Novel takes us through the last, desperate era of Ed Wood's life

 

The Valley Obscured By Smog, Bearmanor Media, 2026. 

Alan Starkwell, is a young college graduate, transplanted to Los Angeles in the latter mid-70s, with dreams of working in the movie industry. Alan doesn't have too many prospects. He has a degree in English. He thought he had a job as a script reader lined up, but his friend took the job from him. And he's crashing the same friend's pad with several others, including an ex-girlfriend who definitely is not interested in him anymore but sometimes hangs around the pad barely dressed.

Ah, the life of the educated young poor two generations ago ...

Alan, needing cash as soon as possible, has a potential job tossed to him, It's a publishing house. He hurries to the job and is hired on the spot by the owner Bernie Bloom, who says he needs a magazine editor. The business office has locks just about everywhere. Alan is assigned a windowless area to churn out copy all day long. The pay's low but there are bonuses if you write a book once a month.

Fans of the cult auteur Edward D. Wood Jr. will recognize the setting. It's a pornography publisher called Pendulum. Ed Wood spent much of his last several years there writing stories, novels, film captions, essays, screenplays, even directing. For $200 a week, Alan is expected to write fiction and non-fiction for the magazines. In these magazines the highest priority are photos, not text. 

Alan can make an extra $800 to $1,000 a month if he can pen a porn book, preferably non-fiction sourced with a "doctor" of some sorts to lend legitimacy on topics such as sex between a husband and wife, or homosexuality, etc. There's even a library in the office with source material that Bloom has purchased. Dr. T.K. Peters, anyone? ...

Most of the staff is young, like Alan. Most are unmotivated, except an older writer, who keeps to himself. This guy, Ed Wood, likes to also occasionally work in women's clothes. He's dismissed and often chided by the staff. They shrug off his disapproval of their laziness, thinking him a tired, old drunk.

There's some truth to the "tired old drunk" moniker, but Alan -- not cynical, just skeptical -- finds the old man interesting. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Alan and Ed form a kind of team. Ed's been assigned to direct a movie, to be called "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love." He has $7,000 to do it. He wants Alan as his assistant. Alan knows he's unqualified for the job but wants to be a part of any movie. 

Alan becomes more of an assistant. He becomes a kind of minder for Ed, once a movie director but now an unreliable alcoholic hanging on to his job. Ed needs someone to care about him; make sure he gets out of bed, his apartment, and finishes the porn film. Ed's job depends on it.

W. Paul Apel has crafted a novel that provides readers a glimpse of what Wood's life was probably like in his final years. In my opinion, it's another addition to the surge of Ed-Wood related books the past decade-plus that -- read together -- provide a sort of biography of Wood's life, before and after, what occurs in the Tim Burton film, "Ed Wood." 

I'll stop with mostly plot narrative. Writer Apel has created an accurate portrayal of Los Angeles/Hollywood of the '70s. He's placed the release of "Star Wars" in his time frame. Alan thinks Ed would be excited about this new blockbuster. Ed isn't but he does perk up a bit when Alan mentions Peter Cushing is in Star Wars. 

Ed's dreams live in the past; but he exists in a hard, tough present where Imperial whiskey is most real to him

Apel's research is a plus for the reader. Scenes in the narrative derive from Rudolph Grey's classic oral biography of Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy. (A quick note: I wrote my NOE review when many of the myths of Ed Wood were still believed.) And Apel has clearly seen the many documentaries and read the growing list of books on Ed Wood, the Ed Wood Wednesdays blog from Joe Blevins, and Bob Blackburn's Ed Wood Jr. Facebook page. 

Shannon Dolder, a young woman neighbor of Wood's in the infamous Yucca Street apartment complex in Hollywood Wood and wife Kathy endured, becomes in the novel a sort of pal to Alan. The late Dolder, who was part of the '70s and '80s LA punk scene, accompanies our protagonist Alan to a reading from poet/novelist Charles Bukowski, and meets rocker Keith Moon; both are fun interludes.

But when Alan and Ed frantically attempt to complete Necromania in a couple of days, contemporaries of Wood surface. There's of course wife, Kathy Wood. There's a phone call to Vampira who turns down a part in "Necromania." There's a lot of Criswell in the novel. They visit him and his eccentric wife. Criswell loans Wood a coffin and visits the movie set, which of course includes Hal Guthu, cinematographer and agent to adult actresses. Porn starlet Rene Bond, and her husband Rick Lutze, both in "Necromania," are in the novel. And there's a hilarious passage of Alan and Ed, after egocentric porn star John Holmes turns them down, sneaking out of the iconic Tail O' the Cock restaurant, stiffing Holmes with the cost of a steak dinner.

Ed Wood fans know, of course, that "Necromania" was filmed several years before 1977, the novel's time. But including the film in the narrative makes sense. It provides a central theme; Wood's economic survival, perhaps his life, depends on him finishing that film. Alan becomes a participant in that drama stress. The film also provides a more interesting center than the locked-up colorless Pendulum offices. There is one fun scene where cops raid Pendulum, which was a normal occurrence back then. (Much of the Pendulum offices scenes are recollections of the late Leo Eaton, who worked with Wood there, and Robert Cremer, biographer of Bela Lugosi who interviewed Wood in the 1970s.)

Apel has written a fast-moving, entertaining novel Wood fans will devour like a fine dinner with great dessert. But even those not aware of Wood's career can enjoy the novel if they come across it. It's an interesting tale of a young, penniless writer living essentially by his wits, grabbing the only job he can snag. And this writer finds a kind of mentor, old and weak, but with a backstory that turns out to be so interesting.

--- Doug Gibson

Apel's Amazon page is here. He's written a non-fiction book -- I Watched Football Early the Day I Died: The Lost Ed Wood Frank Leahy Screenplay -- based on an unproduced screenplay Wood wrote on the life of the legendary Notre Dame football coach. Apel is currently writing a book called Necromania: A Tale of Weird Lit -- The Pulp Fiction of Ed Wood. ... The endurance of Wood's 50 years-plus appeal and cult status is fascinating. It first peaked in the mid to late 90s, after Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, Burton's film Ed Wood, various documentaries, and now-defunct genre magazines such as Cult Movies and Psychotronic Video. But the cult never went away. The past 12 years or so it's grown, along with a renewed interest in Wood's career post 1965. As mentioned, lots of valuable books, websites and Wood Facebook pages exist.

Bearmanor Media link to novel is here.