John Skipp & Craig Spector – Fright Night

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John Skipp & Craig Spector – Fright Night (Star, 1985)

Blurb:
It is hungry. It is thirsty. It lives next door to Charley Brewster.

Charley has seen the coffin and the bodies drained of blood. He knows he will be the vampire’s next victim. But no one will believe him: not the police, not his girlfriend Amy, not even the school weirdo, Evil Ed. Charley’s last chance is to enlist the help of Peter Vincent, Vampire Killer, star of a hundred horror movies and host of TV’s Fright Night.

Nobody thinks he’s telling the truth – until Evil Ed becomes a vampire and Amy is dragged into his next-door neighbour’s evil, foul-smelling house of death!

Sixteen-year-old's Charley Brewster and Amy Peterson enjoying a grappling match in his room on Kings Street, Rancho Corvallis. He's struggling gamely to unclasp her bra straps, she's having none of it. The TV is tuned in to channel 13 and Fright Night, 'ghost hosted' by Charley's hero, Peter Vincent, the fearless vampire killer, twenty-five years on from playing lead in such timeless classics as Blood Castle, I, A Vampire, Orgy Of The Damned, Fangs In The Night, I Rip Your Jugular & Co. Peter Vincent would know what to do in this situation. Peter Vincent "would stake a vampire with one hand while groping some bleached blond fräulein with tits the size of basketballs in the other." Amy finally relents, slips off her blouse and .... Charley pays her no attention whatsoever, preoccupied with gawking through his binoculars at the vacant three story Victorian mausoleum of a house next door where, under cover of darkness, two creepy guys are delivering a coffin to the basement. A furious Amy pulls on her blouse and flounces off home.

Another week at Christopher L. Cushing High. Amy, still sore, is giving Charley the cold shoulder and even his fellow horror enthusiast, Evil Ed Thompson, the official school weirdo, is offhand. All the talk is of Rancho Corvallis' first murder in living memory, the corpse found in minus its head ...

Charley perks up a little when he bumps into a most gorgeous babe making her way to the door of his still unseen new neighbours. His ditzy mom tells him the new owner is dashingly handsome Mr. Jerry Dandrige, probably gay as his only companion is his shifty-looking retainer, Billy Cole. Charley keeps the place under nightly surveillance, at least, until he falls asleep once the snack supply is depleted.

A scream in the night!

The gorgeous babe's name is - or rather was - Cheryl Lane, prostitute. Charley knows this as Cheryl's murder is headline news. Unfortunately, it's flashed on-screen in Wally's Burger Heaven just as Amy decides he's suffered enough and admits she'd like to take up exactly where they left off on Saturday night. Charley, horrified at the news broadcast, blanks her and takes a cheeseburger in the face for his trouble.

That night he witnesses the murder of a third young woman, a co-ed this time, Dandrige sinking his fangs into her shapely neck as she dances provocatively at the window. The vampire catches his pesky young neighbour spying from across the street and casually draws the blind, giving an elegant wave as he does so ...

Plenty of pop culture references: Charley's mum simpering over Mr. Dandridge "like a teenage girl on the Beatles' first American tour": Eerie, Creepy, Famous Monsters and Vampirella magazines; Evil Ed's 'Billy Idol hairdo'; Tales From The Crypt, Pac Man, Space Invaders ....
To be continued ...

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Charley discovers that one sure-fire way to find oneself on the wrong side of homicide detective Lennox is to drag him along to the Dandrige house and demand he arrest the owner as a vampire and multiple murderer. The police, his girl, his best friend, even his own mother think he's losing his mind, but Charley knows the truth, and now it's a case of destroying Dandrige before Dandrige destroys him. The vampire has already attacked him in his own bedroom - Charley flukily coming out on top thanks to supply of sharp pencils.

Who can he turn to? Tonight's Fright Night feature - the Peter Vincent classic I, A Vampire: Part 2 - supplies the answer. Charley ambushes the fading Ghost host just as he leaves the Channel 13 building for good. "I have been fired because it would appear that no one wants to see vampire killers any more. Or vampires, either, for that matter. Apparently, all they want are demented madmen running around in ski masks, hacking up nubile young virgins. Now, if you'll excuse me ..."

Meanwhile.

"The message of Brian DePalma's Carrie hadn't been lost on him: if they could find a way to fuck you up, they would. That was the sentence that God and the world had passed on misfits. Trap them and kill them."

That's 'Evil' Ed Thompson, Charley's best friend of four years, who is now seriously pissed at being all but ignored since his fellow horror head developed the hots for a soppy GIRL. When Amy takes the unprecedented step of actually acknowledging Ed's existence by phoning him over her concern for Charley's sanity, his first thought is to tell her where to get off, but he can't bring himself to turn his back on a Fright Night fan in peril. Ed takes Amy along to meet Peter Vincent. If the fearless vampire killer is unable to convince Charley that Dracula is a work of fiction and "vampires" do not, in fact, exist, then they might as well leave the lad to his paranoid fantasies. Vincent, at a loose end and desperate for easy money, is available for Ed's proposed stunt at a competitive $500. Amy hires him regardless. Between them they arrange a meeting with Jerry Dandrige who cheerfully agrees to drink a glass of Holy Water for Charley's benefit .....

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Preppies and MTV-style trendies mixed and mingled, weaving in and out of one another to the groove of Michael Jackson's Thriller. On the four huge video screens that surrounded the floor, rotting bodies clawed their way out of the dirt while Vincent Price did a voice-over that would've made Peter Vincent green with envy.

For some reason, Charley was less than amused. The deeper he stepped into it, the more the whole thing smacked of nightmare surrealism. There was nothing entertaining about animate corpses at the moment: one was following him, and it wasn't very much fun at all.

If you're a horror-fixated social leper with a crap haircut, becoming a vampire is not going to make the situation a whole lot worse. When the vampire-detection charade ends in crushing humiliation for Charley, Evil Ed can't pass up the opportunity to unleash all that bitter, pent-up resentment toward his friend in a cruel prank. Dandrige, feeling thirsty, waits for him in the alley.

Peter Vincent resolves to leave town. He caught a glimpse of Dandrige in a compact mirror, or rather, he didn't, and what wasn't where it should be proved Charley right all along. As he's stuffing the tokens of his career into a holdall, Evil Ed comes calling. When he most needs it, the fearless vampire killer belated discovers the Gregory Pendennis within, and fends off the vampire Ed with a crucifix to the forehead and an impressive "Back, cursed hellspawn!"

Meanwhile, Dandrige abducts Amy from the Club Radio nightclub, very publicly destroying two burly black bouncers in the process, "while the boys from Duran Duran informed him that they were hungry like the wolf [and] several hundred assholes shimmied and swayed." The vampire whisks her back to his bedroom and you suspect her bra-straps ain't gonna pose him any difficulties. Can Charley and a rejuvenated Peter Vincent save her from a fate worse than death, death and undeath?

Skipp and Spector are inspired choice for this gig. It's not another The Scream - the circumstances don't require one - but it is a sharp, 250 pages of action and sick chuckles. Did they do any other novelization work? Apologies to 'Jack Martin', but I'd have loved to have seen them let loose on Videodrome.