Scream Queen

Edo van Belkom

Ah, a return to the glory days of eighties horror. Back then, there were your great writers, there were your A-list writers (who were good, but rarely approached greatness, and never with any regularity), and then, as A Christmas Story wryly tells us, there were “the nameless rabble of victims,” those all-but-anonymous genre writers whose work is now lost to the wind. (That the same can be said of many of the greats in no way makes the two in any way similar.) For every John Holt, Edward Levy, or Michael Paine writing in the eighties, you had ten Ken Eulos, Saul Wernicks, and William Hills.

These days, the ratio seems to have been turned on its head. You can find great horror writers under every rock. Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Charlee Jacob, Carlton Mellick III, and their ilk have raised the bar for literary horror far past any place I could have hoped it would go when I first discovered that avatar of literate horror, Clive Barker. Nowadays, you have to search pretty far for the genre writer, the guy whose books are going to sell a few hundred thousand copies and then fade into obscurity.

Scream Queen falls solidly into the realm of genre fiction destined for obscurity. But like the best work of Eulo, Wernick, Hill et al., while it sticks around, those few hundred thousand readers who take van Belkom up on his offer to ride through this funhouse are going to have one hell of a trip.

Scream Queen gives us such an obvious premise it's amazing no one's actually pulled it off yet: two brothers who direct low-budget horror films stage a reality TV show, Scream Queen, the winner of which gets the lead part in the brothers' new movie. All the winner has to do is spend the night in a hunted house (rigged with tricks, natch, to scare the contestants), then have the public vote on her as the best of the contestants. Simple, right? (And brilliant. Expect it to happen in real life in the next couple of years. That's a reality series even I would watch.) The only problem is that the haunted house the producers and their team have tricked out really IS a haunted house, and the ghosts therein are not very happy to receive guests.

The action starts early and continues pretty much nonstop (there are some slow points for setup, but the writing is such that even they go by quickly). This is a slim novel, by modern horror standards, three hundred pages even. They fly. The reader is likely to find himself jarred at least once per page by stupid typos (and the obviously far overpaid editor never met a homonym he didn't misuse), but after a while you gloss those over and just get on with it. Nothing here is likely to make you say “boy, that was unexpected!” or think van Belkom has a line on the next great idea to move the whole genre forward.

If this were a movie, it'd be turn-your-brain-off entertainment. As a book, it's fluff, but readable fluff.