Video Town Novel

by Robert Freese

"In the tradition of Animal House, Meatballs and Revenge of the Nerds comes a brand new futile and stupid gesture..."

Two days before Halloween, 1987, Video Town owner Stephen Beckerman crosses paths with obnoxious Barnaby Winthrop, the owner of the corporate Showtime Video emporium located directly across the street from "Beck's" little family video shop. They bet to see who rents out five thousand videocassette tapes in forty-eight hours, with the added incentive of five thousand bucks up for grabs. The war is on and both men plot to win through wild promotions and the outrageous pranks they play on each other's stores. There's no two ways about it, only one video rental store will remain at the end of the contest.

Written with genuine fondness for such classic 70's and 80's "slobs versus snobs" comedies like Caddyshack, Police Academy and Bachelor Party, Video Town harkens back to a simpler time of renting VHS and Betamax tapes, shoving audio cassettes into the Fierro's Blaupunkt and cruising, making prank calls, Mariachi bands, bounce houses, monster trucks and partying until the crack of dawn. Video Town is a hero's journey filled with heart, gratuitous video store nostalgia and a soundtrack headlined by The Go-Go's, Cheap Trick and Oingo Boingo.

Beck is throwing a Halloween party for the ages and you are invited to the wildest, craziest, most insane fiesta of all time!"

192 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2026

About the author

I got my start writing about movies in different cinema magazines but I always had an interest in fiction. I sold my first short story to Night of the Living Dead co-author John Russo. Since then, I've had over 100 short stories published as well as the novellas The Drive-in that Dripped Blood and The Santa Thing and the novel Bijou of the Dead. Simultaneously, I also wrote for numerous cinema magazines. I've been a staff writer for The Phantom of the Movies' VideoScope magazine for twenty-five years, contributing movie reviews, articles and interviews with various filmmakers. I've also contributed to magazines like Rue Morgue, Femme Fatales, Cult Movies, Scary Monsters and Grindhouse Purgatory, as well as the Italian language Nocturno and the French language Medusa Fanzine, and zines like Drive-in Asylum, Psychoholics Unanimous, Wet Paint, Film Geek and Film Ex, to name but a few. I was on the editorial team that helped put together Sam Sherman's book When Dracula Met Frankenstein. At the begging of 2022 I co-launched with my partner Paul Mcvay the film reference series It Came From Hollywood. Also in early 2022 I got the opportunity to write the movie tie-in to Brett Kelly's sci-fi space adventure Galaxy Warriors. Working from the original script, it combined my love of fiction and cinema. I am currently working on a new novelization. I have had the great opportunity to interview authors Richard Laymon, John Russo, Gary Brandner, Jack Ketchum, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Grady Hendrix, Chris Poggiali and Deborah Goodrich Royce. My interview with Deborah appears in the back of the paperback release of her excellent novel Ruby Falls. (She also answered questions for me about her acting career for VideoScope #118.)

Reviews

[Wordsworn]

This book is EXACTLY what the one-line summary on the front says: "a raunchy, retro comedy of errors and rental era revenge." If you liked Clerks, and any/all of the movies mentioned on the back cover, then you're gonna love this book.

I know the guy who wrote this, and every line has his inimitable, wise-cracking voice in it. And because I know that guy, I think this book is a love letter. It's a love letter to movies, to the all-but-extinct video stores of the 80s and 90s, and to physical media in general. It's a love letter to his best-beloved horror movies and Halloween itself, to the Classic Rock 'n' Roll songs that get name-dropped throughout all the action. It's a love letter to people who hate Corporate America and want to "stick it to The Man," and to everyone who doesn't feel like they really belong anywhere, telling them that there's a found family out there for them somewhere if they go looking for it.

It's a hell of a book, and it's one that only Robert Freese could have written. If you also love the things that this book is a love letter to, and don't mind some swearing and off-color humor, you'd be a fool to skip this book.