White Zombies and Sherlock Holmes

While we're on the subject of Pacesetter (we are, sort of), one of the TSR ex-pats who helped found the company was Stephen D. Sullivan. Sully had been at TSR for about a year when I was hired. He was dividing his time between editing, illustration, and cartography (at that time, maps were drawn by the illustrators; those jobs hadn't been split into separate departments yet). We shared an office above the Dungeon Hobby Shop for over a year and were neighbors in the same apartment building for many more, so Steve is one of my oldest and dearest friends. At Pacesetter, he did game design, editing, and illustration for Chill, TimeMaster, Star Ace, Wabbit Wampage, and everything else Pacesetter produced.

These days, Steve is one of the workhorses of genre fiction. Most writers can only fantasize about having a body of work like what he’s produced. Steve’s latest is a book adaptation of the seminal horror film White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. I re-watched this movie about a year ago, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, since I remembered my disappointment with White Zombie as a kid. It moved too slowly for a 12 year old who wanted to see hordes of zombies devouring human flesh. White Zombie isn't that story. It foreshadows by about 10 years the work that Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur would do at RKO in the 1940s with movies such as Cat People and The Leopard Man. If you're a fan of moody B&W horror, Lugosi, or zombies, and you'd like to know where all this zombie mania came from, then watch the movie and read Steve Sullivan's adaptation and recreated script.

And since I’m making book recommendations today, here’s another: Watson is Not an Idiot by Eddy Webb. The book is a collection of essays, one on each of the canonical Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In them, Webb examines the stories for continuity (something Doyle was notoriously bad about), historical context, running themes, characterization, the “real” Holmes and Watson vs. the myth, and whatever else about a story catches his fancy. If you’ve read Ken Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft, this is a similar approach, but the essays are more extensive. (I found many of Hite’s essays too brief: more tantalizing than satisfying. That’s not a problem here.) Watson is Not an Idiot is a terrific companion to the Holmes mystyeries. Even though I’ve read all the Holmes stories multiple times, this collection of essays has made me start them all over again.