paperbacks

So here’s one of those books that’s been sitting on my shelves at home for about three decades now:

From what I can recollect via my vague, age-addled memories of the actual experience of reading the book, it wasn’t quite the madcap zaniness I was primed to expect from the Hitchhiker’s Guide comparison. My sense was that it was certainly a denser book, packed with more information and detail than the casual experience of the Douglas Adams oeuvre, and maybe one I wasn’t quite just ready to experience yet.

Here’s the back cover, to show you what I was up against:

And even if I never get around to reading it again, at least I have that peculiar cover to enjoy.

So the few of you who are left from about four-and-a-half years ago may remember a series of posts discussing movie novelizations (1 2 3 – sorry for all the dead Haloscan links and minor formatting issues you’ll find there). Well, I have a new one to add to the collection, acquired just in the last week:

A couple of notes:

1. Yes, like the movie, the book has multiple endings. However, the novelization has four endings, with Chapter Twenty presented four times as Versions A through D, whereas the film has only three endings. A quick skim through the endings shows that Version C is the one that isn’t in the film, and I’ll reveal in the comments later today who the culprit is and his/her eventual fate, if you’re curious.

2. The novel’s dedication reads “This book is dedicated to Those Who Got Away With It.”

3. When I first glanced at the cover, I briefly thought it said that the author was Malcolm McDowell. For that one very glorious moment, I believed I beheld the greatest book ever produced by human civilization. As it is…well, it’s pretty close.

4. Some comic book connections: the book was a Fawcett Gold Medal Book (published by Ballantine Books), Fawcett having been involved in comic book publishing to some minor extent.

And the film was produced by Jon Peters and Peter Guber, who would later produce a superhero film of some note.

And some of the actors were probably in comic-related movies, too, but I’ll let you guys figure that out since I’m sure if I did it, I’ll forget something.

…

So anyway, that’s my neat acquisition for the week. Now to find time to actually read the thing.

Anyway, that’s that.

Well, actually, about my girlfriend and her teammates, too, as the book is about her high school volleyball team taking the California State Championship in 1986. (Here’s a contemporary report about the event from the Los Angeles Times that singles (“twinsles?”) out my girlfriend and her twin sister for their efforts.)

My girlfriend found out about this book during a visit to our former high school, and I promptly went into a search for the darned thing, which took me a bit…it’s a self-published tome, and was in seemingly short supply less than two years after its release. I managed to find one seller in Philadelphia who had a copy, and just yesterday it arrived in the mail.

I knew I was in for a good time when I read the first part of the opening line:

“A yellow 1975 Toyota sedan stealth along Oxnard street….”

Yup, that’s “stealth” as a verb, and not a usage with which I am familiar. Also, later on the page the authors make it clear that by “Oxnard street” (capitalization as in the original) they actually meant “Oxnard Boulevard.” BONUS: on the same page a car has a “stirring wheel,” which I guess you use in case you need to do a little cooking on the way to your destination.

So, yeah, this is some book. All the place names remain more or less the same (names of cities, the schools involved, etc.) with the exception of the aforementioned Oxnard Boulevard, while the people all get pseudonyms. The name of our high school’s volleyball coach is so barely changed I wonder why they bothered, and my girlfriend Nora and her sister Maria become “Rosalu” and “Rosalie,” respectively, I think. And before you ask, no, I’m not going to start calling Nora “Rosalu” because she’ll put me in the hospital.

Now I haven’t done more than sort of flip through the book, read a passage or two, and identify a pseudonymous volleyball player here and there (“Oh, ‘Delia’ — that’s Della!”), but Nora’s already endured the whole thing. She informs me there are more typos and instances of questionable continuity to be enjoyed therein, and her response to reading passages about her and her sister’s fictional counterparts was a fairly even mix of bemusement and irritation.

The story of our high school taking the championship that year is a good one, I think, and I can understand the appeal of wanting to tell it. Like the L.A. Times article says, the girls on the team were relatively undersized compared to their much-taller competitors, and their team’s victory was very much Underdogs Achieving Success Against Overwhelming Odds, i.e. Sports Narrative Cliché #1. It doesn’t seem as if this book is the definitive telling of that story, however.

Ah, well. Now, I was actually there for that final game back in ’86, when our high school took that championship. And I attended most of the games leading up to it. And I was friends (or at least acquaintances) with a number of people on the team. And I felt the excitement when our school took the victory. So, maybe, I already have my own definitive telling of this story. And Nora, of course, has her own. How could this book ever compete?

