Hub - Issue 8 by Kate Kelly / Paul Kane / Lee Harris

Author:Kate Kelly / Paul Kane / Lee Harris
Format: epub

Reviews

Development Hell reviewed by Paul Kane

Development Hell By Mick Garris

Published by Cemetery Dance (www.cemeterydance.com)

Hardback Limited Edition: $40, Lettered $200

The name Mick Garris should be very familiar to fans of the genre. He is, of course, the acclaimed director of such movies and TV mini-series as Sleepwalkers, The Shining, The Stand and Desperation, as well as being the driving force behind top US show Masters of Horror. He’s written prose before, most notably a collection called A Life in the Cinema, in which his ‘Chocolate’ story – later adapted for MoH – appeared. But Development Hell is his first full-length novel, a really sumptuous looking hardback, complete with Les Edwards cover artwork depicting Jean Harlow with Frankenstein stitches in her neck. If that doesn’t make you want to pick up the book and read, I don’t know what will…

Told in first person, our story begins with the discovery of a mutant baby belonging to a Mexican woman in downtown LA. Rewind slightly, and we get the back history of the person telling the story – a young director who’s come up through the UCLA film-making courses and cut his teeth on a student movie called Words Without Voices, which got him noticed. Unfortunately, his first big gig, Expiration, bombs and we catch up with him as he’s looking for a project that will see him rocketing to great heights again. He thinks he’s found that with the freak baby, and embarks on a mockumentary shoot which includes the hideous baby’s birth. Little does he know, the creature will become a part of his life thereafter.

Lesser story-tellers might leave it at that, but Garris continues to give us a chilling account of a night spent with the re-animated corpse of Harlow, for the right price, naturally, the protagonist’s spiral into despair and into TV soap directing – though which is worse, he leaves you to decide – and his affair with a Hollywood princess, which results in tragedy for all concerned, not to mention the reality show to end them all. There is even the possibility of transcending death, as the book deals with the subject of body jacking in an effort to court the whore that is Lady Hollywood; one minute teasing, the next turning her back on you…

More than just a horror director and author, Mick Garris shows here that he is also quite a cunning satirist and social commentator. His bird’s eye view of the movie business has allowed him to make notes and weave all of his observations into the book, which features guest appearances from everyone who’s anyone in La-la Land: Spielberg, Cameron, even the ghost of Hitchcock, all are wonderfully and more realistically rendered than people might expect. If there’s one thing Garris doesn’t do, it’s pull his punches.

That’s not to say there aren’t elements of horror and the supernatural present – they’re here in spades. I dare you to read about the sick exploits of that baby without wincing (what else, from the guy who

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