THE WORLDS
• Eddie LaCrosse
• Songs of the Tufa
• The Firefly Witch
• The Devil's Hound
• Blood Groove
• Fontana & Bunch
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
NEWS
MAILING LIST
CONTACT
The Devil's Hound
Sheriff Matt Klaren and his posse from Rollins Creek only wanted to retrieve the money stolen by Lila Cherry's disreputable circus. But something more awaited them in the isolated Mexican valley, something with huge jaws and a taste for revenge, something known to the natives as el perro del Diablo....
When I was a kid growing up in the swampy part of Tennessee, we had no VCRs or DVDs; if you wanted to see an obscure monster movie that came on at 2 A.M., you had to stay up until 2 A.M. And that was always when WREG in Memphis scheduled the only two “dinosaur westerns,” The Beast of Hollow Mountain and The Valley of Gwangi.
Since my parents wouldn’t allow a ten-year-old to drink coffee to stay awake, I camped out on the couch in my pajamas and either trusted them to wake me up at the right time, or battled to keep my eyes open until I heard the distinctive Jerome Moross Gwangi theme. Often I never made it all the way through; I drifted in and out, and over time my memories of the films mingled with my dreams to create a kind of alternate version, filled with moments that just didn’t happen in the actual movies.
When VCRs hit the market and I could finally watch both films while wide awake, I was disappointed, to say the least. While Gwangi benefits from the Moross music and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, Beast has virtually nothing to recommend it; at times its animated dinosaur resembles nothing so much as Gumby.
Yet the images and scenes I’d conjured as I fought sleep in front of the TV wouldn’t go away. They were actually better, I felt, than the films that inspired them. So as an adult, I sat down to write that “dinosaur western,” the one with all the good parts that existed only in my dreams.
Any fan of the originals will recognize the broad strokes common to all old monster movies, but I hope the devil, and fun, is in the details. The characters are all original, and the situations, while inspired by these films, are also my own. It’s meant to be a rollicking, slightly goofy adventure with a lot of humor and a touch of pathos. Scientific accuracy is probably minimal, but genre accuracy is deep. This, then, is the dinosaur western I imagined as a child, filtered through an adult storytelling sensibility: The Devil’s Hound.
