Late Shift

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M. L. Rio is best known for If We Were Villains, a book I have on my shelf but haven’t read yet.  She’s one of those rare PhDs who can write, and her punchy, irreverent style has a way of drawing you in.  Graveyard Shift is actually a novella (a cynic would say a way to get you to pay a full novel price on a piece a bit too short to qualify), so it’s a quick read.  It’s a little difficult to classify, genre-wise.  The copyright page suggests thriller, which means not-quite-horror, but with elements of it.  Taking place over one night (and just over 100 pages), its the story of how a college student journalist and her friends crack the case of a mysterious shallow grave they discover one night at their usual hangout, behind an abandoned church, Saint Anthony the Anchorite.  Edie, the journalist, has to find a story to headline the next day’s edition, and the grave provides it.

The story involves mushrooms and rats, sleep deprivation, and lots of smoking.  Still, it’s a well-crafted tale that holds your interest.  Of course, I noticed the centrality of the church to the story.  It’s so much a part of things that the disparate group of friends identify themselves as Anchorites.  An anchorite is essentially a hermit—a monk who prefers not to live communally (cenobites, a name taken up by the Hellraiser franchise, are monks in community).  Of course, the friends aren’t monks, just young people in a college town who like to be out at night, and maybe solve mysteries.  The church is both a focal point and a kind of vector in this world where unusual activities take place after dark.  It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the friends solve the mystery and begin to help address one another’s problems.

I like brief books.  I don’t mind moderately long novels—when they start getting over 400 pages I get a bit anxious.  I have to admit that Goodreads has made me conscious of how many books I read in a year.  And since I like to blog about books, it also helps to finish them in a timely way.  Besides, escapism is especially important at the moment.  If you like stories about college kids, under-employed professors, bartenders and others who manage to eke out a living before family and mortgage change everything in your life, you’ll probably like this one.  It’s not really a horror story, but it’ll keep you turning pages, which is what books of any size are meant to do.

Shifting Gears

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The question’s very basic: do you pay with cash, or by watching commercials.  When it’s the same three commercials the whole way through—for products you’d never buy—just paying the cash may seem the better option.  But it’s too late for that.  It’s the Graveyard Shift.  There’s no doubt  that Stephen King is responsible for the ideas for more horror movies than probably any other single individual.  I’d read his story, “Graveyard Shift,” many years ago.  I was warned, though, that this was one of the least favorite of his adaptations, and that’s a pretty low bar.  Still, it was just a matter of sitting through the same commercials over and over.  And one of them was more entertaining than the movie.  Of course, I don’t really watch for entertainment.  This is a learning opportunity.

Let’s start with the basics: You need at least one sympathetic character.  Okay, you kinda like Jane, because she shows basic humanitarian traits.  And Carmichael.  Then you want a plot that makes some sense—what is Warwick’s motivation?  The writing is particularly bad.  If there’d been a bit more intentional camp, this might’ve made a reasonable horror comedy.  I mean, you’ve already got the empty aluminum cans being fired by slingshot.  As it is, it’s played straight with an evil foreman, rats everywhere, and a giant bat in the basement.  By the end you’re kind of rooting for the bat.  And whose idea was it to use voiceovers of the sub-par dialogue over the closing credits?  Is this so bad that it’s good?  I’m having trouble deciding.

Although set around the fourth of July I wouldn’t call this holiday horror.  Nevertheless, there are some moments of religious imagery that pop out.  The graveyard sinking in the river has a listing statue of Jesus near the start of the film.  And the exterminator—the only real camp in the flick—narrates how in Vietnam they pinned victims down, like Jesus, to feed them to the rats.  The final couple of minutes—well earned, I assure you—have Hall fighting the wicked foreman with the jawbone of an animal (one has to assume an ass), inexplicably among human bones (some still in their coffins).  And his slingshot ultimately killing the giant (bat).  The references are to Samson and David, respectively.  Perhaps this movie’s an indictment of capitalism, since the basement cleanup is on Independence Day.  Or maybe it’s just tired horror tropes on a break.  (Having one of the characters reading Ben in the diner was a nice touch.)  It may become a holiday tradition after all.