EVENT: Jaws documentary! The Farmer & the Shark by John Campopiano

WHAT: Film screening of The Farmer & the Shark

WHEN:  Weds Sept 10 @7:00pm (doors open 6:30) - 90 min runtime, followed by Q&A

WHERE:  SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St, Portland ME

TICKETS:  https://space538.org/event/the-farmer-and-the-shark/

It's the 50th anniversary of Jaws this year!!!  

 

Join us at SPACE for the Maine premiere of "The Farmer & the Shark" - a documentary about the making of Jaws through the lens of Craig Kingsbury, the Martha's Vineyard farmer and fisherman who inspired the film character of the one and only QUINT!!! 

 

Director John Campopiano joins us for a Q&A after the film, as we celebrate the tail end of summer in a very New England way.

Picnics, Lies, and Videotape

Mystery Club #2

There once was a book that haunted me.  

First, it haunted me as a movie, which I watched on VHS tape back in the 1990s, when I worked at Videoport.  

Then, it haunted me because I hadn’t read the book yet (that took a while, finally read it in 2022, phew).  

Finally, several months later, it haunted me from within another book!!!  Madness!  What is this willful book?

It is none other than the Australian masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.  

 

The dreamlike movie of the same title (1975) was directed by Peter Weir, in his iconically surreal manner (his Last Wave also made a deep impression on me in my 20s, another Videoport-era watch).  

 

The novel was written based on a series of dreams Joan Lindsay had, and wasn’t published in the US until Penguin brought it back to life in 2014, so I guess I can be excused for not having read it until recently. 

 

And the third element? 

Well… that’s how this post happened.  I had picked up Riley Sager’s The Last Time I Lied and was intrigued by it immediately.  It wasn’t the first Riley Sager I’d read, that was Home Before Dark.  

 

The Last Time I Lied starts by introducing us to our narrator, Emma, an artist who is gaining notice for her mysterious paintings.  What no one know is that each of these dark wooded landscapes hide three missing girls from Emma’s past, obscured but present under their layers of paint.

I devoured The Last Time I Lied in a matter of days (rare for me), and found myself haunted by it in a way which distinctly reminded me of Lindsay’s book.  It wasn’t even so much the matching set of missing girls, three from Appleyard College in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and three from Camp Nightingale in Sager’s book.  

 

It was moreso the dreamlike summer atmosphere, the liminal spaces being explored by the girls outside of their normal lives while away at camp, and then off-hours in forbidden adventures outside of the camp. 

The setting (beyond the warm weather) couldn’t be more different between the two books.  

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is sunstruck late Victorian Australia, arid, all sandstone and dust, peppered with desert-dwelling plants, parched and sparse with a fringe of greenery and forest, made more uncomfortable by school uniforms and formal dress requirements.   

 

The Last Time I Lied is a wooded lake, rich with birdsong, treeshadow, and moss, carpeted and cloaked by water and woods.  While the camp's founder, a foreboding presence who lives on-site, is not to be argued with, within the strictures of the camp the young women find ample room for pushing boundaries.

 

At Hanging Rock, there seems to be no space for secrets, no place to hide, which makes the disappearances all the more unsettling.  The sunbleached stony heights of Picnic Rock stand brazenly out and dare searchers to exhaust and dehydrate themselves in their futile quest.  

 

At Camp Nightingale, there are too many places to hide.  While the disappearances are upsetting, they don’t defy explanation.  The wilderness around the lake’s dark water closes in and thwarts searchers.

 

It wasn’t until I finished reading The Last Time I Lied, and in a mood of thoroughness read the afterword by Sager that I realized how right my instincts were!  Sager had deliberately riffed on the dreamy haze / nightmare sharp glow of Picnic at Hanging Rock, drawing from the haunting mood of Peter Weir's excellent movie, but not allowing himself to read the original book by Joanna Lindsay until long after he'd completed his own novel.

 

Both books are well worth reading.  

 

Lindsay’s book was a perfect read in the thick of winter for me, especially February and March where everything seems to slow down to a trickle and reading about hot, dry places on the other side of the world is a balm, no matter how intriguingly nightmarish they might be.  

 

I would recommend reading The Last Time I Lied in the thick of summer, when the sun is so hot you flee for the wooded shadows, and the humidity makes you not want to move any more once you reach the shade.  

 

Criterion's cover art for their rerelease.

