[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Capes and Tights podcast right here on Capesandites.com. I'm your host, Spooky Justin. Soderberg we're here for Horror Week at the podcast and the website capesandites.com all things Horror. This week we've got interviews, we've got podcasts, we've got top ten, top 20 lists. We've got reviews of comic books, books, graphic novels, all that stuff right here on Capesandites.com. But kicking the week off for Horror Week, I welcome back to the podcast professor and author Jeremy Dauber to the podcast to talk horror, all things, the genre of horror. Jeremy is a professor over at Columbia University teaching literature, teaching language, teaching, all that stuff, but also teaches books or courses on comics as well as the genre of horror, which he talks about here on this episode. He's also released a book called American Comics that we talked about back on Episode 19. So if you want to learn more about the book American Comics and the History of Comics in North America, check that out over at episode 19 and buy it at Amazon or any of your local bookstores, as well as the author of a recent book called Mel Brooks Disobedient Jew. If you're a fan of comedy and you're a fan of Mel Brooks, you check that out to wherever books are sold. But this episode here for Horror Week is to talk about horror and all things the genre of horror. So this is Jeremy Dauber, author and professor on episode number 133 here at the Capes and Tights
[email protected]. Like follow, share all that stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Blue Sky, as well as Rate Review, subscribe all that stuff over at Apple and Spotify and all your major podcasting platforms. Thank you, everybody. Welcome to Horror Week with Jeremy Dauber. Enjoy.
Welcome to the podcast, Jeremy. How are you?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Great. It's great to be back.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Welcome. Welcome back, I should say, right? We just talked about that off pre recording that it's been. Let's see what's the math on that? Like episode 19 to 133 is 114 episodes.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: That sounds good to me.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Right?
[00:02:16] Speaker B: 114. Wow.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: In between there. And we talked briefly again, I should have pulled us up. If anybody who's going to we're going to talk about the American Comics is a book that Jeremy came on and talked about recently, which is available anywhere books are sold and you can grab it there. Excellent book. But listen to episode 19 about us talking about that book before we get started into horror stuff and stuff like that. How has the two years have been having this on the shelves? Has it been a nice reception for you?
[00:02:44] Speaker B: It really has been. I mean, I think sort of the high point for me absolutely had to have been that Neil Gaiman read it and he really liked it and he blurbed the paperback version. And I got a chance to meet him at a Celebration for Norden who put out the book, and he said some nice things. So that was Lifetime Dream Unlocked, but from Gaiman to other people, perhaps less famous, it's been really lovely to hear some school kids who have read it in high schools and in colleges and said that they've learned a lot and it's just been a lot of fun to get the response.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: That's awesome. That's so cool. And that's funny, because this started off my buddy Gibron, who owns the local bookstore, Briar Patch, was like, oh my gosh. When we were first launching this iteration of a podcast back in 2021, I had you on, and Douglas Woke came on, and he was like, all these great book people who are great authors, who are writing great books about comics. This is so cool. And so that was really cool, little beginning to this journey we've been on over here at the podcast. So thank you again for coming on then. But thank you coming on and returning this time, and I hope people pick up. American Comics is really good, a book on the history of American comics. So grab that at your local bookstore. But we're here to talk about more things. Horror.
This is not horror, but there's horror comics. And we'll get to that later on this week of Horror Week. Here at the podcast, we have some horror comic people coming on as well. But we're going to talk a little bit about what's your day job? You're a professor at Columbia, is that correct?
[00:04:19] Speaker B: That is my day job, yes. That's what I do, and I teach students here at Columbia, and I write books. Those are my two things that I do.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Yes, but you teach more language.
Give us a little synopsis of what you actually do over at Columbia.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Sure. So the way I usually describe myself and my job at Columbia is that I'm a professor of Jewish literature and American Studies. Those are the two things that I really focus on, and I mostly focus on literature and culture. I'm kind of a cultural historian and a literary.
So, you know, I'm very interested on the American Studies side, really sort of American popular culture. And so I've written books about Jewish comedy, which is, of course, a major part of American culture. But not only that, I've written about comic books, as you were just saying, and I've become very interested in horror. I've always been interested, even as a kid. But now with a friend of mine in the English department, we teach a big course at Columbia on the history of horror. And I decided that one of my next projects would be to write a history of what has scared Americans basically from sort of the earliest days until today. And so in the process of doing that, I've been reading a lot of scary stuff, and I've been watching a lot of scary movies from sort of the beginning on forward and teaching about them, too. I said, oh, there's a book in this. That's what I'm working on now.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: That's amazing. I love that.
It sounds like you've been able to some people go to school to become a professor, and they get into professorship and they teach whatever comes along and whatever, but it sounds like it's so much fun because it seems like you have an extreme passion for what you both teach and what you both write about. Am I right about that?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: You're absolutely. I mean, I've been very lucky that I've been able to be in places that allow me to do this and that I've been able to get to a place where I can do this. And so yesterday I'm teaching a seminar on the American comic book and graphic novel. And I said in the seminar, okay, this is a literal sentence that I said yesterday's seminar. All right, let's move from Superman to Batman. Right? And my twelve year old self would have just been and then next term I'm going to say the sentence, okay? Now we have to understand something about Stephen King before we go any further. Right. And those two things, again, adolescent dreams have been fulfilled, so to speak.
