Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 247: Killian H. Gore's Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book (2018)

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As Conrad Brooks taught us all in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), "It's tough to find something when you don't know what you're looking for." Which is true. But sometimes, it's also tough to find something when you know exactly what you're looking for. I'll give you an example.
I found this by accident.If you've ever read one of Shakespeare's plays, you know that his scripts are not formatted like those for modern day stage plays. For one thing, his stage directions are brief, sparse, and very vague. For another thing, his characters often speak in iambic pentameter, so their speeches are formatted like poems. 
I was under the impression—false, it now seems—that there was a version of the Plan 9 script formatted to look like a Shakespearean play. I had a strong memory of such a book existing, and I thought it might make interesting fodder for the blog. It's October, and I wanted to do something suitable for "spooky season." So I searched for it. And searched. And searched. I eventually came to the conclusion that no such book was ever written. I can't find anything remotely like it.
NOTE: After this article was published, reader Ed Goldstein informed me that such a book definitely does exist. It's The Tragicall Historie of Plan the IX (2018) by Ryan D. Smith, and it is indeed a rewrite of Plan 9 in iambic pentameter. There is apparently a filmed performance of the play, also from 2018. The cast includes Dana Gould, Tonjia Atomic, MST3K producer Greg Tally, Jackey Neyman Jones, and others. I do not have a copy of the play or the movie, but they are both candidates for future discussion.
But you know what I did find? Killian H. Gore's self-published Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book (2018). The title tells you exactly what to expect: a collection of trivia questions about Ed Wood's best-known movie. But who is this Killian H. Gore and what caused him to compile such a volume? And could this humble little book actually teach me a thing or two about a movie I've seen dozens of times? I was able to snag a copy from Amazon for only about seven bucks, so I took the risk.
Like many of the hyper-specialized books about Ed Wood that I've read for this blog in recent years, the Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book was print-on-demand, so it arrived extremely quickly. Personally, I love this new publishing model. It allows us to have physical copies of works that might have limited or niche appeal. But Gore's book is also available in a Kindle edition for just 99 cents, should that be a more attractive option to you.
The book runs just over a hundred pages and contains four quizzes in total. The first is a general quiz about Plan 9 consisting of 150 questions. The second is an "out of this world difficult" quiz about Plan 9 with ten additional questions. This is followed by a 25-question quiz about alien invasion movies and a 25-question quiz about zombie movies. Naturally, answer keys are provided for all four quizzes. Gore rounds out the book with an original short sci-fi story called "The Truth Will Astonish Us," which I will discuss later in this review. All in all, pretty decent value for money.
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