Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

 

Gwendy’s Button Box is a curious trilogy of novels and novella well narrated by three different female pros. At the end of the first outing Stephen King (a longtime audiobook fan) engages with co-author Richard Chizmar about the storyline and its  writing. IT began when Stephen gave friend Richard a fragment of story and idea, and that blossomed into their collab. If it ever goes to film the logline could be: Girl is given a strange box by a strange man with dangerous buttons and two compartments which dispense mind-bending chocolates in the shape of animals, and Morgan silver dollars—all uncirculated and the same year. It’s a mashup of the movie The Box (based on the story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, also on The Twilight Zone) and Hellraiser (minus the demons). Add feathers and the Clooney movie Gravity and the Jim Jones documentary Truth and Lies. Writing fiction well is about telling believable lies, and King has been doing it longer and better than his one-time rival James Patterson (who I met and interviewed). In The Mist (shades of The Fog) he doesn’t explain the creatures who pop in from another dimension, except to say it has something to do with lasers operated by the military. He never cared much about science in his horror novels, although there are welcome elements of science and science fiction here. 

So there’s no explanation of the deadly box with multiple buttons that can inexplicably cause random havoc around the world, or not. (Jonestown and the Pyramids are two, the time setting chosen for the first). You probably won’t care about explanations, either, although it may leave you wondering, regardless. The writing is astonishingly good, and never loses your attention, using the techniques honed by both writers over the years, ever since King’s wife retrieved his first novel out of the trash, and Chizmar struggled writing first stories that led to his magazine Cemetery Dance. Speaking of which, my fav King movie was the newer Pet Sematary, which I saw alone in the theater on day one (as I did with Avatar) and led to my book of stories Cat on a Cold Tin Roof. It is my second favorite horror film (IT third), the first being Dark Night of the Scarecrow, a little known made-for-TV gem featuring a postal carrier with a gun. (Am writing a first and last memoir about my 22 years in the USPS and 25 years in the audiobook industry).  Gwendy is followed much of her life through time and political career, and from small town Castle Rock, Maine (near where King lives) to… Read on. Or Listen Up. (Audiofile offices are in Maine). 

Gwendy’s Button Box and sequels resonated with me on many levels, especially the final book Gwendy’s Final Task, as I recall being in Daytona Beach as a child, and much later in Ormond Beach to experience the floods and endless rains of the “Sunshine State.” What a nightmare that was! For more nightmares read Chizmar’s The Boogeyman, and my own Awakening Storm.

Interview with Simon Vance (from the Vault)

 

From the vault: SIMON VANCE is an audiobook narrator and actor, Audible Hall of Fame member, and winner of 14 Audie awards and 67 Earphones Awards. As an Audiofile “Golden Voice” and Booklist Magazine “Voice of Choice,” he has recorded titles in all genres for many publishers, reading authors from Alan Moore to Sherlock Holmes. From Lily King’s “Euphoria” to “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel. Stieg Larsson to Frank Herbert? Yes. He has done horror, too. Clive Barker, Brian Lumley, and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.“ Add “Paul is Dead” by Alan Goldsher to the list (the Beatles as zombies.) The “Master and Commander” series by Patrick O’Brien. The Biography of Rod Stewart. That list of over 750 titles includes “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, one of my personal favorites (as a writer,) made into the remarkable movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. The only thing we can’t say about Simon is that he has never narrated (nor is he related to) Hugo winning Scifi author Jack Vance, whose novel “To Live Forever” was acquired by Blackstone Audio’s Grover Gardner due to my suggestion, narrated by Kevin Kenerly. Simon has also had parts in movies and TV series, and lives in Brighton, UK. 

Jonathan Lowe) It's an honor to host the Audie Awards. What surprised you most about that?

Simon Vance) What surprised me most was being asked in the first place. I knew they were having difficulties finding a high profile host this year but Michele seemed to have everything in hand and was quite confident, as she told me at Katy Kellgren’s memorial just the week before she called me, that she’d be able to find someone from amongst the many ‘performers’ there already were amongst the narrators, should it come to that. Little did I know it would be me. Many years ago Bob Deyan had told me that he’d put me forward as a potential host, which shocked me at the time. But when Michele did call I just felt ready.

Lowe)  But you were ready, having attended so many events over the years?

Vance) Over the past decade or so I’ve only missed one. So I knew how things worked, and was ready.

Lowe) Anecdotes to share? Favorite moments?

