Into the Fluke-verse

In which I read my first sexy fairy tale

I unironically love the 1995 film FLUKE. I first saw the film promoted in an issue of DISNEY ADVENTURES, a monthly digest magazine I obsessed over as a kid that combined comic strips, fun kid-focused features, and a sense of hipness and cool that beckoned me into my teenage years. It was the place where Mickey Mouse met BEVERLY HILLS 90210. Literally.

This is important to note because when something was promoted in DISNEY ADVENTURES, it usually meant that it was A) deemed cool and B) made for teens that kids could also enjoy. When I saw a quick paragraph blurbing FLUKE, it presented it as an upcoming fantasy film but didn’t reveal much more about the plot. There was a photo of a cute dog wearing shoes, though. And, at the ripe ol’ age of ten, there wasn’t much more I needed to know.

I didn’t see FLUKE in theaters, so I must have rented the film from Blockbuster when it hit home video. I don’t remember the exact details of the first time I watched the film, but I do remember the emotional trauma that followed me like a daze for weeks afterwards. The film stars Matthew Modine as a workaholic father and husband who, after dying in a car accident, is reincarnated as a puppy. The puppy is named Fluke by a homeless woman who, after giving the dog some food and a collar, promptly dies, and audiences are treated to the sight of her spirit fluttering away from her still warm corpse as Fluke, the puppy, noses her and whines.

This is all within the first ten minutes of the movie.

From there, the bleakness endures. We watch as Fluke grows into an adult dog and begins to slowly remember his life as a human. Dreams of his son and wife dance through his head as Fluke suffers doggy indignation after indignation. Fired from being a junkyard dog because his weirdly human-like behavior creeps out the owner, and chased by Ron Perlman, who kidnaps animals so they can be experimented on by a cosmetic company, Fluke’s only happiness in life is his friend Rumbo, a street-smart dog voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, who is also a reincarnated human.

Yes, the dogs talk.

FLUKE, as a movie, does a bizarre job of straddling the line between family-friendly AIR BUD clone and bleak Michael Haneke film about the futility of relationships in the face of death. Directed by Italian filmmaker Carlo Carlei in his English-language debut, you can absolutely tell that FLUKE was the victim of death by studio notes. The film is tonally all over the place, both childishly charming and unrelentingly depressing. You may have seen a talking-animal movie before, but I guarantee you’ve never seen one where a dog so beautifully laments the life he can never life again. Not even OH HEAVENLY DOG was able to pull off this emotional tightwalk. FLUKE’s ending is so bittersweet, so beautifully sad, that - when I’m feeling depressed - I will sometimes wallow in my misery by watching this FLUKE fancam that somebody posted on Youtube.

Cut to the summer of 1996. I’m eleven years old and wandering the stacks at my local library (back when libraries used to have a robust paperback collection), and I find a copy of what I assume was a novelization of FLUKE. Boy, howdy was I wrong! FLUKE, it turns out, was based on a novel by James Herbert.

James Herbert was one of the top horror writers in England. Before he passed away in 2013, he wrote almost two dozen books - including the inspirations for the films DEADLY EYES, HAUNTED, and THE SHRINE. I was ten, though, and did not recognize James Herbert as a master of horror. To be honest, the cover for FLUKE should have tipped me off, though.

I took the book home, and it was like opening up a wound and then pouring salt in it. Not only was James Herbert’s FLUKE just as sad as the film, but it lacked any of the soft-edge comedy Carlei had almost certainly been forced to insert into the movie. Moreover, it was so much darker. There is a scene in the book where Fluke, hungry, decides to eat a rat. It isn’t until he’s chomping down on the rat’s jugular that he realizes that the rat, like him, is also a reincarnated human as it screams for its lost life. Needless to say, I was fucked by FLUKE.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I have revisited FLUKE - both the film and the novel - many, many times over the last thirty years. Herbert’s story speaks to me in the same way that Ken Grimwood’s REPLAY does. They are stories about embracing life despite the spectre of death hanging over you, of not letting your regrets rob you of any second chance of happiness. But they are also just really, really sad stories of sad men doing sad shit. And I eat that kind of crap up!

Despite my love for FLUKE, I had never read any of James Herbert's other books. That changed this month with the novel ONCE…

To describe ONCE… would not do it justice. The plot is kind of stupid. There’s a dude, he has a stroke, he moves back to his childhood home, and discovers fairies are real and that he comes from a mysterious lineage and that an evil witch is trying to kill him. It’s the details where ONCE… really comes to life. You see, the witch is trying to kill our hero, Thom, so she can build a theme park on the sprawling estate he grew up on. And fairies don’t just exist, they are the hidden protectors of the world, and Björk is actually a fairy who decided to become a human, and, oh yeah, they get their magic by having sex. A lot.

Did I forget to mention that ONCE… is pornography? And I don’t mean that in the way a southern preacher will point at a copy of A CATCHER IN THE RYE and call it “poarn-aw-graw-fee!” ONCE… is blissfully self-aware smut. Herbert spends at least a quarter of the nearly 400-page book describing fairies masturbating or, in a particularly horrible scene, Thom waking up to discover that his penis is being slobbered over by a goblin-like succubus. Page after page of purple prose exists only so that Herbert can describe fairies tweaking their erect nipples or the witch using herbs and roots to rape a young female physical therapist, so she can, um, that motivation is never quite made clear. It’s a really long chapter, though.

I’ve read a few books with sex scenes, but I had never read a book that is purposely designed to titillate. It was a weird experience. Despite the fact that FLUKE was not written for kids, Herbert remains one of my favorite childhood authors, and to watch him write such shockingly explicit descriptions of sexual acts made me feel uncomfortable and prudish in a way I’m not used to.

And, here’s the kicker, ONCE… exists in the FLUKE expanded universe! A character from FLUKE makes a friggin cameo in the book! In between scenes of fairies going down on each other! You should have heard me cry out in surprise when I got to that section of the book. Like the woman who named Fluke, my own soul momentarily left my body.

I’m not sure if I’ll revisit ONCE… as much as I do FLUKE. In fact, I already left my copy at a free little library today. I paused for a moment when I realized every other book in the library was meant for kids. But if FLUKE taught me anything, it's that one person’s adult thriller is another child’s emotional awakening.

Enjoy ONCE… kids. I hope it does for you what FLUKE did for me.