I'm not doing exactly the same things I think I would have done with them when I was twelve.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: But I'm doing them.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: We were talking about that. I had Ethan Sachs on, who wrote Star Wars Bounty Hunters, but he also has a book coming out, or had a book come out called A Haunted Girl with his daughter Naomi, but he had written a book called COVID Chronicles. He's also a journalist, and so he was saying that they're actually teaching some schools, like his old high school that he went to bought 70 copies of the COVID Chronicles to teach something. I forgot exactly what he said it was, but something about literature, journalistic something. And it was like one of those things that they're teaching using comic book related things in schools. Something that I was getting yelled at for having a comic book in school, let alone now they're actually having courses all the way in college, but all the way down to high school and potentially even lower than that, using comic books as a teaching medium. And it's just crazy to think about nowadays, I'm only 37, but the fact that when I was in high school, it was frowned upon to have a.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Comic book in school 100%. I mean, I often say this when I'm lecturing to public audiences that I'm older than you are, but when I was getting you said, what would heaven have been like? I would say, well, you could go to the public library and you would have comics that you could get, which was just simply not available, and that you could, as you say, read them in schools and sort of do a project on them or something like that. And now librarians are all in on graphic novels. Parents are loving graphic novels. Teachers love them. It's just an entirely different ballgame, certainly from when I was growing up. But as you say, even from when you were a teenager. And of course, what is being on offer books is so different as well. We're really in a golden age for the medium without a question.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: And it's one of those things that I feel like talking comic books. American Comics History might be volume two, which is what the change in we talked then in 2021 about how things are changing at that moment and how it's like when you write a historical book like this, history keeps going. And so it's one of those things that one of these days there might be a volume two of this book or an updated version, which adds a couple of chapters at the end about different things that come out in the way we use comic books in the future. And that's just one of those cool things. We have digital comics now, we have Web comics, we have things in the comic book world is just ever moving. But one of the things that's growing right now, in my opinion, is horror comic books. I think horror comics as a whole is fascinating. I talked about Ethan Sachs here. He's a haunted girl book with his daughter Naomi. It's a book about depression and suicide, but it's written in the horror genre because it's a horrific thing. And he was just saying that. But it also helps because the horror genre is so big right now that it now falls in line with the people who are like, I want a horror book. So not only is this this unique book, but it's like, in this genre that people are actually wanting right now.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: And I think what you're getting to is something that's very interesting to me in talking with my students and in thinking about this for the book that I'm writing, which is the idea of horror as what we could call a mode, a general way of looking at the universe. And then we could say that sort of a story of a true life trauma or a true life could be horrific and it could be written in a way that and horror as a particular self defined genre where we say, okay, there's a section of the bookstore or the library, or it's got a card, gun, those kind of things. And the uneasy kind of blurring that we have between those two.
You know, if you look at sort of the history of it in the United States, which is, of course, what I'm doing in this know, you have authors that we think of as sort of our classic canonical authors. Edith Warden or Hawthorne, obviously Edgar Allan Poe, but Henry James, all these kind of writers who are writing works that we would now put in that horror section, but they're just saying, these are stories that I'm writing. I'm writing ghosts or whatever. They happen to have a ghost in them, or they happen to. But starting in the 20th century, we've also really created this genre, which in some sense is great because it allows for really people to create a community, to recognize one another, to develop new and groundbreaking work, but also sometimes closes it off to people who I think would love a lot of this material or some of it in anyway, but who say, oh, well, I don't read that stuff. That genre is not a genre I'm interested in. So it's that interesting back and forth dynamic that comes out sort of in the last years. But there's a renaissance in it. There is no question. Just amazing stuff. Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: And I agree with you in that sense of labeling things. My brother used to play in bands and he used to be like, what are you this? And he's like, well, we're just a band. And because he didn't want to put a label on it, because putting a label on it made it then section off people. Maybe people will fall more in love with you because of it, but maybe people won't even listen to you because of it. And the same thing goes. My buddies who own a convention in the area, they did the Bangor comic and ToyCon. They added a convention in Portland, Maine, which was the main comic and ToyCon. And so they do one every six months. There's one up here in the Bangor area, and it's one in Portland in April. Well, the last year, a year ago this October, they decided to rebrand it to call it Weekend of the Wicked for that one convention. And they invited five out of the seven kids from the original It movie. Okay, so Seth Green is obviously way too big and too famous to come to our little town. And then, sadly, I can't remember his name, but the 7th one has passed away, so they couldn't get so five out of the seven kids were here in our town. They had brought in what's his name from American Werewolf in London. I can't remember his name, whatever. The actor from American Werewolf in London who played the American Werewolf in London, David Nunn.
And they invited one or two other guests. They had a guy who did a documentary on the It movie. They had the Stephen King podcast out there, invited them all. Coming in the home of Stephen King. I live in Bangor, Maine, which is where Stephen King's house is. This is technically Dairy, Maine, like what you see in Stephen King lore. And it was a and it was the weirdest thing because you think people live in the back door of these places that are in these Stephen King novels. Like I said, it's not called Bangor in his books. It's mostly called so what it was, I think, it was because it was a horror style convention. And I think what it did was it brought the people in who were in love with horror, but then it sectioned off the people who were like, I don't care about scary movies or horrific movies or horrific things.
And they had a couple of other guests that weren't horror that maybe draw in those people, and people just avoided it. And so then from that point on, they're like, okay, that's it. We're not classifying this convention as any specific genre at all. It's going to be a pop culture convention and see what happens. But yes, coordinating those people off or sectioning those people off sometimes can be bad.
That's exactly what you said back in the day. They just made movies.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
It becomes very interesting because you give and you take. You have, as I say, this incredibly vibrant and creative and talented horror community that is producing just amazing work and really interesting. And at the same time, as, you know, people who are not already kind of self identified might not come to when I was talking with publishers for this book, which Algonquin Books is going to publish, and I'm very excited about that, there were some people who got it who are like, this is fantastic. And then there were other people who are like, you know what? It's not about you. It's not about your writing. It's not about you. But we're not into horror. And it was said in a way that people don't really say about comedy or, you know what? I'm not into comedy. Right. Nobody puts it in that way.
And I think that my wife is one of these people who says, I don't understand who I love. I should just say I love very much, but I don't understand why you would want to be scared. And I get that. I do get that. I totally get that. And I also feel like and this is something with the conference that you can understand why you say, we're both parents. You and I just we don't want our kids to be exposed to something that they're not ready know? Totally get that. So but on the other know, fear is an essential part of the human condition. And it's interesting to take material that kind of works with those fears, puts them out into the light, lets you look at them and lets you think about them.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: I wasn't a horror. I mean, I was like starting this week off of this Horror Week, I wasn't actually a huge horror fan at all.
Just full disclaimer. It was the fall of 2022 where I first ever watched Friday the 13th, a Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, all those movies. I didn't read many horror novels at all. Like, if I was going to read a novel, most of the novel or books that I've written or read over the past five to ten years have been books like American Comics or all of the Marvels from Douglas Woke, or autobiographical style, or biographical style books. Books that I'm trying to learn more about a specific person or something. And it was horror comics that really got me saying this is an amazing way of telling the story is having this moments of scariness and gore.
Comics can scare you by flipping a page to jump, scare you on the next panel or whatever it may be. And then I started reading more horror novels.
Like I said last fall, I started watching Halloween and all them. And then this fall I'm continuing the same thing where I'm in this mode where September 1 rolls around and from September 1 all the way to Thanksgiving, I'm just like it's horror or horror adjacent movies.
And then same thing with novels. I'm reading Stephen Graham Jones Indian Lakes trilogy stuff. I read some Daniel Krause recently, and so those horror books are just like, it's so much fun, but I'm reading it more Jeremy, in a way of taking each individual medium of telling the story of horror story and looking at it differently. And so when I watch a horror movie, I watch the entire thing, meaning that I listen for sound effects, I listen for the music, the acting, the special effects, all that stuff. When I read a book, it's the same thing, how I'm imagining all of that in my head, reading a comp book, all that stuff.
