The Late Great Creature: A Novel

The Late Great Creature: A Novel

by Brock Brower
The Late Great Creature: A Novel

The Late Great Creature: A Novel

by Brock Brower

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Overview

“A lost classic . . . the history of a horror-film star and a treatise on human frailty . . . is back to be savored and marveled at anew” (James Ellroy, New York Times–bestselling author of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy).
 
Simon Moro, a sixty-eight-year-old star, is making his last picture, a low-budget remake of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Moro, infuriated by the bland horror movies of his day, sees his own career—even as it ends—as an ongoing effort to wallop the public with an overwhelming moral shock. And he succeeds when an elaborate publicity stunt turns into a gruesome and grand personal statement. As Moro’s life reels toward its macabre end, it also reels backward through lies and evasions to show its surprising beginning. Underneath his Frankensteinian exaggeration, Moro has a vivid and humane story to tell, even as the coffins break open and dark, erotic secrets are revealed. Brock Brower has taken the horror film in all its gory glory to create a book that recycles pop material into literature, creating a Dickensian tale of America.
 
“A wonderful book . . . Like a circus with several brilliant performances going on at the same time . . . A real breaking through. I don’t think anybody ever again will be able to dabble politely in mixing ‘real life’ and fiction.” —Joan Didion, New York Times–bestselling author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem
 
“The way the book skewers society’s obsession with celebrity culture is even more valid today than when it was written, proving that great art stands the test of time.” —Forbes
 
“A cult novel that amounts to a loving satiric tribute to cinema schlockmeister Roger Corman.” —New York Post
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781468301144
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date: 05/15/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 823 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Brock Brower has written for Esquire, the New York Times, and Harper's Magazine, among others, and has received an O. Henry Award for his short fiction. Brower lives in Carpinteria, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

From a Self-Addressed Envelope

A clown isn't funny in the moonlight.

— LON CHANEY

Initial self-imposition: put down everything I failed to tell them at the Breadloaf Writers Conference this past August about writing my piece for Esquire on Simon Moro. The slipshod omissions, the more practiced lacunae, the big, deliberate gaps, everything. That far down on my knees for starters. However: even in contrition, small credit where credit is due. Yes. My talk — no, it was higher rhetoric than that — my lecture at Breadloaf didn't go so badly. Obviously curious, most of them, about Moro. Comfortable chair creaks, i.e., stirrings of a deep, dogged nostalgia. Could remember him from as far back as, say, a triple-feature Halloween horrow show in the late thirties. Or, slightly later, from some gothically patriotic, anti-Nazi, Defense-Bond-rally chiller they might have thought had Karloff in it too. (Not so. Karloff and Moro never did a picture together, and if you think about it, they really are incompatible evils.) Or maybe from right after the war, a bad, really awful Abbott and Costello, one of those abortions where Bud and Lou "meet" the enfeebled wraith of this or that bygone creature. But, even that bad, still a subject of intriguing, if ephemeral, interest. Or is it that any subject that intrigues nowadays also self-destructs, ephemerates? Anyhow, most to my credit: even that death row of lady English teachers who come every year to Breadloaf — a slough of slumped corduroy from one rump end to the other — perked up a little during my remarks, bless them. Though they must believe — must have to believe — that Moro is some kind of depredation. A foul smirch on the literary purity of their most beloved teaching aid, Edgar Allan Poe. Sensed that when I began talking about Moro's work on Raven, could see the disapproval in their faces, like trowel marks in sad, old stucco. And it goes a long way back, that disapproval. If only they'd been around when that spindly Poe boy, the one well-read, sensitive lad in a classroom full of upstart Virginia farm girls, reached for his first, fatal glass of cooking sherry ...

