Double Feature Fanfic Heaven: Peter Grandbois's The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors

The Arctic deserves more consideration from us. We ask so much of it. We expect it to take on so many of our failed experiments, our alien discoveries – our monsters – without noticing the toll it takes on the polar region’s ice cover and permafrost.

Two of our most important abandoned Arctic legacies are, of course, the Blob and the Thing. The Thing was first immortalized in John W. Campbell’s (aka Don A. Stuart) 1938 novella Who Goes There?, then reincarnated on film as The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982), whereas The Blob emerged fully formed as the B film of a double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. While physically contained within the polar ice now, the Blob and the Thing re-emerge in new iterations and formats continually.

One such example is Peter Grandbois’s Double Monster Feature, The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors, two novellas in the Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas. The A-side, The Glob Who Girdled Granville, imagines a world in which Mr. Gregory Glob, an anthropomorphized version of the monster in The Blob, begins anew after three years penance in the Arctic Circle as an office worker, with wife Jane, née Martin (Steve McQueen’s teen girlfriend in the film), and their children in small town Ohio. The B-side, The Secret Lives of Actors, places the Thing (here, as a seven foot tall, red haired, failed Hollywood actor Jim, whose most famous role was the monster in the 1951 film) in a suburban Denver community theatre troupe, still recovering from his failed love affair with Nikki (Nicholson – a character from the 1951 film).

Both novellas unspool from slightly misshapen balls of thread. Characters and actors co-exist, are sometimes conflated, and are repurposed for their new worlds. Both novellas are quick reads, at under 60 pages each. But The Secret Lives of Actors is the more successful of the two, both in narrative and style; in true double feature fashion, after reading both novellas, the B-side has taken over feature film status. While both books draw heavily from their filmic lore (with references to their legacies throughout), The Secret Lives of Actors does more work to establish itself as a standalone, through stronger characterization and a more fully developed narrative arc.

In the first pages of The Glob Who Girdled Granville, Mr. Glob splits himself in two, and thus so does the reader’s attention. Alternatively, The Secret Lives of Actors begins with vegetable-based Jim severing his own finger to grow a better version of himself, and here, the reader finds connection with the monster in his search for emotional evolution. While the clichés are gratuitous in The Glob, they’re held in check more in Actors, which develops an alternative twinning to the two Mr. Globs through exploration of both Things: Jim, from the 1951 version, all vegetable matter and orange shuffling, and newcomer John, from the 1982 version, possessed with a new range of abilities far darker in scope yet much more overtly appealing to Nikki.

Development of the female leads, Jane and Nikki, suffers from these overburdened dual male roles. Yet while Jane remains a mere phantom, Nikki gains a certain status in The Secret Lives of Actors from her mystery; even in its final pages, the reader is left to imagine what powers Nikki might possess of her own.

While either of these novellas can be read without prior knowledge of the Blob or the Thing, bringing at least a basic understanding of the monsters and their physical dimensions to the books will definitely help you as you read. Grandbois does a bit of front-end description, but his references to the films are largely devoid of backstory dump; a reader unseasoned in cult film legend may find themselves lost to some of the more nuanced allusions. I confess, I have seen both The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing but went into The Glob Who Girdled Granville with no points of reference, and as much as I tried to avoid it, this disparity in my own background knowledge affected my readings. These novellas act, in some ways at least, as tributes to the films (and the novella) that came before them.

So really, why try to avoid the full pleasure of the experience? Grendel is rewarded by an understanding of Beowulf, Wide Sargasso Sea by first reading Jane Eyre, and any responsible moviegoer wouldn’t dare show up to The Avengers without having seen at least some of the Marvel cinematic universe. Treat yourself to a night of B movie delights, then pick up the most literary of fanfic in Peter Grandbois’ Double Monster Feature: The Glob Who Girdled Granville and The Secret Lives of Actors.

Fear and Loathing in B-Horror Movies: On Peter Grandbois's Wait Your Turn

Peter Grandbois has presented, in novella form, a double feature of B-horror-film-based stories. Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems are strung out from the movies The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Fly, respectively.

He takes these movies and creates stories from them. In the first story, he depicts an actual creature, not a man, who was cast in the movie. He shows a monster who desires, and fails, to be human.

When exploring stories structured around B horror films in his double monster feature novellas, Peter Grandbois pinpointed their motive to incite fear.

“What brings you here?”
“I wanted to be afraid.”

If horror movies cause fear, then the behind-the-scenes story is the absence of love. In both of his stories, Grandbois depicts monsters that approach humanity or depart from humanity on the hinge of love. They are monsters because of their failure.

The Creature falls in love and has a child, but he cannot become fully human despite reconstructive surgery in that direction because he has destroyed the ability to love within himself and the object of his love between his strong hands.

