Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI: The Official Novelization by Jonathan Raab
April 8, 2022 10:32 AM - Subscribe
Author Jonathan Raab (the actual author) has been hired to do a novelization of Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI. The Camp Ghoul Mountain series is a transparent riff on the Friday the 13th series where an animal-masked serial killer murders teens in a mountain summer camp. The book is thus divided in telling the story of the fictional slasher movie franchise's most infamous entry as well as giving a bizarre backstory about its troubled production history. The resulting book is loopy and meta, a love letter to 80's slasher movies, 90's conspiracy theories, and B-movies throughout the years.
This came highly recommended by Stephen Graham Jones (My heart Is a Chainsaw).
This came highly recommended by Stephen Graham Jones (My heart Is a Chainsaw).
I won't say I hated this -- the "movie" part was pleasingly frenetic, if fundamentally uninteresting (people are introduced, maybe they get a chance to say or do something amusing, Henry murders them; repeat several times, then introduce fairly standard "blood for power" cult).
The meta stuff was kind of fun too, with comments about how this one scene makes no sense, and there were UFOs, and how the studio "made" it into a cult classic. The part about the Shadowy Caller Warning The Author just sort of... happened, I guess.
And then the abrupt shift into "The director was a cult leader, Janet Reno was a tyrant," which, okay, the author has already inserted himself into the narrative to a certain extent, but then we get this utterly unsupported "The whole movie was about 9/11" thing? I feel like the author was trying way too hard to insist that we were all in a world where CGM6 really existed and of course everyone knew that it was seen as a 9/11 allegory, such that he didn't need to establish it.
Raab is a pleasant enough wordsmith that I might get some more of his stuff if the subject matter intrigues me, but this one just didn't work.
posted by Etrigan at 6:43 AM on April 19, 2022
The meta stuff was kind of fun too, with comments about how this one scene makes no sense, and there were UFOs, and how the studio "made" it into a cult classic. The part about the Shadowy Caller Warning The Author just sort of... happened, I guess.
And then the abrupt shift into "The director was a cult leader, Janet Reno was a tyrant," which, okay, the author has already inserted himself into the narrative to a certain extent, but then we get this utterly unsupported "The whole movie was about 9/11" thing? I feel like the author was trying way too hard to insist that we were all in a world where CGM6 really existed and of course everyone knew that it was seen as a 9/11 allegory, such that he didn't need to establish it.
Raab is a pleasant enough wordsmith that I might get some more of his stuff if the subject matter intrigues me, but this one just didn't work.
posted by Etrigan at 6:43 AM on April 19, 2022
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posted by OnTheLastCastle at 4:39 PM on April 17, 2022