Ed Gorman's Blog, page 220

The soup on soaps

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My wife Carol did a fair share of musical theater so we know a few people who ended up in soap operas. In fact one of our favorite stupid-silly movies is Soapdish in which Sally Fields is perfectly willing to make a total physical and emotional and hilarious ass of herself for the entirety of the goofy film. Kevin Kline is great as a Ham With Aspirations (his dream is to do a one-man Hamlet if that tells you anything) and a very young Elizabeth Shue who is both gorgeous and winning. Whoppi Goldberg, Robert Downey, Jr. and Cathy Moriarty provide strong back-up. Not to mention Garry Marshall's clueless network boss. This is one of those gag-a-minute stories that generally keeps the laugh rolling from start to finish.

I thought of this today as I read the piece in the Times about the latest soap opera to fold and what the actors will do for a living afterward. I never got into soaps. I tried when a few of the people we knew were on but I could never get past all the intensity. I just wanted somebody to sit in a chair, open a beer and say "I don't care if your grandmother is having a sex change operation and if your first husband (whom I know you are still in love with) was gored fighting a bull in Pamploma. I'm watching a fricking old movie with Bogart." And so we sit on the guy watching tv and drinking beer for three or four minutes. You know, a little real life among all the stormy passions.

But I'm always sorry to see actors lose jobs. We're having it tough as writers these days but these men and women are really up against it what with Hwood cutting back on the number of movies and tv doing all these fucking reality shows.

It's an interesting (if melancholy piece) and worth reading:

Stay Tuned for Soap Stars' Next Acts

By GREG EVANS
Published: November 4, 2010

IF people at the Knitting Factory recognized Jake Silbermann's cornflower-blue eyes last month, they were too cool to let on. The handsome Mr. Silbermann, looking considerably more pulled together in a sport coat and sweater combo than most of the 20-somethings attending the Royal Flush film festival at this Brooklyn club, took questions from the small audience following a screening of his short film "Stuffer."

At 27 and just three years after quitting his telesales job to join the cast of the soap opera "As the World Turns," Mr. Silbermann is known to millions (maybe not you, but millions nonetheless) as Noah Mayer. Paired with the equally photogenic Van Hansis, who played Luke Snyder, he was half of daytime television's first same-sex super couple and the last in a long line of the show's duos honored with one of those conjoined nicknames favored by adoring fans. Noah. Luke. Nuke.

Now Mr. Silbermann is out of a job, or at least the steady soap opera work that only a few of his former cast mates can currently lay claim to. On Sept. 17, after 54 years of backstabbing, bitchery and tune-in-tomorrows, "As the World Turns" followed its sister soap "Guiding Light" into an ever-expanding universe of defunct daytime melodrama. In 1990 an average daily soap viewership of 6.5 million could choose among 12 network serials. Today, according to a recent report in Advertising Age, average viewership hovers well below 1.5 million, with six soaps left on the air. When production at the "As the World Turns" studio in Brooklyn halted in June, New York was left with only one soap — "One Life to Live," on ABC — and hundreds of actors plotting their next real-life story lines.

(more)

"New York, he said, "will have a lot more actors waiting tables."

for the rest go here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/art...

Stuff-be warned some politics

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1. Movie posters have been real pop art since the early days of the silents. I'm always on the look-out for for good ones and thanks to Ain't It Cool I came across the above today. Great B movie title and equally great art.

2. I'm beginning to wonder if Zach Galifianakis is going to last much longer at the top. Unless he's hiding the kind of talent that would allow him to play other kinds of characters I think he'll burn out pretty fast doing his take on irritating child-like assholes.

3. Nobody's raised this point yet but I wonder if there's not something more behind Keith Olberman's suspension than his political contributions. The always stupid Howard Kurtz wrote this morning that Olberman should apologize to MSNBC. Wrong as usual. MSNBC should apologize to all of us who owe Olberman for being the voice of truth for so many years. Yes he can be a gasbag, a blowhard, a narrow-minded lefty, a poor imitation of Edward R. Murrow--but he's proven himself to be a brave, witty, insightful commentator who always offers the real facts first and then his commentary. People don't seem to notice that many of his guests quietly (and often) disagree with him. There's a real give and take sometimes. Whatever piece of shit suspended him should himself be suspended--by a thin frayed rope over the Grand Canyon. One of my real heroes Sen. Bernie Sanders calls it "a disgrace" and writes about it here on Huff Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-ber...

