Letter from Camp YWA: Damien and the Book of Books
Before anything else, you should know I’m writing this letter to you while listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack to The Final Conflict: Omen 3, a movie that follows grown-up Damien as he dates a TV news presenter and goes fox hunting and honestly does hardly anything else. I watched it, oh God, more than a decade ago. (When I think about what I learned in college I usually come back to all the horror movies I was watching at the time).
The score is probably the best thing about it--a sentence which really fails to give you the impression that the score actually is improbably grand, majestic, complex, uplifting...honestly, maybe too good, since it gives a lot of dramatic heft to our protagonist’s quest to destroy The Nazarene. (Whoever that is!) I would happily dress up and sit in a room festooned with velvet to hear it performed. But what really sells me on it, I think, is that Jerry Goldsmith appears to have written it around the same time he worked on The Secret of NIMH, and they sound...well, if not similar, then like sister pieces, taken from the same musical galaxy. Antichrists! Genius rats! It’s all magic in the end.
I am writing to you from Camp You’re Wrong About today (where it is very hot, please buy me more tokens for the snack bar) because I am pertly assuming that your appetite for cheesy Satanic paperbacks has somehow not yet been satisfied by the giant plate of Satan Seller we just served you. I have spent a lot of the past month sitting in my backyard, reading books, but mainly re-reading books I’ve read in the past several years, and summarizing and outlining them in notebooks. (I call this project the Book of Books.) And as you can imagine, that stack has included a fair number of horror paperbacks.
We are reluctantly taking a break from Patreon bonus episodes this summer, as you may have noticed. It’s frustrating to not have the time and energy to dedicate to them that we need to give you something we love, but my hope is that you might also enjoy this newsletter substitute. (And if you don’t, then now, as always, feel free to stop sending us your hard-earned money and spend it instead on a nice sandwich, or an avocado mask, or pencils for your children...or some horror paperbacks.) You can expect a couple more letters from me this month--and actually, I’d love to know your thoughts on what newsletter frequency you prefer. Can email ever truly be fun? Is really the operative question here, and it seems like a highly personal one.
But today, oh blessed day (Oh bad day, as our friend Dean the Satanist might say), we’re talking about The Omen. No, not the movie. The book. There’s a book--kind of. Like Erich Segal’s Love Story, it is amphibiously both novelization and not: the movie’s screenwriter, David Seltzer, wrote it after he finished the screenplay, but the book was released two weeks before the movie.
The only reason I can imagine for this is that it gave the movie a patina of...relevance? It was familiar, and therefore seemed more worth the money? You could see if you liked the story before actually going to watch it, the way people do with Wikipedia today? I honestly don’t know. I grew up reading novelizations when they were, I think, already on their way out. Today, they speak to me of a time when video, moving images, were scarce, hard to conjure, and caged within little rectangles or reels like the magical creations they were, and remain. I don’t wish we still lived in a time when I had to just buy Labyrinth or pony up $3 for a rental whenever I felt like watching it, but...well, it’s still like that, actually, so that’s nice.
I imagine a lot of kids read The Omen because they couldn’t figure out a way to see such a scary--such a cursed--movie, and for them, the book includes eight fabulous pages of movie stills: it’s like a flipbook of Gregory Peck looking concerned until you get to the part where David Warner’s head flies off. I bought this book at a dollar store in New Brunswick, and I like to think that whoever had it for the forty-odd years before it entered my custody was once a child of the 70s who wanted to read a scary movie they weren’t allowed to see.
The Omen feels like a “yes, and” sequel to Rosemary’s Baby: the Antichrist is born, so now what? In Rosemary, we met little Anti when he was a newborn, and hadn’t had much of a chance to flex his evil muscles, though the book specifies that he has pearly claws (concealed in mitts so he won’t scratch himself, not because they aren’t cute!) and teeny tiny horns. But how do you depict that Satanic nature beginning to emerge? When would you start to see it? Will the baby have magical powers? How often do you trim his claws? Can you paint them? Do you have to buy tiny little black candles for his birthday cake? Can you get the trick kind? Questions, questions.