The Fly becomes less human as his wife observes a change inside of him. “’You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘You’re not the person you once were. Something about you is different.” Helene says these things to her husband before his change. And it is these words that cause him to transform. “I wanted to say I needed her to see me as I once had been, to tell me I was the man she’d fallen in love with, perhaps then all would go back to normal.”

“I didn’t know which was more frightening. The fact that one month ago she no longer loved me because she thought I’d changed, or the fact that now that I really had changed, she seemed to love me more than ever.”

There is this pull on each monster to love and be loved, and it is not necessarily that they are not capable of love, merely that they just don’t. They don’t love their wives and they don’t love their children, and this is frightening.

This is what the author wants the audience to take away from these stories, maybe, but I don’t know if he believes it. “Movie magic is all about illusion. How easy it is for us to deceive ourselves, to be deceived. . . . With time, we see clearly.”

“Love’s illusions are as powerful as any manufactured by movies.” (Wait Your Turn)

“It is difficult to see things clearly in the present… Only with distance can we understand.” (The Stability of Large Systems)

There is this sense of distancing, like how one writes fiction to get at certain truths that feel too close to be spoken of honestly. Love is an illusion, Grandbois writes, no matter how monstrous the opposite of love may be. Time and space are the antidotes, it seems, to both love and fear. Both fear and love are catalysts to keep the human species alive. But what if you don’t feel human? What if you want to do something other than merely survive?

In the end, both monsters have escaped from society, but they can’t escape from themselves. They each try to hurt what they have tried to love. It is an effort to bring that spectrum of love and fear together and make the distance between them negligible.

Grandbois has presented two excellently-crafted novellas, and they definitely made me want to read more of his work, especially the rest of this series.

Stories About Scars: On Peter Grandbois's The Arsenic Lobster

For my thirtieth birthday, I had a storytelling party. When no one knew what to talk about, I asked for a story about a scar. Even though I cringe through them, even though I cover my mouth, even as I gasp and violently shake my head and fall just short of shrieking, I love them. Stories about scars give me an experience I could never otherwise have.

My own scars are uninteresting. Surgeries. Tattoos. Stupid adult mistakes. My only scars I find interesting are the ones that precede my memory. I’ve got a straight line down my bicep a couple inches long. I’ve had it “forever,” but I haven’t a clue what happened. I’ve got a flat slug under my chin, gnarled and white and mysterious. I wasn’t born with it — something happened to me. It happened one time and it stayed with me, living in my skin all the way to now.

Back when it first happened, I was a different person. It was anyone’s guess who or what I’d become. At some point, it was possible that I could’ve been the sort of person who sought out scars. I could have decided that stories weren’t enough. Self-sabotage is attractive when dressed up as experience. Undoing, erasing, or ruining your life becomes a viable prospect when the alternative is never doing anything: a life of inexperience. But even after you’re experienced, self-sabotage stays with you, just like a scar. And you wind up fighting every person you’ve ever been.

So it goes in Peter Grandbois’s book, The Arsenic Lobster. Labeled as a “hybrid memoir,” I found myself wondering how much was true — did the second person narrator really swim for miles in a rancid canal? Did he really chase down a six-foot boa constrictor? Did he really hang off the top of his friend’s car while his friend tried to send him flying with his own recklessness? Of course he did. And of course it’s true. The physically dangerous decisions we foolishly made in childhood — especially a suburban childhood like Grandbois had (and like I had) — were easier to accept because, when you’re just a body, you don’t care what happens. You’ll heal eventually. But after you become a mind, a conflicted, oversensitive brain, decisions become harder to make. It becomes more difficult to accept what you’ve done because you’ll remember it, because experience is permanent. Grandbois exploits the transition between body and mind, between childlike faux-impermanence and concrete, selective amnesia:

“The further back you go, the more shadows you find. You catch glimpses beneath the surface of memory: Kids alone in their house sniffing glue. Do you want some? Another kid takes a baseball bat to a parked car. Do you join him? Another tells you to distract a clerk while he steals the Dungeon Master’s guide. Do you go along? Another pulls down his pants and asks you to suck his dick. Do you? Another hits a defenseless kid. Calls a kid a faggot. Calls a kid a queer. Do you stop them? Many, many kids drinking, taking shrooms, smoking pot, disappearing in rooms. Images flash through your mind, but strangely, your part in these memories remains in shadow. Flicking in and out like the old TV show, The Outer Limits. Don’t adjust your vertical hold. There’s nothing wrong with your television set. You stand on the edge of memory, always observing, wondering when, how, if ever, you participated.”

