A guide to happy marriage

 So, as part of spooky season reading, I got a copy of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives from the library. I vaguely remember watching bits and pieces of the 70's movie on TV, and I fully remember watching the early '00s Frank Oz version, so I was interested to see what the actual source material was like. 

Hoo boy.

Let me start this by saying the copyright is 1972, so there are quite a few references that either left me scratching my head, or worse, having flashbacks. (I'll note these as we go.) 

So, we open with Joanna and Walter moving to Stepford, Connecticut, to raise their son and daughter away from Manhattan. Walter, a lawyer, commutes to and from the city by train, suggesting they're in the southwest corner of the state. Joanna is a semi professional photographer who's also active in Women's Liberation and National Organization of Women. She's less than pleased that the men in town all seem to belong to the Men's Club, high on a hill in town. Walter, of course, loves the Men's Club, even if he starts off suggesting making it coed. 

Joanna tries to make friends, but the women of Stepford all seem to be obsessed with household chores, except for Bobbie (with a big behind and small mammaries), and Charmaine, a semi professional tennis player who's into astrology. Except Charmaine goes away for a couple's weekend, and returns as a dedicated hausfrau, even tearing up her clay tennis court to give her husband a putting green. This gets Bobbie and Joanna suspicious, to the point they write a letter to the state board of health to see if chemicals from the nearby factories are acting like the lithium in El Paso water to make the women all docile. That gets disproven, and we start getting signs that something is amiss, as men from the club sketch Joanna and have her dictate on cassette words, phrases, and songs. (Cassettes. Happy it wasn't 8 tracks.)

Joanna tries to convince Walter to move, and indeed joins Bobbie in looking for houses outside Stepford. Well, at least until Bobbie and her husband have a staycation and suddenly Bobbie doesn't want to move, is suddenly wearing a girdle and a push up bra, and waxes the kitchen floor daily. Walter tells Joanna they can look at houses after Christmas, and insists she sees a shrink. Shrink thinks Joanna is just overly stressed. Joanna finds a house, calls Walter, since she can't find the bank books (When's the last time anyone used one of those?) to put down a deposit. She ends up in the library basement where she finds out the men in town have work/have worked on animatronics and synthetics, among other things. Which leads her to the logical conclusion the men of Stepford are killing their wives and replacing them with perfected sex doll robots who can wax a floor. 

The conclusion is kind of ambiguous as to whether or not Joanna is correct, which is a big point in its favor, although the matron of the one black family (introduced not long after Charmaine becomes a Wife) runs in to Joanna at the store in the epilogue, noticing how Joanna's shopping cart is perfectly organized, and how Joanna has given up photography in favor of keeping Walter happy. 

Ok, so, I really enjoyed this quite a bit, even if the overall idea of losing autonomy to please a man makes my soul itch. As Peter Straub points out in his introduction, lots of little things towards the start take on really ugly meaning as the conclusion nears. Although, I will add that while Joanna refers to Disney's Hall of Presidents as evidence robots could pass for human, we really don't have that tech now, 50 years on, so there's a lot of suspension of disbelief here. Really good read, even with some of the outdated references, since there are plenty of folks who'd like to see it happen still.

In the name of Lowrek, Prince of Elves, DEMON BEGONE!

 OK, so as I mentioned, it's spooky season, so digging through the library for scary stuff to read. Found The Nightmares on Elm Street as written by Jeffrey Cooper in a box of books I found in mom's attic, which made me mildly bittersweet happy. 

Yes, such a thing does exist.

 So, a few quick notes on this. I read this before seeing any of the movies novelized in here. (Mom for a long time wasn't happy about me watching R rated horror movie, eventually relaxing to let me see them on video, even if she complained about women screaming in the dining room [where the VCR was]. I tried explaining the Final Girl trope as Female Empowerment, which didn't go over well. Eventually, she quit caring, and the local theater didn't card most of the time, which meant the first NoES I watched was Part 4. Anyway, in a desire to be cool, I bought this collection, thinking reading them would let me pass as having seen them. We'll explain how wrong I was here in a bit. The one thing I love about finding this now, several decades on, is that there's still a faint aroma of the pipe tobacco scent every book I bought at Main News in my hometown ended up carrying. Well, that and you can still feel the embossment of Freddy's glove on the cover. 

 So, anyway, it's three novelizations of three different installments, with a short story at the end explaining Freddy's birth and death, plus stills from the first two movies.