The Omen takes the daring approach of...not really answering any of those questions, and instead just kind of putting them off until the sequel, which you can tell did a great job addressing them because of how many of you went "oh, there's a sequel?" just now.
Yet when I first read this weird little book, three years ago, I remember buying it in the hopes that it could have some interesting moments, and then being amazed to find myself riveted. I love it when a book that tells us it’s about unearthly evil is actually about something very knowable indeed--too knowable to see as horror without a Satanic veil. To me the most interesting character in The Omen is Jeremy Thorn, Damien’s dad, because oh my God, Jeremy is the worst!!
Jeremy and Katherine Thorn were played in The Omen by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, two actors who are unable to even hint at the backstory Seltzer spins in the book, which is like a version of the movie where no one loves each other and everyone is miserable before Satan shows up. We open on Jeremy reflecting on his wife’s struggle with fertility, and seeming certain that her “instability” means that if this pregnancy fails, it will “be the end of her sanity.”
Jeremy has tried to help Katherine, but he does have limits: “It was even suggested that he masturbate so that his semen could be injected artificially, but here he drew the line. If a child were that important to her, she could adopt.”
!!!!!!!
I just want to take a moment to bask in...well maybe bask is the wrong word...to just let the weight of those two sentences sink into my brain. I don’t think they ever will, really. Jeremy Thorn knows that his wife’s sanity is hanging by a thread (men know everything about their wives’ mental states, it’s the 70s), that a baby is the antidote, and that maybe they could have a much easier time conceiving if he provided some sperm… but we’ll just never know, will we?
This is the part of the book--five pages in, by the way--when I start feeling like Satan might be an improvement. It reminds me a lot of the experience of reading Peter Benchley’s Jaws, which is like a version of the movie where no one loves each other and everyone is miserable before the shark shows up. It’s great. There’s a lot more to talk about than I can possibly get into here, but let me submit my favorite paragraph in the whole book, which depicts Sheriff Brody coming home mid-shark-attack-week, getting some lip from his adolescent sons, and miserably fixing himself a sandwich:
The remains of the pot roast sat on the kitchen table in a roasting pan, surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy… He found a piece of American cheese, dried and curled with age, and he folded it and popped it into his mouth. He debated heating up the pot roast, then said aloud “The hell with it.” He found two pieces of bread, spread mustard on them, took a carving knife from a magnetic board on the wall, and sliced a thick slab of roast. He dropped the meat on one of the pieces of bread, scattered a few pickles on top of it, covered it with the other piece of bread, and mashed the sandwich down with the heel of his hand… In T-shirt and undershorts he sat down on the bed and began to eat his sandwich. The meat was dry and flaky. All he could taste was mustard.
(Source)
A book is an object made of a finite number of pages; this edition of Jaws has 278 in it, and Benchley has just spent half of one focused on the pathos of his sandwich-making protagonist. I think I’m fascinated by this section because of its very out-of-place-ness: why on earth are we supposed to care about Brody’s dinner, and the implication that it reveals how his wife doesn’t adequately provide for him, his sons don’t adequately respect him, and the world is not offering him what he somehow deserves?
Steven Spielberg, who said reading Benchley’s Jaws made him root for the shark, turned this story into one where Sheriff Brody ventures out onto the salty seas to protect his beloved, edible wife and sons. His children provide him with affection and motivation, not challenges to his authority (and his wife does not--as she does in the book--have an affair with Hooper--Hooper!). The movie is about an outside threat challenging the safety of a town; the book is about a town harboring the kind of pressure for which shark attacks, and the opportunity to prove your masculinity by executing bloody revenge, is the only possible release valve. And by “a town” I mean “a man.” A man driven close to the edge by having to make his own sandwich.
Jeremy Thorn gives off that kind of energy, but I honestly feel like we’re supposed to see him as a beleaguered everyman--well, actually, someone more special than that. “The estimate that his personal wealth was close to a hundred million dollars was unverifiable,” Seltzer writes, “and in truth Thorn himself did not know. To account would have meant to pause, and Jeremy Thorn was in constant motion.”
