When I was in my early 20’s, one of my favorite things to watch late on a Saturday night was a local horror show on public access TV. The hosts would dress up as various horror characters and introduce B-movies, cutting in between commercial breaks to talk horror and put on corny skits. It was a horror fan’s dream, and I miss that old-fashioned platform of collective horror movie viewing.
Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy by Steven Paul Leiva taps into the nostalgia of camp horror with its radio-show style audiobook. Below is my review of Creature Feature, now available from Magpie Press.
Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy plot summary
In the early 60’s, actress Kathy Anderson makes her living playing Vivacia, the vampire host of a local Chicago horror show. Looking to spruce up her career, Kathy decides to move to New York. On the way, she stops by her hometown of Placidville to visit her parents and catch up with her old friends. But when she gets there, she finds that everyone, including her parents, are acting strange, eating bugs, walking around in a trance, and idolizing her as Vivacia.
The town geek, Gerald, warns Kathy that the town is being taken over by creatures from another dimension, but Kathy doesn’t believe it until she sees it for herself. By then, the two work together to save their town before it’s too late.
The performances
Having read this as an audiobook, I got to have the story performed for me. This story is the perfect format for a live performance. Performed by Castle alums Seamus Dever as the narrator and Juliana Dever as Kathy, the two actors really bring Leiva’s tongue-in-cheek narration and dialogue to life.
There’s a sarcastic yet beloved take on the genre, and the audiobook adds in music and special effects without overpowering the story. Some of it works, such as the various sound effects mid-action, and some of it doesn’t, such as a tunnel-like echoing when characters’ inner-monologue is performed. But it keeps the story fun and the reader engaged through its four hour run time.
Balancing campy humor and horror
Horror and comedy have always gone hand in hand. Camp horror can walk a fine line between fun and annoying. Creature Feature tends to stay on the fun side of the line. Being set in the 60’s, it helps to make some of the dialogue and jokes permissible. And the humor stays relatively dry so there is less winking and nudging at the audience. Leiva seems to know his audience and doesn’t have to keep checking in to make sure they’re getting the jokes.
However, there are also some real horrific stakes at play. The creatures are a real threat, and the heroes are at a legitimate risk. The 60’s-era high tech methods used to battle them feel like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, but that helps to play into the nostalgic feeling of the book itself.
The political nods were a little tiresome, possibly due to modern exhaustion with politics in general. But it works for the time period in which the story is set.
The characters
Kathy is less the story’s hero and more just a character caught in the middle of a supernatural takeover. She’s conceited and dismissive of her claim to fame, feeling like her turn as Vivacia has stalled her career, despite its success. So, she’s too much in her own way to really take charge. I imagine it’s how Maila Nurmi’s Vampira would respond to a supernatural threat.
Gerald is the typical underdog hero whose hours fiddling with his inventions and experiments in his basement get the town of Placidville into their mess, but it also gets them out. Gerald is the true hero of the story, and it may have even served the story better if he was our protagonist. But once the two begin to work together, they make a pretty solid team.
My recommendation
I recommend Creature Feature to anyone who loves classic horror, full of monsters and otherworldly weapons with ultimately a light-heartedness that keeps the intensity at bay without lowering the stakes. I definitely recommend the audiobook version which is well-produced and entertaining and really brings out the story’s playfulness and late night horror TV and radio traditions.
Buy it!
Estimated Length: 4.4 hours
Publisher: Magpie Press; (Spring 2021)
Publication Date: April 13, 2021
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Language: English
Available on
Buy a copy of Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
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My dad used to watch creature feature. This would be such a great gift!