Criterion was kind enough to rerelease the film in recent years, so you can watch it via their streaming channel or by picking up a DVD or Blu-ray of the film.  There's a good trailer here, if you'd like to get a taste of the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_XNrF6lsvw

On Mysteries - a personal history

Mystery Club #1

It has been a while since I posted about my love of mysteries here on the shop blog.  Part of the reason was that I had started a separate blog which was all about mystery reading.  But then after working on the (207)Terror posts with Dennis, I realized that I didn't need to send you folks somewhere else for mystery book posts.  So I'm going to reintegrate them here instead.  😺  Enjoy!

My favorite all-time reads in no particular order, but limited to ones with a mystery/crime element:

The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale – Dark and tantalizing, the Depression-era Texas landscape is introduced to readers through the eyes of the young narrator, who finds out bit by bit how hauntingly strange the adult world can be.  Peppered with ghostly tales of local folklore and mysterious crimes in the obscure but too-close-to-home Big Thicket, this book calls out to horror, mystery, and true crime readers alike.  "He was just a big shadow next to the tree, and I thought of the devil come up from the ground, all dark and evil and full of bluff." --Harry

 

The Cass Neary series by Elizabeth Hand – After staying up way too late finishing the first book in this series, Generation Loss, I emailed Liz and explained to her, “Rarely have I read a book whose main character has made me want to smack them upside the head so often and made me want to hang out with them the other half of the time.”  Cass Neary is warped and wonderful.  Elizabeth Hand is a magician.  No matter the setting, she captures it, and places you in it.  With mere words on paper she can create vivid phantoms in your mind the way few other writers can.  Her visual imagery does not beat you over the head with descriptive terms, instead it infects your brain and haunts you (in the best way possible).

 

Two of my favorite covers for Nemesis.

Agatha Christie, in particular but in no way limited to: N or M? (the first Tommy & Tuppence book I ever read, though 3^rd in the series), The Man in the Brown Suit (a rare standalone novel from Christie), and Nemesis (wherein Miss Marple is set to solve a mystery without being told what it is or who it involves).  My mom introduced me to Christie's books when I was still young, knowing I would love them, and I have been reading them ever since.

"You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end."  -- Miss Marple

Least favorite: Endless Night which seemed horribly pessimistic to me.

 

John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series – I started reading John Connolly because I ran across a reference to Massacre Pond in Scarborough in the text of one of his books, Dark Hollow (you will soon find out that I often sample mystery series by jumping in at a random title that appeals to me rather than being sensible and starting from the beginning).  I read it and liked it – great characters, peppered with adept wit for humor.  So I kept reading them!  

 

If you want a dark, intriguing, no-holds-barred series, some of which is set in Maine, this is it.  Especially if you like the cathartic feeling of reading a book where by the last page everything is burned to the ground, these are for you.  They are not light and fluffy, but boy are they good.  I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.  You should probably go and sign up for his monthly email, because John Connolly is delightful, and every time one arrives it makes me laugh while reading it.

 

3 Raymond Chandler titles with stellar Tom Adams cover art

Raymond Chandler – I’ve read both Hammett and Chandler, and let me tell you, Chandler is the one for me.  Something about his ability to paint a scene, and his careful choice of words and phrasing, sticks with me.  From Killer in the Rain (so evocative!) to his collected short stories (did you know he wrote stories in the weird fiction vein, as well as noir crime writing?), Chandler does not waste your time.

"I could feel my skin crawling, and the air was suddenly cold on it." -- Carmady, in "The Curtain"

 

Ngaio Marsh – For a long time, I only read Agatha Christie.  No one had told me that there was another author, equally adept, equally witty, who had written stories in a similar vein, although hailing from New Zealand instead of Britain.  Almost as prolific as Christie but not quite, (she wrote 33 novels, while Christie wrote 33 for Poirot alone), she left behind a treasure trove of cases as related by her main character, Chief Inspector Alleyn, possessor of a sneaky sense of humor.

 

Jan Willem van de Wetering – I first read one of his Amsterdam novels because (you guessed it) I was going to Amsterdam.  I loved it!  The understated humor of the main characters was right up my alley, and the immersion in a city in another part of the world sealed the deal.  But the first book I read by him, The Maine Massacre, was in a graphic novel format.  Yes, he was Dutch, but he spent the latter part of his life in Maine, and after almost three decades here, he died in Blue Hill, ME, in 2008.  In other words, he’s got a lot going for him.

