Kolchak-The Night Stalker Compendium

Fan Faction

Kolchak-The Night Stalker Compendium
edited by Joe Gentile, Garrett Anderson & Lori Gentile
Moonstone Books
ISBN: 9781933076928

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Compendium is a 2011 reprint tome amalgamating two collections of short stories featuring everyone’s favourite seersucker suit clad, straw hat wearing, supernatural stumbling newspaperman... namely Kolchak The Night Stalker Chronicles from 2005 and Kolchak The Night Stalker Casebook from 2006. And, truth be told, I was expecting it to be something of a hit and miss affair when I bought it around ten years ago (it’s taken me this long to catch up to what was originally supposed to be a ‘holiday read’) but there is a major problem, for me at least, running through pretty much all 43 of the original stories contained therein.

Okay, so a year or two ago I started reading some Kolchak The Night Stalker comic books from around the same time as this book was published (if memory serves) and, I only got about six issues in when I had to give up on them... I decided against a review because I didn’t want anything I wrote about Kolchak to have such an angry, negative tint to it. The problem was, they’d taken Kolchak... 1950s seersucker suit and all... and dropped him into contemporary times without ageing him (because, yeah, he’d be dead if they did) and tried to turn him into one of those ‘timeless’ characters who seem to live through way too many Christmases for their own good... like The Simpsons or the Peanuts crowd or James Bond. And, for the record, it makes no sense in the case of those franchises either... people should just try to stop moving characters out of the decade from which they were spawned and leave them anchored there... unless they are prepared to age them.

And, sad to say, this book takes exactly the same tack in most of the stories here, which seem to take place following a move to Hollywood where the key characters of Carl Kolchak, Tony Vincenzo, Ron Updike and Miss Emily all seem to now work (I think this is following a new novel or possibly comic strip which was written before these stories were published... Im guessing). So we have these characters happily using cell phones and email and... yeah... it’s a mess. It makes no sense that Kolchak would still be in that same suit and have even survived... especially when it comes to characters like Miss Emily, who was 84 in the original series and who is now existing in contemporary stories which, even as they push all these modern gadgets and modern pop culture references such as The Oprah Winfrey Show at the reader, also reference the original TV stories as something which has happened. It makes no sense and I hate it.

And now that’s out of the way... yeah, the quality of the stories is still hit and miss. I’m guessing this project was spun out from the various collaborators on those newish comics I read because there are a fair few comic book writers in here... some even famous enough for the likes of myself to have heard of, such as Peter David and Tom DeFalco. There are some stories which, in spite of their modern trappings, do actually have a certain authenticity in terms of the Kolchak character and you can imagine the late, great Darren McGavin delivering their words as lines. In more cases than not, though, it all seems more like a parody of Kolchak rather than a genuine tale, it has to be said.

And there are some nice ideas here too. Such as the ghost of Dashiel Hammett helping Kolchak right a wrong or a story revolving around the makers of The Fear Files TV show, which is very much a parody of The X Files (which itself was kickstarted by Kolchak, see one of my other Kolchak reviews for clarification on that one), who are engaged in making a pilot movie based on Kolchak’s exploits, called The Night Stalker. There’s even a story about old Hollywood actors finding their way out of the screen and into real life... and anyone who references the great Elisha Cook Jr is alright in my book. Alas, the execution is poor in terms of actually feeling like they totally fit into The Night Stalker universe but, yeah, even so, there are a fair few nice ideas in this book... and also a fair few clichés of story ideas too, to be honest.

If I was going to single anything out in this 665 page tome that I really liked it would be Wet Dog of Galveston by Jason Henderson. This humdinger of a shaggy dog story tells of various people in peril being rescued by a ghostly dog from the sea... the phantom dog thinking they may be his absent mistress in peril. Eventually Kolchak and some people assisting him manage to help the ghost doggy be reunited with his absent mistress, who died many years before, manifesting as a ghost to welcome her doggy home at the end of the tale.

And this is me pretty much done with this particular collection of tales bundled up as the Kolchak The Night Stalker Compendium, I think. Yeah, there is some good stuff here and a lot of it is written deftly, while some writers try to dance around the introduction of new technology in the world of Kolchak by writing in excuses for him not to use it and, thusly, not make things much easier for the character to get himself out of various situations by modern, labour saving devices. Honestly, who thinks Carl Kolchak with a mobile phone is a good idea? It’s sometimes entertaining, sometimes dead on in keeping with the spirit of the show but, more often than not it tends to come off just like fan fiction, with all the pros and cons that kind of condemnation carries, it’s sad to say. I’d not really recommend this one to fans of the original show but, saying that, if you aren’t a fan of the original show, then I don’t know what you’d be doing wanting to read this one in the first place, to be fair. Possibly the least interesting book I’ve read this year, it pains me to say.