Upon reaching adolescent self-awareness, Grandbois taps into hyperawareness, watching everyone watching him. So he takes up fencing, a spectator sport that scars him physically and emotionally, breaking his hand, ending his first marriage, making him both more and less noble than he would’ve been otherwise. He describes his life away from fencing as a dream, the sort you can’t wake up from. He is most alive when fighting, be it with himself, or with an imagined self. He risks those selves each times, but they always seem to multiply, just like choices. With the right amount of perspective, anything is possible, but then, how do you choose? It’s no easier than choosing who to be. While Grandbois is himself, always, he is only one of many selves, with each self becoming more dominant, more permanent, more willing to sacrifice another part to be the real you in the end. And even in the end, still taking risks, abandoning dreams both likely and remote, he imagines the future, wherein he’s still fighting and still collecting scars and making new possibilities and imagining the self that will get to win out, the one that hopes “when he is that age, he will be able to look in the mirror and whisper to himself, Go to hell.”

My most unmysterious, pre-memory scar comes from a mirror. I first discovered it when I was twenty-two. I shaved my head, making me look very different than the person I’d been before, and about four inches from my forehead, there was a length of sickly white skin where my hair didn’t grow. I remembered an inconsequential story my father once told me about a mirror that had fallen on me when I was very young. Apparently, I caught the corner with my head. In my invented recollection, it happens one of two ways. Either I see a baby, which I understand is me, and the mirror falls and hits my head and there’s a bit of blood, then it’s over; or I’m very short, but not a child — that is, I’m me, only smaller, and the mirror falls toward me and breaks before it makes contact. Neither is true, but I don’t really think it matters. Like any experience, I can’t go back and undo it. And, like the experience I borrow whenever I hear a story or read a book, it’s difficult to imagine a mirror that doesn’t hold a dozen selves.

I Always Thought I Was the Only One

The first time I read some of my writing out loud in front of people I almost peed my pants. You see, the story was embarrassing and it was about me. I write creative nonfiction, which means there’s no hiding behind a safe filter of a fictional narrator.

The story I read that first time was about when I heard the news that my ex-boyfriend of four years was engaged, and how completely crazy tailspin nutty emotional it made me. There’s another story about when the mean girls in seventh-grade P.E. pantsed me in front of the entire class. Then there’s my favorite: my experience posing for nude photographs. The first time I read that one out loud, my dad was there.

But as scared as I was to read my first-person, nonfiction story, the reward of sharing it was like nothing I could have anticipated. People I didn’t know came up to me and said things like, “Thank you for sharing your story,” and, “I’ve felt the same way and always thought I was the only one.”

People wanted to know how I got the courage to share something so personal. And, really, I’ve just never known any other way to write. I think it’s a shame that much of the human experience gets hidden behind constructed façades based on our perceptions of what the world expects of us.

The more I write and the more I share my stories, the more I realize that people long for authentic connection — no matter how miniscule a connection they make — even with a stranger. They want to know they’re not alone in their pain, lust, embarrassment, hate, mistakes, flaws, anger, addiction and longing. They want to know that someone else has had a similar experience, and survived to tell about it.

So I started a storytelling project in the form of a digital micro-magazine. It’s called Under the Gum Tree, a literary magazine exclusively publishing creative nonfiction and visual art. It strives for authentic connection through vulnerability, by harnessing the power of sharing stories without shame.

And there is power. After publishing the premiere issue in August 2011, I received an email from a subscriber thanking me for manifesting my own creativity and saying that reading the magazine provided her with an “infectious inspiration.”

The premiere issue features an excerpt from the hybrid memoir The Arsenic Lobster by Peter Grandbois, a meditation on porches and losing one’s mother by Kate Washington, and stunning photography by Bryan and Stephanie Mazzarello.

We’re about to publish the third issue, and we are publishing stories from writers like Steve Almond, whose piece questions whether the convenience of technology diminishes the music-listening experience, and Colleen Kinder, whose extensive essay explores life as a chronic blusher:

“Willpower accomplished nothing. In fact, willpower like mine just stoked the fire. So I tired avoidance. I steered clear of any situation that might give my skin occasion to flare. I wore shorts under my plaid uniform skirt. I locked my journal in a small box under my bed and hid the key inside an unassuming stuffed animal beaver whose tail region I had split open with scissors. I did not raise my hand.”

–from “One Bright Case of Idiopathic CraniofacialErythema”

Perhaps the thing I am most proud of in creating Under the Gum Tree is that alongside these accomplished artists, I also published a story by my childhood best friend about her first pregnancy: one that was a surprise to her and her then-ex-boyfriend (now husband) and an abomination to her devout Christian parents.

I have the chance to help others tell stories that need to be told, because we all have a story that can help at least one other person in the world. That’s the goal of telling stories without shame.