Vance) Favorite moments? Well, certainly the moment when the whole thing was over and I’d made it through relatively unscathed! Otherwise there are moments of satisfaction, in that I could say to myself “I handled that.” Back in 2006, I think, when Grover Gardner was the host I went up to accept my first Audie and while giving my acceptance speech. Every winner did back then. The event lasted hours. But I messed up the position of his notes and it took him some moments while he sorted them out and found his place again! I’ve always felt so guilty about that. Fast forward to this year and something similar happened to me…someone told me afterwards that they thought they’d moved my script and it was their fault that I started in on the wrong introduction. But I think I had confused the order of the pages myself…I’d call that karma. But I “handled it,” as I think I did in the moment things got awkward, when the audio/visuals didn’t behave and I filled the embarrassing silence with a little soft-shoe shuffle across the stage…which linked back nicely to my referencing the desire to do a song and dance number for the opening.

Lowe) Do you have any friends who prefer print books, which may go the way of cassettes and even CDs, as in Fahrenheit 451?

Vance) It’s not something I go around asking my friends! But I don’t see print books as being in the same category as cassettes and CDs by any stretch. Despite some people’s doom-laden prognostications, I believe there will always be print. Clearly it’s more expensive to create a hard cover book than it is to distribute data, but just look at the market for vinyl, which is also a relatively modern invention and again not really comparable to print. I think there will always be a desire to read words on paper and to collect libraries…I mean, the money isn’t there, so it’s never going to be as big as it was but this is not an art form that will vanish any time soon.

Lowe) What's next for you?

Vance) More of the same! I’m back in the studio already booked solidly for the next 6 weeks with an exciting roster of books from new and returning authors to look forward to in the fall.

Lowe) Thank you. And check out Vance reading David Copperfield, which is included in the original movie Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury as a book that must be learned and spoken aloud to be saved from the fire.  

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Saw how ANNIHILATION compared to the audiobook (which is actually a trilogy), I can report that the movie was definitely worth the price of admission, whether of not you’ve read or listened to the books. (Available free on some cable outlets.) Still, it’s a different animal, and there are plenty of strange creatures populating both movie and “audio movies.” Natalie Portman starred with several of director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina actors, particularly Oscar Isaac, who was fantastic. Mood is everything, and although there are elements of horror, the movie does keep close to the tone of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 science fiction Southern Reach novel, which won a Nebula award. An opening shot of a meteor striking a lighthouse in the swamps of a park on the coast of northern Florida is followed by jigsaw scene pieces that move back and forth in time, like Pulp Fiction. The book is told through the biologist’s field journal into an expedition of Area X, which shimmers with inexplicable power. Others have died, going in, either (it is believed) by attack or by turning on themselves. Whereas the film takes a women with weapons direction, the book is more about induced visions and journals, with a “Crawler” writing cryptic messages on the walls of a tower that need to be de-cyphered. (Special effects and shooting sports being more important than reading or language, these daze.) Both concern biology and change being forced upon humanity. Why doesn’t the Army just roll in with tanks, or nuke it? Because the scientists want to understand it, as in Avatar. And this is not something that bullets can stop, anyway. It’s DNA, a subtle invasion and evolution of all species. Since change is scary, too, a few are in denial it’s happening…but giant hybrid creatures about to eat you (before transforming you) are difficult to deny, and so even the Army is freaking out…as they did in Arrival (based on the 2002 book “Stories of Your Life and Others” by Ted Chiang, which may have influenced VanderMeer, since it is also about understanding alien language, and also includes a tower.) As for Alex Garland, he wrote THE BEACH as a novel, which became the Leonardo DiCaprio film. (Alex also wrote The Tesseract, scripts for Halo, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Dredd, Never Let Me Go, Big Game, Annihilation, and Ex Machina.) On audio, Annihilation is narrated by Carolyn McCormick. And speaking of wild horror creatures, there is THE SLENDERMAN MYSTERIES by Nick Redfern, narrated by Shaun Grindell. (Footnote: In the movie Annihilation, look for a Slenderman effect! Intentional or just optical illusion? Near the end, in the lighthouse, for about two seconds of special effects.) 

