Horror icon Kelli Maroney narrates award-winning horror book

After decades as a certified scream queen and appearances in nearly four dozen horror films, Kelli Maroney has added a unique new role to her resume: that of audiobook narrator.

Now available on Encyclopocalypse, Kelli Maroney lends her voice to the 2022 Rondo Award nominee Landis: The story of a real man at 42^and Streetthe first biography of Sleazoid Express Founder and horror historian Bill Landis. Written by novelist and journalist Preston Fassel (Our Lady of the Inferno; FANGORIA), the book traces the career of Landis, whose groundbreaking magazine covered the films shown in Times Square’s grindhouses in the 1980s and the people who attended them. For many, Sleazoid was the only source of information about exploitation and underground cinema, and remains an enduring document of the many subcultures and disenfranchised groups that gravitated to the grindhouses, including LGBT people, drag artists, and sex workers.

Landis regained notoriety in 2002 with the publication of Sleazoid Express: A confusing tour of the Grindhouse Cinema in Times Square, a book about the films and theaters of Times Square, which he wrote together with his wife and collaborator Michelle Clifford. This book led to Landis and Clifford writing the Sleazoid Express Magazine and hosted Grindhouse film screenings for several years in the early 2000s. Landis died in Chicago in 2008 of a drug-induced heart attack.

Fassel says:

“Kelli has been a friend of mine for over a decade, and when I was approached by Encyclopocalypse to produce an audiobook of Landisshe was the first person that came to mind. This was a particularly important project for me. Reading Bill’s work literally got me to where I am today, and I wouldn’t be where I am without him. Kelli really understood that importance and brought the right passion to her performance to convey the meaning of the book to me.”

Kelli Maroney added:

“I have always loved and admired Preston’s work, so I was thrilled and honored to Landisand I still am. I know how much it meant to Preston to write this book and get it out into the world, what a perverse, senseless struggle it was to get anyone to talk to him about Landis, to get information out of anyone, and how lucky Bill Landis himself was to have someone like Preston who cared so much about telling his story. The irony that almost no one cared about him, in life or in death, and then Preston created this beautiful tribute to him, really touched me. I’m extremely proud to have been invited to be a part of these things, so I approached this book and this story with great reverence.”

Landis is the second collaboration between Encyclopocalypse, Fassel and a scream queen. In 2021, the publisher released a full-cast radio play by Fassel’s Our Lady of the Inferno starring Barbara Crampton as cannibalistic serial killer Nicolette Aster. This book received similarly rave reviews and won the Gold Medal for Horror from Independent Publishers in 2019.