So, Part one, the original, follows Nancy Thompson as she has nightmares about a dirty man in a red and green sweater and a fedora who lives in a boiler room. She finds out her friends are dreaming about him as well. Which leads to her friend Tina asking Nancy and Glen to spend the night at her house, with Tina's boyfriend Rob joining them. Well, Tina runs into the man in her dreams, and winds up dying in her bedroom. Rob takes the blame, and Nancy arrives in a dream to see him get killed in his prison cell. When she arrive awake, it looks like Rob hung himself in his cell. Exposition later, we find out that Nancy can pull things out of her Nightmares, and the man is/was Freddy Krueger, who her parents turned into a pig roast after he got released on a technicality after murdering a bunch of children. Nancy's mom puts bars on all the windows, her father (Sheriff of Springwood and divorced from Mom) tells her to stay at home and be safe. She asks her boyfriend Glen to stay awake and wake her up as she tries to drag Freddy out of the dream. Glen fails, and becomes a victim of a mattress volcano. Nancy winds up doing what she wanted to do without glen and uses her alarm clock to drag Freddy into objective reality, using booby traps to beat the crap out of him, although he does kill Mom on the way to her turning her back on him and robbing him of his power. Well, except the stinger, which is just as dumb in print as it is on film, where Freddy pulls mom through the window of the front door at the end.  While this one does a really good job of following the movie, there are bits missing, like exactly how drunk Mom is and how much coffee Nancy is actually drinking, and the one shot from the trailer that made 9 year old me want to go see the movie, where Nancy gets sucked into goo on the stairs isn't in here. 

Part 2, Freddy's Revenge, picks up five years later as Jesse Walsh moves into Nancy's old house and starts having nightmares. Things get weird fairly quickly, as Jesse makes friends with jock Grady over a mutual hatred of Coach Schneider and gains a sort of girlfriend in Lisa. (There's a hell of a lot of homosexual subtext that doesn't quite show up as much in the novelization. At the time, from what I remember, it was thought to be homophobic, but particularly with a bunch of revelations as time went on from the lead actor and the screenwriter, it's actually meant to be homoerotic.) Anyway, seems Freddy is working on possessing Jesse to reenter reality. Which leads to a bunch of silliness involving exploding birds, an S&M scene with the coach, Jesse sleeping undressed with Grady, and being unable to perform with Lisa. (You can watch clips on YouTube if you're curious.) Anyway, Jesse defeats Freddy with the power of teenage virgin hormones, except the stinger where Freddy's glove comes out of Lisa's chest. Again, novel follows the movie fairly closely, although it tends to gloss over the stuff that makes the movie more interesting in the modern age. 

Part 3, Dream Warriors, which is where my ruse of having seen the movies fell apart. See, the novelization is based off Wes Craven's original script, while the filmed script got revised quite a bit, meaning there are quite a few derivations in the novel vs the movie. The biggest ones being that Joey and Kinkade die in the book, while they survive 15 minutes into Part 4 in the films. The deaths and powers are also a bit different, like the Wizard in the film is here a D&D nut without a wheelchair, the drug addict shoots fire, Joey talks (and doesn't get taken hostage by a cross dressing Freddy when g=he gets trapped), and Nancy isn't a professional. There's no mention of Amanda Kruger, although it's revealed Nancy's house in the original was where Amanda got raped by 1000 maniacs. Oh, and our sleepwalker gets thrown in front of a speeding ambulance rather than off a building, and Freddy quotes Johnny Carson when TV girl dies. The one thing the book does a bit better than the movie is explore how it stops mattering so much whether anyone is in the dream or not, by the end reality and dreaming have become one entity. 

Honestly, the biggest issue with these novelizations is that the film series highly relies on visual images, and the author really can't shape the words in ways that let you see them the way film can. (Although with the dawn of DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4k, they look pretty threadbare with the cleaned up visuals.) On the other hand, the author does give us occasional peeks into the minds of the protagonists, something the movies couldn't really do. While you're probably better off renting/streaming the movies, the novels are a fun way to spend some time, and even catch a glimpse of what might have been.

The Scorpion or the Grasshopper?

 So, I've technically reviewed this previously, but I hate that review and kind of want to redo it.

With it being spooky season, I pulled Gaston LeRoux's The Phantom of the Opera off the shelf and spent the week reacquainting myself with late 1800's Paris as our narrator in teenage Paris narrates the strange affair of a missing singer, a missing Viscomte, a dead Count, and various goings on at the Palais Garnier Opera in Paris. I have some tangents to go off on, but we'll put them at the end as I try to spoil a century old book. 

We open with our narrator breathlessly telling us he has evidence proving the legends of the Opera Ghost were true, and that hey can narrate for us, the reader how such tangled threads can be related to a non supernatural man. This transports us back to the night when management of the House traded hands, and new management came in, unaware of the codicils in the charter involving on particular Opera Ghost, like leaving Box 5 open for him and paying him 20,000 Francs every month. Several things are happening during the turnover, as Joseph Buquet is found hanging in the third cellar behind a scene from La Roi de Lahore (although the noose is missing by the time half the corps de ballet make it down to investigate), the Opera Diva, Carlotta, has called out for the gala, so one Christine Daae steps up and sings in her place, surprising everyone with his voice and range. Christine's old playmate from childhood, Raoul, Viscompt de Chagne, happened to be in the audience for the gala with his older brother Philippe, Count de Chagne, and goes backstage  where he hears Christine talking to a man in her dressing room, even though no one is in there besides Christine. 

