SECRET MOVIES: THEODORE ROSZAK'S FLICKER

My modest contribution to Bill Ryan's "The Kind of Face You Slash" celebration of horror fiction over at his esteemed blog The Kind of Face You Hate is now online, a brief consideration of Theodore Roszak's 1991 novel Flicker. I never really thought of Flicker as a horror novel in the strictest sense while I was reading it-- the first half reads more like a decadent orgy of movie lore woven expertly into a pleasingly reluctant, expertly teased detective story. But the book certainly qualifies as horror in that it shares the obsessive nature of its protagonist, film historian Jonathan Gates, who follows the decaying nitrate trail of long-forgotten genre filmmaker Max Castle all the way down the rabbit hole, beneath the deceptively tacky first layer of the director's strangely seductive imagery and into a nightmare world of secret movies. Here, bathed in the sinister interplay of shadows and light, where something always seems to be just hidden from view, the hooks of the past are set, dragging the academic, and us, into a present where Castle's subliminal text is developing, with the help of a mysterious religious sect and a newly emerging cult phenomenon by the name of Simon Dunkle, into malignant foreground. Flicker's vampires and creatures of the night may remain locked in tattered celluloid, the remains of Max Castle's oeuvre, but like Castle's mysterious technique, the flicker, Roszak's book gets under your skin, makes you shiver, and makes you think about how elastic the horror genre really can be.

Check out my piece and all the other essays in Bill's month-long horror fiction roundup as October rolls along at The Kind of Face You Hate. 

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