn what, exactly, has happened to Jason Taverner, the Big Explanation that serves as the denouement is too contrived, and too full of holes in its logic, to be anything other than a disappointment. 

Indeed, at times 'Flow' reads as if its main objective was to satirize the Hollywood nightclub culture of the early 70s. Jason Taverner is in fact a caricature of Dean Martin; Heather Hart, for example, is an amalgam of Joey Heatherton, Angie Dickinson, and Jill St. John. The cultural milieu within which these two operate is peopled with facsimiles of the VIPs and Beautiful People who partied with Dino, Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, and the other icons of the Playboy era whose glamour was fast fading with the advent of the 1970s. 

Underneath their boozy innuendo, wealth, and privilege, Dick signals to us, these individuals are so vacuous and self-absorbed that their lives are less 'real' than those of the outcasts struggling to survive on the mean streets of L.A.

Summing up, I can't recommend 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' as a stellar example of 70s sci-fi. This one can be passed by.

Captain Marvel the Complete Collection

Captain Marvel: The Complete Collection
by Jim Starlin
Marvel Comics, 2016

I remember reading Jim Starlin's issues of Captain Marvel in 1973 and 1974. Although Starlin's run on the title was in actuality rather short, his skills in writing and art made Captain Marvel stand out from the other books in the Marvel lineup.

Much of my admiration for Starlin's work revolved around the high quality of his art. It wasn't unusual for other Marvel artists of that era, like Dean Colan, to meet their page count by taking shortcuts, but Starlin lavished care and attention on all of his efforts. This single page must have taken him several days to draw:

So it was nice to see Marvel package all of Starlin's Captain Marvel-related work in this 352-page 'Complete Collection' trade paperback. Along with comics from 1973 and 1974, it also contains the 1982 Marvel Graphic Novel The Death of Captain Marvel.

It's interesting to read these stories from the 70s and see the advent of Thanos from Iron Man No. 55 (February 1973):

As well, Starlin's introduction of the 'cosmic' aspects of Captain Marvel still has that aura that testifies to the influence of the underground comix scene:

I'm not sure how comic book fans under the age of 40 will react to this material; in some ways, the plots certainly are more approachable than much of what is featured in the current Marvel lineup. But readers familiarized with the Thanos storyline through the recent Avengers movies may find the Captain Marvel of the 70s too...........'trippy'....... to be all that endearing.

I'm guessing that Captain Marvel: The Complete Collection will appeal more to comic book fans over 50 than any other age group.

Unfortunately, if you want a 'new' quality copy of Captain Marvel: The Complete Collection you'll need to be prepared to pay at least $36 (plus shipping) at amazon. 

Some speculators at amazon are offering the book for an obscene $461. My advice ? If you're a fan of Starlin and Captain Marvel, you might want to pick this up sooner, rather than later................