Such constant motion, in fact, that he doesn’t really pause to contemplate whether or not it might be a bad idea to follow the advice of the for sure trustworthy priest who meets him at the hospital where his wife has just given birth, and informs him that his son didn’t make it, but they have another baby to give to his wife, who is out cold and will never be able to tell the difference. In the words of Jeremy Usbourne: Is this a terrible idea?
He does it, of course; and it’s striking to me that both Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, released a decade apart, take as their opening horror the act of a man betraying his wife in order to bring a Satanic cuckoo into the home. Jeremy Thorn does Satan’s bidding unwittingly, Guy Woodhouse very wittingly, and though it does occur to me that publishing is an unoriginal business this is exactly the kind of thing you might include while trying to manufacture a bestseller, the connection feels deeper than that. When sitting down to write a scary story that resonates with your audience, it helps to present them with some real facet of their lives, dusted with enough supernatural glitter that we can’t quite tell what we’re looking at, and can finally admit that our mundane reality is as scary as heck.
Rosemary’s Baby scares the shit out of me because Guy’s neighbors only have to to have two conversations with him in order to convince him that drugging his wife and letting the Devil rape and impregnate her is both a) a great way to advance his career and b) something that won’t even negatively affect his wife, not really, in the end. He seems capable of believing this, and the author, Ira Levin, was capable of understanding that this was where the true horror lay.
I don’t know about The Omen, and the story might be all the scarier, in its way, for that general lack of self-awareness. Seltzer may have felt that giving your wife a substitute baby was a pretty relatable thing to do, and Jeremy latches onto the idea very quickly; he only entertains real doubt when his son starts attracting sinister playmates. “Thorn was unaccustomed to doubting himself, to accusing himself,” we learn. “His mind struggled for reassurance that what he had done was right… Could it possibly have been wrong?”
As in Rosemary’s Baby, Katherine is undermined by the medical establishment. Her psychiatrist dismisses her dawning awareness of her husband’s lies as wish fulfillment and paranoia. “She fantasizes that her child is not really hers,” Dr. Greer tells her husband. (Because why not tell your patient’s husband all about your sessions?) “...She searches for a reason that won’t make her feel inadequate. She fantasizes that the child isn’t hers, that the child is evil…”
“...What?”
“She’s unable to love it,” explained Greer, “so she invents a reason why it’s not worthy of her love.”
In this world, men tell brazen lies and are never questioned, whereas women discover the truth and are deemed insane. I give the book an A+ for realism, with extra points for having a picture of David Warner’s head flying off.
As for Damien’s evil, or relative lack thereof--this may in fact be a feature, not a bug. Director Richard Donner reportedly preferred to see the story as an ambiguous one, where Damien might be the Antichrist, or his parents may have just lost touch with reality altogether. It’s hard to come away from either version with that reading, but Damien’s agency is just...well...lacking. We know that he caused his mother to fall from a height and miscarry a pregnancy, but we can’t really say whether he did it on purpose. We know he attracts big, weird dogs who wander over from the forest, but who doesn’t?
We hear he’s a reserved little boy who hardly speaks, but...again, that describes a lot of children. Cast across this story I can feel the chilly shadow of all the families around this time who ended up with a child they didn’t order--a child who was not evil at all, but was somehow different than whatever they hoped for, reasonably or not--and became consumed by disappointment. How could it be? What had they done wrong? Had they been given a changeling? How to make sense of this equation?--A pursuit time-consuming enough to take up energy you might need to accept your child as they are.
“‘Why ever did we have a child, Katherine?’” Jeremy asks, in what might be the book’s most self-aware moment.
“Our image,” she replied.
“...What?”
"How could we not have a child, Jeremy? Who ever heard of a beautiful family not having a beautiful child… It’s true, isn’t it? We never thought of what it would be like to raise one. We just thought of what our pictures would look like in the newspapers.”
In conclusion: give the devil boy to me, and he can sit quietly and have all the weird dogs he likes.
PS--sometimes I think of a joke so simple and daringly unfunny that I feel a pang of emptiness in the part of my life where Twitter used to be, and I just thought of one, just now, so I’m going to tell it to you instead:
“Google dogs”
That’s it, that’s the joke.
