Brian Lindenmuth reviews: Crimson Orgy by Austin Williams
South Florida, 1965. The birthplace of underground cinema.
Struggling to cope with a reluctant starlet, a booze-ravaged leading man, a backwoods cop bent on revenge, a mutinous crew, a devastating hurricane, and his own inner demons, grindhouse director Sheldon Meyer is cultivating an obsession. He has just one hellish week to shoot Crimson Orgy., seventy-six minutes of mayhem destined to become the world's most notorious cult movie...and maybe the first true "snuff film" ever made.
The prologue feeds us the provocative premise that a crew member died violently on the final day of shooting and in the years that followed the rumors that the death was not only intentionally staged for the camera, but also that it made it to the final edit grew the film to legend status. It's a deceptively simple premise that keeps us off balance and asking questions from the start. Since they are unanswered as we start the book there is a sense of questioning everything that keeps our guard up.
Crimson Orgy is framed with non-existent primary source material that ground the story firmly, not only in its time frame but in the events portrayed. This era is perfectly presented and Williams weaves historical fact and location with fiction and puts us right there on the front lines.
The characters start out as two dimensional but then through rich interactions they begin to further flesh out and become much more fully realized. As more and more of their personalities are peeled back, and the other facets revealed, everyone becomes a suspect to the reader.
Perhaps the books greatest strength is that it succeeds in making the reader feel like a frog in a pot. Williams gradually ramps up the pace, tension and suspense as the inevitable conclusion draws ever closer until it becomes almost unbearable. There is an atmosphere of unavoidable ruin that permeates everything as we start to wonder who we can trust, who is responsible, and what, specifically, will happen.
Crimson Orgy is an entertaining novel that deftly straddles the line between horror and crime and becomes not so much a who-dun-it but instead a whose-gonna-do-it.