A writer writes.  That’s what they tell me.  My buddy Tom Piccirilli claims that if he was stranded on a desert island he’d scribble in the sand at low tide.  I’d probably just jerk off a lot and try to spell things with the spooge.  Hey . . . double your pleasure, right?  Or maybe if I was stranded on the island with a couple of bros I’d kill and eat one of them and write dirty love letters to Christy Canyon or Dorothy Stratten—I like my porn stars dead or retired—in the guy’s blood.  That would be fun also.  Or maybe . . .

 . . . Umm, sorry, I digress.  You get really  . . . err, philosophical . . . when the rent's due and the fridge is empty and you’re passing kidney stones and the credit card people won’t stop calling.  I have to disguise my voice when I answer the phone.  Still no word from the landlord.  Guy’s probably dead.  The GOOD NEWS is that my new book this summer is my first-ever honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool, they-really-paid-me-cold-cash-to-write-this-fucking-thing MOVIE NOVELIZATION.  And, while, yes, I DID do it for the money, honey—and the nookie (any dead porn stars out there reading this?)—this one is really special because it represents an actual honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool Dream Come Fucking True. 

See, while most novelists with some relative fame—say, Christa Faust, Denis Etchison or whomever—tend to be kind of embarrassed when they pen one of these weird mutant movie offsprings (Dennis took his name off most of his, and he did VIDEODROME, the fucker!), it’s been my ambition to write books based on films since I was a kid.  The very first work of fiction I ever completed as a 12 year old was a “novelization” of John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, scribbled out over several feverish weeks in my math notebook when I should have been concentrating on what the fuck a division symbol meant.  (I still have no idea.)   In the past I have been responsible for comics and comic adaptations based on fine films such as PHANTASM, THE GATES OF HELL, ZOMBIE and most notably THE BEYOND, which was the official tie-in when Quentin Tarantino released the UNCUT movie stateside for the first time in 1998—all very cool, yes.  But, just released last week, is my first ever prose-only movie novelization, and, way cooler still, it’s based on a brand new movie which may well be one of the silliest, sickest, most controversial and (most importantly) DISGUSTING horror cult comedy thingies to come along in a while.

Yes, folks, THAT movie.

BLACK DEVIL DOLL.

I’ve been working with these guys as a poster artist since the start of production—and that’s because I hadda teach myself how to do retro movie art for my last project SHOCK FESTIVAL.  (Maybe you’ve heard of that one?)  I even created the DVD packaging and wrote the “liner notes” for this film, all done in the voice of a fictional college professor named Julian Krantz who truly believes BLACK DEVIL DOLL is “the most important film ever made about African American culture.”  (His article is called TOSSING THE SALAD, by the way.)  When the producer called me up and said he wanted to come out with an official book tie-in, at first I was stunned . . . then I realized it was a golden opportunity.  And also, I really needed the money.  But how . . . and I mean HOW IN THE FUCK . . . was I gonna turn THAT MOVIE into a book?

See, most movie tie-ins are based on screenplays.  Usually these screenplays are constructed by professionals who add things like characters, story and dialogue into the mix.  BLACK DEVIL DOLL is a film based on a series of alcohol-induced stage directions scribbled on cocktail napkins at four in the morning by two of the most despicable lowlife characters you could ever hope to avoid in a dark alley.  The film itself was made over a period of about a year and a half, as new “ideas” came to these yahoos during drug blackouts and those “ideas” somehow found themselves into the works.  I soon came to realize that these people would stop at nothing.  In fact, when I created the first advance poster for the film last year, I coined the rather lovely phrase “filmed in Negroscope” to describe the low-blowing nonsense of a trash-talking, demon-possessed Afro-American ventriloquist doll who rapes and kills 15 Caucasian women for no particular reason . . . and they actually got inspired by this!  I mean, they went out and FILMED SOME NEW SCENES IN NEGROSCOPE!  IT’S IN THERE! 

I kid, of course.

Writing BLACK DEVIL DOLL: THE BOOK was some of the best fun I’ve ever had as a writer.  It was the fulfillment of a real childhood dream and my first comedy, too, so anything was fair game.  Anything.  At all.  Because of the rather . . . errr . . . elliptical nature of the film’s plot, I was faced with the task of explaining everything by way of fairly elaborate backstory and new scenes to fill in gaps—hopefully making the experience of reading the book a different one from watching the film, but something you get excited about because it exists as an expansion of the subject matter.  These guys set out to make a film which is, essentially, a long string of pussy jokes and racial slams, so I figured the book must be even more extreme.  Co-screenwriter Mitch Mayes offered me the high praise of “man, this is some over-the-top ballsy shit” when he read the first draft.  When a guy who is most famous for a TV show about bitchy trailer trash ladies who beat the shit out of each other in a garage says you’ve got balls, it’s probably true.  That show is called BRAWLIN’ BROADS, by the way.  It’s real.  I’m not joking.