Also: the gist of what I had to say was straight cold turkey, a good Puritan sermon for would-be writers on a drizzly, devil-damp Vermont evening. "Why There Is Only a How to Article Writing." Final self-appraisal of lecture: semi-enlightening, damn near close to candid, wittily self-deprecatory, but, in the end — since this manila envelope has got to be some kind of four-cornered hell, nor am I out of it — in the end, diligently self-preserving. Yes, a large cut of self kept in reserve, or if that self isn't always too sure a thing these days, maybe only a large cut of reserve kept in reserve. Single biggest fudge: gave audience distinct impression that I was letting them in on a sure thing, a lead article that would Soon Appear in a leading national magazine. Chances not too good of that happening, right now. Legitimate excuse: didn't quite know that then, hadn't really even finished writing the article yet, but, on the other hand, how was this stark truth recently ascertained? By breaking the very first rule I laid down for them at Breadloaf. Never call an editor. I gave them that one, chiseled in porphyry. Such restraint, I elaborated, (1) allows editor to make up his sluggish mind more leisurely, hence, more favorably, and (2) allows writer to maintain his ineffable dignity, hence, his top price. So, this morning, I didn't call. No. After four long weeks of not hearing, I got on the 9:10 A.M. bus to New York City, arrived at Port Authority Bus Terminal around 10:25 A.M., walked over to Forty-second Street. Noticed that none of his old movies were showing along there any more — bad sign — then checked the pop poster in the first dirty-books-store window, a big, scaly one of Moro as Gila Man. A true believer had scrawled "Gila Man Lives!" across the window in some new blood type of murderous lipstick, but inside, the poster's edges were starting to curl, rolling up under the streaked glass, tight, like a creeping shroud. Another bad sign. Got a taxi over to 488 Madison, driver still for Wallace, took elevator to fourth floor, slipped in side door, Staff Only — "After all," told myself, "I used to work here" — and since Connie wasn't at her desk, walked right in on Harold.

"Hel-lo there, Warner." Cheery, no surprise. "Glad you came by. I was just going to call you."

"Got a lunch date?"

He even bothered to swivel up a0nd frown at his desk calendar. "Sorry. Can't break it. Sit down, sit down."

I sat. We sat. And we talked, or I talked. I talked about how far along I was on my novel, I wanted him to see it first when I had enough to show, then in a tight, familiar way about the Names I have to admit are bigger than mine — Tom (Wolfe) and Jimmy (Breslin) and Joan (Didion) and Dan (Wakefield) — and in a friendly, distant way about the ones that are still smaller, that you have to give in full. All the time establishing my own size, of course. But the anxiety-brewing thing was I couldn't tell if Harold was really agreeing with me on size. He wasn't saying much, making me feel almost like a full name myself. Finally I had to say, "When are you going to run my piece?"

"Well now, Warner, we've got a little problem here."

How many times have I heard Harold say that, with the same little pebble-and-rill, good-old-So'thern-boy chuckle. But never to me, never to me. How do I dump thee? Let me count the ways. Nota bene: chuckle runs much swifter, a lot more Rebel, coming at you.

"You're late on this already," I got right back at him. "You wait any longer, with your lead time, it's all going to be over. These things peak, then they plummet."

All Harold did was nod.

So I reversed wisdom.

"Look. Everything Moro's doing — I don't care how bad it looks — it's all working for him."

"He's gone too far."

"You can't go too far any more, Harold. There's no such place."

"You don't think so?"

"If there is, we've been there and back."

"You've heard the word on the picture?"

"You seen a screening?"

"Wouldn't bother."

"He's great, Harold. I'm not saying anything about the picture, but if you want to see a performance."

"I've seen his performance. How can you miss it?"

"They're trying to calm him down."

"Who is?"

"Terry's here. I'm seeing him for cocktails."

"Who he?"

"The director. Read my piece."

I got a blink of credit for that twist, but then he swung around on me with that hard, black-eyed-pea stare of his. "You saw what he did on the Tonight Show."

"I heard about it."

"You didn't see it?"

"No."

"Susan and I saw it."

"We were out that night."

"You know how he got that thing into his mouth? With his foot. Took off his damn sock and picked it up between his toes."

"That's an old trick of his."

"Oh come on, Warner!"

"No. Truth. From The Unholy Circus. Did it first with a spoon, then with a cigarette. He played this armless clown. Kind of a Pagliacci story." Can see now I was talking too much. "Clown used to be a trapeze artist but had both his arms amputated after he let this other acrobat fall. Remorse. But his wife is this high- wire artist, still the star, and she puts him down. Betrays him with the strong man, and Moro strangles her. Lil Dagover, I think."

"How?"

"What'd you mean?"

"How?"

"Oh. Between his knees."

We both started sort of shrugging at each-other. "It was a silent," I tried to explain. "A very early German silent."

"What about the cawing?"

"He cawed?"

"Whatever the hell ravens do."