4. I noted on my political postings that Jon Stewart irritated me at his rally when he seemed to equate left tv/radio talkers with right radio/tv talkers. This "equivalancy" bullshit spoiled the entire rally for me. The other thing wrong with it was that it wasn't about anything. Sanity? What Stewart was sanctimoniously promoting was mediocrity and cowardice. Bill Maher really took him on and down last night. This is just a few minutes long but well worth watching. http://tv.gawker.com/5683124/bill-mah...

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Unpublished authors-there's hope!

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Ed here: Christine O'Donnell is only the latest. Snooki and at least one of her moron friends have book deals. So does one of the most histrionic of The Housewives, maybe the blonde who crashed Obama's party. I ask with no guile--who reads this shit anyway?

Christine O'Donnell Considering Book Deal Offers
By Jason Boog on November 5, 2010 12:31 PM

U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell lost her Congressional bid in Delaware this week, but now she is considering book deal offers.

O'Donnell (pictured, via) spoke about the future in a Today Show interview. Fox News recently noted that they have "no plans to hire her" at the network (as some had speculated).

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "I honestly have no clue. I'm looking at the short-term, we have a lot of opportunities from book deals that I'm exploring, but like I said, for now, I would like to continue to be an advocate for those in Delaware , the farmers who have never had a voice in Washington, I would like to see what I can do to help bring their issues to the spotlight."

"The fucking Eagles?"

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Ed here: After The Big Lebowksi started to gain attention on HBO etc. a few people I'd known in the old days e mailed me to say that Lebowski's episode in the back seat of the taxi where the driver plays the Eagles reminded them of me in my drinking and drugging days. Belligerent to a fault; willing to say anything to piss somebody off. And always succeeding. Especially impressive was the fact that I wasn't tough. Unfortunately a few of the guys I picked on were.

"The fucking Eagles?" Lebowski cries. And then the burly cabbie tosses him out into the night.

I have to admit I've always been of two minds about the omni-present Eagles. I've always thought that Glen Fry was a hack and an idiot, esp when he was trying to ride the "Miami Vice" train and pretend he was Don Johnson's character. Some of their tunes are memorable but the collective persona is ridiculous. Seinfeld brilliantly mocked "Desperado," the phoniest bullshit-macho song ever recorded ("Up there riding fences" in his GAP duds). Range ridin hombres all right. Their fans are quick to point out that some of them actually came from Texas. I come from Iowa but I don't raise hogs or grow soybeans.

There were certainly better groups around at the time they hit so big but they had the right kind of urban cowboy schmaltz people wanted to hear and they had brilliant management.

I mention all this because The AV Club ran a truly interesting take on the Eagles and their relationship to country music. I don't know who Nathan Rabin is (I'm sure he doesn't know who I am either) but he is one hell of a writer. Read on:


By Nathan Rabin November 2, 2010

In 2009, A.V. Club head writer and hip-hop specialist Nathan Rabin decided to spend a year or two immersing himself in the canon of country music, a genre he knew little about, but was keen to explore. The result: "Nashville Or Bust," a series of essays about seminal country artists. After 52 entries, Rabin plans to travel south and explore some of country music's most hallowed landmarks and institutions.

Nathan Rabin:

When it comes to the Eagles' suitability for Nashville Or Bust, I am powerfully split. Part of me feels like I have to write about the Eagles, who became one of the most popular bands of the past century while playing a historically non-commercial genre: country-rock. I feel like I should write about the Eagles because they represented the non-cool side of the same hip scene that spawned Sweetheart Of The Rodeo-era Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Gram Parsons. Yet there is a dissenting voice in my head screaming that I shouldn't write about the Eagles because they aren't really country. After a certain point, it'd be a stretch to even call what they play country-rock, and this certainly isn't a series devoted to the biggest-selling rock groups of all time.