The hook I finally hung the whole project on was the voice I decided to wrote the novel in, which was the same voice—and pseudonym—I had created for the haughty, scholarly DVD liner notes that had proven such a hit with the filmmakers.  Indeed, the pompous Professor Julian Krantz, PhD, would return to chronicle the life and times of scumbag Black Panther radical Mubia Abul Jama and his transformation into the BLACK DEVIL DOLL with all the overcompensating admiration and lofty pretentiousness I could muster without sacrificing the word “motherfucker” too often.  I made the professor a character in the book, who is raped and brainwashed in the 1960s by Mubia himself—the entire book is sort of a sick, hilarious love letter to the BLACK DEVIL DOLL, written by a gimp-like academic fallen from grace.   Think IN COLD BLOOD meets DOLOMITE meets CHUCKY GETS A HARD ON.  I was so into this, I wrote the whole thing in just seven days.

That was good because I really needed the second half of my advance to pay the rent.  I got Shawn to pay me early, actually—and dedicated the book to him because the check didn’t bounce.  He’s the other degenerate responsible for the screenplay.

Have no illusions.  BLACK DEVIL DOLL is a movie made on a wing and a prayer by guys who had never made a movie before.  It’s got its problems and its passions—but, unlike a lot of other self-deluded fucks at the starting line in this business, these guys know their limitations, and moreover have the courage of their convictions.  Shawn, who is also the film’s producer, has always been a self-starter and a doer.  I’ve known him for fifteen years and he’s never dropped the ball on anything he’s ever gone after.  He went and made his raunchy, irredeemable little no-budget blaxplotation thing into a real hit, considering its humble origins, and I am proud of his balls.  Indeed, when the right reverend Al Sharpton went pubic against BLACK DEVIL DOLL last year, slamming the film in the most obvious manner as “lowest common denominator entertainment” . . . Shawn’s first reaction was to re-name his production company immediately, and now both the film and my book are LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR productions.  Proudly.

Yeah, I can hear some of you already.  Is THIS how far we’ve come?  What about “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”  Isn’t this the Barrack Obama age or something?

Fuck you.  We’re still at war.  I won’t EVER accept this bullshit “politically correct” thing that seems to exist in the media until, we, as a nation, are done lying to ourselves about bombing an entire civilization out of existence.  THAT’S the real horror.  Until then, if we can’t laugh at our differences and smirk at low comedy as the irreverant release valve we need to keep from losing our minds in a sea of pompus denial, it’s not an age of "enlightement" we're living in . . . but a sad, sad age indeed.

Remember the days when you didn’t feel all that guilty about laughing out loud during movies like BLAZING SADDLES?  Notice now they JUST DON’T MAKE MOVIES LIKE BLAZING SADDLES ANYMORE?  We’re fixing that.  My book fixes that.  The goal was to offend as many people as humanly possible—particularly the actresses playing the female leads in the film—and make everybody else laugh their spleens onto the floor while the Spike Lee crowd blows righteous Moby chunks.  I even attempted to get into the Guinness Book Of World Records with what I believe to be the longest list of illegal drug slang ever assembled in one volume.  For that, I have to thank my tireless editor Teighlor Darr, who insisted on being a part of this politically-comatose farce, in spite of its obviously marginalized subject matter.  In fact, once I told her I wasn’t taking out any of the Mexican jokes, she got right into the spirit of things, coining such phrases as “bearded beard-splitter” and “fondle his fetus feeler” in reference to the rather large  . . . equipment . . . possessed by the Black Devil Doll.

Yeah, a writer writes.  Yeah, he’ll write anything if the money’s green and the rent is due.  But I also did it because I fucking LOVE these guys.

Now . . . I double DOG dare each and every one of you.  Go to Amazon.com and buy a copy.  It’s just twelve bucks and some change.  A gorgeous oversized trade paperback. With a full color painted cover, sexy movie stills and even a forward by noted blog critic Louis Fowler.  But that’s only part of the dare.  The rest is this . . . if even the most uptight among you fail to crack a smile at least once at the dark brown depths to which grown men and women will sink in pursuit of the almighty Lowest Common Denominator . . . I will, personally, lick each and every one of your assholes.  But only if you're a hot chick.  And a porn star.  And dead.  Really.

Go here:

STEPHEN