--Love, Sarah
Jerry Goldsmith - The Final Conflict Omen 3 - Soundtrack Music Suite 1981 (YouTube)
Comments (85)
absolute genius. I loved this book as a kid of the 70s. Nearly had a school girl crush on the later versions of Damien.
Very late to the party segue, but that Jaws novelization messed me up. I did not need to know what fingering was at that age for one. And it was just so sordid. Not sure I ever got over it. :)
On the topic of satanic books that claim to be real but are OBVIOUSLY fiction, I recently recalled reading “Jay’s Journal” in high school and being super disturbed by it at the time. Apparently I was a pretty gullible teen but I think that’s why I really love the Satanic Panic book clubs from Camp YWA! Maybe add that (or the “editor’s” other “real diaries from real teenagers “ like “Go Ask Alice”) to your book club to-do list?
Pleeeeeease can you do an episode on Erika Giradi & Tom Giradi/ Real Housewives. As a story it’s got everything, and I’m COMPLETELY obsessed (and very far down the rabbit hole).
Sarah, Inspired by your Letter from Camp YWA, I decided to read Peter Benchley's novel Jaws for the first time. In addition to Brody's sad sandwich scene that you described, I'm less than halfway through the book and there is also a detailed description of a dinner party at Brody's house, so I'm thinking describing "food and drink" may have been something that really interested the author. The description of the dinner party describes all of the dishes served, what every one is drinking, where everyone is seated at the table, how Brody objects to the lamb dish his wife Ellen has prepared being too raw and a discussion of adding grass (marijuana) to gazpacho to create a dish a younger character calls "g and g". Inspired by your latest episode of your podcast You Are Good with Alex Steed, I also recently finished the novel Legally Blonde upon which the movie of the same name is based. (And until I looked up Legally Blonde on Wikipedia, I had no idea there was a novel upon which the movie is based). As with The Omen and Jaws, the Legally Blonde includes a significant number of backstories for the leading characters that were left out in the movie version. All of the above is my roundabout way of saying that if you ever want to do a Camp YWA Book Club on movie novelizations and/or books that inspired movies, I would definitely be here for it.
The Peep Show reference made me guffaw!
I’ve listened to the entire back catalogue and I am not satiated.
Please do a bonus episode on the chillin adventures of Sabrina, like it’s the Satanic panic put into a show!
I second this emotion
I enjoy the newsletters and I know you guys are busy with other fun projects but I just want to say YWA is my all time favourite podcast, and I am really missing listening to it. I think I've now successfully worked through the entire back catalogue and I am struggling with motivation to clean my house and go exercise and do other such things that are easy when I'm listening to your chatterings and debunkings. You guys are the best (and if you don't want my dirty house on your conscience any longer and wanted to give us more new episodes, that would be fine 😘)
You captured my feelings perfectly!
Newsletters as frequently and in the manner of your choosing, Valued Camper! *offers stick for good ember poking*
Yes. I would read your words and hear them in my head, spoken in your voice, all day long if I could. I love the way you see things. You take things, music, movies, books, that I have enjoyed and give me a completely different perspective on them and I am truly grateful for that. Thank you, Sarah, for improving my view of the world
I like reading the newsletters as long as you like writing them. This was fun!
Love your beautiful writing, though since you've asked, my personal preference would be for slightly shorter newsletters - I get stressed that I can't give them the time and attention they deserve and consequently rarely read the books. I also admittedly find the book club episodes, though hilarious, and this book focused newsletter as well, a bit harder to engage with having not read them. As Izzy mentioned above, I'd also love to know a bit more about your other work and what you are personally up to, if you're willing to share. Thanks for being open to thoughts and comments, but I'm sure there is a vast spectrum of interests among your audience and please do what feels good to you - I always learn something new! Finally, that ad reminded me that my wonderful grandmother uses mustard to season every pot roast she makes to this day, and they are delicious!
The recurring moral panic over children not learning cursive anymore would be a nice back-to-school episode.
Do a you’re wrong about about the bling ring!! That’d be a fun episode and/or bonus episode
I loved this newsletter, and would happily read more! One of my favourite bits of trivia about The Omen was that Seltzer apparently wanted to name the main character Domlin, after the obnoxious child of a friend of his, but his wife convinced him that that would be an awful thing to do, and he settled on Damien as an alternative.