"His animal thing. I've got it in the piece."

"I guess ravens rave. He was raving, Warner."

"When he came to this country, he didn't have that much English, had to play it kind of Harpo Marx-y for a while, but he had all these gutturals. So he used them. Rolled them over into a lot of midnight-zoo sounds."

"He also flies, right?"

"Right."

"Straight at you, with this dried-up ... thing still in his teeth."

"Did he?"

Could see it: exactly how Mora would go and do the Raven on T.V. Live. Same way he did the Moth in 1935. Up close on camera, with a lot of wild, undulating motion, but always with something to deflect, rivet your attention, so you don't notice he isn't really off his feet. Could see the whole bit, could admire his moves, even smile, sorry I'd missed it.

Wrong facial gesture, at that particular moment.

"Wasn't funny. It was plain sick-grisly."

"Guess it depends on your sense of humor."

"Come on, Warner, he's a damn ghoul." Harold went after something in his manuscript pile. "Now where in here do you tell us that significant personal fact?"

He had my piece slap-down in front of him, with the green bucksheet paper-clipped on top of it. I couldn't read the comments, but I could see there were too many, all too long, to be favorable.

"You said you wanted a funny piece," I said.

"Not if he's not funny! Not if he's plain damn morbid!" Harold has this kind of low-key, rational, almost enumerative way of screaming at you. "You know he was fired out of Shakespeare in the Park. You know he's just damn lucky they didn't cut him off on TV. You know what he's been pulling over all this damn city. If you don't know, read the papers. The damn New York Post even had an editorial on what he pulled in Gramercy Park ... or do you only see the Times out where you are?"

"You hold a piece this long, it's bound to date."

He laughed. "You know as well as I do." Not chuckled, laughed. "It's a whole different piece now."

I mentioned this type of situation to them at Breadloaf. I quoted, quote, "A friend of mine who writes a lot for Life once wrote: 'Such is the precipitancy of present-day events, denying that sparest consistency to human affairs upon which even the most ephemeral reporting must depend.'" Ponderous, but I wanted to sound respectable. The truth: I wanted to be asked back to Breadloaf. The truth behind that truth: you have to hedge your woes and master a knowing, rock-ribbed tone if you're going to hold your own with the would-be's for two solid weeks up there in the Green Mountains. They listen, do they ever listen, for the ring of self- fulfillment and proper remuneration and tacit immortality. Have to sound simpatico but always deeply laureate. Can't let any would-be know you might be a would-have-been. But, in sum, apropos that unmanageable quote: what he's saying, I'm facing.

"Harold," I try, "Moro used to be part of all our bad dreams. The good part. Maybe even the best part. Why else this craze? He's only trying to stay in there as a going figment of the public imagination. These days it's terribly hard to be a horror."

"Why didn't you write it that way?"

"That wasn't supposed to be the idea."

History of an Idea: Warner Williams, a middle-class indigent, given, during times of nervous stress, to referring to himself in the destitute third person — like a failed CIA agent, babbling under a blown cover — quits his job at Esquire to take a contract with the SatEvePost. A move down in the maso-fadistic careerism of the New York literary scene, but what good is reputation if it can't buy you money, what with four children and a superior wife. Far superior. Above American letters, a Francophile; above antibiotics and chemical fertilizers and the Pill, a naturalist; above money, perhaps even above marriage, a housewife. During 1966–67, Williams manages to slip enough pieces by Otto Friedrich to gain a little extra money, i.e., time, to work on his novel — though he does not use that time to work on his novel — and even survives one of those French-Revolutionary editorial changes at the Sat-EvePost. From the Committee of Public Safety to the Directorate. All the close-in powers-that-were are trying, but it would really take Thomas Carlyle to write the company history of Curtis Publishing. But this past spring, he is given a crack at Richard M. Nixon during the primary campaign. The assignment is the first one he has liked, not having been passionately either for or against such as the Country's Leading Tree Surgeon or the New, Rough-and-Tumble Patty Duke, Teen Turned Trollop. He is, as an objective reporter, fanatic against Nixon.

