NNtG: Deadtime Stories #10: Grandpa's Monster Movies

It's showtime as we sit back and observe yet another edition of Deadtime Stories. This time we have two true elements of horror: Old timey movies and the ravages of age. But also a monster that's more than ready to ravage as well. So will this book be two thumbs up or was it better to just leave it in the cannister? Let's roll film on Grandpa's Monster Movies.

Cover is very basic and simple. Not bad mind you, it sells the concept very well with the black and white footage and the old looking car to sell the fact that this is definitely an old home movie. Then you have the giant claw slashing through the screen which works to sell the idea that something's going to emerge from the world of the movie. Very "Magic Ticket my ass, McBain!" feel to it. I just feel like it's missing something to make a more memorable cover. A rug and a hardwood floor kind of just leave everything feeling too empty, you know? So it falls more in the "just okay" category of covers. 

Catan Thomas (or C.T. for short) and his cousin Lea Rose are running in a cornfield. Mainly trying to avoid their cousins as they're stuck in Bumbleweed at their grandparents' farm for the big family reunion which is also the seventieth birthday of their Grandpa Eddie. We learn that Grandpa has two brothers named Ernie and Earl. Earl seems fairly normal, as he's married and has a lot of kids. Ernie, however, well he got struck by lightning sixteen times and has lived to tell about it, though has the head holes to prove it. Jeez, makes the guy from Benjamin Button who got struck by lightening a mere seven times look like a wuss. But the kids soon discover that the thing chasing them isn't their cousins (that they know of at least) but rather a strange furry creature that looks like a tumbleweed. So it could be a Critter or a Kuriboh then. 

Despite their concern about the strange creature, C.T. manages to convince Lea into finding out what this thing is. But before they can, they get stopped by Earl's twin daughters April and May, named that for being born on the last day of April and the first day of May. Don't let Big E know about that. Then, the rest of the cousins show up, Joe-Bob, Billy-Bob, Jimmy-Bob and Bobby.. Bob. I can see a lot of thought was put into these names. Lea and C.T. make a run for it but get caught by Ernie, described as being large and hairier than most people on account of the lightning strikes (or he's a dog all along?) and his pet pig, Porkchop, which when you think about it, kind of a messed up name for a pig. Ernie tells the kids to leave the cornfield in a way that's totally not suspicious at all. Lea and C.T. arrive back at the farm where food is being set up at the picnic table by their Aunt Luleen, who made pickled pigs feet.

After being scolded by Lea's mom for not wanting to eat Luleen's food, the kids are tasked by their grandmother to get their grandfather and Earl at the new barn, and especially not the old barn that's breaking down and I'm certain won't be a set piece for later. When they arrive, C.T. and Lea overhear Earl talking about finally killing a creature while also sharpening an axe. He also has buzzsaws and TNT, which makes this sound like one hell of a monster hunt or the finale of Caddyshack. Grandpa tells Earl to not ruin his birthday, but Earl lays more exposition that a man named Floyd Garvey was killed sixty years prior and he blames Ernie for it. But Grandpa says that it was someone named Gus-Gus and also alludes to the old barn being a place where killings happen. 29 pages in this book and we're getting a lot of the story and eventual misdirect early. I can respect that, book.

After being caught, Earl is about to kill C.T. and Lea, but Grandpa stops him before his seventieth is overshadowed by dead kids. The kids return to the picnic and watch as Luleen, Earl and the kids eat pigs feet and possum tails. They ask around about what a Gus-Gus is, but again Earl warns them to shut up about it. With the food unappealing and the cousins wanting them to play Red Rover, C.T. and Lea sneak to Grandpa's house and find their way in the attic to hide. It's there where C.T. find a box labeled [[TITLE OF BOOK]]. Film cannisters with Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein labeled. But what catches their eye more is a film cannister labeled "Gus-Gus". 

They set up the projector and play the film which features Earl, Ernie, Grandpa Eddie and Luleen as kids with a pig named Hamhock, which was the great ancestor of Porkchop. Look, this family named their child Bob Bob, so I don't expect clever pet names. Ernie finds a strange furry creature dashes off and eats a nearby cow and her owner Ms. Beezley. So now C.T. and Lea know what Gus-Gus is. It's the creature they saw in the cornfield. But before they can get answers, the two are caught by their mothers, pissed over not wanting to hang out with their cousins. The kids try to mention Gus-Gus, but they won't listen because... well, they're already mad at them for trying to hide from the family and all, but also because Goosebumps-adjacent Parents. Before the kids leave, C.T. spots another film cannister that says "Floyd Garvey", but they can't watch it right now, so hold that for a little bit I guess.

It doesn't take long for Lea and C.T. to avoid the cousins again, this time hiding in the old barn. However, inside the barn is an electrified cage with Gus-Gus behind it. The two try to run for it, but get caught by Ernie and Porkchop, panicked about the kids finding out. But he tells them that Gus-Gus isn't actually the bad guy here, and what happened to Floyd Garvey was Floyd's doing. He then turns off the electricity and introduces them to Gus-Gus, who proceeds to bite C.T. and roll up to his shoulder. Turns out that it seems Ernie's telling the truth. Gus-Gus seems pretty gentile, but while he can eat creatures like Cows, Ernie's kept the creature's carnivorous mentality at bay. He then reiterates that Earl's the real crazy one around this farm, on account of what happened to Floyd sixty years ago. Ernie says that Floyd wasn't killed or anything, he just ran away and joined the circus. Yeah, that's the ticket.