Thank you for the letter, Sarah! I have a topic request: Toxic Shock Syndrome! As a tween girl, I remember the fear of god being put into me about getting TSS from tampons. After some extremely basic WebMD research, it appears TSS is actually just a consequence of a regular Staph infection. I know you’ve talked before about how “syndromes” are often defined only loosely by symptoms– I’d love to hear about how & why this particular educational campaign/(moral?) panic over an extremely rare medical condition became so widespread. Why were adults convinced we would specifically die by tampon out of all the many sources of danger? (Mike bait: health scares, product safety regulation in the 70s and 80s; Sarah bait: teen girls’ sexual agency, blood) Love you both and thank you for all the hours of laughing & learning. Love, Amara
Although I am not now and never have been a tween girl, I can recommend the following resource for the history of Toxic Shock Syndrome: Michael T. Osterholm's and Mark Olshaker's book "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs" which includes Dr. Osterholm's account on how scientists determined the cause of TSS.
I LOVED movie novelizations when I was younger, because our local movie rental place didn’t have a great selection. I remember reading the kid’s novel versions of the 90s “Little Women” (not the actual Alcott novel, but the book adaptation of the movie, complete with little still photos on color pages in the middle of the book) and Karate Kid 3 (I liked that one because the protagonist was a girl). PS. The Nazarene is Jesus!
Oh and to Sarah: One of my english professors taught a class about literature concerning hell and the devil and sin. He had a clever name for it but I'm blanking right now, anyways, he'd have the class over for movie nights and one of the movies we watched was The Omen and I remember thinking "this has nothing to do with anything really..." and loving how the movie was really just being used as an excuse for us all to drink and have pizza at our teacher's house. OH COLLEGE.
Reading this newsletter and then reading the comments and thinking about summer... I just imagined how fun it would be to have a You're Wrong About Camp and who would show up and the convos and tangents we'd all have with each other. And that makes me smile.
Hi! not sure where to comment this but I’m wondering if YWA would do an episode on peanut allergies becoming more common / peanut restrictions in schools. As someone who grew up in the 90s I realize I still have a fuzzy understanding of the actual state of the field on peanut allergies!
I think I've suggested this before. Didn't grow up with it, either but was always appalled at the comments on any article pertaining to peanut allergies: "PC gone mad" at best and stark raving eugenics at worst.
I love these updates, and I’d love to just expand out little community by having more frequent letters, or even just like? Discussion boards of some kind? Because like? I just wanna talk about debunking Michael Jackson and Van Gogh and get your opinions on the dumb books I see going through the slush pile at the publishing company I work at. I want updates on Mike’s white collar crime article and I want to know what kind of weird stuff you’re finding while writing about the satanic panic. I feel like a friend, even though I know you have no idea who I am. Also! Just like, I would love love love if you just posted fun updates about episodes we already heard (like Michael ducacus! Is he still picking up litter and taking about policy during covid? Who do you dog sit for? How are you always in your childhood bedroom or a closet and yet seem to never actually be in the same state or country twice! Email me forever and I’d love you just the same. Or don’t, but I refuse to not support two people who work so hard to survive (because it’s fucking hard out here)
Izzy, I for one would very much like to hear about debunking Van Gogh. Please tell me you'll elaborate!
You could just post Mike's pages of notes and sources or whatever and I'd be fascinated.
I love the newsletters, Sarah! You are such a good writer. (and podcaster.) I am listening to the Michelle Remembers episodes now and I LOVE your book club format. Sarah reads mostly terrible book/Michael reacts with horror and laughter is such a magic combination.
I would like a T-Shirt or a meme or anything at all with the line, "In this world, men tell brazen lies and are never questioned, whereas women discover the truth and are deemed insane."
I did a book report on Jaws in high school and I'm sure I didn't notice any of the things you mentioned! I do remember telling someone there was a lot of sex in the book and they said "people sex or shark sex?".
The Omen series is my favorite “horror” series. I also have all three novelizations. Great newsletter, Councilor Sarah! Please recommend other books where “no one loves each other and everyone is miserable BEFORE the “___” shows up!