Yes, the Eagles are too big to cover, and too big not to cover. For a group whose greatest hits implore listeners to take it easy and cultivate a peaceful, easy feeling, the group inspires an astonishing contempt. The mere mention of the group's name is enough to inspire reflexive cries of "Fuck those guys," or approving references to Gram Parsons' description of the group's music as "a plastic dry-fuck."

for the rest go here:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/week-4...

Forgotten Books: The Crime Lover's Casebook edited by Jerome Charyn

There have been numerous anthologies attempting to show the breadth of crime fiction by signaling that it reaches from genre all the way to world literature. This is one of the best of them due to the taste of editor Charyn, himself an accomplished literary writer.

The genre is represented here by such excellent writers (with excellent stories) as Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Harlan Ellison (Not that Ellison can comfortably be claimed by any genre; he is unto himself), Tony Hillerman, Walter Mosley, Ross Thomas, George C. Chesbro and several others. Since the anthology was published first in 1993 it was nearly a decade ahead of the next group/generation up. There is no Megan Abbott, Marcus Sakey, Ken Bruen, Daniel Woodrell, etc. Be interesting to update the book with some of these new editions.

The literary writers range from Joyce Carol Oates to Italo Calvino to Flannery O'Connor to Manuel Vasquez Montalban among many others.

For me the two outstanding literary pieces are the excerpt from Don DeLillo's novel Libra and Raymond Carver's famous Cathedral. The DeLillo piece demonstrates how effective backstory can be. Yes, even though it's fallen into disrepute in some quarters, DeLillo uses it here to create a character and a world as unexpected and grim as any apocalyptic fiction. Stunning work.

Cathedral is arguably Raymond Carver's finest story. His version of the unreliable narrator is masterful. We don't challenge his veracity as a reporter--it's his attitude toward the dark tale he's relating. This is a story you can read a dozen times without mastering.

The Casebook was first published by the late (and much missed) Byron Preiss and is a great example of his taste in literature.

Why E-Books Aren't Scary - Stephen King

Here's an interesting interview with Stephen King about e books (From The Wall Street Journal):

Why E-Books Aren't Scary

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Stephen King has filled HIS share of printed pages: Since "Carrie" was accepted for publication in the spring of 1973, he has written more than 40 books and countless short stories. His latest work, coming Nov. 9, is a collection of four stories titled "Full Dark, No Stars." In an author's afterword, Mr. King notes that he wrote one of them, "A Good Marriage," after reading a piece about Dennis Rader, the "BTK Killer" (for "bind, torture and kill") who murdered 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. He wondered what would happen if a "wife suddenly found out about her husband's awful hobby."


Mr. King is realistic about where books are headed. In digital publishing, as a writer, he's what might be called an "early adopter." Back in March 2000, Simon & Schuster Inc. issued Mr. King's story "Riding the Bullet" as an e-book that was downloaded from the Web onto hand-held devices or computers.

More recently, Mr. King's novella "Ur" was written exclusively for Amazon's Kindle e-reader when the second generation of that device went on sale in February 2009. In the interview below, Mr. King discusses his thoughts on the future of digital reading and publishing:

for he rest go here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...

The Wall Street Journal Reviews Stranglehold

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From The Wall Street Journal

Dirty Politics, Deadly Games

By TOM NOLAN

What's worrying the Illinois congresswoman? That's the question vexing political consultant Dev Conrad, the protagonist-narrator of Ed Gorman's engaging political mystery "Stranglehold" (Minotaur, 211 pages, $24.99).

Instead of stepping up the tempo in the final days of a too-close-for-comfort election campaign, Rep. Susan Cooper is unfocused, secretive and often absent-without-explanation. Conrad, a former Army intelligence man who carries a Glock in his rental-car's glove compartment, goes into investigative mode, shadowing his own client through her private life for the sake of her (and his) career.