It's just there's so much more to it than if I put a comedy on, for example, you're just listening for the jokes. You don't care about the special effects, you don't care about anything else. You're just watching this movie to have it be funny. You literally could not watch it most of the time. Most of the time you could have it on in the background and just go, that was funny, and keep on going.
Comedy comics are more subject. I mean, people could take it. There's so many different avenues of comedy that comedy doesn't hit everybody. And so that's kind of hard in that sense.
And so long winded thing here is I just feel like each individual medium to tell a horror story has their own individual pluses and minuses, and there are just more to it. And that's just me because I've just fallen in love with horror over the past two years. And why I think it's better than everything else right now, but I don't know. Do you see what I'm saying on that?
[00:18:17] Speaker B: I do. I think you really have hit the nail on the head here. I mean, I think that just to start with my own Audiba, I did not grow up watching horror movies. They were too scary. And part of that gets to this point that I think you're making, which is that comics and movies by definition, are a visual medium yes, there are words in both, but they're a visual medium. And so that is a kind of presentation that really kind of basically puts it out there. I grew up with horror fiction. I loved reading. Particularly Stephen King, your neighbor.
That was what I read. And even though you can argue that sort of what you create in the mind and the abstraction of these words is somehow scarier than what you see, that wasn't what it was for me. And it's certainly the case, to take an example of a slightly older horror comic that I think is very interesting, which was Garth Ennis'and, Jason Burrows'crossed. That was something I remember. It came out around the time when I had my first kids, and I was like, I do not want this in the house.
Because with a book, they're not really going to pick it up until they're at least older.
You pick up and you open to almost any page of some of these comics and you say, Right. And that gets to a second point, which is that even within these media, though, whether it's comics or it's novels or it's certainly movies, you could have different kinds of visual display.
Even now, although I watch a lot of this for research, I'm not much of a gorehound. It's just not my thing. It's fine for people who like it. They like it. That's great.
I'm more of a suspense, psychological horror kind of guy, which maybe makes sense given that I came to it through sort of novels where it's less visually out there. But that's just my particular inclination. But you can do great work which demands and this gets to that last point you're making, Justin, total attention from either of these, right. From the total effect that they bring about.
And I do think that a great work, whether it's of comedy or of horror. If it's a work that, as you say, you cannot sort of not pay attention to it, then it's just not doing as good a job as other ones. Right.
But the final thing between comedy and horror, and these are, as you're implying, two things that I love, both working on comedy and horror, both is that they really do demand a relationship with the audience. Right. If you write a poem and the audience says, you know what? I don't get that poem, you can say, well, that's not your problem. I'm the poet. But if you say, I made a horror movie and no one finds it scary in any way, you got to be rethinking your life choices exactly.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: As a horror movie. If it's not a horror movie, is not scary. Is it like a tree falls in the woods? Does anybody hear it? Is it actual horror movie or just like I mean, exactly.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: And I think that sometimes it would be wrong, I mean, as a critic, right, to say, oh, here's the psychological horror movie. Why isn't there gore in it, right?
Usually it's the opposite way where and I do not feel this way, but I've read some critics who say, well, this movie is just gore, it can't be a good movie. And I think that's wrong. I think you can have a movie that is really a splatter movie and that can work very well in the same way that you can also have very gory works on the page, splatter punk. That can be excellent, but you have to judge it by those criteria. You can't say the opposite.
Why is this not just suspense or whatever?
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Are you watching more movies right now than reading or are you equally doing both because you've read a lot of horror already and the movies you're trying to catch up on? Or is there just a balance of both for research for this movie, this book?
[00:22:15] Speaker B: I'm trying to do both. And I started out in this very sort of strange thing, which I think you know, Justin, but the podcast listeners don't, which is that I said, you know what, I'm going to watch a bunch of movies for this. And I've decided because as a historian, that it'll be useful to watch them in chronological order and so I'm going to watch them and I'm going to kind of live tweet through it.
This was a long time ago, before Musk had bought Twitter and what have you. So it was Twitter then and not X. And I said, okay, you know what, I'll probably have to watch like 150 movies and now I'm on something like 350 and I'm only up to 1974 or something like that, so I got a ways to go. But I do feel like it's been very interesting to watch this evolutionary development in a way that very few people on the planet have done now, because they weren't watching them chronologically as of 1970, they'd have to be in their ninety s or one hundred.
So that's been interesting, but it means that I'm very good on stuff up to the mid seventy s at this point. And then after that I get a little bit more shaky.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Yes, and I feel like there's a difference. I think back. One of my favorite horror movies of all time are Psycho. And then also on there, honestly, we're going to release during this week as post is my favorite horror movies and up there is Rosemary's Baby. And it's funny though, because my top five or ten are all 1980s and earlier for my favorite actual like, horror movies. And then like the ten to 20 are the ones that are like within the past five years. And it's just kind of funny that for most of them, I would say there's a mixture of everything in there, but 2022 for me had a bunch of really good horror movies that came out that I was really excited about. But it's still one of those things that if you want to say, what's some good horror movies, I'm probably going to go to the 1970s, 1980s, and tell you that's where horror movies were good. Because I feel like also they changed a little bit. I think we're going back, I think, to the classics in the sense of some people are writing more current horror movies that are based like they could be written in the 1970s, but there was a while there where they just wanted to freak people out and gross people out in horror movies. And I just didn't understand, like, even the Amityville horror from what, 1979 right around there to the 2005 version or 2009 version. It with Ryan Reynolds in it. 1979 one where it was like you had to rely on acting. You had to rely on practical effects. You had to rely on most of that stuff was way better, I think, than the new one, because the new one was almost like they were just trying to gross me out and just trying to make me not be able to watch the screen, whether it be jump scares or thing. There was more story in the 1979 version that was just scary. And I think that's what I think. I think you're up to the point now in horror movies where you watch some good ones, whereas now it's from this point on, you have to struggle through some of these movies that you're going to watch if you end up watching a lot more.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Well, I also think one of the things that's interesting is when you watch two movies from 1975, let's say, and one of his jaws, you're like, this 1975 is a great year for army. You watch, like I just did, 45 movies from 1975 that are horror movies. There are a lot of stinkers there, too.
You can learn interesting from a cultural historian's perspective, you can learn a lot of interesting things from us, but a lot of them are not very good. But as we should. Because if you're normal human beings and not writing a book about this, you cull in your head.