Does Sarah ever interact in the comments section? If so, Sarah, I loved this newsletter! I’m researching miscarriage in popular culture, and I’m so interested in how it shows up in horror movies. If you know of any other horror films that include miscarriage (or stillbirth) as a plot element, I would love to know their names.
Jo, I don't know if your interest extends beyond film for your current project, but if so, Season 1 of American Horror Story is definitely worth checking out. The series as a whole (I initially typed "hole" which might be saying something about the deep ambivalence AHS evokes) is obsessed with women's bodies; sex & sexuality; pregnancy (problematic pregnancies, & pregnancy-as-problem); motherhood (especially twisted & abusive mothers, both real & symbolic) and abortion. Your research sounds really interesting, I hope you'll say more about it...
As a kid who grew up without a TV and fast-forwarded over the witch cackling on the audio tape of The Wizard of Oz because it was too scary, I am now catching up on all the horror in life, real and imagined. Love the newsletters!
I enjoy these letters quite a lot, for the record. They make me nostalgic for a certain vintage of the internet where blogs were not only common, but could be of great quality as well. The vast majority of personal blogs were essentially long-form Twitter in an era before Twitter, but you could find myriad blogs of quality. There is something strangely satisfying about quality writing that walks the line between the informative and personal. Maybe it fulfills the implied promises of every disappointing pen pal situation I've ever been in. There are certainly some blogs of note still out there but it is just not the same. I, for one, welcome our new newsletter overlords. I once quipped, as Twitter becomes a worse place to be every day, that we should all just abandon the platform and all start newsletters that we can share with all our friends before I realized I just invented LiveJournal. Alas.
Not horror, but I'd recommend the Grease novelization, told from the POV of....Sonny? And incorporating song lyrics, I remember it even going as far as to include the whole "Beauty School Dropout" number in terms of "I had the weirdest dream"
I like you and the people you surround yourself with.
I also vividly remember Sheriff Brody's Sad Sandwich, despite reading Jaws ages ago!
Loved this, Sarah. I was one of the many whose parents did not notice if I read a novelization of a movie I was not allowed to see, and I think I still have my coverless copy of The Omen somewhere.
I bought a copy of this book at a used bookstore as a teen in the 90s—possibly the same day I bought Rosemary's Baby (which I think I gave to my mom for MOTHER'S DAY?) I remember being riveted by both, then hating both movies when I eventually saw them. 🤷🏻♀️ Sidenote: when I was a scaredy cat 10-year-old, I regularly borrowed picture books that retold the stories of horror flicks I wasn't yet brave enough to watch. The scary bits were glossed over/edited/downplayed, and that's how I ended up dressing as Regan MacNeil that Halloween.
I don't know which image I love more - dressing up as Regan for Halloween or giving your mom Rosemary's Baby for Mothers' Day!
"The only reason I can imagine for this is that it gave the movie a patina of...relevance? It was familiar, and therefore seemed more worth the money? You could see if you liked the story before actually going to watch it, the way people do with Wikipedia today? " Sarah, First, I really appreciate your review of movie novelizations and popular books that became movies. I was in elementary school, junior high and high school in the 1970s and it is really fascinating to me the things you notice that I would never have noticed in popular books from that decade. Second, I think one of the major ideas behind novelizations were to advertise the movie. By the 1970s, television was so big that people weren't going to the movies on a regular basis as they had in earlier eras, so the movie studios could not depend on previews of coming attractions as much as they once did. Movies were covered in magazines, but usually only an anticipated blockbuster or particularly "socially relevant" picture would rate a magazine cover. Newspapers also featured ads for movies, but the ads were usually in black and white, so they were often not as eye-catching as paperback cover was in a rack at a grocery store, drug store or newsstand. Also, as you noted, the paperback of The Omen includes "eight fabulous pages of movie stills" and back in the 1970s, that paperback might be the only way a kid under 17 might be able to see those images from the movie. Also, in the days before HBO and video rental stores, even adults often only had the few weeks a movie was in the theaters to ever watch the movie "uncut." And you can imagine how many cuts that might need to be made to an R-rated movie to allow it to be shown on one of the "movie nights" on ABC, CBS or NBC.