He finds that he is not the only one probing into the congresswoman's present and past. One step ahead of him is a ruthless duo specializing in "opposition research": digging up toxic dirt on political candidates.

"Elections are a contact sport," Conrad acknowledges, and in his trade "there are no saints . . . just degrees of sinners." But the game turns fatal when one of these rival snoops is murdered. Now the congresswoman's re-election race is a matter of life and death.

Mr. Gorman, the author of more than 30 books, tells his fast-paced story with a minimum of stylistic fuss; but he doesn't fail to indicate the selfish motives propelling certain public "servants" and the economic and social pain often suffered by the citizens so "served." The author uses an observation by Thomas Jefferson as the novel's headnote: "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct." The most frightening revelations in "Stranglehold" may be the unseemly truths it seems to tell about the status quo of our electoral process.

(Ed here: Thanks to Brendan Dubois for sending me the link to the review)

My Halloween Story

YESTERDAY AND THE DAY BEFORE

The rain didn't exactly help Elly Ward's mood.
She sat at her desk in her office at Sullivan & Kostik Advertising wondering how she was ever going to face him tonight. Neither ten months of seeing a shrink nor eleven months of taking every kind of anti-depressant imaginable had helped him much. He still went to the cemetery two days a week, and he still cried out for her in the middle of the night.
She watched the October rain streak the window here on the thirty-sixth floor. She felt confined, just as she had when she was a little girl and the rain made her stay indoors. She wanted to be outdoors, and she wanted the sun to be shining, and the wind to carry the scent of lilacs and the soft silent arc of butterflies.
A knock. She knew who it would be. She'd been dreading it all day.
"Yes?"
The door opened. Tom stuck his head in. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Busy?"
"Thinking, I guess."
"That's why you win all the awards. You think about what you write. Unlike some other people I could name."
Tom was an account executive. She'd won two Clios in the past three years and was the darling of the agency. Both the accounts she'd won the awards for were Tom's accounts.
"Just wondered if we could talk."
"Sure," she said. She just wanted to get it over with.
He came in, sat down in the leather chair facing her desk. He was handsome in a middle-aged sort of way. He'd been a professor before turning to advertising and college still clung to him. He wasn't quite as hard or cynical as the others, and seemed to have some occasional difficulty groveling before clients. Pride, she supposed, was the word she was looking for. Unlike most advertising people, Tom still had a little pride left. He glanced only once at the framed photograph of the twelve-year-old girl, Danielle, on her desk, then looked quickly away.
"Is it all right to say," he said, "that I had a good time last night?"
She looked out the window, at the darkening sky, the slanting silver rain streaking the glass. Then, rumbling distant thunder. Easy to think it was actually gunfire of a distant war somewhere, people being killed, children. Especially children.
"I won't let it happen again," she said quietly.
"You deserve a life, too," Tom said earnestly. That was another thing she liked about him. He wasn't afraid of being earnest, even slightly foolish. Some of the men found Tom vaguely embarrassing. But she liked his foolishness. It was usually well-placed.
She turned and looked at him. "You seem to forget, Tom, I'm married. And I'm sorry but I feel like shit about last night. I've never committed adultery in my life, and I don't intend to ever again."
"God," he said, and smiled sadly. "We're really working at cross-purposes here, aren't we?"
"Oh?"
"Yeah," he said, the sad smile still on him. "I came in here to tell you that I've fallen in love with you."
* * *