So 1974, you see Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That's something that we're doing where this is not a movie that shies away from anything and it still goes hard, the original, many, many years later. But what it does, which I think is one of the many things that it does that's very good, is it takes account of the impact that this violence would have on a random person who stumbles into it. So the main character, the main protagonist, the final girl, spends a lot of the last 15 or 20 minutes just screaming her head off, like panic. And you're like, of course. What would you do if you were a normal human being? And you would just go stark raving mad right away and just scream and go on impulse. And Toby Huber does a phenomenal job of portraying that so that. Works very well. Jaws, which comes out the next year, thank God the shark broke, as they say, because it ends up being a work of real sort of suspense because they don't show the monster. And it also and this was interesting about watching it, right at this time, is it becomes in some ways a work about sort of post Watergate not trusting the government, right? They're like, oh, we can keep it open. It's all fine, right, when they know. So those things become a lot of fun. But then there's all these other movies in which you're like, really? This is what you're talking about now?
[00:27:15] Speaker A: And it's funny you mentioned Jaws, too.
It's a movie that for the longest time, I didn't want to put on a horror list. For a longest time, I was just like, no, it's not. And I don't know why. I don't know if it's because I didn't have a lot of history and knowledge of horror, where I was just like, but then I'm like, no, it does make that an Alien. A lot of people don't put Alien on a lot of their lists of horror movies. But I'm like, I think it's a horror movie. It's a different type of horror movie, but it's a horror movie. But also, Jaws in 1975 was the first realist summer blockbuster. And so you think about it, it's like this horror movie in this movie that's really uneasy to watch and how many people didn't swim the summer of 1975. You think in places that have no sharks, for sure, we're still not swimming. People were, like, paid to go on ponds and pools in 1975. But it was the summer blockbuster. It was the first definition of a summer blockbuster film. And it was in that horror genre, which is pretty crazy because nowadays, if a horror movie makes $10 million in the box office, they're like, look at that. This is amazing, when now there's like back in 1970, it was a blockbuster. It was a movie that made tons of money and was very popular and still is to this day.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it gets back to this thing that we were talking about earlier, about sort of I'm less interested about the blurring between sort of horror as a mode, let's say, and horror as a genre.
I, for this book, am more interested in what scares people than what the genre is. So I have a lot of things in the book that you wouldn't conventionally call a horror movie.
So I think that gets, I think, quite rightly, Justin, to some of your diffidence about putting this in sort of a horror category. Everyone understands, and Spielberg does a great job with this, with these shots from kind of underwater coming, the fear of being in this sort of murky medium and something where you're not really in control and something grabbing you and sort of taking you out of control, right? It really is about a we're trying to go out there and conquer an environment, and the environment is just too hostile for them. We really kind of know that. And alien is the same way, right? Space is hostile.
Alien, you could argue, is kind of Jaws in space. It's really HP. Lovecraft in space, but kind of Jaws.
And this is something with all sort of the later shark movies. The more you see the shark, the more you're like, okay, it's not going to happen. I'm not going to have a gigantic shark go like this.
I'll jump, but then I'll be fine.
But every time we go into the water, we're like, okay, we know it's not going to be a shark, but maybe we'll something else.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Yeah, something in that water is something that's like, why crystal clear water on a shore of a Bahama beach where you're like, see the water? Okay, that's fine. But like murky water in a pond, you never know what lies beneath kind of thing and so on. But what's even scarier about Jaws is the Jaws Two when the people who run the town still don't get it. That's the scarier part, honestly. It's a horror movie in a sense that there's obviously sharks and all that stuff. But the scariest part is the people who run the town are like, no, it's not out there. Like, dude, we just did this not long ago and people died. This is not cool. Why are you listening? That's scary. So I was thinking in my head, like, talk about what scares us in this world. Are you going to get into politics? No kidding.
Because that's what's scary in this world right now.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: I think that 100% the book is going to get into politics because in that broadest sense of the word, right? Because in the 1950s, for example, people were afraid of the Americans, I should say, were afraid of the Soviet Union. They were afraid of the Cold War suddenly heating up, of this kind of death, and they were afraid of communist infiltration. How meaningful a threat communist infiltration really was we could talk about. Right? But certainly a movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is built on this fear of there's some hostile force, and it's a human force, even though in the movie it's allegorized as an alien that's going to come in and it's going to ruin our way of life. And whether the actual facts of that are right or not, the fear was there. And that's something that's very important to me. I mean, to take a different kind of thing. So much of our domestic agenda now is generated by all sorts of fears. And I'll take sort of a simple one.
All of these shows on CBS over the last ten or 15 years are like, there's a predator right in your neighborhood and this and that, right? And they're going to drive.
And you can say until the cows come Home, that the statistics show that these fears are disproportionately put on these shows, but that doesn't necessarily change our attitudes towards it. And that's very interesting to me in terms of the fears in question.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: We had David Desmolcha and Leah Kilpatrick on in the month of October. Obviously we're recording this early, so I recorded it yesterday, but it doesn't come out until the middle of the month. But this is coming out at the end of the month. So it's always weird when I have this discussion with people where I'm like, this person came on the podcast and it really hasn't even aired yet. And they wrote a short story in a book called Headless Horseman for Dark Horse Comics, which is their annual it's like their anthology about horror stories, like little horror snippets. And this is little, like, kid monsters that go into a horror haunted house. And the horror rooms that they go into are not your typical, like something's going to jump out at you or whatever. It's like a psychiatric office, psychiatry office, and there's a political one, and it's all these different ones that are like actual fears in the world. I am a big fan of horror movies, of things where you turn the movie off and go, oh, my gosh, Jeremy, that could actually, like, that's possible to happen. And that's A Legacy of Violence is a book that Cullen Bun just put out with Mad Cave Studios. And I just had it I read it at my book club with my local comic book shop, and I'm like, the biggest thing I love about this book is the fact that when you close it, there's no supernatural element, there's no alien force.
The book is quote unquote, believable to the point where you close the last page of volume one and you're like, this person in this book could be my neighbor. And that's the scariest thing to me. Forget the fact that Jason has now been around in 17 films and the fact that Michael Myers for somehow can't be killed and all that stuff. The original Halloween when it was just this person to the point where or the original Jason, where it was spoiler for everybody who haven't seen Jason or Friday the 13th, number one is this his mom was believable to me. When Jason comes, Jason gets resurrected by the lightning bolt in his body in the grave. That's where, okay, you lost me. And that's the scariest. The scariest thing to me is the fact that I could leave this house and run into someone who is based in this movie who could be killing people. That's scary to me.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: And I think that one of the interesting things about that is that in some sense, you might be able to argue that those later movies lost the plot. Right?