After following the candidate around for several weeks, from White Plains, N.Y., to the Disneyland Hilton, and watching Nixon slowly inch out of his shell to start slavishly impersonating his own crowds. Williams begins to see a possible approach to the story. He is fascinated by the candidate's victory gesture, a borrowing from Eisenhower. Both Nixon arms shoot upward, and then the big Nixon hands hang limp from the Nixon wrists, index and middle fingers forming two loose, pudgy V's. Like waggling claws, and has nobody but Williams ever noticed that a lobster goes through exactly the same motions when you pick one up by its back and drop it into the pot? Williams' conception is now that Nixon is still in his shell, but has evolved into one of those shellfish that assume a more mobile life form. The Old Nixon was possibly a mollusk. The New Nixon is perhaps more like an Alaskan King Crab.

He is told by the SatEvePost that it's an Esquire idea, and besides, the staff is being cut again. Williams did not last into the Empire. Then again, nobody there turned out to be Napoleon either.

He and his wife then have a long, many-whiskeys talk and agree that freelancing is no kind of life for them, that he hasn't gotten that much done on his novel anyhow, that he'd better ask for his old job back at Esquire.

Harold tells him his old job is gone, but would he like an assignment? In fact, a free trip to Hollywood. "Some schlock outfit is shooting The Raven again. Why don't you do Simon Moro for us?"

"Simon Moro? I thought he was Undead."

"That's what I mean. Could be a very funny piece."

Williams calls his wife to say he'll be home on the 6:00 P.M. to tell her all the news, meet him at the Junction, but she wants to know now.

"No," Williams finally admits, "but he has a great assignment for me."

Nothing.

"Simon Moro."

Nothing.

"I can do a fast job on it. It'll only take a couple of weeks, and then I can start looking around for a —"

"A couple of weeks where?"

"In Hollywood."

Nothing.

"He's paying me a thousand this time, and I can pick up a little on expenses by staying with the Dunnes."

"So you're still free."

"That's not it, honey."

"I wish I were free."

"Look. Alice Glaser has my old job."

"What's it feel like to be free, Warner?"

"I can finish it during July, and then we can both go up to Breadloaf together."

"I'm not going to Breadloaf. You're free to go if you want. Come and go, just as you please."

"It's not as I please. But we need —"

"Only it isn't really freedom. You know that, Warner? It's just absenteeism."

"You know we need the money."

"You're being marked absent, Warner. Get your mother to write you an excuse."

Williams also calls his agent, to tell her that Harold will call, to tell her ... no, to have her tell him that it's all fine and grand and dandy. But she surprises him.

"Why are you doing this?"

Nothing.

"Why are you doing this, Warner?"

"The money, Candida."

"You know it's not the money."

Nothing.

"It's going to be the Post all over again, only for even less money."

"I learn from these trips, Candida. I'm using a kind of cinematic technique in my novel. These guys won't be D. W. Griffith out there, but that's just the point. I want this novel to have a sort of hand-held quality. It's going along nice and trashy now, and —"

"Then why would you want to do this instead of it?"

"I can't just starve."

"You've never starved, Warner. Except for things I guess you don't really have that much appetite for, do you?"

Addenda to History of an Idea: I was often asked two questions at Breadloaf. 1. Do you think up the ideas, or do they? "We sort of agree on them together." 2. Does an agent do any good? "Funny thing, but, it's not so much the money, though an agent can obviously be very helpful, there. It's much more the comfort, the relief."

Then there was a third question. What happens if a magazine doesn't take an article? "You mean, one they've assigned?" Yes. "Well, there's always a guarantee ..."

"We've already paid you the two-fifty, haven't we?" Harold began to wind up on me. "We'll forget about that. It's still a thousand, clear, if you want to do the rewrite. Keep the anecdotes. They're great. Same with the bio, but better check your facts. The researcher couldn't find half the stuff you've got in here."

"It's all from personal interview. Nobody ever asked him about his Vienna days before."

"Okay, okay. That's not the real problem anyhow. What you've got to tell us is why this new weird scene. Is he just playing to his own craze, like you say, or has he gone megalomaniac, like I say, or maybe back on drugs again?"

"That's out."

"You be sure."

"I am sure."

"All right. For all I know, he's seeing a Mad Scientist, but something's freaky. That's where this piece falls down. You've got to tell us why this zombie walks. There's a title for you."

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Late Great Creature"
by .
Copyright © 1971 Brock Brower.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Copyright,
I. From a Self-Addressed Envelope,
II. Certain Unedited Tapes,
III. A Final Manuscript,
IV. Remains,

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