David Ward told his secretary at the law office that he was leaving early because of a headache. She nodded knowingly, and not without sympathy. Ever since his daughter's death three-and-a-half years ago, Daniel had pretty much coasted through his job here at the law firm. He'd once been the firm's most aggressive lawyer. Now he just put his time in, and sometimes—as today—he didn't do even that. But it was an old-line firm—quiet as a church in its offices, its partners Presbyterian, Princeton, Republican—its one charitable inclination being that it took care of its own.
She smiled. "Going to get your costume ready?"
"Costume?" he said, throwing his topcoat over his arm.
"You know. For Halloween."
"Oh, yes. Halloween."
That was another thing since the accident. Half the time David was in some other world. Just didn't hear what you said.
The secretary looked out the window. "Well, at least the rain has stopped. The kids'll be out tonight, you know, trick or treating."
He nodded—she still wasn't sure he'd actually heard and understood what she'd just said—and then he was gone.
* * *
"It isn't a life, and you know it," Tom said, still being earnest. "It's just existing."
They were still in her office. The rain had stopped. The late afternoon rush traffic was just beginning. Up this high, Elly could see most of the freeways from here. Another twenty minutes, it would be bumper-to-bumper.
"Well, if you think it's bad for me," she said quietly, "think of what it's like for him. He's lost thirty pounds, he can't sleep, he has no interest in sex or work—he spends most of his time up in her room. He even sleeps in her bed half the time. And I can hear him in there talking to her." She paused. "And he scares me, the way he talks about the neighbourhood kids sometimes. What he'd like to do with them."
"The little bastards. It's too bad you can't do anything about them."
"Unfortunately, there's no law against cruelty." Tears glistened in her grey eyes. "The names they called her—the way they used to follow her around all the time—they'd write things on the front of her locker at school—and they'd stand out in front of our house and call her names till David would come out and chase them away. There wasn't anything she could do about her condition, how obese she was. It was her endocrine glands, they put too much of a hormone into her system. She just got bigger and bigger." She touched a fingertip to a lone tear silver on her cheek. "I really am afraid of what he might do to them. It was their fault, it really was—they were just so cruel, I'd never seen anything like it—it's just that I know there's nothing we can do." Then, "Maybe I'm being selfish."
"Selfish? How?"
"He's given himself to her. He won't let go of her. He's willing to lay down his whole life for her. Maybe I'm too selfish. Maybe I should be that way, too—instead of wanting to go on with my life." Tears choked her voice suddenly. "She was twelve years old."
Tom shook his head. "God, she was just twelve years old."
"Twelve," she repeated gently. How many times she'd whispered that lone word to herself. Twelve. All history, all suffering was in that word. Twelve. She'd come home and found her daughter dead. She'd overdosed on Tom's tranquillizers. Twelve years old.
"I've never heard of anybody that young doing—" He stopped himself before he said the actual words. The actual words would just make things worse, the way actual words often did.
"I hadn't, either," Elly said. "I hadn't, either. But the grief counselor we saw said that it happens more than most people realize. At that age, I mean."
After a time, when she was gone from him again staring out the window, he said, "I love you."
She looked at him, then, and said, "Oh, God, Tom. It's your divorce, can't you see that? Your wife left you and you need somebody and we see each other every day and so it's just very convenient. That's what last night was—not love, not love at all. We were just trying to comfort each other."
"You need somebody, Elly. You really do."
"I have somebody, Tom. My husband."
"But he isn't—" More actual words he didn't want to say. More actual words that would just hurt.