 

RECENT READS* that I’ve loved:  Riley Sager’s The Last Time I Lied, Simone St. James’ Sun Down Motel, Maureen Johnson’s The Box in the Woods, Adam Sternbergh’s The Blinds, Jean Luc Bannalec’s The King Arthur Case, M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series (the books and the AcornTV series), Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, and Robert Thorogood’s Death in Paradise (the books and the BBC series).

*:  (This list is a couple of years old, but it still holds good!)

 

OLD FAVORITES that I haven’t read in a long time:  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy series (which has some issues I'll admit), Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee series, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane series.

(207)TERROR #4 -- The Pike by Cliff Twemlow!

Hi everyone!  Once again life ran amuck with us.  Yep.  Dennis and I got together to have one of our little horror chats back in…. oh heck, mid-March!!!  Whoops.  It was my job to type up our booktalk notes, and here I am 4 months later finally getting around to it.  Life is full of unexpected complications.  It’s a pity more of them don’t lend themselves to being resolved quickly, but hey that’s life, isn’t it?  We had such wonderful goals of getting back on a more regular schedule with this blog, but we are irredeemably irregular, as it turns out.

 

This installment of (207)TERROR is in honor of The Pike by Cliff Twemlow!   

 

The Pike in its original paperback format.  Shiny!

 

I found out about this fishtale from friend and documentary filmmaker John Campopiano (Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary [2017], Pennywise: The Story of It [2021], and Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made [2022]).  John was interested in The Pike’s status as one of those horror stories that was slated to be made into a major motion picture, but floundered and sank somewhere along the way as filming was getting going. 

 

I’ll leave that story for John to tell you someday, but suffice it to say it is a gem buried back in the early 1980s, which was to gain its sparkle from the dazzling star Joan Collins and the picturesque location of the Lake District.  The story’s events were set in and around Windermere in Cumbria, England.  According to the book’s introduction, Hammer Film Studios had accepted a screenplay of The Pike for production before Twemlow wrote it out in novel form for publication.

 

The Pike by David Seltzer (1982)

“A cold relentless killer from the murky depths”

 

You had me at murky!!!

 

I will admit that I started this novel with few expectations, beyond a hope for plenty of monster fish.  I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, which is surprisingly professional and all in all a very fun read.  I’m not surprised it was picked up for adaptation!  How disappointing that it prematurely disappeared from view.

 

Dennis and I sat down over drinks and snacks, and hashed out our reading experience.  We both love the movie Jaws, and The Pike is clearly a descendant – as the introduction avers, “The Pike was Cliff’s answer to Jaws, and to the franchise that had given birth to.”  One of the characters even has the last name Brodie -- too close to Chief Brody’s name to be anything but a planned coincidence!!!  But -- “Is this even legal?!” Dennis jumped into the fray immediately, and was then shocked at my blasé response.  “That didn’t bother you?!” 

 

Au contraire!  I relish a good effort in the vein of Jaws.  Where’s my JAWS Bingo card?  Let’s start with… a REGATTA!!!  I really enjoy the many, many movies and stories that follow the Jaws formula.  Snowbeast (1977) and Tentacles (also 1977!) are among my film favorites.  So while I was gleefully marking off blocks on my JAWS Bingo card, Dennis was being bothered by all the Jaws tropes, which felt like cheating to him, rather than an homage. 

 

I do recommend taking the JAWS Bingo approach.  A boating/lake festival imminent in the next two days?  Check.  Hordes of badly-behaved boaters running amuck in the water trying to flush out the monster fish?  Check.  Wait wait wait – even a counterpart for Matt Hooper, shark specialist?  CHECK!!!  Bahahahaaaaaa! 

 

As pike-specialist John Wilmslow comments, no doubt with accompanying eyeroll as he surveys the “savage glee” surrounding him on the lake, “Compared to some people, the behaviour of underwater predators was genteel.”

 

It just puts a big fat grin on my face, and turns Dennis into a Mr. Grumpy Pants.  Earlier today, I asked him if he had any last-minute commentary about The Pike, and all he said was, “No final thoughts from me other than the book should’ve been illegal.”  Which just made me start howling with laughter again.

 

I liked the use of a reporter for the main narrator, who joins up with a nicely varied team including a savvy local woman and the wildman local lake steward. 

