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Musings: Stephen King Gets Schooled on Diversity in the Media

Awards are not the end-all and be-all, but they do have meaning: libraries make purchases based on lists of award winners and recommended titles, and so do readers. When a well-regarded organization hands out an award, there is a ripple where often that book, or movie, or theater production, will also be held in high regard and rise to the top. It might even stay there decades later, after it has become dated or recognized as problematic (true of a number of early Newbery and Caldecott winners).

Many award-granting institutions have undergone upheavals in the past dozen years or so: debate over the World Fantasy Award Fantasy Award, the Sad Puppies fiasco that attempted to taint the Hugo Awards, the renaming of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the recent cancelling of the RITA Awards. There has also been a more obvious scrutiny of the Oscars, starting with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Any hope that public criticism of the Oscars’ lack of diversity would have an impact on judges’ considerations was dashed this year  as the Oscars failed to nominate any woman for Best Director, just three nominations for artists of color, and, despite acclaim for both Us and Midsommar, zero nominations from the horror genre (I’m also baffled that Frozen 2 didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Feature: it is a gorgeous film).

I haven’t felt like the Oscars were worth my attention for years, but with Joker, The Irishman, 1917, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood racking up the nominations even I couldn’t escape the blinding whiteness and maleness of the slate. It has to make you question, are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino really the only directors capable of making an Oscar-worthy movie? I know  women and people of color are making great movies, and that there are outstanding horror movies that deserve a look. There are stories out there being told from a fresh point of view that deserve to be seen and heard.

Author Stephen King is a judge, and decided this was the time to put himself out there and tell us:

 

I guess now that he’s won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he’s become on authority on what makes quality art. Which is apparently not diversity?  Twitter does not seem to agree.

He later backtracked a little, saying everyone deserves “a fair shot”, whatever that means (marginalized people start with less than a fair shot so..?). Here we’ve got an old white guy (he comes within a day of sharing a birthday with my mom, who is in her seventies) who has locked down the bestseller lists for decades.  There can’t be too many people who haven’t heard of Stephen King, read one of his books, or watched a movie adaptation. At this point in his life, could he identify a fair shot if it walked up to him and tapped him on the nose? How many promising writers could have “New York Bestselling Author” on the cover of their books if King didn’t have a permanent place there?

Stephen King is positioned in publishing in a way that he could make a big difference in making available quality work from diverse and #OwnVoices creators, maybe not so much in the movies, but definitely in fiction. My background is mostly as a K-12 librarian, and maybe you aren’t familiar with the authors for that age group, but one of the big names is Rick Riordan, who gained his recognition writing contemporary fantasy with kids who discover they are demigods from various world mythologies. Riordan was able to use his privilege as a popular, bestselling, writer to start a publishing imprint with the specific mission of finding #OwnVoices authors who have stories to tell grounded in their own mythologies and legends. Riordan is a name, but he certainly isn’t in Stephen King’s league when it comes to name recognition, number of books written, or number of copies sold. For King to say he would never consider diversity, but only quality, is a blind spot I hope is rectified by the reaction to his tweet. Because he has the ability to find and promote #OwnVoices creators in a way that most writers do not. And it would be wonderful if he did.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

Quirk Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1683691532

Available: Hardcover, Kindle

 

The Remaking is a meta-supernatural thriller that follows a true crime paranormal case revived by various means every twenty years. The book starts in 1951, with the telling of a campfire tale, “Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek”, that occurred in the 1930s. For ten years, Jessica and her mother, Ella Louise, lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. They did not live within the town itself, since they were ostracized by the citizens of the town, as well as by their own family: Ella had no use for the societal game, and Jessica was born out of wedlock. Ella ran an apothecary from her cabin, and while the townspeople avoided the family in public, they were not above patronizing Ella when in need of a cure. But when a well-known customer died, Ella was immediately accused of witchcraft and both mother and daughter were burned at the stake. Because of the superstitions and paranoia of the townspeople, Jessica, thought to have magical abilities, was entombed in a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of white crosses.  Ella was buried in an unknown location.

In 1971, someone who was present at the telling of the campfire story has grown up to become a film director. He casts Amber Pendleton as Jessica in his horror movie. Amber’s overbearing mother thinks this will be a great opportunity for her, and make her a star. The tensions and stress on set drive Amber to run into the woods, where she comes face to face with something nobody believes happened. Fast forward to 1995, and Amber is trying to make ends meet by doing the horror convention circuit. A young, up-and-coming director with money approaches Amber to play the part of Ella in his remake of the film that cost her an early career. She reluctantly agrees. She becomes the star of her own witch hunt after something happens to the new Jessica actress on this set.

