10.05.2008

Sultry Sunday #4 - The weekly "Pop Sensation" crossover

Another Sunday, another installment of "Pop Sensation"

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Paperback 147: Beacon Books 143
(PBO, 1957)


Title:
Shock Treatment
Author: Wright Williams
Cover artist: Peeping Tom



Best things about this cover:

  • I love how she looks - not terrified, but exasperated: "You again!?"
  • Wait - I thought she was in her bathroom and the peeping tom was opening the window shade, but it seems just as likely she's in a hospital with mobile curtain dividers, in which case a. whose arm is that?, b. what's it yanking on?, and c. what is that red cloth? What am I looking at!?
  • "AT LAST..." - HA ha. I was just asking myself, "Why is there no book that explores the borderland between love and perversity?" Now, at last, that void is filled.

Best things about this back cover:

  • "Sure, big Eric was crazy. Crazy about women! And who can blame him? Am I right, guys!? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about ... [amused chuckles from drunk comedy club crowd] ... ah, chicks."
  • Whimsical drawings of cruel medical experimentation. "It'll cure your pervertedness, but ... you're gonna experience some rubber-arm, I'm not gonna lie."
  • Maybe those arms are supposed to represent the gyrations of patients at the "hospital dance" (!?)
  • "Not since Snake Pit ..." - I can't stop laughing long enough to comment on that line
  • "Frankly!"
  • "Passion-wracked!"
Page 123~

Instead of thinking of Katrine as a lovely, attractive girl who had bravely come out of a harrowing experience, I was drawing mental pictures of her in bed with a man married to someone else. It was rotten of me, and I almost welcomed the self-loathing that I began to feel.


Well, we've all been there, right?

~RP

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

For a moment, I was wondering why that book is packed with wrassion.

Maren said...

I'm actually reading this while taking a break from watching...The Snake Pit! (That was a mid-century slang term for a women's mental hospital, btw.)

Anonymous said...

I read it as "Snake Pii".

Bybee said...

She does have an exasperated look. I love how she took time to carefully apply that hideous lipstick, but opted out in the wardrobe department.

Lindsey said...

Brilliant...I want to read it.

Christopher Stribley said...

Ok, so that front cover composition is hard to read. We're looking through a window that the man is about to close the blinds on. The red thing draped over the screen is the woman's appropriately coloured dress.

Looks to be a fantastic read!