The hell of getting these right is that the effect of the film grain on the image is such that, frame-to-frame, the letters can look slightly different. What looks like a BUCK one frame could look more like a BOOK the next. With that in mind, let’s proceed.
There’s two books in this section I haven’t gotten yet–the top of the back pile (best guess: The Mysterious/Mysteries (something)–looks like it was put out by Anchor Books), one behind the doctor’s head (best guess: (red text on black) The Garden by Samuel/Sarah Garth, or Tom Grogan by Francis Smith). Obviously, I’ve scoured the earth for some proof of these best guesses and runner-up guesses, to little avail.
I haven’t identified anything here (the stack under the doctor’s chin), but there’s been some close calls. The white spine looks like A Naked Lunch or A Proper Launch or something, and another seems to be authored by someone with a name ending in “ERSON” or “LISON/LASON” and the title of that book seems to be two 5-7 letter words stacked atop each other. My best guess there is Harlan Ellison’s The Deadly Streets (either having lost the “The”, or else it’s somewhere too small to see), which is a series of short stories about dangerous street kids. Several of the stories have applicable-sounding names, but I especially like this trio: Kid Killer, With a Knife in Her Hand, Sob Story. At this moment in the mirrorform, our killer kid, Danny, is racing to a hiding spot, while his mom was slashing Jack with a knife in her hand, and on the other side of the movie, Wendy’s about to tell a different sort of sob story.
And this is the moment the doctor is bringing Tony back up, who made a lot of theatre-goers think Danny was some kind of demon child. So a book about dangerous children was probably a nice touch here. Also, if the above book is Naked Lunch somehow, that would seem apt since that books deals with child murder and pedophilia. Ellison and Burroughs were both fairly controversial figures, as well, if in very different ways. So I would absolutely love to throw down the gauntlet and say this is them, and these are the two works by them. I’ve simply never been able to clear up the other components to my liking.
Next literary reference: Playgirl
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