Nick LeBlanc’s Reviews > The Funhouse > Status Update

Not proud of it, but had a major Koontz phase around age 13 - even temporarily preferred him to King because the plots of his books were so gonzo, and he had so many of them - been ages, but isn't there some kind of demonic backstory supplied for the masked killer?

My Koontz/King phase came around age 13, too, though I never read this one and had no idea it was the basis for the Hooper movie. I remember thinking that Koontz maybe had a slight edge over King in nastiness, if not in writing skill.

So, the funny thing is that this book wasn't the basis for the movie so much as it was an adaptation of the screenplay by Larry Block. But it oddly reads much more like an adapted novel rather than a novelization of a film. I haven't completed my read yet but it seems to me that Hooper really only included like 30% - 40% of the story in his final cut. What's unknown to me is if that means Koontz went wild and supplied all this crazy stuff--including, yes, the demonic backstory--or if Hooper took a chainsaw to the screenplay and decided that a simple slasher at a carnival was enough for him. Plus the addition of an Elizabeth Berridge shower scene and a disconcerting (potentially incestuous) handjob.

And it's funny that both of you guys mention reading Koontz at 13. I had the thought while reading yesterday that if I had encountered this book when I was young like that, it may have left an intense impact on me. Maybe that's his target audience, pre-teen nerds.

Well, around the time I was that age ('98-'99), King and Koontz were the two biggest horror authors around. Maybe you could make a case for Anne Rice, but my impression was that she was a little more niche, vampire-specific. Whereas King and Koontz were liable to take you anywhere. It was also significant in retrospect that both of their last names begin with 'K', because that meant you would always find their books in the same general area on the shelves. In my local podunk library, most of the books in the fiction section had very plain covers and spines as well, didn't stand out at all, whereas the King and Koontz editions (there was no separate section for horror) tended to be newer, the covers a little more colorful and sensationalistic. So the 'K' aisle kind of stood out as both alluring and somewhat "forbidden", though no one was expressly forbidding me at that age. A few of Koontz's books genuinely scared me, though- Dragon Tears, Intensity and the first half of Phantoms stand out in my memory as particularly frightening. I remember liking Mr. Murder as well, even if in retrospect the plot sounds like a shameless rip-off of King's The Dark Half.

That's funny, about the screenplay. I had to google Larry Block, because for a second I thought you meant Lawrence Block, the crime/PI novelist. Just off the top of my head I'd say that Hooper generally liked his films lean and mean, so maybe he did excise the backstory. I thought the movie was pretty good, but I remember just one line in particular. Something like, "When you're high, even Charles Manson's a good guy!"