80s News Today

NEW YORK CITY — The sun crawled over the Manhattan skyline like a bruised eye this morning, but for the denizens of the underworld and the literary elite alike, the light was blinding for a different reason. The New York Times Bestseller List—that holy scroll of high-brow validation—has finally been breached by the barbarians. Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy has officially debuted on the list today, February 16, 1986. It is a grim, jagged spike in the heart of the "polite" reading public. Pileggi has done it. He didn't just write a book; he performed a public autopsy on the American Dream, using the vocal cords of one Henry Hill—a man who lived his life in the wet, red gears of the Lucchese crime family. "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." It’s a line that drips with a terrible, infectious honesty. It’s the kind of truth that makes the suburban book-club set tremble in their loafers. They want to believe the Mafia is a collection of o...

One must pause, occasionally, in the relentless, illogical march of human history, to appreciate moments of truly splendid absurdity. And few moments in the mid-1980s achieved such a perfectly poised balance of brilliance, frustration, and sheer, delightful pointlessness as the saga of Kit Williams' Masquerade . And so, on January 13, 1987, the peculiar, tantalizing aroma of a mystery—already famously solved, mind you, but more on that later—wafted across the Atlantic to the unsuspecting shores of America. This was the day Schocken Books released the American special edition of Masquerade. Now, Masquerade was not a normal book. Most books are content to sit on a shelf and be read, occasionally serving as a coaster or a way to level a wobbly table. Masquerade was different. It was a book that actively encouraged you to leave your house, buy a shovel, and dig up large portions of the English countryside in search of an 18-carat golden hare. The American edition, published years after...

LONDON — January 5, 1981 . A Monday. A gray, drizzly, post-Christmas slump of a day in the Big Smoke. The sort of day where the British public—wrapped in their itchy wool cardigans and nursing the last of the festive sherry—stared into the cathode-ray tube with a desperate, hollow longing for something beyond the nightly news and the local weather report. Fortunately for them, this was the very eve when the BBC, that venerable institution of tweed-jacketed producers and tea-stained scripts, unleashed upon an unsuspecting nation something utterly improbable: the television premiere of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Picture it! In an era when color television was still a status symbol in many a semi-detached suburban home, when the airwaves were dominated by the stiff-upper-lip dramas of Brideshead Revisited (still gestating in the wings) and the endless parade of news about Thatcherite upheavals, here comes this...this thing! A sci-fi comedy, no less, adapted from a radio se...

Blacksmith, Ohio - January 1985 Can you hear it? That low-frequency hum vibrating through the drywall of every split-level ranch in the Midwest? That’s not just your new Panasonic microwave or the neighbors’ ultrasonic pest repellent—it’s the sound of the future arriving right on schedule, wrapped in a Viking Press dust jacket! It is January 1985, and while the rest of the world is busy worrying about the Super Bowl or the deep freeze on the East Coast, a man named Don DeLillo has given the erudite something else to worry about: White Noise . Look at him—DeLillo! He’s the anti-celebrity, the phantom of the suburban supermarket aisles, emerging from the "Statusphere" of high-concept fiction to show us exactly what we’ve become. And what are we? We are Jack Gladney, a man who has achieved the ultimate academic coup de grâce by inventing the Department of "Hitler Studies" at the College-on-the-Hill. Jack doesn’t speak a word of German—shhh, don't tell the Dean!—but...

It's epic! It's divisive! It's controversial! And it's also the definitive and superior film adaptation of the novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Yes, I'm talking about David Lynch's Dune , which opened in theaters on December 14, 1984. The later reboots simply don't hold a glowglobe to Lynch's lavish treatment of one of the greatest works in Western literature. You see, Dune is the rare genre novel that achieves escape velocity from the mere science fiction orbit to legitimate comparison with Great Expectations or The Great Gatsby . A true desert island book, it can be reread endlessly. And not simply because Herbert creates a universe the reader is sucked into, but because his writing is so damn good. I will occasionally pick up my copy - a mass market paperback released with the 1984 flick - and, some time later, regain consciousness to realize I'm already 100 pages into the story once again. It's that good. So, theoretically, I should be one of t...

Let's talk about the creeping dread that arrived on computer screens back in 1985. Not a paperback, not a VHS tape, but something new, something...digital. It was October, and the wind was starting to hum those mournful tunes it likes to play before winter truly sets in. A perfect time, you might say, for a little taste of the infernal. And infernal it was. Because that month, in '85, something slouched onto the IBM PC. Something that wasn't just based on a story; it was a story you could walk through. Or, more accurately, limp through, heart pounding, trying to figure out what hellspawn awaited you in the next room. I'm talking about The Mist. Now, you know The Mist. Or, you should. It was a novella penned by the uber-prolific Stephen King in 1976, but only later published in two of his story collections during the 1980s, Dark Forces, and Skeleton Crew. King evolved The Mist from a simple premise: What if a monster, a really scary one, was loosed on the world while you...