The impetus of Jason was that he was a believable character and then they rendered him unbelievable. I think I was a young adult. I think the timing is right. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out, which I loved, and I thought that clearly it made no bones about not being real, but it did. And I know there's all this stuff with Joss Whedon now, and I think that we should mention that. But the thing that made it very powerful for people in the 90s certainly was the sense that it was such a clear allegory for stuff that meant a lot to people. So, like, when she sleeps with angel for the first time and then he becomes an ass and never calls and never yes, it's true that the nature of the ass that he becomes is a psychopathic killing vampire, right? But really, it's all of this thing like, are they only interested in me for one thing? And I felt that that rang very nicely because it never made any bones that it was an allegory if it works in whatever vein, it works. But here like you're saying with the Jason thing, you say, well, okay, it was one thing and it was really about sort of this plausible and believable thing. But then it becomes something like, what? No worries. And you're like, okay, I understand you wanted to make more money and you needed sequel number nine or whatever.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: And I always look at this in a way that I am not a filmmaker, and I don't feel like I could be a good filmmaker, but couch critics here, sitting on the couch watching the movie, like, how I could make this better? It was like the simplest answer to the Michael Myers and the Jason thing is that they're both wearing masks, so it could literally be anybody underneath it. And so this could be passed down multiple times. He would have Friday the 13th, number 27, and just have it be, oh my God, he didn't know he had a son, or all this other stuff that could make it more believable in my sense. But no, you kill this guy a bunch of times, you revive him or you get shot in the head and still survives and all this stuff. And I'm just like, okay, now I'm like, of course it was Jason. Everybody's. Not that's the other one where people don't believe it. There's no way it could be Jason, okay, we're near Crystal Lake and a guy's killing someone. It's probably Jason. People. Come on. How many the 17th movie has come out and you don't understand it's actually Jason. But no, you're right. They lost where they were going with it. And that's the other part, is most horror movies are cheap to make and they make their money back. And so making these movies is to them as, like, making another reboot of Friday the 13th or Halloween or something like that. They finished Halloween. You're telling me right now michael Myers is not going to make another appearance in the next 1015 years, it could be five years between Michael Myers returns and they reboot the whole franchise again. And it's because they make money and they're going to make movies that make.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Money, and because there was something, yes, 100%, and there was something sufficiently powerful about that original myth that makes people will say, oh, okay, well, I don't know. Some of these have been better, some of these have been worse. But I'm going to come back and I'm going to take a look. We are both come from a medium that we love, in which there have been characters who have had been around for 80, 90 years with thousands of stories, tens of thousands of stories about them. And some of them have been amazing, and some of them have been amazing.
And yet there's this big thing that and so that becomes interesting about these monster type characters and these archetypes. And really someone back in the late seventy s and the early 80s, they said, we've got lightning. Not the lightning that reanimates the head, but lightning, and we're going to work it. And I do find that interesting too. I mean, in the 1940s, the 1930s, then into the 1940s, you have like six different Frankenstein movies and four werewolf movies and all these, and you can see them sort of actually trying to figure out this is a cash to grab, but also, what does it mean to make the fifth Frankenstein movie?
What can we say? For lack of a better phrase, what can we say that sort of justifies the existence of this movie and it becomes interesting. It's an interesting set of questions.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Yeah, you're right. It's funny how you mentioned it. You're the smart person over there. I didn't even equate the fact that I've read 17 iterations of Spiderman or whoever's died or come back, or they waste someone's memory and things like that. I'm like, that's basically an equivalency to the horror side of this, where they're just like, well, we've got to keep this character going because people like them. So we'll figure out a way to revive them and tell the story or continue telling the story.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: And it's interesting just to get back to the comic thing for a know, for people of my cohort at least, was again, a little older than Gray. The fact that Jean Grey came back to know people kind of were like, all right, well, maybe, whatever. Although that still was a big deal when she came. But when Gwen Stacy came back, people were like, one of the most meaningful things about the universe was that she was dead. And the fact that they've made this decision in some sense, really messes with the warping. It would be like having Frankenstein be like, you know what, I'm perfectly integrated into society.
It seems to betray the essential features of the myth, and the only way to do it is to play it for comedy. Like, in the know, you're like, okay, he's a happy family guy, but we all know this is a.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: I've had I've listened to multiple podcasts about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the idea, like, people have tore like, is Tony Stark going to come back? It's like no, stop. That was a very integral part in the entire storyline of the MCU. And for you to bring back Tony Stark from the death or the number of times they brought back Loki and things like that, like, okay, guys, you had meaningful, purposeful deaths that made an impact in both the viewers and the actual storyline. And you're talking about the idea of like, oh, but he's actually not dead. And I'm like, no, stop. There's hundreds of other characters you can go and play with. Stop. Tony Stark. We liked it. Robert Downey Jr. Is great. He's dead. Let's move on. Stop rebooting these people.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: And it'll be interesting to see what happens, I mean, as we're dealing with these cohorts of 60 years, 80 years, 100 years, something which is so deeply meaningful. I mean, it turns out that I came into the Marvel universe when it was even though it seems crazy to me, when it was only about 2025 years old, and now it's 60 years old. And so there are people who were born.
They become adults and everything like that almost you after I started reading this, and for whom gwen Stacy doesn't mean anything, right? So just some random character who died off the broken 40 years ago or whatever it is. So why not bring her back? Well, you don't have that. Also, as a cultural historian, becomes interesting to me when certain things which have a sacredness to them, like you're saying when that sacredness sort of wears off, if it ever does.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: And I don't know.
I'm a huge marvel. I'm a bit of Marvel zombie since I got into comic books, but I've lost a little bit of the love not fully not done with them altogether. I don't read DC Comics, so that's just I don't like DC Comics, but I read Marvel Comics here and there, and I looked at my poll list for this week, and I have a pretty substantial poll list. I pull about ten to 14 books a week. And this week, I have one two Marvel prop. I have a couple of Star Wars on there because they're owned by Marvel, but there's four Marvel Comics altogether on the entire list, and there's seven horror comics or horror adjacent comics. And so one of those things that, like, thinking to myself, it's slowly been overtaken about stuff that are these little miniseries that come and go. There's something about the even me as a person who's been a Marvel fan for a long time, sometimes I'm lost on where things are and who's done what and who's alive and who's dead and who's actively in a team or whatever. But when you have a five issue miniseries that's a horror miniseries that literally comes and goes. I'm like, I can do that. It's five issues.
