The book is always better than the movie. True statement. That doesn’t mean the movie is bad but that’s just the way it is. Weird U. S. the TV show is better than the book. The problem? The book is mostly about ghosts and supernatural places told through letters from fans of the author’s. Most, hell all, of these letters are retellings of stories, embellished and lame. It’s like the writers of the letters are trying to outdo each other and you know what they succeed. Succeed in outdoing the lameness of the previous letter. The show features actual visits to the places so you get a sense of what it is really like instead of hearing about it second hand. The part of the book that dealt with odd locations was more to my liking.
Now as most of the stories are only a page or two this is really a coffee table book. Pick it up, flip through until something catches your eye, read, set down. So I can’t do that. I pick up a book and have to read it from the beginning to the end. I read Weird U. S. over the course of a month or so. There were a few places in Houston mentioned in the book. I plan on going to visit the Orange Show someday, which I learned about through the book, one man’s homage to the orange built from scrap metal. Exciting no? Well at least it’s only a buck or so to get in.
The one story that really stood out for me was about the Albino village. When I first read it I thought how stupid. If the rest of the book is filled with drivel like this I won’t be able to finish it. I told my wife about the bit and she pointed out how ridiculous the story was. It lightened up my thinking of the book. So here it is.
You drive down a dead end road that leads into a group of houses. All inhabited by angry albinos. How do you see these angry albinos? Well you wait to drive down the road until after midnight, and then when you reach the houses you honk your horn over and over until they come out of their homes mad and yelling at you. And why shouldn’t these people be upset. I’d be pissed if cars were always driving down my street honking the horn waking me up in the middle off the night. I’m pretty pasty to begin with but at night with the headlights of a car shinning on me; yeah I’d look albino to.
I began to think that most of the places in this book really couldn’t be verified. Places like the albino town and the midget town were listed as “to protect these locations we can’t tell you exactly where they are…” Yeah I’ll take the orange show any day.
Just think, if this was the highlight of the book for me, what’s the rest like? Yeah don’t waste your time finding out.
If you really must see the TV Show
. Well I can’t stop you. Looks like there are three sets out so far. Or you can see how the author's got their start, in New Jersey.
