Lee Gambin

You ever get that wonderful feeling of anticipation for a book that just gets closer and closer to the top of your to-be-read pile? The one that sits like a hidden gem in the stack, constantly calling to you while you finish the ones ahead of it?

Yeah, that was this book for me.

For months, I've been eyeing it in my stack of books to read, often tempted to pull it out of order and just read it. I mean, shit, it's about the making of the Cujo movie! How cool was this going to be?

Instead, when I finally got to crack the cover on it tonight and dive in, instead of the fantastic reading experience I was expecting, it was somewhat closer to diving into a steaming pile of St. Bernard shit.

Lee Gambin, where's your fucking brains? Seriously, normally, I don't really say a lot about the author, I prefer to discuss the merits of the book itself, but in this case, the fault is firmly rooted at the feet of the author. Because it says right at the front of the book, "Written and edited by Lee Gambin" so he both wrote this mess, then proceeded to turn it into a near-incomprehensible mush of ever-changing topics and repetitive facts and facile quotes.

From what I could tell of the two terrible fucking chapters I stumbled through, Gambin's decided to take a few minutes of the film and layer in his half-baked theories and observations of the movie. Chapter One covers the title card and Cujo chasing the rabbit into the hole and getting bit by the rabid bats. The problem with the lack of narrative flow comes in the second half of the chapter where the author sprinkles overlong, unconnected quotes from the various cast and crew. Instead of addressing those few moments of film, we dive into the aspect of the original director being shitcanned after a couple of days' worth of shooting and a different director coming in.

The second chapter moves a few more minutes into the film, with the son, Tad, coming from the bathroom and back into bed and calling for his mother. The author leans heavily on a particular camera angle for when Tad jumps into bed, dissecting the shit out of it and giving us the history of it from a Russian film, then, when we get into the cast/crew quotes, we get the same history again, as well as either repetitious quotes from the same people over and over, or stuff that's so far off-topic that you gotta wonder what the hell the author was doing. Honestly, it feels like he might have tossed a bunch of them onto the floor, then just grabbed a few. Dee Wallace talking about how her husband at the time was cast as the guy she was cheating with in the movie. Why not wait until that scene is introduced? Or, maybe you have an exceptionally similar repetitive quote at that point in the book? Don't know, couldn't be bothered to stick around to find out.

Then there's the writing. Here's just a single example (bolding is mine):

More changes would eschew when Peter Medak would be fired from the project, ushering in King's first choice for the film Lewis Teague as director.

There's just so much wrong with this single sentence, but let's start with the verb "eschew" shall we? To eschew is to refrain from, or to avoid. So, it kind of sounds like Gambin might be saying something like "additional changes would be avoided after Medak was fired" ...but in fact that's the opposite of what happened and what he's trying to say. Teague came in and changed the opening, pulled the supernatural stuff, etc. So, this is just the case of an author trying to use a fancy-ass verb and having no clue what it means.

Then there's the tense. Doesn't he actually mean those changes would be eschewed when Medak was fired, not when he would be fired?

Seriously, this whole thing is just a goddamn hot mess of no talent. It's terrible.

What's worse? I spent a fuck-ton of money to get this book. Gambin, you owe me both time and money, you shit.… (más)