But then I like, the connected ones, you know what mean? Like, so, like, there's all this whole back and forth on it, but horror to me has overtaken it. And my local comic book shop owner was the same thing. Paul Eaton. He's like, dude, you're pulling more Marvel or more horror stuff than you are or know fully than you are Marvel nowadays. And I said, yes. I don't know. It's something about it right now that I'm into it. I don't know if it's like I mentioned at the beginning, the resurgence of the genre of horror, and people want that. If it's just really good stories being told right now in that genre, maybe it's one of those that's what it is. People just who tell good stories have decided to do horror comic books, and that's where it's landing.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: I don't know. I think it's a confluence of a lot of these factors and the fact that you're growing, aging as we all are, at the same rate and changing too. I mean, I remember because I'm almost precisely of this age that I was a Marvel zombie in elementary school and through high school. And then I went to college, and I was like, I'm tired of sort of some of that stuff a little bit. And that was when Vertigo really DC's Vertigo, really started coming out, and Sandman was in the middle of its Veronica and Preacher and Hellblazer had switched over to Vertigo. And that was this golden age, this golden age of horror. There are always lots of golden ages, but this was one of these ages. And I was like, I would not have wanted to read this stuff in high school.
It would not have been what my tastes would have been. I would have been too scared.
But in graduate school, I said, this was exactly right for me. And I think that with an audience who's pulling stuff that really are adults that are able to deal with kind of the maturity and the themes that are in these horror comics and the just monumental talent that's working in it now and with some exhaustion from we when we were growing up, there wasn't so much on TV and movies and everything that you didn't have to also keep track of those universes.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
It makes it difficult. Like I said, that's that horror I guess that's again, that horror thing, which most of them I am a person. Like I mentioned, I watched Amityville Horror 1979, and I watched the more recent one, 2009, I think it was, to kind of give a and I watched them back to back. I watched them, I think, one night and then the next night. And those are the kind of like, trying to compare. I like, connected things in the sense that either the remakes or the same worlds. And I think the reason why I love all that is because of Marvel. I think Marvel at the beginning, I'm like, wait, I can read the Thor book and then the X Men book. I see the different angle of the same battle. This is amazing. And rewatch remakes or continuation stories or whatever.
I'm going to watch The Exorcist again and then watch the new Exorcist that comes out. And those kind of things where I'm like, I like that connectivity. And I thank Marvel for that because I think that's what really started me on that.
But I do like this one and done thing, too, where I'm just like, okay, I get it. I consume it, and I move on from it.
But yeah, I don't know. It's one of those I guess it is growing up. I'm growing up, dad. I'm growing up. My dad just turned 60 years old yesterday. So he's growing up, too.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, happy birthday to him.
I bet he's listening. Happy birthday, sir. I do think also, though, that this has always been the case that we have different pleasures and we take them in different ways from different things. So there's a great pleasure in reading a long serialized material or watching it or what have you, and that's one kind of pleasure. And we get that with this part of our brain and then the other part of our brain, we're like, okay, out, in and out. And we want the story, and we want it to be done.
And again, it gets back to a theme we've been sounding where sometimes on Netflix or something like that, you're like, this should have been a one seasoner, and it's five seasons long. You're like, oh my God, they ran out of story. They ran out of Know, even for great one season or two season shows. And I think that's true with some of these stories, too. I mean, there's a very interesting I talk about this a little bit in the Comics Book introductory essay by Alan Moore, one of the first great modern horror comics writers, obviously, among other things, in a swamp thing collection. That he did back in the collection came out in the Swamp Thing and he says the problem with Swamp Thing I tried to tell my stories but is that there's no real end.
He's like, I could stop. Basically, I'm paraphrasing, I could stop. But something that he knew was going to take it over. And so when Know took over Sandman or Redid sandman recreated Know, he basically said, and I've confirmed this with my Levitts, who was the president at the time of DZ. He was, is when I'm finished, this is going to end. And Paul was, you know, okay, we get it. And that really started in a very deep way, this kind of storytelling that we love so much and being able to say with a comics character. Okay, I'm out. But a lot of them.
[00:47:38] Speaker A: So you're researching this book. So this book is hopefully you said hopefully at some point in the near future is going to actually come out.
I would like to know a little bit about the process before we finish this up.
Do you physically write as you're going along? Are you all the research and then you write your book? Is that how you do it?
[00:47:57] Speaker B: Usually different people have different processes. Definitely. My process is really to write as I go along.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: And I find that as a historian, that can be very useful, particularly a cultural historian, because it's not like to take one of our examples in 1975. It's not like Steven Spielberg, when he's making Jaws, is saying, this is going to be an enormous hit. I'm going to create the summer blockbuster as we know it, and I'm going to become Steven Spielberg. Right. I've had a movie or two. They've done okay. I'm basically a TV movie director with high ambitions, but some slightly higher possibilities of success.
This was a very popular novel. I'm going to try and adapt it. We'll see what happens.
And so it's nice to be in that headspace as well as looking around at what he's drawing on from right before. Oh, he's certainly seen Rosemary's babies. Not that those, but he's certainly seen Rosemary's Babies. He hasn't yet seen the Amityville Horror. It hasn't come out yet that's useful. So that's really what I try and do. You can't unknow a lot of stuff that you do, but you try as much as possible. So with the book on Mel Brooks that I wrote recently, it's the same thing for most of his career.
He becomes really Mel Brooks already when he's a real adult. He's not an early, huge success. And that matters, having had all the tears of not really being successful.
[00:49:29] Speaker A: Yes. And that book is what, mel Brooks, the disobedient Jew?
[00:49:33] Speaker B: Yes, that's exactly right. So it's what we call a Jewish biography of Mel Brooks. But if you're interested in him out there, including Young Frankenstein, there's our cross.
There's some fun stuff about that in there as well.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: That's amazing. You've been watching 300 and some OD horror movies now, and are you pinpointing ones that in your mind and just your life that's like some of your favorites from those 300 movies, or most of them just blending all together at this point?
[00:50:05] Speaker B: Well, a lot of them do blend. I mean, I was taking notes, thankfully, because otherwise they would allow.
And what's interesting is that because you can't write about all of these in a book, that covers a lot of other ground, too, the ones that stay in your head, you're like, oh, there's something worthwhile about this. So I'll leave the podcast if you want, Justin, with one recommendation of one that I think people probably have not seen, or the ODS are good, that they haven't seen anyway. And I think it's very interesting and in some ways it's quite powerful. It's a movie from the early sixty s. It comes out a little bit before the Kennedy assassination called The Sadist. So clearly someone saw a psycho. They were like, I'm going to but the movie is not really about it's not really a psychological movie in any way. That's the title. And it's basically, and this will sound very familiar to everyone who's listening to the podcast, it's about these friends in a car and they take a wrong turn, right? And they drive off and they run into these two people who basically try and kill them. And what's interesting and very powerful about the movie in 1963 and it's made by people who have made, like terrible horror movies before, right? They never did anything like this again, is that there is basically no motivation for why they kill some of these people and they attack other people.
