John Skipp Cooks Up the Hollywood Alphabet Soup of Horror
Steve Barton
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There’s no doubt that amongst the hardcore horror crowd there are few authors as beloved as John Skipp so any time the man turns out something new, we’re all over it so you can be all over it. We’re good like that.
Over on HorrorDrive-in.com Skipp has just published a short story titled Skipp’s Hollywood Alphabet Soup of Horror, and as always it’s the goods. Check out an excerpt below, and click the link for the whole enchilada!
A IS FOR ALPHA
Above, somethings slither with ponderous weight.
Below, they are tearing off pounds at a time.
In the stands that surround the blood pit, the Audience leans forward as if their heads were every bit as heavy, watching as the man with the ancient Oscar takes a swing at the kid lining up for nomination, the statue’s skull a jagged thing that severs as it thuds.
The kid is good – his last three pictures made money, and his blade cuts swift and deep – but the chunk of skull that crunches free at this moment lets just a little too much air in, directly on the brain.
He crumples, spraying, and already praying that the next project won’t be this fucking hard. Maybe a sequel wouldn’t be so bad, after all. Got to be better than this.
The elder survives, maimed and poked full of holes, but gets to fight one more heavyweight A-list round.
Approval gurgles, unearthly, from the rafters, where the real decisions are made.
Barely heard, above the Audience’s hypnotized cheers.
B IS FOR BIG OPENING WEEKEND
When the 100 million dollar remake of It Conquered the World didn’t, it was a disaster to end all disaster movies. Not since the epic fail of the American Godzilla had a monster so huge fallen so short of expectations.
They’d made billboards of skyscrapers, plastered every bus in L.A. with the creature’s odious eyes, put John Hamm and Harrison Ford on every talk show in existence. It wasn’t enough. It finished eighth, with a weekend gross of $3.6 mil. The talking hamster film took sixth.
So when the flying saucers appeared over Hollywood Way in Burbank on Sunday, many suspected it was a last-ditch effort by Warner Bros. to pump some life into the thing.
But when the beams of searing power rained down from above to liquefy the water tower, raze the sound stages, and carbonize Keanu Reeves, it was time to guess again.
Turns out that the aliens were just as sick of big-budget miss-the-point bullshit as everyone else.
On the other hand, the Discovery Channel has gotten reeeeeal popular, all of a sudden.
C IS FOR CREDIT
It’s worth its weightlessness in gold.
(Or, at least, so I’ve been told.)
That’s why they’ll slice and gut you clean
To see their names up on the screen.
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