What I’m reading this week: “Zardoz,” by John Boorman. 👽📚 A gigantic stone head levitates over a futuristic grass-covered landscape, spewing guns from its cavernous mouth to its bloodthirsty followers below. Sean Connery (a.k.a. the original James Bond) is among them as Zed the Exterminator. He’s bare-chested in a red loincloth, and sports a black ponytail and 1970s handlebar moustache. A dazzling menage of bizarre scenes unfolds from there, complete with freaky caves, macrame-clad “Eternals,” psychic probes, and trippy kaleidoscopic interludes. Through it all, the gargantuan stone head floats, god-like, in and out of the action to say and do terrible things.
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I picked up a pristine original pulp copy of this sci-fi oddity at Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree. I was drawn to it like a Brutal to a cache of corn and fleeces. Upon reading it, I was delighted to find that Zardoz the novel is as wonderfully weird and non-sequitur as the film is. The novel was written by the screenwriter and based on the cult classic film.
Zardoz the film is a corpulent tour de force that encapsulates everything wrong with 1970s-era filmmaking, and somehow everything that is awesome about it at the same time. The prose in Zardoz the book is just as, ahem, imaginative as the film. A seminal work from a truly strange place and time in pop culture.
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