So, Carlotta is a bit upset about being upstaged by the younger soprano. Indeed, she spends some time trying to get her supporters to help with this. Christine runs off to her father's grave, where Raoul follows. Christine isn't exactly happy to see him. He follows her, hearing someone playing "The Resurrection of Lazarus" on a violin near her father's grave. He sees a shadow among the ossuary, and wakes the next morning on the church altar. 

Anyway, Christine vanishes for a month or so, eventually returning and giving Raoul specific directions on how to dress and where to meet her at the Masquerade Gala. The new managers are mildly upset by some rather pointed notes from the ghost, and indeed get in a fight with Madame Giry, the Ghost's personal usher. (One should note, in the text, Giry has 3 teeth in her head and is particularly frumpy. She's also portrayed as rather unintelligent about a lot of things. Even if she's French, she comes off as Cockney.) 

 I think Box 5 is in the top picture in the visible row.

Anyway, the Masquerade doesn't go well for Raoul, as Christine tells him to leave her be. He watches as she vanishes into the mirror in her dressing room. 

The Ghost tells management to let Christine sing Marguerite in Faust as Carlotta will be sick and to let him have Box 5. Management gets annoyed and fires Giry. They then sit in Box 5, watching Carlotta sing the lead. Which leads to two famous set pieces from this. First, Carlotta starts "Co-ack"ing as she's singing. The ghost tells the managers in a diembodied voice that she's going to bring down the chandelier, which does indeed fall right after, killing Madame Giry's replacement.

Yes, this one, even if it is a replacement.

This all happens in the first third of the book. Anyway, Christine does eventually confess he love to Raoul, but only above the stage, indeed on the roof, by the statue of Apollo. 

 

Top Center

This leads to a secret engagement, and Christine finally confessing as to what the hell has been going on. After the death of her father, she lost interest in music. Then the Voice came, teaching her to sing better and with passion. The voice was jealous and told her if she saw a man, he'd leave her forever. The Voice also claimed to be the Angel of Music her father told stories of when she was a child. Anyway, long story short, said voice eventually kidnapped her and took her to his house on the lake in the 5th cellar. Where she learned he was the Opera Ghost, Eric, who wears a black mask to cover the fact he has glowing eyes and a face like a skull.

He also knows all and hears all that happens inside the Opera. Raoul arranges to elope with Christine the next evening after the performance. 

The next day, a gossip rag posts something about the engagement, Christine is upset that the ring Eric gave her vanished on the roof, Phillipe things Raoul is embarrassing the family name, the managers question Giry about how she delivers the money to the ghost. 

 Quite a few things happen. Giry confesses she has no knowledge of there being money in the envelope. She indeed slips the envelope in the manager's pocket, where the ghost gets it. Her whole motivation is a promise the Ghost made that, like other ballerinas in the corps, her daughter Meg will marry into the nobility (namely Empress). (I should note, an aside in the first chapter mentions Meg did become a baroness, so she did get upgraded.) The managers suspect each other of stealing the money, and recreate the evening the money vanished, confusing everyone there to see Faust. Christine sings Marguerite and vanishes during her appeal to heaven towards the end. Raoul eventually meets the Persion, the ebony skinned gentleman who hangs out at the Opera, who leads Raoul into the cellars to find Eric and Christine. (SIDE NOTE: there are some very interesting but never really well explained people running around the cellars, like the shadow the escorts the uninvited to the manager's office, the rat catcher with a flaming face, and the firemen who tend the furnaces. One could almost see another novel of errata explaining how they work.) The Persian leads Raoul into the 3rd cellar where a trapdoor opens into the Ghost's house, behind a certain scene from La Roi de Lahore. 

The Persian takes over narration duties for a bit, explaining how he and Raoul wound up in Eric's torture chamber. (For the record, it's a hexagonal room with mirror on all sides and a painted tree that revolves to change the images to eventually get prisoners to hang themselves.) Raoul and the Persian hear Eric and Christine through the wall, as he tells her she has until 11 the next night to choose between the Scorpion and the Grasshopper (two Japanese bronze sculptures), meaning yes, she'll marry him or no she won't. The Persian finds a trapdoor and a room filled with gunpowder filled barrels. Meaning the Grasshopper will jump if she says no, and take a quarter of Paris with it. Christine does eventually choose the Scorpion, and indeed marries Eric however briefly. He relents after a few days and sends her off with Raoul to their own love, before dying in the dungeon used by the Commune under the lowest cellar. In the end, he claims he didn't directly kill anyone (the chandelier chain was worn out, Buquet hung himself, Phillipe ran into a trap and drowned), and he did right by Christine even if it killed him. By all accounts, she returned when he died and returned his ring. 