"I know what he isn't, Tom. But that doesn't mean that he's not still my husband and that doesn't mean I don't still love him. I do. And I'm going to tell him about what happened last night."
"Oh, God," Tom said. "I'm not sure I'd do that. I'm not sure that's a good idea at all."
She looked right at him and said, "It may not be a good idea, Tom. But I owe him the truth."
* * *
The smell of brownies reminded David of his childhood. Of his mom and winter days when he'd stay in and read his science fiction novels. She'd always bring two brownies and a glass of milk up the stairs to his room. The aroma was always rich, sweet, warm.
As it was now.
He'd spent the last hour making the brownies. He'd used a box of Pillsbury Brownie Mix. Even a non-cook like him had no trouble. These were special brownies. His special brownies. He'd added one extra ingredient.
As they cooled, he went into the living room. He wanted to make sure that the porch light worked fine. So all the neighbourhood kids would know he was home and ready to give them their Halloween treats. A beacon, that's what the porch light was. Summoning the neighbourhood kids. Summoning.
When the brownies were cool, he cut them neatly into squares and then put them on a large white serving tray. He covered the tray with aluminum foil. He wanted to keep the brownies nice and warm for the kids, the neighbourhood kids. He carried the tray into the living room and set it on a TV tray which he stood to the left of the front door.
Then he turned on a table lamp and waited. He would have preferred the darkness. But he wanted to make sure that they knew he was home.
He wanted to give them his very special brownies.
* * *
Elly got home an hour later.
She was late because every crosswalk she came to on her way home was filled with Dracula and Frankenstein and the glowing white mask of Jason from Friday the 13th. The littlest kids were the cutest, tiny bodies lost in vast costumes, booty bags almost as big.
Halloween. With a stab, she remembered they could never find costumes large enough for Danielle. Elly always made her costumes by hand. The neighbourhood kids were especially mean to Danielle on Halloween nights. Finally, Danielle just stayed in, hiding in her room as she did so often.
As she reached her own block and saw the kids who had tormented her daughter—she could recognize them even beneath their costumes—she felt some of the rage that David felt constantly. Here they were out and enjoying themselves. They'd forgotten Danielle utterly. Life was so unfair sometimes. She thought again of the idea she'd been discussing with David recently. Maybe they needed to move. New city. New lives.
Two Freddy Krugers were washed by her headlights as she pulled into the drive. They didn't move, just stood there boldly, glaring at her. She knew who they were, Ronnie Haskins and Bob Nolan, two of Danielle's most relentless tormentors. She had an impulse to floor the accelerator. She could almost feel them crumpling beneath her car. How satisfying that would feel. How terrible they had been to Danielle.
Finally, they moved on the walk leading to her front door. They were trick or treating.
She pulled up the drive and into the two-stall garage.
The kitchen smelled of brownies. Freshly baked. For a moment, she let the scent carry her back to her Minnesota childhood. Her mother had been a pretty bad cook—there were a lot of good-natured family jokes about that fact—but her older sister Doris was wonderful in the kitchen. These brownies smelled like something Doris would have made.
"David? David, are you here?" But of course he was here. His car was in the garage. But he didn't answer. For some reason, this made Elly uneasy. Even when he was at his most depressed, he answered her calls.
Elly walked over to the counter. It was a mess. Mixing bowl, Pillsbury brownie box on its side, half full quart of milk turning warm. And a small paperback book. She wondered what it was. The instructions for brownies would be right on the box.
She picked up the paperback, which had been flattened to pages 61-62. A sentence was underlined.

