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.