According to Ernie, Floyd Garvey invited him and Gus-Gus to his birthday party. There, Floyd kept feeding chicken to Gus-Gus, which made the creature grow bigger and bigger, until the creature brawled with him and it scared Floyd so bad he ran away. So Ernie doesn't feed Gus-Gus anything but baby food and takes care of him. Why can't the creature be sent away? Because Gus-Gus always finds his way back. You also seemingly can't kill him, which might explain his survival for likely well over sixty years. After Gus-Gus is fed and Ernie sends them off, C.T. and Lea return to the house as the surprise party for Grandpa Eddie is about to go down later. But this gives C.T. and Lea enough time to head upstairs and see what the Floyd Garvey movie is really about.

The movie seems to go as Ernie claimed, with Gus-Gus turning into a giant beast after being fed the chicken. Just as he attacks Floyd, everything goes black due to a power outage. The kids check outside and see April, May and the other Bob cousins leaving the barn, noting that Bobby-Bob is charred up with his hair straight up. Meaning he's either reenacted a Looney Tunes cartoon, or he got electrocuted by the electric fence which caused the outage. And, sure enough, Gus-Gus got loose and is chasing the cousins. But before they can go check on the cousins, their grandma sends them to the henhouse to get eggs. However, there's only one hen left in said henhouse and a six-foot Gus-Gus spitting out feathers, meaning that he wasn't waiting for FRIED chicken. Also, it coughs out a bow, one that looks like one of the bows the twins wear, so it may have had an appetizer before the colonel. 

They find Ernie and tell him about the rampaging Gus-Gus. Ernie suggests using a tranquilizer to put Gus-Gus to sleep, and to use the pickled pig's feet to feed him it. They eventually find the now gargantuan Gus-Gus who is being rammed by Earl's truck. Gus-Gus easily grabs the truck, but Ernie feeds him the tranquilizer... which doesn't work. That's when C.T. gets the idea to use the dynamite that was mentioned earlier. He covers them in marshmallows and lights them up using a barbecue. When Gus-Gus eats the bait, he blows up immediately, seemingly putting an end to the beast. The birthday party goes down and the twins were fine, Gus-Gus didn't eat any actual humans in this book.

As the families drive off, C.T. and his family notice some strange tumbleweeds rolling around. It turns out that, oops, instead of killing Gus-Gus, I guess this caused the creature to multiply. C.T. tells his dad to floor it as the creatures gain on them.

This one was fine, but I will say I'm a bit disappointed in it. The concept of the "monster movies" doesn't feel all too important to the plot. We get two scenes involving the projector, and all it does is slightly provide some minor exposition in one scene and confirm what we were all thinking in the other. Everything else does more of the heavy lifting for the plot than what the book is titled after. Though thankfully it does a better job as a misdirect title than something like The Birthday Party of No Return! did. The book technically does use the movies as its title and its hook, but the book is still held up on its own by not using it as a crutch and instead always focusing on the action and the history of Gus-Gus, which does lead to a fun, albeit rushed finale. And given this is like my sixth Deadtime Stories so far, I think I can see the Achilles Heel of this series. Heavy buildup, rushed finale. Eh, could be worse issues. 

C.T. and Lea are okay protagonists. Nothing overly dynamic and, save for the ending really, they mostly observe what's going on and are here to get exposition dumped upon them. The cousins and most of the family are our Superfluous Clay however. Especially the cousins who really only exist as reasons for C.T. and Lea to head off somewhere else. Earl and our titular Grandpa exist, then disappear mid-book, making the title feel even more misleading, since Ernie is the most important adult character here. I do like that he cares for Gus-Gus, and does try to take care of the creature, even if everything would eventually go to hell anyway. And you can tell he's someone who knows what Gus-Gus is capable of, but can't bring himself to tell anyone, especially Lea and C.T.. 

And Gus-Gus is an interesting monster. Granted, nothing outwardly original about a monster that grows when it eats and later multiplies, but he still feels like both a cute creature that you could think is more docile than it really is, and also a creature that if it went out of control just once, would be a serious threat. We, of course, have no clue what Gus-Gus actually is, or where it came from, but that's fine. You don't need to drop all the shoes in a book that already does a lot of exposition and build. You'd just be padding like ten more pages in this 120 page book. I also like the twist of the multiple Gus-Guses after all is said and done. Reminds me of Along Came a Spider and how we really didn't solve anything, we just made more deadly creatures. Only ones that might be harder to defeat than spiders. 

So ultimately, this was fine like I said. You might be disappointed that the title feels misleading, and you could argue the biggest sin the book does is focus more on exposition than horror, but I've read books that have done both of them much worse, so this one ultimately comes off the most "just okay" book I've read in some time. Light recommend. Although the book sure likes to punch down on southern people a lot. That might also be a turnoff. Unless you're an ignorant Yankee, then laugh away at them silly hillbillies. Grandpa's Monster Movies gets a B-.