 

Dennis enjoyed the three-guy team that is the other viewpoint for storytelling.  The three adventurers came kitted out to film a documentary about Lake Windermere, the longest ribbon lake in England, in which the team sees great potential for adventure.  Its impressive length sets it above and beyond most idyllic holiday spots for divers and explorers alike, and their aim was to let the world know about its unparallelled options.  They weren’t expecting to hear from the hotel bartender the news, “There’s something ghastly in it.”  Uh oh!  Oh YEAH.  Game on!

 

Like Jaws, part of the drama in The Pike is generated by physical evidence left behind in the wake of bloody slaughter, once again illustrated in the form of a monstrous tooth.  Not even a whole tooth – it’s just a sheared off portion of a tooth, found in the skull of the first known human victim of the beastly pike.  Ah heck, the pike has around seven hundred teeth, he’s barely going to miss part of one.

 

There are some wonderfully awful deaths in the book, including poor Henry, early on in the third chapter.  Nobody is spared, man or wildfowl, and there are no niceties involved.  Just gore, dismemberments, and lots of panicked splashing.  Pity the poor creatures who either witness the slaughter, or stumble across the pike’s leavings after the fact.  A community member summed up Henry’s fate: 

 

“She glanced over her shoulder as if something invisible had moved closer to listen.  ‘Dead,’ she said, ‘Mutilated.’”

 

Diana, almost a hundred pages later, doesn’t fare well either, and we get to be plunged into the water with her every step of the way.  It is quite delicately disgusting. 

 

A cautionary soul warns others: “This fish has tasted human flesh.  By now it may be looking for more.”  And it’s not just any fish.  Our expert estimates it is over 10 feet long, well over 200 pounds, and ”something this size wouldn’t put on the brakes for anything smaller than a rhinoceros.”  The pike is no ordinary pike – no, it’s a giant, a freak – five or six times the size of the biggest officially recorded catches in the UK, even today.

 

Well guess what?  Like the pike, and like Jaws before, our 3-man documentary team isn’t just any film crew, either.  These guys are in it to win it.  They won’t even be stopped by the lake water, which they refer to in their highly technical jargon.  “Larry went to the rail and looked down at the water lapping the side of the boat.  ‘It ain’t going to be easy.  It’s creepy water.’”  No, seriously – they give a definition for this condition.  Because “things can sneak up on you in that stuff.”

 

As they get ready to dive, knowing they may encounter the monster at any moment, Joe says to Lars, their cameraman, “If it chews your leg off, try to face the camera while it’s doing it.”

 

Unlike Jaws, there is a twist ending in The Pike, which we can’t tell you about because that would ruin everything.  Suffice it to say that it gives the last pages of the books a distinctly Scooby-Doo-for-adults flavor.  It’s ludicrous and questionable, and really not a logical “ending” at all, so we both wondered if the author was in fact laying the groundwork for a sequel.  Oh well, maybe someone else will write it someday!

 

As someone with very Fortean leanings, it was unsettling for me to encounter very anti-Fortean attitudes in the book.  Absolutely nothing outside the average norm is allowed to exist (or at least is refused acknowledgement) in this prosaic universe.  This outlook towards the UK’s infamous lake monsters was reflected by a 1982 series of articles for New Scientist, in which Maurice Burton posited that Nessie and the like could be logically explained away.  Burton thought sightings might be the result of mistaken identification of innocuous fermenting Scots pine logs rising to the surface of the loch, their velocity generated by the release of gases during decomposition. 

 

It is entirely possible that, alongside his intended mirroring of Jaws tropes, Twemlow was also using The Pike to thumb his nose at the dour men who poo-pooed the UK’s long history of lake sightings and water horses.  As friend Brian Sterling-Vete points out in his chatty introduction, Twemlow “had always been fascinated by monsters, aliens, and the paranormal.”  Not only that, but early on, “Cliff wanted to turn Manchester’s Belle Vue amusement park into an animated version of what we would now call Jurassic Park.”  Twemlow was excited by the idea of the existence of monsters, whether mythical, real, or manmade.

 

In discussing the end of the book, Dennis noted the high level of denial amongst the characters (again, very like the plot track of Jaws).  If local authorities can wade through the mysterious carnage, then wrap up the case and put a bow on it with an arrest, who needs to worry any more?  Yes, let’s all blithely jump back into the water again. 

 

YOU GO RIGHT AHEAD!  Yes, YOU FIRST!!!

 

Happy summer, everyone!!!