The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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David Houston and Len Wein, �Swamp Thing�

Started February 16 � Finished February 16, 2005; 224 pages. Posted 21 March 2005

I just got back from seeing, by myself, The Vagina Monologues. I saw it because I got free tickets. I went by myself because the way I asked people to go with me went something like this:

�Hey, I got tickets to see The Vagina Monologues and I thought you might want to go with me...�

Pause.

��Cause you�re a cunt.�

So I�m sitting in my seat, looking confused while people around me tittered like 12-year-olds in sex-ed class whenever somebody uses a euphemism for pussy, feeling not unlike Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.

�You mean vagina?�

Parts of it were funny, though many of the actors weren�t particularly good and flubbed their lines. But, in one of those strange situations where things are too much of a coincidence so that it can only happen to me, I was reading Eric Idle�s biography of his recent tour before the house lights went down. Not two minutes before we were plunged into darkness, I read the words for �Not the Noel Coward song.�

If you haven�t seen the play, or the HBO special, or read the book, it works like this. Be a little funny, then strive toward something poignant, and then hit the audience with a statistic about violence against women with all the subtlety of a Patsy Cline song. Whenever they went into the third category, talking about rape, or genital mutilation, or whatever, that little tune would pop into my head.

Isn�t it awfully nice to have a penis?

And I�d start giggling. The two women sitting to my left moved to a different location after Act One.

None of that has anything to do with this book, however, so I�ll leave it at that. This is a novelization of the awful Wes Craven movie of the early 80s. I�m not sure, but film tie-in novelization writers must be pretty close to the lowest tier of the writing ladder, only slightly elevated from the rushed unauthorized ripped-from-today�s-headlines biographies.

I suppose people have to start somewhere and need to get paid. Hell, even Neil Gaiman wrote one of those unauthorized paperback biographies on Duran Duran. But Jumping Jesus, did these two writers even know who was cast in the film? I ask, because on page 14, where they introduce the character of Alice Cable, they say she was �pretty�slender, with brown hair and regular features.�

In the film, a slumming Adrienne Barbeau plays Alice Cable. If those are regular features, then I have a vagina.

Anyway, to read a novelization based upon a movie that sucked makes it pretty hard to expect otherwise. I wasn�t disappointed. The only thing good about reading this, which I got for free and have been putting off for about five years, is that it was a signifier on how close I am to actually finishing this stupid project.

Is it worth keeping? Hell no. And I�m betting that I won�t be able to sell it to the store either.


Rating: Worthless.

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