Blue Sunshine - A Novel by Ken Johnson. Sphere. 1977.
PSYCHOSIS...It started off as a great party - just eight of them in a ski-lodge in upstate New York. But then the last guest, Frannie, arrived. There was something wrong with Frannie's hair. And something very wrong with his eyes. And what he did with three of the girls was too hideous for description....
That was just the start. After that, things began to happen all over New York - ugly things: psychosis, insanity, murder - and no-one could find an explanation. The police were helpless- because they didn't know that behind all the grisly happenings lay a single, uncontrollable horror. A horror called BLUE SUNSHINE...
based on an original screenplay by Jeff Lieberman.
SPOILERS!
Poor old Mrs Rosella. She's waiting in hospital for an op, and her doctor, David Blume is looking tired and appears to be losing his hair.
Poor old Wendy Flemming she's stuck at home babysitting her neighbour Stephanie's brats whilst her ex-husband Edward's on the telly - he's running for congress. She tells the kids a version of Rapunzel. The boy brat decides to test it out on Wendy's locks - great clumps come away in his hands.
Poor old Jerry Zipkin. Not only is he blessed with an incredibly silly name, but, as he plays saxophone for his friend Frannie's Sinatra-like rendition of My Way in front of more pals at a ski-lodge, one of the others notices something odd about Frannie's hair and gives it a tug. The wig comes away in his hand, and Frannie runs off screaming into the snow. The other chaps decide that he's headed downhill to a bar. They set off with one of the girls. Jerry follows Frannie's footprints into a nearby wood. He finds the wig dangling from a tree. As he retrieves it, he hears screams coming from the chalet, and dashes back to find the trio of young ladies burning merrily in the lounge. Pulling down a curtain to extinguish them reveals Frannie, bald, pupils swollen to cover irises and stark, staring bonkers.
Zip and Fran fight their way outside and Jerry manages to shove Fran under the wheels of a truck.
Jerry returns to the chalet to mourn his sizzling former friends, unaware he's being pursued by an irate, pistol-packing truck driver who, already convinced Jerry has committed one murder, is horrified to find him with the charred remains of three more apparent victims.
Jerry gets away with a bullet wound and returns to New York. The girl Alicia who accompanied the lads believes in him, and tries to help.
Jerry spots a newspaper headline regarding a cop who has gone bald, nuts and massacred his family, then turned his service revolver upon himself.
A little later, Jerry breaks into the cops house and, among other things finds a macaw croaking 'No more Blue Sunshine!'
Then things begin to get more mental...
To ruin everything, Blue Sunshine is a form of LSD that certain people took in 1967. Now, in 1977, these people's hair is falling out, their eye pupils are expanding, and they're reaching for the nearest weapon....
I saw the low budget film once years ago, and it couldn't live up to this novelisation, but both are bursting with ideas. Jerry Zipkin is the classic Hitchcock hero, on the run for crimes he didn't commit. It's also shot through with 70s paranoia, fashions and there's a massacre in a disco.
Strangely satisfying to see hippy students get their come -uppance.
Good old Jeff Lieberman - he came up with Squirm before this (novelisation by Richard Curtis - surely not...?) and Just Before Dawn after.