RJ will be selling it at the Festival, and I do encourage those who will be attending to plan on buying it there.  You'll save on postage AND be able to get the author herself to sign it!

For those who are interested, I wrote a review of the book on the Barnes and Noble page for it.  There is a page for it now on Amazon, as well.

Best, Steve

Congratulations!

And now my fingers itch to type "Soon to be a major Hollywood motion picture starring Meryl Streep!"

G.

MB, I think an excellent example of what you were talking about with less-than-stellar performers sharing screen space with excellent ones who then make an amazing moment of what seems on the surface to be unpromising dross is the sequence where [spoiler]Jeff Clark goes to Professor Stokes to learn how to regress back through to the Eighteenth century.[/spoiler]

I've been meaning to track that scene down again for years--I've only viewed it a couple of times, but my memory is that Thayer brought real magic to that moment.  His invocation to the powers of the herbs is one of the rare instances where DS came close to an accurate reflection of a serious magickal practice.

G.

To Ian and others who have never seen house of DS--

be aware that it's much more like a late Sixties low budget vampire flick (with a gore quota comparable to, say, Hammer's Taste the blood of Dracula, but far less stylistic finesse) than it is the series we all know and love.  The movie is populated by people with names like "Barnabas Collins," "Julia Hoffman" and "Eliot Stokes" who exist as characters only because of the superb non-verbal acting ability of the artists portraying them.  Nearly every scene, dialogue sequence or set-piece that actually established the people in the movie as characters was axed in favor of a higher gore content (slo-mo stakings, close-ups of blood running, etc.)  I well remember that as I walked into the theatre back in the Summer of 1970, I heard one person ask his friend "So, what'd you think?" and the other man's reply:  "Lots of teeth, lots of blood."  I still think of this single sentence as the ideal review of house of Dark Shadows.  They could use it in the New York Times television section.

Grayson does look fabou throughout, of course.  Love the bed-head do!  And the costumes in the ball sequence, though we see everything far too briefly, are the most lavish and exquisite yet.  The one for Barnabas was used on the show subsequently, and I think one or two others as well.

G.

Hey, Julia, I hope you include the dialogue when Peggy tells the Keach character that their meeting was "veddy Noel Coward."

After you get past the shock value of the rest of it, in some ways it's a brilliant moment.  I also love the short scene where he finds her on the beach (I believe this was actually filmed in Great Barrington, Mass.).

Best, Steve

Connie dear, that's adorable!

Many thanks for all the good wishes! I surely do appreciate them.

G.

Another stellar element of the 1840 storyline is Chris Pennock's work as Gabriel Collins.  By far Pennock's most nuanced, emotionally plausible characterization on the series, I think.

I also enjoy John Karlen's work as Kendrick Young in PT 1841 because it is so unlike anything else he did on the series.  He gets to play the young romantic hero--more in the vein of Jane Austen than Bronte (that's Frid as Bramwell--even his name is Brontean), I think.  His courting scenes with Nancy Barrett are adorable, and of course I love watching him cross swords with Grayson's acid-tongued Aunt Julia.

G.