Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee blog tour

I'm so excited to join the blog tour for Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee with not one but two brilliant posts from Jeff Zenter. I absolutely loved this book and you can read my review here.

First, there's a Q and A and then a fun post from Jeff about why The Goonies is a terrible/ingeniously brilliant movie. This will be an interesting one, as that's my husband's favourite film (as you'll see from the photograph of his collection).

Can you tell us more about the book?

Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee is the story of Josie Howard and Delia Wilkes, two recent high school graduates who host a creature feature show on their local public access station in Jackson, Tennessee, under the guise of their alter egos, Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood.  They show some of the finest(?) horror movies from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. During breaks in the movie, they do corny skits, read viewer mail, sometimes get dim-witted classmates to do shirtless dance parties. Josie is doing the show to kickstart her television career. Delia is doing the show to reconnect with her father who abandoned her. The big question of the book is whether they’ll be able to take their show to a level that will allow each of them to reach their goal without going their separate ways. It’s my first attempt at a comedy.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

One night, a couple of years ago, I came home on a Saturday night and turned on the TV and started channel surfing. This is not something I generally ever do. When I hit the Nashville public access station, it was showing this grainy zombie movie from the late 60s called Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. Intrigued, I kept watching. The movie cut to these two young women dressed in goth/vampiric attire, who went by the names Marlena Midnite and Robyn Graves. It was a show called Midnite Mausoleum that was syndicated from someplace in rural Iowa. It fascinated me to see this labor of love and I’ve always had a soft spot for people who put things into the world for the sheer love of it. A story began forming in my head. All of my books are about people who fascinate me.

Do you have any writing tips for aspiring authors?

Give yourself opportunities to be bored. We’re not bored enough nowadays because we have boredom-killing smart phones with us all the time. But boredom is the mother of imagination. I go on long walks to enforce boredom upon myself. I listen to meditative music  and take my puppy, so it’s hard to look at my phone. I find a lot of inspiration that way.

What are your favourite recent books?

Two books that are coming out in 2019. Hello Girls by Brittany Cavallaro and Emily Henry. This is a darkly hilarious and sharply written YA Thelma and Louise about two teenage girls on the run. It’s brilliant. Then, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous  by Ocean Vuong. I love novels written by poets and he’s one of my favourite poets. This novel—a letter from a son to his Vietnamese immigrant mother—is easily one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Every sentence burns like a flame.

Which character (of yours or other authors) would you take to a midnight matinee movie showing and why? What movie would you watch?

I think I’d take Charlotte Holmes from Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte series because she’s brilliant and hilarious. And I’d love her take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, my favourite horror movie.

What are your favourite horror movies?

Besides the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Ring, Wolf Creek, Hereditary, Session 9, The Exorcist, Alien.

Thanks for the Q and A, Jeff! It's really got me in the mood for watching some horror movies. Now, it's time for Jeff's guest post about The Goonies.

The Goonies

I’m going to take some heat for this one, but The Goonies is a bad movie. It feels, in every way, like a bunch of kids were playing pretend in their unspectacular hometown and filmed themselves improvising a movie. It posits a world in which pirates from the 1600s are fixated on the coast of...Oregon? Ok, that might be historically accurate but it seems wrong. But The Goonies also posits a world in which said Oregon-fixated pirates from the 1600s are capable of stunning feats of engineering. These include an organ made of bones in a dripping wet massive underground complex that makes pieces of the floor fall away. Oh, and by the way, it does this reliably some 300 years after it was built. The door lock actuator on my 2007 Honda CR-V just went out. It’s like 400 years younger than One-Eyed Willie’s contraptions and made by Honda.

For some reason, these pirates really only want someone who is good at playing the organ and capable of reading sheet music (that has also survived for hundreds of years) to get their treasure. They can’t abide the thought of someone who sucks at the organ running around, rich off their treasure. You want our treasure? Get your non-organ-playing asses out of here. Better yet: die. If you can’t play organ, you not only don’t deserve our treasure, you deserve to die. Other feats of pirate engineering include incredible water slides, and a giant underground pirate ship garage. I know I’m forgetting a lot of stuff here.

Then we have the Fratellis. Who I guess are supposed to be organized crime of some sort? They’re certainly coded as such. In Astoria, Oregon, famously a hotbed of Mafia activity. And then there’s the scene when Mikey reverently confers upon One-Eyed Willie the title of “the first Goonie.” But why? How is that earned in any way? The Goonies are a bunch of doofuses who repeatedly luck their way out of tough situations. One-Eyed Willie was a rich sociopath who, even in death, delighted in using Rube-Golbergian contraptions to kill people who wanted to share in his fortune. He created marvels of engineering to murder. Where the Goonies were so uninterested in money they couldn’t bring themselves to steal wishing-well money (aside for their wish and they’re taking it back), One-Eyed Willie loved his money so much that the thought of someone using it to save their home from being bulldozed made him want to kill them hundreds of years after his death.

He wasn’t the original Goonie, he was the original country-club-guy who wants to bulldoze the Goonies’ houses. If he was the original Goonie, then the Goonies really suck and they’re going to grow up to be serial killers.

In conclusion, this is one of my favorite movies of all time. Five stars.

Thanks so much to Jeff for the brilliant posts and to Andersen Press for inviting me to join this blog tour. You can follow the rest of the tour using the banner below.