Anyway, a few errata here. The version I currently own is not quite the same translation as what I had in High School. There are a few paragraphs missing in it that I remember quite clearly (one pretty much calling Carlotta a hussy and another describing not only how Carlotta's supporters cheered her on, but were downright rude to Christine) and here it is a secret engagement rather than a pretend engagement. On the other hand, the phrasing in this edition flows more naturally. 

My original copy I ended up giving to a homeless kid in 1995. I had dressed as a cheap Broadway Phantom (plastic half mask, black bedsheet cape) to lead kids from the emergency shelter around the dorms trick or treating, and the kid thought I was the Undertaker from the WWE.  He asked for my mask, I gave it to him with the book. 

As you can tell, the book is majorly different from almost all adaptions, but then, in acting, one needs the big set pieces in a different order to compliment the flow of the performance.

There's a small hint Eric knows he's in the wrong, since the duet he sings with Christine from Faust is during the seduction, when Faust and Mephistopheles don't really have Marguerite's best interests at heart. 

As a side note, the chandelier did fall at one point, inspiring this entire novel, but it fell during routine cleaning, injuring no one.

Overall, despite being a century old, it's still fun to read and enjoy wandering around a haunted theater with people who all are doing wrong, but doing it with heart. 

Oh good, something's actually happening finally

 Ok, so we're back with Book 3 in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins's Left Behind series, Nicolae.

After two books of what mostly consisted of setting up Armageddon, we finally start getting payoffs as the Horsemen ride. Oh look, the United Nations (now Global Community) is using its 10% of all arms on Earth to bomb major cities! Oh look, Bruce is actually dead! 

Let's see, Carpathia, the Antichrist, has moved the GC to New Babylon somewhere in Iran. His new plane, flown by Rayford, has a special gadget that lets Rayford listen in to conversations in the back while he's flying. Buck winds up in Israel to sneak Tsion Ben-Judah out since two factions want him dead. Oh yes, and after the major story lines are resolved and Buck's magazine predicts the "Wrath of the Lamb" Earthquake when the 6th seal is broken, we get a world wide Earthquake that removes the global population down to roughly 75% of the population pre-Rapture. Ben-Judah is living in the fallout shelter under New Hope Baptist. Buck, who survived the quake in a Range Rover is trying to find Chloe and Ben-Judah in the wreckage. Hattie has more or less vanished, having spent most of the book being a strawman of why it's not OK to abort the Antichrist's baby. And Rayford is in the air with Carpathia when the quake hits, so he's fine. 

Ok, so, none of the major core characters dies until towards the end, and they all come back for the finale, so we're not worried about any of them at this point, nor are we particularly worried about them anyway, since they remain flat characters, acting as cyphers to relate the beliefs and arguments of the authors. 

Like I said, there's literally a few chapters devoted to arguments against abortion, that later get roped in to how abortion leads to Eugenics. There's the big reveal that Buck's personal nemesis is a lesbian, which gets thrown in with the whole "Fidelity in Marriage, chastity in singleness" argument that was viewed as a compromise in the 90's. (I'd say I wonder if that argument changed at all when Same Sex marriage became a thing, but I'm pretty sure legalizing marriage more or less threw off the veneer of that argument, revealing again the absolute repulsion certain people have towards non cishet relationships.)

Oh yes, we get more about how Militias, even prophesied to fail against the Antichrist, are a good thing, about how one should invest in gold, because one we get to one world currency, Christians will not be able to use it because it requires the Mark of the Beast... (Deeper you go down the hole, the more the commercials on Faux News make sense.) About the only argument they present that I halfway agree with once you separate it from the Abortion leads to Eugenics and thought control by a strong man, is the one they make about Free Speech as the GC creates the Morale Monitors (secret thought police, and I might add I think they're using the wrong word, since in context, it really should be Moral) to start silencing dissenting voices. Yeah, I tend to believe people should be allowed to speak their mind, and I frankly could give two shits about Evangelists praying me into hell. (I grew up in an era when Brother Jed would come preach on the Quad at Wright State, and the shit the Westboro Baptist did and still do.)I still fight with myself about how responsible one is for what actions one's words inspire. The problem here is that instead of actually exploring the argument, we instead get "The bad people are trying to silence the Christians!" because there is no gray area in these books. 

Honestly, while the writing is slowly getting less wooden, it doesn't change the fact that every character in here feels like they're marionettes dancing on strings while lipsyncing to a recorded message. 

As a side note, since it is October, I'm switching out of series reads to start having fun with one shot horror novels in my collection for a bit.