This Book Has Worms In It!: Pin By Andrew Neiderman

Exactly 30 days ago, I took on the leisure task of beginning a paperback novel.

My interest in the literary field of fiction is not a large one, but I give it all the time I can manage when it piques my interest. I would read for hours, completely ignoring my responsibilities, body, and anyone who wasn’t as entertaining as the chemically treated paper with the colorful illustrations on the front. I treated the act of reading as an investment of attention; no one else had their sights on the type of wealth I was after, and I wanted that part of my life to be plentiful.

Being the odd black swan that I was, I had a love of reading fiction that aided in the escapism that only death would have provided me within my flaccid youth and adult years. I went from novels printed in series to binging particular authors that interested me with their style of writing that wasn’t too psychoanalytical but enough to know that literature is a conduit for the contiguity of life imagined.

This novel is a drop of water in the ocean of collective madness that was the 1970s and 80s, where the time of expressing the strangest narratives without little explanation other than it being “fiction.”

Pin is the first novel I’ve read mentioned in the book Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix. One of the best novelists of our time, amassed a collection of research to bring attention to the books you purposely pass over in thrift shops. He attained a list and physical copies of stories to shock, entertain, and invoke unawoken emotions of life’s traumas.

I first explored 1981’s Pin by Andrew Neiderman in the film version adapted seven years after the novel’s debut. I saw this movie before reading the book, and it was because the film was fucking crazy that I had to read this book. I could not believe that any of it was visually woven from the book. The performances were spectacular and were honest visual representations of the characters and their motives. A large part of the film was creative filler to display the weight of the narrative the book conveyed. To state that the movie was better than the book or that the book was better than the movie would be misleading. They don’t go hand in hand, but one amplifies the other.

The horrors of adolescence, the coldness of the medical profession, developmental neglect, and my interest in biology is what drew me to this book. There is nothing to note about this book that is funny in a way; the crutches the human mind uses to follow paths that resemble survival is a stark reminder that some people hold on to instability like an anatomically correct doctor’s office prop that they plot murders with.

The moral I received from this novel is that if you decide to have a child or children, don’t nurture odd behaviors. It will end up burning you in the end.

Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix
Pin by Andrew Niederman
Pin (1988) Film can be found on YouTube
For your consideration