A couple of Februaries ago I wrote about my childhood library and what a reflection it was of the boy I had been and the adult I am now.  In The Book Worm Turns and The Book Worm Returns, I waxed nostalgic about being the only kid on my block – hell, probably in my whole town – who had his own movie book library.  My books weren’t restricted to horror films – I had volumes pertaining to westerns and gangster/crime movies, too – but they did make up the lion’s share of the bulk of that repository of knowledge and trivia and the ratio hasn’t changed much.  But unlike a lot of my fellow Morlocks, who have written about their cinebibliomania this week as part of the ongoing “Reading Movies” meme, my love of movies wasn’t fostered entirely by movie-related books.

I think the first important book in my life was Jules Feiffer’s THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES, which my Dad took out for me from the library of the high school where he was Principal.  If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s a compendium of origin stories for superheroes from Superman and Batman to Submariner and The Spirit.  A lot of the book is dark, the goings on ghoulish and grim (the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents on a Gotham City sidewalk is a panel that, while hardly graphic, remains burned into the retina of my mind’s eye) and not kids’ fare… but I ate it up and read the book feverishly until it fell apart in my hands like wet bread.  (Gee, I hope they ordered a new copy for the school.)  While not being a cinema book, the use of panels to tell a story  make comics a kissin’ cousin to the movies and the association wasn’t lost on me, even at the age of 8 or 9.  Another book even farther afield that I couldn’t live without was THE FBI STORY by Don Whitehead.  This (we now know) sanitized chronicle of the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation captivated me as a boy because it showed me the real faces of famous gangsters I’d seen in the movies: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker.  I suppose I’d seen the Warner Brothers movie, THE FBI STORY (1959), starring James Stewart, and I was no doubt thrilled that it was all true.  Well, mostly.  Kinda sorta.

Another non-movie movie book was the incredible 18 story anthology THE GHOULS, edited by Peter Haining.  I bought this at a school book fair – the cover sold me – for the then-princely sum of a buck twenty-five.  Oh, but it was worth it.  The collection consists of short stories that inspired horror movies, from Francois Oscar Man’s The Devil in a Convent (which beget Georges Méliès  LE DIABLE AU CONVENT (1899) to George Langelaan’s The Fly (first published in Playboy in 1957) and adapted as the classic sci-fi/horror hybrid THE FLY (1958), starring Vincent Price, the following year.

André emitted a strange metallic sigh and I just had time to bite my fingers fiercely in order not to scream.  He had let his right arm drop, and instead of his long-fingered muscular hand, a grey stick with little buds on it like the branch of a tree, hung out of his sleeve almost down to his knee.

This book is remarkable for two reasons.  One, it disproves the theory that giving kids what they want to read rather than what they should read limits them and prohibits them from an appreciation of “finer” things.  On the contrary, reading horror stories as a child encouraged within me an interest in history, in comparative religion, in philosophy, poetry, fine art, dance, in architecture, in geography, archeology, pathology, astronomy.  It encouraged an innate curiosity that led to me becoming a writer.  It all began here, with THE GHOULS, the first horror fiction and probably the first fiction I ever read on my own.  I think this sadly forgotten book is also remarkable for the fact that it was published by mainstream publishing house and then marketed, at least partially, to school children.  That would never happen nowadays, when a project like this would be relegated to the niche markets.  I’m so glad they didn’t dumb it down when I was a kid.

Truth be told, I never really read a lot of the classic critical stuff: James Agee, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael.  I even had some of those books (I used to be guilty of buying way more books than I could ever hope to read) but the opinions of these people in regard to movies I liked was never more than of passing interest.  If I had to single out a movie critic who really changed my life, who really sculpted my aesthetic, it would have to be Tim Lucas.  You may know Tim as the publisher of the monthly consumer guide Video Watchdog, as a popular film historian and/or as the author of the recently-released MARIO BAVA: ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK.  I became a fan of his magazine in the early 90s and warmed instantly to his infectious accommodation of high and low art into a common ground that didn’t cheapen the former or elevate the latter unnecessarily.  Like any critic, Tim wasn’t immune to flashes of high dudgeon but he never seemed snooty or pedantic in his approach to movies.  His writing was muscular without being starchy or inflexible.  I thought then and still do that his mix of sense and sensitivity was the perfect one and after I began writing about film (and studying Tim’s back pages through the essential VIDEO WATCHDOG BOOK, a collection of his pre-VW columns for the defunct UK magazine Gorzone) I accepted the invitation to write for Tim.  Ten years later and I’m still listed among his “Kennel” of writers, although obligations of career and family keep my contributions to the magazine too far and few between these days.

To this day, I still don’t get nearly as big a thrill by movie shopping as I do shopping for books about movies.  I guess the die was cast back then I was a boy when I spied that copy of Frank Manchel’s TERRORS OF THE SCREEN on the shelves of the Danielson Public Library.  Mind you, I’m not complaining.