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The Dark
Book by Franklin
187 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 6, 1978
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June 4, 2020
The film THE DARK (1979) always stood out in my mind as one of those oddities you would run across in the early days of HBO, programmed late at night before the channel went off the air. A weird movie - as a kid I always remembered it as "the werewolf in bluejeans who shoots lasers out of his eyes" movie. Later exposure and coverage explained that the films producers, with a monster movie already in the can, observed the financial success of ALIEN (1979) and decided to retroactively turn their savage, decapitating zombie-creature into an "alien" through the expedience of hastily applied laser-beam effects, explosion overlays and some re-filming. All that ended up doing was making a potentially okay (even occasionally eerie) film complicated, confusing and flashy to no good effect.
When my boss' publishing company purchased the literary estate of Richard Deming and I was sorting his archives, I came across the movie tie-in novels he banged out for a pittance during the 70's (near the end of his career) under the pseudonym Max Franklin. One of them was the tie-in for THE DARK ("with 8 pages of film scenes!") and I thought "Ah hah! For the novelization to be released with the film, the authors generally worked with earlier drafts of the screenplays, so here's my chance to find out what the movie originally was intended to be!" And so I read it, and now I know...kinda
First things first, movie and tv tie-in "novels" tend to be terrible - name authors (or not) slumming for chump change and banging out slightly expanded copies of screenplays. And sadly, despite the quality chops Deming evidenced in his mainstream crime writing, the same turns out to be true here. Just warning you up front.
Los Angeles is rocked by a series of savage decapitation murders in which the bodies of the victims show signs of having been partially eaten. The stories of the two detectives tasked with finding the killer - Mooney & Bressler - intertwine with those of Roy Warner (father of the first victim, now a popular thriller/horror novelist but also an ex-con jailed by Mooney for murder years ago) and Zoe Owens (TV reporter) as their individual approaches to investigation cause mutual friction. Meanwhile, elderly psychic Madam DeRenzy has a vision of the killer's future victim whom she meets at a party, while Randy Morse, the future victim in question, continues on in his gadabout LA lifestyle looking for his big break. And the killer, dwelling in an abandoned building, lurks, waiting for nightfall to continue its depredations...
That makes it sound better than it is. The writing is mechanical, hewn from lumpen prose in which every possible opportunity to pad and stretch are taken to increase the page count to contracted length: will they wash the blood off the sidewalk with a hose (twice!)? who parked behind who and where exactly? How many dead-ends did they follow-up before hitting on the right one? Hold tight in breathless anticipation...
It's almost painful to read, but also kind of interesting to contrast with the film, which I re-watched afterwards. The monster, in the novel, never has its backstory or surrounding narrative explicated - although research by Warner into the subject of cannibalism turns up a century old newspaper story about a cannibalistic killer lynched by a mob in LA c. 1879. And when this cannibal killer's Potter's Field grave is identified and dug up, it's empty. So it could be him. But the screenplay didn't really care and, so, neither does the book. As one might expect, the "alien" aspect is non-existent (despite a passing mention of lunatic theories like "lights in the sky"). Oh, and that grave exhuming scene? - they dig up one side of the grave marker, then the other (because they don't know whether it was marking the head or foot of the grave back then), THEN dig up both sides of a nearby grave to settle the point as to whether anything would even be left after 100 years (it would). And that's the kind of picayune padding this book deals in.
Not worth anyone's time.
When my boss' publishing company purchased the literary estate of Richard Deming and I was sorting his archives, I came across the movie tie-in novels he banged out for a pittance during the 70's (near the end of his career) under the pseudonym Max Franklin. One of them was the tie-in for THE DARK ("with 8 pages of film scenes!") and I thought "Ah hah! For the novelization to be released with the film, the authors generally worked with earlier drafts of the screenplays, so here's my chance to find out what the movie originally was intended to be!" And so I read it, and now I know...kinda
First things first, movie and tv tie-in "novels" tend to be terrible - name authors (or not) slumming for chump change and banging out slightly expanded copies of screenplays. And sadly, despite the quality chops Deming evidenced in his mainstream crime writing, the same turns out to be true here. Just warning you up front.
Los Angeles is rocked by a series of savage decapitation murders in which the bodies of the victims show signs of having been partially eaten. The stories of the two detectives tasked with finding the killer - Mooney & Bressler - intertwine with those of Roy Warner (father of the first victim, now a popular thriller/horror novelist but also an ex-con jailed by Mooney for murder years ago) and Zoe Owens (TV reporter) as their individual approaches to investigation cause mutual friction. Meanwhile, elderly psychic Madam DeRenzy has a vision of the killer's future victim whom she meets at a party, while Randy Morse, the future victim in question, continues on in his gadabout LA lifestyle looking for his big break. And the killer, dwelling in an abandoned building, lurks, waiting for nightfall to continue its depredations...
That makes it sound better than it is. The writing is mechanical, hewn from lumpen prose in which every possible opportunity to pad and stretch are taken to increase the page count to contracted length: will they wash the blood off the sidewalk with a hose (twice!)? who parked behind who and where exactly? How many dead-ends did they follow-up before hitting on the right one? Hold tight in breathless anticipation...
It's almost painful to read, but also kind of interesting to contrast with the film, which I re-watched afterwards. The monster, in the novel, never has its backstory or surrounding narrative explicated - although research by Warner into the subject of cannibalism turns up a century old newspaper story about a cannibalistic killer lynched by a mob in LA c. 1879. And when this cannibal killer's Potter's Field grave is identified and dug up, it's empty. So it could be him. But the screenplay didn't really care and, so, neither does the book. As one might expect, the "alien" aspect is non-existent (despite a passing mention of lunatic theories like "lights in the sky"). Oh, and that grave exhuming scene? - they dig up one side of the grave marker, then the other (because they don't know whether it was marking the head or foot of the grave back then), THEN dig up both sides of a nearby grave to settle the point as to whether anything would even be left after 100 years (it would). And that's the kind of picayune padding this book deals in.
Not worth anyone's time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review