Interview with Kristoffer Tabori

 

Kristoffer Tabori is known for his movie roles, his directing of Hallmark movies like “Murder, She Baked” and TV series all over the world, but especially in LA. He has narrated many audiobooks, including my own “Fame Island,” for Blackstone Audio, and has won an Audie award for MIDDLESEX, plus Earphones awards for at least four others. See Audible.com. His dad directed the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he narrated an audiobook about that. I spoke to him via Zoom, and we talked for over an hour. To summarize, he is in a good place in his life now, looking back at where he’s been, teaches a Shakespeare class, and is ready to start narrating more audiobooks. He has a channel on YouTube with acting reels and movies like Family Flight, where he flies a small plane in distress onto an aircraft carrier. You can watch his role on The Twilight Zone, and two episodes of The Rockford Files, plus an interview with gaming aficionados about his playing HK-47 (and other video game voices.) In the video below a tiny bit of that is included, plus talk about Rod Taylor, an actor he loved, and James Garner. It was a pleasure to speak to him, and he will no doubt be busy again in this newer audiobook chapter of his life. I met him once at the Audie awards with the late Yuri Rasovsky, a Grammy winning audio producer and columnist for Audiofile, who was married to narrator Lorna Raver, who also starred in a horror movie I recommend highly, “Drag Me To Hell.” That was a 2009 production directed by Sam Raimi with a 92% rating by Rotten Tomatoes. There was just today a story on it by journalist Jamie Duncan! Kristoffer narrated an audiobook with her and Yuri, who gave my first novel “Postmarked for Death” an Earphones award as narrated by the late Frank Muller as “Postal,” (2000), now an ebook again. Yuri directed Kristoffer in Fame Island, out of print from 2004 but coming back in 2023.

Fame Island novel produced by Grammy winner Yuri Rasovsky for Blackstone Audio 2004, narrated by Emmy winner Kristoffer Tabori (Star Wars games, TV from The Rockford Files to Law & Order, Hallmark movie director.) Currently rewritten for Blackstone distribution as Lottery Island, with two Powerball wins, narrated by Tom Lennon. Based on the true story of John Caldwell, developer of Palm Island in the Grenadines. (His book “Desperate Voyage” was once optioned for film before he died in 1999. Trump tried to buy property, and Caldwell showed Barbra Streisand around. All this in letters on his stationery in my possession. Have slides and photo release. Caldwell purchased Palm at $1 a year for 99 years from the government of St. Vincent, plus 12% of future profits. It was called “Prune” at the time, and was overrun by swamps and mosquitos. He planted 8000 coconut palms by hand, got the name “Coconut Johnny,” and employed native islanders from Union. He also fought off renegades with .22 rifles, aided the Marines during the Grenada invasion, which prompted my turning articles into a novel.  A travel writer and his photographer side-kick are hired by a “disappeared” lottery winner to finance a coup against a corrupt Caribbean island governor so that he can emerge a hero, famous for more than just 15 minutes. With twists. And sharks. (George Clooney and Jimmy Buffett have cameos. Mentions Dolph Lundgren lookalike. Dolph currently appears in ads attacking on heavy equipment for Volvo, just as he does in the book.)

NARRATOR by Landon Beach

 

 

Scott Brick, whom I’ve interviewed here, is the perfect choice for NARRATOR and posits a Misery situation Stephen King (an audiobook lover) would love. You learn the intricacies of voice acting while being told a suspense story similar to the viewpoint of Richard Chizmar (also interviewed here) in Chasing the Boogeyman. Using abrupt scene changes in a way that is adept and convey tension, combined with excellent writing of dialogue makes it a must-listen. It’s a long book, but you never feel that it was too long, especially if you are interested in the subject. The ways in which narrators prepare for reads is worked into the thriller plot in such a way that you would listen, even if you weren’t interested. Bravo to Landon for his idea and choice! I wish I knew how much Scott and other narrators contributed to the project. 

The was an Audible plan purchase. The references to being in a dark place running out of food resonated with me because of my first novel Postmarked for Death, and the killers name was Calvin Beach to boot! I look forward to the author’s new series, read by Scott, and his follow up. Interviews by others about this book and more are on YouTube. 

Was just imagining the incredible career of Paul Giamatti since his big break in the book and movie Sideways, right after American Splendor.  Many Billions of dollars in production costs and box office. BILLIONS on Prime and cable. Lady in the Water, San Andreas, Saving Mr. Banks, Win Win, The Hangover, Too Big to Fail, Parkland, Morgan, Madame Bovary, Cold Souls, The Holdovers, Cinderella Man, The Illusionist, Jungle Cruise, John Adams... Scott Brick narrated Sideways by Rex Pickett, whose followups were Sideways 2 and 3 and Vertical. His newer book The Archivist is in hardcover and on audio from Blackstone Publishing. In Sideways the character Miles is a writer whose first book is too complex and obscure to sell, shopped to 35 publishers without success. He and his old buddy from college embark on a wine country trip that turns hilarious, sad, and unforgettable. The script was voted one of the Top 100 ever written, and won Best Screenplay at the Oscars, along with four other nominations.