Not to mention having to wait for it to come to town, if you didn't live in a major city.
These are great and much appreciated
Sarah, I love when u write the newsletter especially when they turn up as a surprise. Also now I want to read The Omen, you make it sound soo interesting
Well, Sarah, I love horror and I love you, so I would welcome more newsletters about horror books and/or movies. (I used to teach a class called “The Literature of Horror,” but it had to be pretty high-brow, so no Damien stuff for us.) I would also welcome letters about anything else upon which you are moved to muse. Did I mention that I love you?
I so want to read The Omen now!
Any letter from you is nice. I love horror but I was always squicked out by demonic stuff so this is a pleasant way for me to get some gosh dang pop culture information without having to read the things myself.
I’ll pass on the horror newsletters and wait for more episodes. But thanks for sharing anyways. I appreciate that you are doing something different even if it’s not up my alley. Have a great summer! 🌞
Yay! I love these camp newsletters. Thanks for writing, Sarah. These are always entertaining. Stay cool in your backyard. I myself am eating between 4 and 6 popsicles a day as an AC substitute.
Would love any newsletter but a Satanic newsletter would spice up my inbox
I was a 70's teen. Your assumptions are spot-on, as we read these little novelizations, because we were not allowed into "R" movies. Since THE OMEN was just past the time of Vietnam and Watergate on the nightly news, we were still conditioned to consider the social controls of movie theater management. Reading materials were not off limits though, and the horror adventures ensued. I had read THE EXORCIST in the 8th grade, so following with THE OMEN was disappointing, but it added to the mysticism of the Catholic Church. Keep up the newsletters. This is fun!
I love newsletters, but I would also love to hear your voice. As someone with only a small phone screen to read off of, a long newsletter is sometimes too hard to focus my eyes on and the auto-reader doesn’t have your charm. Would you consider recording these as short releases to the audio feed?
Yay!. Great newsletter, overflowing with ideas and a much-appreciated substitute for bonus episodes during our cold winter down here in the true Deep South. Although I do miss the banter. I read once how many authors who ended up doing "genre" writing did so reluctantly. They considered themselves "real" authors but squeezed in an alien invasion, some devil worship or a killer shark to justify a lurid cover and book sales of the sort that 'literature" would never achieve.
1- yes to email newsletters. 2- my fave fact I learned about novelizations is that in the 80s, authors were assigned them before the movies were filmed, so often there are odd differences because things would change in the movie script but the author wouldn’t be notified. 3- I’d love to hear your book report on Good Omens.
Thank you Sarah so much, also can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading that with the spooky tunes in the background. My preferred schedule is YOUR preferred schedule
Your love for horror 🤝 my love for horror. Please tell me you’ve read Grady Hendrix’s book Paperbacks From Hell? You’ll love it.
That book is amaaaazing.
I like the newsletters a lot. My two cents on the frequecy of them is to write freely. And, I do enjoy the anticipation of knowing something is coming each month. That’s fun too. But honestly, write them freely and I’m happy.
I read the “novelization” of ET in 4th grade -so 1981. After seeing the movie, I went around telling anyone who would listen that the candy was supposed to be M&Ms (like it was in the book) and that the movie didn’t make clear ET was a botanist, which is why he was so into plants. I’m sure I was a delightful child.
I read The Omen when I was in a deep lonely depressive funk and it did not improve my mood, not one bit. I realize now it's because of all the realism. Thank you for the letter! I would read as many as you're willing to write.
Please tell me you're reading Peter Straub's GHOST STORY, in which the devil is just.... women. The same woman over and over again. From the girl you liked in high school to the child you kidnap because she makes you feel a little....unmanned.
This is my favorite book report of a book I'll never read, ever. The mustard sandwich made me guffaw. I'd absolutely buy a book of your book reports, and am happy to receive as many emails as you feel like sending.
What a great cultural artifact to remind us (hopefully!) how far we’ve come! From the days of men paternalistically infantilizing their wives, to today’s standard of family roles. I was at a picnic yesterday with a bunch of nurses- strong, intelligent women- who were allowed the time to interact and socialize with their colleagues while their husbands minded the toddlers around the pool 😄Yay progress!
