By sheer coincidence, I read two books this month that were genre novels dipping into the world of film, which is where I live, being a film critic before a book or music critic. As I write, I'm also preparing for my film festival, the Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival, coming up in October. This one is almost designed for me, being a horror thriller framed within a curse that's attached to a horror flick from the nineties, 'The Guesthouse'. No, it doesn't exist outside these pages but we learn so much that it feels like it does. "Never underestimate the power of a movie", we're told late on.
In this book, 'The Guesthouse' was a Hollywood production, shot on a Universal Studios soundstage in Los Angeles, and it gained a prominence beyond its reception, because Vince Madsen, the construction foreman, died during the shoot in 1993 in a fall off the roof of the Guesthouse set. What's more, after its release, a further seven members of the cast and crew also died, each in an eerily similar way to the sequence of eight fictional kills within the movie itself, ending with its director, Christopher Rosenthal, who hanged himself at home, just like Mr. Manners hanged himself in the stairway of the Guesthouse.
If you're already conjuring up 'Poltergeist' as a comparison, you wouldn't be far wrong, especially with the lead actor in 'The Guesthouse' being a seven-year-old actress, Polly Tremaine. However, there are a set of key differences, which the author uses to twist his story away from what we might expect. For one, Tremaine isn't among the eight victims of 'The Guesthouse', surviving the curse to reinvent her life and career a continent over, becoming a journalist called Laura Warren in the UK.
For another, Rourke wasn't an actress, though she had appeared in an episode of 'Fantasy Island'. That was her elder sister Tammy's job, and Heather got caught up in the business when Steven Spielberg saw her eating in the MGM commissary. Here, Polly's the elder sister who doesn't want to be an actress but is living her mother's dream, as so often tends to be the case, but her younger sister Amy does, without any success whatsoever. Given the role Amy takes in this story, it's easy to see that as important.
In fact, it's Amy who triggers this story, because she lets slip to Mike, Laura's ex-lover and current boss at 'Zeppelin' magazine, who Laura used to be and Mike has the bright idea of sending her to L.A. to get a story on the reinterpretation of 'The Guesthouse', a Netflix TV show called 'It Feeds' that's being shot on the very same soundstage at Universal. Laura doesn't have a clue until she's on the plane and, given how many years of nightmares and therapy she's gone through, she isn't remotely happy about it. That she witnesses her first death before she even gets to set, when someone jumps off a bridge to his death right behind her car, merely underlines that something's been waiting for her to come back.
For something so drenched in horror, this is built like a mystery. Of course the curse returns and starts to claim further victims, that unknown suicide being the first because he ceases to be unknown later in the book. If we read it straight, then clearly it's Laura whodunit, because all the evidence points to her, so much so that the truth soon outs and she goes into hiding because the authorities are seeking her. If we dig a little deeper, because that solution's far too obvious, then Amy is hiding far too much for her to be entirely innocent. Of course, once we latch onto her, other characters start to implicate each other, a process that neatly confuses us and takes us still guessing through to the finalé.
The title has a double meaning. Initially it’s taken from one of Laura's therapy sessions, negative here a counter to the positive that she should be focusing on. However, Todd Terror, the director of 'It Feeds', is such a fan of 'The Guesthouse' that he owns the negative print and it's carefully stored in the safe in his office, where it's highly likely to become a key plot point. He's a fan boy for 'The Guesthouse' and that's precisely the sort of detail that surrounds legendary films like this one. Another legend that Winning is clever to tap into is the suggestion that the original production hired an actual demonic parasite to play the film's monster, the Needle Man, in an echo of the myth that Max Schreck, star of 'Nosferatu', was a real vampire, a story that became its own film, 'Shadow of the Vampire'. Films can grow.
I liked this a lot, but I'm a film nerd. Some of the film nods here are pop culture level obvious but others are more obscure. The more you know about film history and especially Hollywood film history the more you'll see nods here everywhere, from the grand truisms of Polly Tremaine's mother forcing her dream on her own daughter, who was the Sparkleshine Baby in commercials at the tender age of six months, to the grand curse borrowed from 'Poltergeist' and a string of character names borrowed from those who are important to the genre in film: a Landis here, a Hodder there; a Barker here, a Hooper there.
As to the book itself, someone not knowledgeable about the horror genre ought to still enjoy this, just without the added depth from all those nods. The ephemera that's dotted between the chapters won't make you grin the way it did me, because the interviews, articles and transcripts ring very true indeed, but they'll still make sense and they'll bolster the text for you. The grand sweep of the story, of course, isn't reliant on you bringing any knowledge with you, just the same sort of grounding in reality that an author of mystery novels expects you to have.
I enjoyed this a lot but, like so many nineties horror flicks, it's fun while it's on and drifts away a little in its aftermath. My eldest son will probably dig this a lot, so I may pass a copy over to him, because he's a particular fan of Hollywood horror in the eighties and nineties and would dig the Needle Man and want him to continue into a slew of sequels. For my part, the other genre novel I read this month that plays in Hollywood film history found a deeper truth and has taken over as my book of the year. That's Nghi Vo's 'Siren Queen'. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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