It was a chilly, unremarkable Friday in a thousand places, the kind of autumn day where the sun felt like a pale lie pasted against a high, cold sky. October 20th, 1989. The smell of damp leaves and dying grass was everywhere. And in bookstores across the country, stacked neatly between the celebrity memoirs and the historical romances, a weighty new novel landed with a heavy, disturbing thud: Stephen King's The Dark Half . It was more than just a book release; it was the arrival of a new kind of trouble, dressed up in a dust jacket. The story was familiar, because the best horrors always are. It dealt with a man, Thad Beaumont , a decent, literary writer who had long used a pseudonym—a vulgar, successful bastard named George Stark —to publish his violent, money-making paperbacks. Thad had tried to be done with the alter ego, even giving him a symbolic burial in a magazine exposé. He’d thought the whole sorry business was finished. But things don't stay buried, not in the world...

You're hunkered down in your basement den, the one with the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a screaming face, if you squint just right. The CRT monitor flickers like a candle in a windstorm, casting ghostlight on your hands as you boot up the old IBM PC. The internal 2" speaker beeps, and the disk drive grinds. It's not the future yet—not quite—but Neuromancer makes you believe it is. Based on William Gibson's novel, that razor-edged prophecy from 1984, the game was Interplay's mad stab at turning words into wire. The story hooks you like a fish on a barbed line. You're Case, a washed-up console cowboy, your nervous system's fried from a bad score—betrayal by the only crew you ever trusted. Molly Millions lurks in the shadows, her mirrorshades hiding eyes that could cut glass, and together you're chasing the ghost of an AI named Wintermute.  It's Chiba City first, that neon-drenched sprawl where the street finds its own uses for things. ...

The air's got that crisp bite to it now, doesn't it? The leaves are turning, a hint of woodsmoke is on the breeze, and the days are getting shorter, pulling the shadows longer behind them. It's the kind of season that feels right for a certain kind of story. The kind that makes you pull your collar a little tighter, maybe glance over your shoulder when you're walking home alone. The kind that makes you wonder what really goes bump in the night. And speaking of bumps, creaks, and things that go howl, today's the day. October 11. Just the kind of day that lulls you into forgetting the darkness that comes with October. And oh, boy, did the darkness come to Tarker's Mills, Maine. The story of what stalked Tarker's Mills took celluloid form this day in 1985, with the release of the movie Silver Bullet , based on the 1983 Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf . In Tarker's Mills, a series of brutal murders begins to tear the community apart. At first, the...

The date is October 8, 1985, and the sound of the future is the clickety-clack of the Commodore 64 keyboard, a sound like a million little typewriters in a million little suburban bedrooms across the land! But this wasn't typing—oh, no, not like Miss Henderson's secretarial pool at corporate HQ! No, this was  The Fourth Protocol ! Based on the bestselling, Cold-War-chill-down-your-spine Frederick Forsyth novel of the same name! The gamers, they knew the name. The name Frederick Forsyth! The author of The Day of the Jackal.  The man who wrote thrillers so REAL they practically had blood smeared between the pages! And now, now...they could play one.  The young computer operator, a bowl of Sugar Corn Pops growing soggy on the desk beside him, was no longer just a kid. He was a SPY! A secret agent! He was JOHN PRESTON! A British intelligence officer! He was investigating a plot so diabolical, so sinister , so utterly Cold War, that his very blood ran cold! He would have to i...

A good book serves as a vacation, a portal to another world. But what do you do when you are already on vacation and the weather turns? The sky over Ocean City, Maryland, in August 1982, is a bruised purple, the color of a bad cut. You can feel the storm coming, a low thrumming in your bones, a promise of broken skies and a good old-fashioned electrical show. The air smells of salt and fried clams, and the gulls are screaming like they know something I don’t. I’m holed up at the Sea Scape Motel, room 204, with its peeling wallpaper and view of the angry Atlantic, which suits me fine. I'm staring down a long, wet afternoon with nothing but the television’s blurry offerings for company. Not good. Not good at all.  So, I pull on my sneakers, the ones with the perpetually untied laces, and head out into that heavy, humid air. The Phillips Square shopping center isn’t far, and I figure Welsh Drugs might have reading materials to keep the brain busy. I zip up my windbreaker and...