Yay, a newsletter! I will say that when newsletters come more than once a week, I get behind on them, and other than that, any frequency is great!
OO. NOVELIZATIONS. One of my very favorite books growing up was the *sigh* Orson Scott Card novelization of The Abyss, which gave all the characters - including the aliens - phenomenal depth.
No pun intended. God dammit.
Can you please address your Old Testament/New Testament comments from last week’s episode? Your comments veered very, very close to antisemitic canards about the “vindictive” OT versus the “forgiving” NT. As a Jewish listener, I was incredibly disappointed to hear y’all say something so hurtful, and I know other Jewish listeners have reached out as well without response.
But the Bible is a bunch of false narratives and fables so any interpretation about it is subjective. Isn’t that what they tried to force us to “believe” in the first place? This is not anti Semitic, but a way to explain how each testament is flawed regardless of beliefs.
This was one of my very favorite books when I was like... 10, maybe? It was the early '90s and my mom was very much of the opinion that some movies could be bad for me, but books can only be good, and so I was not allowed to rent the movie for another two years, but I could get the book at the library book sale for, I believe, 25 cents. My older brother had a best friend at the time named Jeremy Thorn, which tickled me to no end, especially when I was finally able to rent the movie and found that the MOVIE protagonist was named ROBERT, which is just objectively a less interesting name. Real-life Jeremy also humored my bad child jokes about how he'd go on to father the Antichrist one day, but at least he'd be rich (which I look back on with many cringes, because, well, Jeremy was Jewish).
Just want to take this moment to say how much I HATE Guy Woodhouse.
I remember watching it as a teenager and having a STRONG physical desire to kill him, which was a fairly unusual feeling for me.
Much love to you!!! I miss your tweets at times too but we love a boundary over here, and that's more important. Instead of novelizations now we just have the fresh editions of books with "movie covers" that draw that battle line between "people who liked the book first" and "people coming to the book from the movie."
Thank you for your letter! What a perfect way to wake up on a Sunday and read about evil children. I also “hear” the letter in your voice which comes through perfectly. Any amount of newsletters feels good to me as kind and you want/feel good about sending.
Thank you for your letter! Your insights on popculture and life is always welcome, but I also like rereading previous posts because there’s always something I don’t fully digest the first time, so please only send out letters when you want to!
I’m reminded that entitlement is a prominent feature of abuse culture, whether it be from an abusive partner or from trolls directed at the greatest gymnast of all time. I won’t turn down incredible writing popping up in my inbox, but you do you. Big fan here.
I hope that your little terrible horror library includes some books by Guy N. Smith. Somehow his works were one of the first imperialistic American culture artifacts that were (lousily) translated to Polish and published when the iron curtain lifted. Father of my highschool friend collected them, and 20 years later we read them during boring classes. I still love them: The Sucking Pit, The Sucking Pit 2, The Crab series. So bad, so good, only partially translated, so unaware of itself. Sometimes I wonder who decided that after decades of separating central-eastern Europe from American popculture one of the first things we need are Guy N. Smith's books. I wish I could talk to them. Thank you for your letter, Sarah!
Thank you for this very interesting letter. I was initially surprised as I first glanced at my phone the morning without my glasses and was convinced that the image was of Matt Gaetz... Still not sure how he is connected to the omen, but convinced that he is!
My preferred newsletter frequency is often as you feel like writing them. I'd never say no to more, but I don't want them to be forced or a chore.
This.
I love that you guys posted this at 2:42am. And of course, I am awake. 😜
I love getting this email. You guys are the sole email that finds me well. Thanks 💕
I’m listening to the Diana episodes for the first time ever, they’re sooooo interesting. Never gave a shit about royal family but now I’m a Diana fan 😩😩😂😂 thanks to you guys. I recently made a friend at my new job and her name is actually Lady Dayana, her mom named her after princess Diana 🤩🤩🤩 I can understand that very well now lol. Have a good summer u guys I wait patiently for more Patreon episodes but you deserve a break too😘😘 best regards Rósa from Iceland 😛😛😛😛
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