In Preston Fassel’s new horror novel Beasts of 42nd Street, the setting may be 1977 New York, but its exploration of the corrosive nature of extremist content on the human soul resonates deeply here in the modern world of streaming.
The novel follows Andy Lew, a heroin addict and film projectionist at a grindhouse cinema called The Colossus. Andy is thoroughly repulsive and dead inside thanks to a lifetime of trauma and drug abuse. His sole source of happiness is a snuff film gifted to him by a mysterious figure starring a young woman he has fallen in love with through the images of her suffering and death. When his brother’s headless body surfaces and a former porn star with occult delusions offers to buy the movie, Andy is pulled even further into the city’s vile underbelly.
Fassel, who was born in Houston and attended both Lone Star and Sam Houston State, based part of his story on the life experiences of “Mad” Ron Roccia, a legendary figure in the projectionist world that Fassel interviewed for Fangoria magazine about his collection of bawdy and bloody clips, trailers, and films. As a former projectionist for the River Oaks Theater myself, Fassel perfectly captures the voyeuristic and slightly sleazy nature of the work. There is something so deviant-feeling about cutting and taping a film together, threading it through a brutal machine to entrance an audience below, and the hours spent there in the dark, dirt, and dust. It gives you a perverse sense of ownership over the films as well as power, like you’re a fairly shady magician.
The days of celluloid are mostly gone now, and the work of a projectionist (including its ties to organized crime!) reduced to digital codes and button pushing. The violent, sexist content hasn’t disappeared, though, and the descent of Andy mirrors the dark rabbit holes that so many angry young men fall down as they become desensitized to atrocity.
By the time the reader meets Andy, his only driving purpose is to push the limits of acceptability in film. He strives to introduce the Colossus’s audiences to even more depraved horror and sex, acquiring movies that are rarely or never seen elsewhere. Part of him is just spreading the poison around the way hurt people sometimes do, but another part is desperately trying to transfer the feeling of beauty he gets from watching his snuff film and the woman he refers only to as “her.” Her suffering lends meaning to his openly meaningless existence, and showing pale imitators to paying perverts and burnouts is his ministry.
Andy’s toxic state of mind can be found on any number of anonymous message boards where young men trade increasingly putrid depictions of rape and murder. Like Andy, they are obsessed with the beauty of their subjects and its subsequent destruction through violence. Those images are more likely badly constructed memes and computer generated art than film, but the result is the same. Andy’s Colossus is everywhere now, not just on 42nd Street, and it leaks like a badly built toxic waste dump.
Beasts of 42nd Street is a rough read full of unlikable characters and horrid settings. It’s hard to root for Andy, even when the sad facts of his tragic life are laid bare. Nonetheless, he and the novel are a darkly compelling exploration of demons we still have not learned how to deal with. Its horror is a creeping one, like a growth on the skin that is almost surely cancer but which a person is too afraid to go to the doctor and have checked out. Everything about the book is grimy, gruesome, and nauseating, and not since Clive Barker’s “Son of Celluloid” has the messy viscera of between films and the people and places that show them been so viscously exposed.
Beasts of 42nd Street is available now from Cemetery Dance Publications. 250 pages. $17.99.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