The book then switches to 2016, with a popular form of media, the true crime podcast. An enthusiastic, greedy, journalist hunts down Amber (who has, strangely enough, moved to Pilot’s Creek), to get her side of the story. Amber thinks telling her story might just be her best bet to redeem herself. Of course, there’s also a chance that it will just add to the neverending cycle of the nightmare of Jessica and Ella.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. An interesting aspect of the book for me was that it was always ambitious, heartless men at the core of each of the retellings of Jessica and Ella’s story. There was no heart in the development of the original film, nor the remake, only prestige and greed. Both directors were convinced that Jessica was demanding that her story be told, only to become so firm in their own vision that they missed the point. Amber immersed herself in both roles, and was chastised and abused for her intuitive reactions to her characters, first as the young Jessica, and in the remake as Ella Louise. She is blamed for creating her own drama and trauma, and ultimately put on actual trial for an incident that occurred during the filming of the remake. Then the podcaster aims to debunk the sightings of Jessica and Ella, as well as dig as much information out of Amber as he can to debunk that, too. Chapman’s characters and layout of the story are great. The Remaking is a fast and engaging read. I would recommend this for those who like true crime (it was based on the true story of a mother and daughter who were burned for being witches) and unique storytelling experiences. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on October 5, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Happy Death Day & Happy Death Day 2U by Aaron Hartzler

Happy Death Day & Happy Death Day 2U by Aaron Hartzler

Blumhouse Books/Anchor Books, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9848-9772-5

Available: paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Remember the good old days when movie tie-ins were available for almost every film out there, and good authors wrote them?  Lest we forget, Alan Dean Foster, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, and Orson Scott Card all took a shot at tie-in writing.  You read them for two reasons: they were able to add a level of detail that a film can’t convey, and they often had scenes deleted from the film, which made you feel like you were getting something new.  Tie-ins are still around, and here we have a two for one deal: both of the Happy Death Day films in one novel.  If you liked the movies, it’s worth reading these to recall the fun of a surprisingly clever horror film.  If you haven’t seen them, it’s still entertaining enough to be worth the read.

Teresa ‘Tree’ Gelbman is a shallow, insensitive college student who wakes up with a hangover in a stranger’s dorm room on her birthday.  Her character gets established quickly on her bolting from the dorm and making her way through the day.  She’s a grade-A bitch, with no redeeming qualities.  She treats her few friends and all strangers like trash, and pretends to be nice to others to maintain her social standing.  To top it off, she’s trying to screw her way to a good grade in her biology class by having an affair with a married professor.  At the end of the day, she gets murdered by an unknown assailant.  Upon dying, she… wakes up with a hangover in a stranger’s dorm room on her birthday.  That’s her fate: she’s condemned to re-live the same day over and over, getting killed by the assailant each time, until she finds a way to break the cycle.  The second book follows a similar pattern.  The main differences are Tree finds herself in an alternate timeline, and you get some explanation for why the time-loop thing happened in the first place.

As expected for a movie tie-in, both books follow the script very closely.  The level of detail added in is not very high, although there are a few minor brush strokes to flesh out some of the scenes a bit.  Tree’s feelings about her professor are one area where the additional detail makes her seem a bit human, as opposed to completely unfeeling.  The real challenge to writing a story like this is, how do you make a re-playing scene seem interesting to the reader?  The author does a good job of making the repeated areas seem new, by using different ways to explain them.  For example, instead of just writing ‘the sprinklers turned on, someone fell down, a car alarm went off’ over and over, he finds new ways to describe it.  One good example is saying ‘The day unfolded with Tree’s greatest hits: Sprinkler.   Alarm.   Person falling over.’  It’s minor, but it really does help make the story more readable, and not make the reader feel as if they are caught in a time loop of their own.  This is written well enough that you feel like you are reading an actual story, and not just a copy of the script.  The only minor drawback to the book is that if you are looking for added scenes that weren’t in the movie, you’ll be disappointed.  As noted, this follows the original premise very closely, and I couldn’t find any new scenes added in.  Whether that’s good or bad depends on the reader.

The final verdict: The Happy Death Day movies have enough originality that they translate well to book form, thanks to the author’s treatment of the script.  The book is also a quick read, with both films are fitted into only 272 pages, and it reads fast enough that most readers will be hooked enough to finish it in a sitting or two.  It’s perfect for summer beach fare, and the violence is mild enough that it’s palatable to young readers.  A good horror choice for both adults and young adult readers.

Contains:  violence

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on July 3, 2019 by , Reply
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