Book review - "Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror" by Mel Gordon

Excellent overview of the famous theatre genre, written with a lively style with plenty of pictures, reviews, paragraph descriptions of heaps of plays plus two complete plays. Gordon really gets under the skin of Grand Guignol - reading it I couldn't help think this would have made a terrific Lugosi-Karloff film and wonder why it wasn't done. Maybe legal reasons. The characters are all there: the playwright Andre de Lorde, whose father made him spend the night in a room with a dead body so he wouldn't fear death, the female star Maxa who was raped on stage 10,000 times and killed 15,000 (or some such), mysterious managers, Ho Chi Minh visiting while a pastry cook, Goering and Patton visiting during the war. Great fun.