They happen to be turning in the Roman, and I'd watched up to this .1 hundred and 5200 horror movies, there's almost none of them that are like that, right?
A lot of times, as we know from our friends in the EC comics, there's a disproportionate punishment to a crime, or like Friday the 13th, you could say the wages of premarital sex are not that you should be stabbed to death, right? But you could say that the movie has that moral code, whether we agree with it or not. Here there is nothing except that they go the wrong way and they suffer for it. And you watch this, and as I say, it comes out a little bit before the Kennedy assassination, which again, you have this feeling starting around there, that maybe the universe is meaningless. Maybe a random guy like Oswald can kill the President.
[00:52:20] Speaker A: Have you seen the Strangers 2009 Tyler in it. Yes.
It's the same idea. It's like, why us? It's because you were home. Like, oh my God, that's like 100%.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: And I think the sadist is the first version that I've found. You never want to say first because it's always but the version that I've had, where there's that sense of there is no overriding order to the universe.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:52:50] Speaker B: It's not even that there's a maleficent overriding order, there's just none. It's just amoral and bad things just happen.
And that's a fear that deep down we all kind of have.
And it's put out there in this movie.
I think it's a well put together, well shot, and from a theme perspective, extremely scary movie.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: Even I'm going to add that to my list to watch. I haven't seen it either, so I'm going to add that to my list. But in this journey of myself, like I said, you've been watching horror movies and reading horror books and doing all the stuff for the research, for the book. I've just been trying to catch up on the. Horror genre as a whole in both novels and in the movies. And I've watched a bunch of movies over the past few years that fall in that horror genre or adjacent genre. I've also watched way too many movies with unnecessary nudity. I realized that about the horror genre, that there's one of those things where it's like for some reason when the killer attacks the person, they end up being topless. And I don't understand why, okay, someone's in your house, you can't reach for a t shirt. There's small plot holes that I don't understand. I go, oh, it sells movies because sex sells.
But there's these unwritten rules that are in horror movies where there has to be certain things that you have to say like, oh, who's out there? Oh, I'm going to go look at it. You have to have a topless. There's like these things that I just realized that we're watching these movies. I'm like, my budy Paul and I watched the Man Thing movie from 2005. We discussed it on the podcast. It's a Marvel movie, but it really has nothing to do with Marvel Comics. It's just the character name man Thing came from the movie. And I'm thinking to myself, it's funny because we laughed because like five minutes into the movie, they're on this boat in the swamp and the woman's topless and then her boyfriend gets stabbed and the blood goes all over her and that's like a pointless scene. Like he was fully clothed. Why was she it was this whole thing and it was like Marvel was trying to make a horror movie and they're like, we've got to do this.
We got to put this in the movie where we're not going to be taken seriously. And I just laugh and sometimes and I go, maybe that goes down to the fear. Whereas if I were at home completely nude and someone I would be more scared being completely nude than I would be if I was closed.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: I think it's extremely interesting, both that vulnerability of being naked and the double standard of, as you say, well, the guy could be guy could be naked. Why is she and then also where again, I said to the mid seventy s. And you have this relaxation of kind of these standards. And so it's not just at that period, at least it's not just horror movies that start showing lots of gratuitous nudity. All these movies where you're like, there is no point for having.
[00:55:42] Speaker A: Boom. I think the Amity Hill horror I mentioned earlier, the 2000 and whatever version of it had, just barely not showing it, if that makes any sense. It's more imaginative to the idea that the first movie there was and the second movie or the remake, it was like shots that were like, okay, she doesn't have a top on, but you don't have to actually show that, do you? What know, I mean, I think that's even more. It's the idea of showing why some movies show an actual rape scene in a horror movie, but don't like, you don't have to. If someone gets taken off screen and you hear screaming and all that stuff, you're like, okay, we can use our imagination. We know what's going on. You don't need to show me that. And the same thing with some of this nudity I'm like sometimes it's pointless in the idea that you just give us a little bit of glimpse of what's going to happen and we can use our own imagination if we need to or want to. But, yeah, it was kind of funny, but Paul and I, the LCS one, we're like, it just happens. There's so many horror movies out there where there's just or and actually, you mentioned early 70s movies that just have it because you can I just don't know.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: And getting back to that horror thing, that in some sense, what you've just read is the essential philosophical question about horror. What do you imply and what do you show? Right? How much is to use this very clap that goes back to the 19th century?
What is horror showing and what is terror kind of implying, right? And where is the balance between that and every movie has to make its own decision. And apparently some of them involve nakedness and some of them don't.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: And I don't know. Like I said, rules were more relaxed. Like, honestly, movies that had swearing and nudity and were rated PG in the 1970s, which nowadays it could be rated R and so on and so forth. There are certain things that you see over the chain. And just because the rating scale was different then, too, it was parental guidance and then that was it. That was it. It was just telling you, hey, parents, be aware. This is a movie not for kids, potentially, where nowadays there's a lot better scale on that and there's rules, and you can't go to a movie unless you're a certain age and all that stuff. It makes more sense. It's a little safer now. I'm not saying it's perfect. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a lot safer. It's a little less safe now with streaming and things like that because people can just go on yeah, people just go online and watch it now with these things. But I don't know, when your kids.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: Get a little older and we have to hide the remote control to just sort of make sure they don't.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Well, I have to hide it now because it just turns the TV on to random stuff. So we're just going to continue that. We're just going to have the remote not be hit, not be visible altogether.
Your research is in this book. We can wrap up here pretty soon.
Researching this book. You've been watching. Has it been over a year now? You've been doing this.
[00:58:24] Speaker B: Are you watching movies probably like almost a year and a half now.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Okay. And so if it comes out sometime, hopefully soon, in the near future, you must be, like, moving along. You must be getting some chunk of this book done.
[00:58:37] Speaker B: Yes, that's right.
This is sort of the history of sort of the horror in America from sort of the earliest days to now. I'm probably a couple of hundred years in.
Maybe I've got the last 40 or 50 years to really sort of nail down. But as a percentage wise, I'm doing all right.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: That's great. That's fine. And you're having fun doing it. And I'm guessing I mean, this is an enjoyable experience.
[00:59:01] Speaker B: Yes. Again, if you had said to me when I was a kid that my day job would be to read Stephen King and watch movies and sort of write about be what could be bad?
