Fright Night novel

 Fright Night novel

Last spring while VHS hunting in NH with my friend Nate and my tattoo artist Shane, we found our self's in an old barn owned by this woman Ruth who is seriously pushing ninety. This woman I guess back in the day used to buy out old school mum & pop video stores. Sitting on all these tapes, he began to sell them for super cheap as the years went on. I've made several trips to this barn, and picked up probbaly a good twenty-five to thirty tapes that I've been looking for. (Nate, myself, and a few others cleaned her out of all her horror tapes.) Still, her collection is pretty impressive and massive. There's shelf's upon shelf's packed with VHS tapes. In fact you have to pile up milk crates just to move around. For those who don't like tight quarters or the fear of having a million tapes crush you to death...this isn't your cup of tea.

Anywho, on one of my last stops at Ruth's, I went with Nate and Shane to see if she had any other hidden gems. I had all ready visited Ruth's home, which is best described as the witch's house from Ernest Scared Stupid. I spent a whole afternoon in the freezing cold with the guys searching through an old tractor trailer for tapes. Trust me...it wasn't pretty.

On my last visit to see if there was anything left, we noticed that there was a small section of the barn we haven't looked in it. Instead of tapes, there was all of the books Ruth had collected over the years. Taking a peek inside that's when I noticed how impressive her collection was. Just by chance looking down, I spotted Mr. Chris Sarandon on the cover of one of the books...and of course the amazing words I fondly remembered as a child...

Fright Night.

I was pretty surprised to see this just laying there among the millions of other paperback books. In fact I had no idea a novel even excised based off one of my all time favorite vampire movies. Picking it up, I tossed it in along with the few other tapes I had snagged. A month later I drove back making my final visit so far to Ms. Ruth. I picked up several paperback novels based off such movies as Halloween III, Deadly Friend, Poltergeist, The Hearse, Fade To Black, The Fog, and of course some pretty awesome original Stephen King works. 

I really don't have much to say about the Fright Night novel. Like many books based off films, it follows the movie pretty closely. It was a quick read, 230 pages, I finished it within a couple of days while killing time in my car. 

Written by John Skipp and Craig Spector, I was really not that impressed. I know this was a huge marketing tool they used (mostly in the 1980's.) Shortly after a movie was released, they published a book to go along with it. For some this work...for some they didn't.

This was one that really didn't.

You would think making a book based off Fright Night you would want to go further into the story lines, mostly dealing with Jerry. Instead we got a page by page recount of what happened in the movie. The writing was pretty poor as much as I hate to admit it, and not very well done. 

This is a great collector item for fans of the movie, but after reading several others based off movies, this one is one of the worst.

Now if anyone can find a Gremlins 2 book...send it my way!