“Early September: oookay. Got a digital arc. This thing is currently unreadable in e-format. Hopefully the finished product is improved, but the layouts are pretty complicated, and I just don’t think it’s gonna work out.
It’s a shame. I’m still really looking forward to reading it. But if the final version is anything like this, it’s kind of a disservice to sell it in e-format. Says the guy who’s probably never being given another ARC again…
Mid-October:
Great!
Yes, the issues with the electronic formatting are totally resolved in the print version. I would not recommend e-reading on this one. Frankly, I’d call it borderline irresponsible (read: buncha bullshit) to even offer this on small screens. It’s probably doable on a large tablet or iPad, but you’d never want to read this thing on a Kindle or a phone. I mean, if you have inset images and text, you need to format it for e-reading differently. I can’t just be reading about some shit and then, midparagraph, be reading about some totally unrelated shit. Take your shit and get said shit together.
That said, the print version was a lot of fun. The best parts of this book were the ones outlining some of the bonkers-est horror paperbacks out there. A personal favorite was the William Johnstone stuff. Shooting a clock stops time? THAT’S some wacky shit!
I have to say is that I’m pretty sure reading ABOUT these books is probably more fun than reading them. It’s like talking about a really bad action movie. When you describe it, it sounds kind of awesome because it’s so, so awful and not worth it.
Super applicable to some titles, however, Roger Ebert said this about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:
“Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they’re brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can’t get more conventional projects off the ground. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre belongs in a select company (with Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left) of films that are really a lot better than the genre requires. Not, however, that you’d necessarily enjoy seeing it.”
Horror lit was (and is) the same. You can pretty much do what you want, and it’s pretty cool to see there’s still a space for that somewhere, a place for the weirdos to try and out-weird each other. The times when nobody “serious” cares about horror are probably the times when the most interesting, wildest things are happening, and it’s this reader’s theory that it’s during those times that horror will attract the best talent, folks who are uninterested in having their work over-analyzed and thinkpiece’ed to death. I think that’s why you end up seeing movements like the ones outlined in this book in addition to bizarro and the one-man movement that is Chuck Tingle.”