Horror Icon Kelli Maroney Narrates Award-Nominated Horror Book For Encyclopocalypse
After decades as a certified scream queen and credits in nearly four dozen horror films, Kelli Maroney has added a unique new credit to her resume: audiobook narrator.
Now available via Encyclopocalypse, Kelli Maroney has given voice to the 2022 Rondo-award nominated Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, the first biography of Sleazoid Express founder and horror historian Bill Landis. Written by novelist and journalist Preston Fassel (Our Lady of the Inferno; FANGORIA), the book charts the career of Landis, whose pioneering magazine covered the films screened at Times Square grindhouses in the 1980s as well as the people who came to see them. For many, Sleazoid was the only source for information on exploitation and underground cinema, and it remains a lasting document of the many subcultures and disenfranchised groups who gravitated towards the grindhouses, including LGBT individuals, drag artists, and sex workers.
Landis rose to prominence again in 2002 with the publication of Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square, a book chronicling the films and theaters of Times Square, co-written with his wife and collaborator Michelle Clifford. That book led to Landis and Clifford resurrecting the Sleazoid Express magazine and hosting grindhouse film screenings for several years in the early 2000s. Landis died of a drug-induced heart attack in Chicago in 2008.
Says Fassel,
“Kelli’s been a friend of mine for over a decade now, and when I was approached by Encyclopocalypse about recording an audiobook of Landis, she was the first person who came to mind. This was an especially important project to me. Reading Bill’s work literally put me on the road to where I am today and I wouldn’t be where I am without him. Kelli really got that importance and brought the right passion to her performance to convey the book’s importance to me.”
Kelli Maroney added,
“I have always loved and revered Preston’s work, so I was thrilled and so very honored to narrate Landis, and I still am. I know how much writing this book and getting it out into the world meant to Preston, what a perverse, nonsensical struggle it was to get anyone to agree to speak with him about Landis, to get any information out of anybody, and how lucky Bill Landis himself was to have someone like Preston care so much about telling his story. The irony of having pretty much no one care about him in life or in death and then having Preston create this beautiful tribute to him really touched me. I’m beyond proud to be invited to be part of things so I approached this book and this story with great reverence.”
Landis marks the second collaboration between Encyclopocalypse, Fassel, and a Scream Queen. In 2021, the publisher released a fully-cast audio drama of Fassel’s Our Lady of the Inferno starring Barbara Crampton as cannibal serial killer Nicolette Aster. That book won similarly rave reviews and won the 2019 Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal for Horror.
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