Swallowing or smelling a toxic dose of cyanide as a gas or salt sprinkles can cause immediate unconsciousness, convulsions, and death within one to fifteen minutes or longer.

Then she saw the small rumpled paper sack pushed far back on the counter. She looked inside and found the cyanide. It had been opened, used.
She knew what he'd done, then.
My God.
She ran into the living room. Empty. She ran up the stairs. Their bedroom, empty. The TV room, empty.
Danielle's room—that's where she found him.
He was lying on his back on her bed, hands folded across his sternum the way he'd be in his coffin, eyes staring straight up at the ceiling. The eyes were glassy, tear-stained. The room was a zoo of cuddly stuffed animals, red birds and blue monkeys and canary yellow dinosaurs. Danielle's best friends. How she'd loved them. The room was in darkness but for the miserly light of the quarter moon.
Before she could speak, he said, "I couldn't do it." He didn't look at her.
She came over and sat softly down next to him on the single bed with the festive pink spread. She lay down next to him, both of them fully dressed, not even their shoes off, lay on the bed together, husband and wife, best friends, brother and sister, so many, many different kinds of relationships in a good marriage.
"I've been planning this for months," he said, "and I couldn't do it. I'm too much of a coward."
He began sobbing, then, and she held him the way she'd held sobbing Danielle so many, many nights when simple existence became so overwhelming that it crushed them, and made them hate not their tormentors but themselves. Danielle had loathed herself. Nobody considered her more of a freak than she herself had.
"I owe it to her," he said, choking on his tears. "I owe it to her. They've got it coming—and I still can't do it. Even as much as I love her I can't do it."
Danielle used to cry herself asleep. Literally exhaust herself. David did this tonight. And it didn't take long, either. One moment, he was talking; the next, next to her, he was snoring softly.
The doorbell rang downstairs.
She didn't want to wake him.
He needed sleep. Then maybe he'd forget this terrible day.
* * *
She hurried downstairs before the doorbell rang again.
She was just about to reach for the doorknob when she saw the serving plate with the aluminum foil over it. The brownies. She touched the foil. Warm. Still very warm.
She opened the door and there in the grainy porch light of the damp October dusk stood the two Freddy Krugers. Ronnie Haskins and Bob Nolan. The neighbourhood kids.
The words came as from a far place, as from a puppeteer that had turned her into his handmaiden.
Instead of sending them away empty-handed, she put on the big fake smile that all adults use on Halloween night and said, "Treat 'r treat, I'll bet."
Both boys were technically a little old for trick 'or treating. But she wasn't about to mention that now.
She filled their hands with brownies and said, "Right from the oven. Be sure and eat them while they're still warm."
They mumbled thank-yous and hurried down off the porch. Before they reached the next house, they'd flipped their masks up and were cramming the rich, chocolatey brownies into their mouths.
* * *
She went up and lay next to her sleeping husband. There would be no sleep for her.
She listened to the laughter and the sheer joyful shouting of the littlest ones as they went door to door. Nothing was more innocent than the sound of a child laughing.
She thought of Danielle and started to cry.
* * *
The ambulance—shrill siren, raucous red lights—raced into the neighbourhood twenty-three minutes later.
Ronnie Haskins was the first to die. He did not even make it to the hospital. At the hospital, Bob Nolan got the full treatment. They pumped his stomach and gave him an intravenous injection of sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate. But it did no good. He died nineteen minutes after reaching the hospital.
* * *
Elly did not answer any of the ringings of the bell or knockings on the door. Two were enough. Two settled the score.
But later there was a knock that sounded different—not a trick or treat knock—and she slipped away from her sleeping husband and went to the window and looked down.
A police car stood at the curb.
She thought of waking David, of telling him what she'd done. But, no, he deserved his sleep.
There would be plenty of time to tell him when he had to call the family lawyer and when the press came around to covet her with its cameras and put her—weepy and crazed-looking—on the six-o'clock news.

My favorite horrorfic film

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l'll say again, even though I've never known anybody to agree with me, that The Seventh Victim is the finest of Val Lewton's pictures.

I say this because its sense of evil is pervasive. And because the evil is suggested rather than demonstrated until the very end. Even the first act, which is essentially a detective story, concludes on a darkening note despite the setting of the cosmetics business for which the sister worked. There's a decadence to the business itself.

I don't want to spoil the story so I'll say that what fascinates me on third and fourth viewing is how subtly the theme is played out--the young woman hoping against hope that the evil she suspects doesn't exist--and the forces against her who have dedicated their lives to discovering evil and feeding on it. And then the reverse--it is the young woman who understand real evil and the Diabolists who are pathetic pretenders.

Kim Stanley had a troubled career. For me she was too smitten with The Method. But this was apparently before acting school got hold of her. She does excellent work here.

I like enjoy and admire all the Lewton pictures and watch them over and over. But this one has stayed with me as none of the others have.

Here are a few notes from IMBD:

The story as filmed:

Mary Gibson, a naive orphan, goes to Manhattan to find her missing sister Jacqueline. Her investigation leads her to Jacqueline's secret husband, and also to a strange cult of Diabolists who are also hunting Jacqueline. Written by Ken Yousten {kyousten@bev.net}

The story that wasn't filmed:

The original story for the film (outlined by DeWitt Bodeen) was to be about an orphaned heroine caught in a web of murder against a background of the Signal Hills oil wells. If she didn't find out the killer's identity in time, she would become his seventh victim. Producer Val Lewton wanted the story to go in a different direction and called in a second writer to help reshape it.

A Fine New book from The Library of America

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(Thanks to Ricky Sprague for the link)