So I was going through this collection when I spotted this paperback cover and I said to myself “that’s certainly a head drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith.”

“Behind Kak he saw the albino and The Moor whirling to the death.”

and

“His fist flopped through the folds of K’ing’s pants.”

…so there you go.

For more details about this series, including scans of all the covers (plus the British editions), here is a message board discussion on the topic.

At one point in that discussion, someone suggests that the author of this series, Marshall Macao, is Ron Goulart writing under a pseudonym, but Goulart himself says this is not the case.

The back cover:

Also, seeing the “Barry Smith” credit reminds me of this story (about a third of the way down the page) that I told you all, long ago.

Recently acquired in a collection, a somewhat rough copy of Vaughn Bodé’s Bodé’s Cartoon Concert:

The back cover:

When this book was published, I was only four years old, and my interest in underground comix was still at least, oh, two or three years away from coming into full bloom. So, I don’t know how this was marketed, or displayed, or what. I presume this was an attempt by an established publisher to capitalize on the underground comix movement (much like Marvel’s Comix Book), but I have a hard time seeing this racked along with popular fiction in supermarket bookracks. I’m supposing it was targeted at bookstores near colleges, or maybe just shelved in whatever “adult interests” category your larger bookstores had.

Then again, this was the early seventies, and maybe people just weren’t so, you know, uptight, maaaaan. Basically, I’m picturing that the streets were filled with naked people, flowers in their hair, smoking dope, and freely sharing their underground comix with their whole families. …Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong.

I do have a library in the house, with overflowing bookshelves. Primarily, though, the books tend to be hardcovers or comic strip collections or graphic novels. I have yet to put out my collection of plain ol’ standard issue paperback novels, as I need to build some special shelving for them and I just haven’t done it yet. In the meantime, they languish, alone and afraid in the dark, packed away in boxes and stored in the upstairs closet of horror and lament.

On Monday, when I was goin’ through some of the boxes stored away in that closet, I went through the book boxes as well, and pulled out a few items of some minor interest.

First is this, a first printing of the initial installment of the long-running Wild Cards shared universe superhero saga (published in…well, it’s copyrighted “January 1987,” but I’m pretty sure it was out in late ’86):

By the way, my main purpose for pulling this out of the box is to lend it to Employee Aaron, who’s been jonesing to read this series but has been having trouble getting his hands on the first volume, and who will also face dire consequences should anything happen to my book while it’s in his possession.

I also had a thing for movie novelizations, which is…weird, admittedly, but for several years I actively sought them out, even for films I hadn’t seen and even had no intention of seeing.

Like I said, weird.

I did see this film, on a double-bill with The Goonies, no less (and the novelization for which I also had, ’til I gave it to pal Corey…no relation to any Corey that may have been in the film):

…and, whoa, turns out he died in ’86, from complications from a bee sting. Wow, that came as a surprise. That’s too bad. Mr. Gipe also worked on a couple of Steve Martin movies, and wrote the novelization for Melvin and Howard.

Now here’s a novelization I’ve mentioned on the site once or twice before, but I don’t think I’ve whipped out a scan of the cover for you. It is the one, the only, the astounding Howard the Duck movie adaptation:

I had a habit of saving bookstore receipts and using them as bookmarks…and it turns out the receipt for this book was still in it, 22 years later. So, here you go, proof someone spent CASH MONEY on this novel:

Other novelizations I have or had: Buckaroo Banzai (liked it much better than the movie…but still sold it for an obscene amount of money on the eBay), Tron (I think I didn’t see the movie for years after I’d read the book…I’ve yet to watch the film straight through from beginning to end, in fact), Raiders of the Lost Ark (mentioned before on the site that this book had “variant foil covers” — really just different colors of covers you could choose from), The Black Hole (boy, I was fascinated with this film, even though it’s crap…well, except for the kick-ass robots), all the Star Trek and Star Wars films (I think it was Return of the Jedi where they actually spelled out all of R2D2’s tweets and whistles: “‘ArooopTWEETwheeee!’ exclaimed Artoo”), the first three Halloween movies (hand-me-downs from the parents…apparently there’s a book for the fourth film, too)…

…and, of course, novelizations for the first Swamp Thing movie (written by Len Wein) and the second, Return of the Swamp Thing, written by Peter David (who included several characters named after assorted Swamp Thing artists and writers).

Any particular novelizations you folks out there have a fondness for? (Or can’t believe you own…I’d like to hear that, too!)
 
 
(Updated 6/2017)