Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 247: Killian H. Gore's Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book (2018)

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As Conrad Brooks taught us all in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), "It's tough to find something when you don't know what you're looking for." Which is true. But sometimes, it's also tough to find something when you know exactly what you're looking for. I'll give you an example.

I found this by accident.

If you've ever read one of Shakespeare's plays, you know that his scripts are not formatted like those for modern day stage plays. For one thing, his stage directions are brief, sparse, and very vague. For another thing, his characters often speak in iambic pentameter, so their speeches are formatted like poems. 

I was under the impression—false, it now seems—that there was a version of the Plan 9 script formatted to look like a Shakespearean play. I had a strong memory of such a book existing, and I thought it might make interesting fodder for the blog. It's October, and I wanted to do something suitable for "spooky season." So I searched for it. And searched. And searched. I eventually came to the conclusion that no such book was ever written. I can't find anything remotely like it.

But you know what I did find? Killian H. Gore's self-published Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book (2018). The title tells you exactly what to expect: a collection of trivia questions about Ed Wood's best-known movie. But who is this Killian H. Gore and what caused him to compile such a volume? And could this humble little book actually teach me a thing or two about a movie I've seen dozens of times? I was able to snag a copy from Amazon for only about seven bucks, so I took the risk.

Like many of the hyper-specialized books about Ed Wood that I've read for this blog in recent years, the Plan 9 from Outer Space Quiz Book was print-on-demand, so it arrived extremely quickly. Personally, I love this new publishing model. It allows us to have physical copies of works that might have limited or niche appeal. But Gore's book is also available in a Kindle edition for just 99 cents, should that be a more attractive option to you.

The book runs just over a hundred pages and contains four quizzes in total. The first is a general quiz about Plan 9 consisting of 150 questions. The second is an "out of this world difficult" quiz about Plan 9 with ten additional questions. This is followed by a 25-question quiz about alien invasion movies and a 25-question quiz about zombie movies. Naturally, answer keys are provided for all four quizzes. Gore rounds out the book with an original short sci-fi story called "The Truth Will Astonish Us," which I will discuss later in this review. All in all, pretty decent value for money.

The Plan 9 quizzes are exactly what I expected. They reminded me of the kind of nerdy, nitpicking questionnaires I used to compile as a fanfic author in the 1990s, back when I haunted Usenet groups about cult movies. I should have probably aced the 150-question Plan 9 quiz in this book, but believe it or not, I only got about 85% of the questions correct. I've never been exceptionally good at memorizing trivia and reciting it on demand. To this day, when I'm writing about Ed Wood's movies, I find myself consulting the IMDb or Wikipedia to recall specific character names or lines of dialogue. 

Gore's book also contains numerous questions about the latter-day parodies and tributes inspired by Plan 9. While I've covered this material to some extent in this series, I am far from an expert. I watched the 2015 remake of Plan 9 exactly once, for instance, and then promptly forgot all about it. But at least I was semi-familiar with it. Some of the other offshoots mentioned in this book were totally off my radar. If I got the questions right, it was through sheer luck.

Meanwhile, I out-and-out bombed the quiz about alien invasion movies, and I did only modestly better on the one about zombie movies. I probably should have aced that last one, too. If you've followed this blog since its beginning in 2009, you may remember that it started as an offshoot of a now-defunct zombie movie podcast called Mail Order Zombie. For the first few years, Dead 2 Rights was almost exclusively about zombies and zombie movies. Only when Mail Order Zombie ended in 2013 did I branch out into other subjects. (It's not a coincidence that Ed Wood Wednesdays started that year.)

The author and one of his books.

I mentioned earlier that the book includes a short story by the author called "The Truth Will Astonish Us." It's not specifically related to the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space, but it fits the Ed Wood aesthetic quite nicely. Eddie might have even written something like this himself, though his version would have been more eccentric and less coherent. It's set in a quaint little English village that experiences a rapture-like event when some UFOs appear in the sky one night. The eerie tone of the story is reminiscent of the early passages of Village of the Damned (1960), so I wonder if the author was influenced by that film.

You may have guessed by now that the name "Killian H. Gore" is a little too perfect for a project like this. Not only does it include the words "kill" and "gore," it's also very close to Kurt Vonnegut's famous alter ego, Kilgore Trout. And, yeah, it's a pseudonym. As far as I can tell, the true creator of this quiz book is one Philip Graham Hamer, an American-born horror author currently living in England. It seems that Hamer writes exclusively under his colorful pen name and has even given the nonexistent Killian H. Gore a backstory. (He is said to be "a distant relative of the serial killer Ellen Mort.")

I'd never heard of the hyper-prolific Mr. Gore until stumbling upon this Plan 9 book, but the author is practically a cottage industry unto himself. He's released numerous unauthorized quiz books based on other films, including The Shining (1980), Jaws (1975), Psycho (1960), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Lost Boys (1987), and many more. His other books include What's Your Favorite Scary Movie? (2015) and UFO of the Dead: A Novella (2023). He seems to divide his time between pop culture puzzle and trivia books and various works of genre fiction. Gore also maintains a robust presence on multiple social media platforms.

Just learning about this guy cheered me up a bit. It's nice to think that Philip Graham Hamer, obviously a lifelong devotee of sci-fi and horror, is having a grand old time writing these books and selling them on Amazon. The books themselves are modest in their ambitions, but they are cheap and readily available and make for neat little souvenirs. 

Frankly, I'd be interested in knowing whether this enterprise brings the author any income or whether he just does it as a hobby. I can imagine myself publishing lots of these little "unauthorized" guidebooks about various movies I love and then marketing them in this exact same way. I'm currently the co-author of one book that retails for forty bucks, but I think it would be more fun to be the author of ten books that cost four bucks apiece.