I have so much material on the Robert Clarke movie that I thought it'd be fun (and very fast and very easy) to put together a book so ... I did. It's like a MagicImage book: two versions of the script (the first, SAUROS, very different from the movie -- a lizard-man running around Guatemalan jungles), preceded by an intro by the movie's producer Robin Kirkman (who died a couple weeks after writing it), the long "Making Of" that Robert Clarke and I wrote for his autobiography, Gary Rhodes' MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT article about the movie's 1958 Texas drive-in world premiere (with the Sun Demon in attendance); plus Wade Williams' reminiscences of decades of knowing Clarke, Arthur C. Pierce's 24-page treatment (from the 1970s) for the SUN DEMON follow-up NAKED SUN DEMON aka SORCERESS, and notes on the scripts and plenty of "Fun Facts"* by moi. She's just out of the hospital but Nan Peterson wants to do a preface or SOMEthing also. Marty "Astounding B Monster" Baumann is doing the cover, Frank Dietz is providing some art, Bob Burns is supplying some latter-day pics of Clarke, and I've got a whole pile of photos from the movie itself, some never-before-seen, including behind-the-scenes.
*Also a certain number of UN-fun facts ... for instance, the little newspaper-vending kid in the movie ("Extra, extra! Weird killer still at large!") -- Clarke's real-life nephew -- died a few years later in what was called one of the most savage crimes in Oklahoma state history. Sometimes when you dig, you find stuff you were happier not knowing.
I hope to be able to send ev-er-y-thing to the publisher in the next week or two, after a few more stray items straggle in (like Nan P.'s intro), and I've got my fingers crossed it appears some time early in the New Year. Thermo-dynamic horror from BearManor Media!
