Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

***Spoiler Warning *** I don't discuss plot points, but the themes may give some of them away.

Horror Movie is the latest book by Paul Tremblay, and it initially got my attention because of the cover and the online review site Book Marks Reviews, where it has rave reviews praising it. Any given book on that site has a range of opinions from those who love it to those who don't, but this book received the literal highest praise from every participant reviewer. As for the cover, it features an old, cracked VHS tape; call me nostalgic but that combined with the theme of horror movies which have fascinated me ever since I was in high school, where I didn't have the guts to watch most of them but would religiously study the lore and plots through Wikipedia articles. I was intrigued, but also suspicious.

Books that receive such positive accolades are usually ones that have a strong theme, one that the reviewers believe is 'important'. This is not to say that such books do not have their merits, but I usually find myself bogged down by them; if you can sum up a whole book in a one-line message or moral, what was the point of making it a whole book? I pushed passed these concerns though because if there is one genre that can do 'important' books justice, it is horror. If you don't believe me look to The Twilight Zone which was often very heavy-handed with its messaging, but used those simple messages to help guide us through a complicated, twisting world of monsters, puzzles, and existential dread. I wasn't sure if Horror Movie would accomplish the same thing, but there was good reason to hope.

I read this book in three sittings. The first I blazed through nearly half of it, and then had to take a week to step away from it. The second sitting was a few scattered attempts to push through it at a normal pace, held back by my own sense that I needed time to process what I was reading. Finally, on my day off I finished the last third. 

I'm flummoxed by this book, but more than anything I'm disturbed by it. Not because of monsters or serial killers or any of the usual horror story suspects. There are no demons to possess our characters, pushing them toward horrifying actions. There is just the simple human drive to create. 

I've seen several movies about the struggling creative fighting to make their art. Any number of biopics will show the artist constantly inspired by the world they inhabit and having to fend off family, banks, and editors to make sure their work is realized to perfection. The drive to create is held up as a fundamentally noble aspect of humanity, sometimes as the very essence of what makes us human.

Not so in Horror Movie.

This is the perfect re-imagining for a modern-day readership of themes present in Heart of Darkness. That all of us, no matter how noble, can be easily driven into our worst selves when we have been given a motivation to do so. That drive here is the drive to create, to make a movie at all costs, and to make that movie legendary. The narrator does terrible things to himself in the name of getting into character, the director drives him and the rest of the crew to extremes to achieve her vision, and the screenwriter is using all of them for her own purpose of self-expression. In many ways though, this is the exact process of how collaborative arts are made: everybody using each other, pushing each other to make a vision a reality. In Horror Movie we get to see that pushed to it's worst, but most realistic extreme. The greatest horror here is what people will do to use each other, although there are also strong themes of body and psychological horror as well. 

If you are looking for something classic - a cursed film story (which the cover blurbs advertise this to be) to be you will probably be disappointed. It is a short novel about an inevitable fall. I'd compare it to getting on a roller coaster that keeps going up, and up, and up until you're not sure how long you've been on it, and the moments of horror are the shifts in gravity as you realize how hard and far you are about to fall.

All in all, a good book, well worth reading, and even re-reading.