[00:59:13] Speaker A: I laughed at my wife. I'm like, I'm a completionist in the idea that completionist. But I'm like a checkoff. I'm a check off the list. And so a lot of times if I'm picking a movie to watch, I'm like, I'm watching the hour and a half movie, not the two hour movie, because I can maybe watch two one and a half hour movies where I've only watched one two hour movie or whatever. And so I'm like, I want to consume some Stephen King books. I actually Googled shortest to longest Stephen King books because I was like, I want to check a couple off. But I know reading like it right now is probably going to take me a lot longer than reading something like, what was it? Cycle of the Werewolf was like, I don't know, 200 pages or something like that. Whereas it is this massive book. It's just kind of funny. I'm like Stephen King just likes to put words on paper, I'll tell you that.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: I will say, though, that it's an interesting thing where some of them, a lot of them are worth the trip in history.
And then there are some of them where you're like, it's 150 pages, and it's probably 100 pages too long.
But not only do I think he's a master of horror, I mean, this is not a shocking opinion hot take.
[01:00:26] Speaker A: Jeremy Dover hot take.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: And I think a slightly warmer take, although not hot at all either, in years, but that he's a much better writer than he is often, at least by colleagues of mine, that he is often given credit for as a crafter of fiction. He is also very good.
We'll see what happens. Maybe he'll do all right.
[01:00:50] Speaker A: Maybe he'll do well. I think he's got a future in him.
It's kind of funny. We talked about the movie aspect. You've been watching movies and stuff like that. I forget how many movies have been based on his books, honestly, the number of adaptations he has out there. Someone's like, oh, this book was actually adapted into this movie. And I'm like, with a different name or a similar name or whatever, and I'm just like, or that was a short story from him, or so on and so forth. I'm like oh, gosh. And his son is up there, too. In my opinion, Joe Hill has an excellent horror writing ability to both in novels and in comics. As you know, some of his books are unbelievable. A Basket Full of Heads, if anyone recommendation for a horror comic is an unbelievable, really short comic series that you can get. And then there's a sequel that wasn't written by him, but it's based on the same thing called The Refrigerator Full of Heads. Oh, I thought, yeah. And then obviously, like Nosferatu and all those things that he's done, too, in the book world. And Lock and Key obviously can't not mention lock and key when you say Joe Hill's name. But yeah, so it's a talented have. Like I said, I have not read much, and I wanted to read more, but I needed to check off that I've read more Stephen King books. And so my thought process was if I were to do the shorter books first, then I could check those boxes off and then be happy with, you.
[01:02:10] Speaker B: Know, I envy you your first and maybe second readings of some of them at whatever length they are.
What a great project.
[01:02:19] Speaker A: Some of them. I read an audiobook, which is kind of funny. I'm looking at the thing and it's like one and a half days to listen to this. I'm like, Holy smokes, I can sit down for a day straight and listen to it. That'd be amazing.
But yeah. So I'm excited to actually read this book. I'm excited to talk again. Maybe we'll have you back on when you actually publish it. And obviously think about us here because we'll be more than willing to read the book when it comes out for advanced copy reading.
[01:02:47] Speaker B: I absolutely will get it to you, and I promise you it will be shorter than it. That much I can tell you. The publishers will not allow me.
[01:02:53] Speaker A: Well, it's funny because I had Daniel Krauss up here in Bangor, we brought him in. I did a beer collaboration with his For Whalefall, his book that just came out. Oh, yeah, sure, we did a beer collaboration, highly recommended. But talk about that suspense and eeriness and uneasy feeling a bit swallowed by a whale. It's fascinating.
And he was talking about the many Deaths of Zebulon Finch. Lifes and Deaths of Zebulon Finch, one of the books he wrote. And it's two novel, two books, and they're both substantial books. And he's saying in his talk, he was doing goes, oh, yeah, my publisher made me split it into two books because it actually was one book. And I'm like, oh, my God, that book would have been it would have been an encyclopedia. I was like, Holy crap, man. He goes, yeah, I try not to write that long of books, but it ended up happening. I keep on looking over there because it's over there on the shelf, but yeah, so I'm excited to read it. I'm excited for it to come out, people. I mean, I'm a big Mel Brooks fan, so I should read this Mel Brooks book as well, which you can get wherever books are sold, there's an audiobook version of it. If you are an audiobook or digital version of it, you can buy it anywhere. I've always say buy it at your local bookstore, but really buy it anywhere.
[01:04:02] Speaker B: Let's be honest with you, both parts of that statement.
[01:04:06] Speaker A: If you can get it at your local bookstore, awesome. If you can't, don't not buy it, because you can't. There are these massive online stores that we try not to shop as much on, but they have it available and it still shows the publisher and shows Jeremy here that people like the book and want to read. You know, always buy don't the only thing I'm going to say to people is don't download it illegally.
[01:04:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: The only thing I will say is buy it. Try your local bookstore first, but if they don't have it, then obviously and if you want the audiobook version of it, you have to usually go through someone like a big megastore like Amazon or whatever.
[01:04:42] Speaker B: Or ask your library to buy it. Right. Authors are I've never met an author who isn't delighted with having the library buy it and share it. Right. That's fine, too, but please don't pirate it. Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:53] Speaker A: And that's the other thing, is libraries do have audiobook collections nowadays, too, online, and so do local bookstores. I know that Briar Patch and Bangor here, if you go to their website, you can actually listen to some audiobooks or buy them through the store. So the store gets some sort of kickback on that as well, which is pretty cool, too, but also read American Comics, which is a great book if you're a fan of comic books and the history of comic books and that's available at all your local bookstores and things like that as well. We're looking forward to it. Good luck on your journey in this horror field. Hopefully you don't get too many nightmares. I don't know. How do you sleep? Okay.
[01:05:29] Speaker B: What I'm about to say, I know, is not an appropriate biological metaphor, but that boiling the frog, right? So if you start watching them in chronological order, they're not too scary usually, but we'll see what happens as I go forward. So far, few nightmares, but we'll few.
[01:05:42] Speaker A: Nightmares, yeah, just watch them with the lights on and things like that. You're fine.
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
[01:05:47] Speaker A: I've always said the benefit of a novel in a comic book is that if it gets too scary, you can close it. Trying to find the remote in a scary moment of a movie is a hard thing to try to figure out, turning it off. By the time you're too scared, it's already past the scary moment as it is. So that's the difference between those mediums as well. But yeah. So good luck on that and thank you so much for taking time out of your day and talking to us here at the podcast about horror and all things related and yeah, I appreciate it so much.
[01:06:15] Speaker B: Always. It's great to talk to you. And Happy Halloween to you and to everybody.
[01:06:19] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Let's get scary, right?
[01:06:22] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:06:23] Speaker A: Thanks, Jeremy.
