- Grandpa’s monster movies (Deadtime stories #10). A. G. Gascone. Snooty city cousins C. T. and Lea are not having a good time at their family reunion. Oh, Grandpa and Grandma are okay, mostly on account they serve fried chicken. But the lower-class uncle and his wife and kids who eat stuff that doesn’t come out of a KFC? And the single uncle who likes animals and happens to be very hairy! They keep EXISTING and, like, not apologizing for it, how dare they! And there is also a man-eating monster on the loose, but really, that’s noting compared to the fact that these poor privileged middle-class kids are expected not to spit on their ugly poor relatives. The horror.
“Deadtime Stories” was one of several children’s horror knock-offs that littered the 90’s in the wake of the success of “Goosebumps” (and several predecessors). Some, like “Shivers”, tended to be even better than the series the publishers wished to ape. And some, like this series offered by sisters Annette and Gina Gascone under a shared pen name, reminds us that 90% of everything is at best mediocre.
To be sure: In terms of plot itself, this book is neither particularly bad or good: It’s a fairly standard monster story that takes a specific horror sub-genre ant presents a somewhat watered-down version to make it suitable for —not for children, exactly (good authors for children know that they are often much more resilient than adults and teenagers), bur rather suitable for mainstream publishers. The genre in question here is equal parts “Southern Gothic” (as the name implies, Gothic tales set in rural South US) and what one might call “Hillbilly horror”.
And it’s this second part that is the problem: The atmosphere and the violence might be toned down, but the classicism inherent in the sub-genre is present in full (the only thing not applied is anything sexual —and frankly, the book is *this* close to insinuating that one set of characters are inbred and that the single uncle is a zoophile). Every description of the rural, blue-collar characters is meant to evoke revulsion from the reader, or at the bare minimum a nervous titter. I have seen at least one review that comes this close to agreeing with this viewpoint, too. Small surprise. Appealing to the lowest common denominator usually finds the vilest kind of sympathy.
One might say —okay, but what if we ignore all of that and just focus on the monster part? Well, first, it’s difficult, because the book is 90% gross descriptions of relatives, 10% plot. And the plot itself is… undercooked, to say the least. The concept isn’t bad: A “wild pet” that has been kept captive and secret for at least three generations but which gets loose every so often and wrecks havoc. But the actual execution is riddled with plot holes: How can this creature be kept a secret when it has killed people in plain sight, even registered in film? (Why, yes, the title is literal. Grandpa kept home movies of the monster for reasons that are left as an exercise for the reader). How unfortunate does a man have to be to be stuck by lightning SIXTEEN times and also get a literal monster at an arcade? Where did that arcade machine come from and why was it in the middle of a county fair? How can one take a cartoonish plot like blowing up a monster with TNT seriously? (Some might argue that the ending is meant to be silly, but nothing in the prose suggests that the Gascone sisters are playing it tongue-in-cheek. Involuntarily hilarious is more like it).
The result, then, is a book that is more a curiosity (an often irritating curiosity), a sampling of a specific era, than a good story on its own right.
