Richard Matheson was a well known writer who published many novels and short stories, penned teleplays for The Twilight Zone, and wrote the novel Psycho—which later became Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller—but his 1962 supernatural novel A Stir of Echoes is a bit obscure. It's probably better known as a 1999 movie starring the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon. The story here deals with a man whose talent as a medium is accidentally unleashed when he's hypnotized at a party. The book isn't elegantly written. A typical sentence: He walked weavingly toward the door. But you don't have to be a master stylist to tell a good story and that's what Matheson did over the course of his long career, churning out great concept after great concept, here unspooling the tale of a man who can't control his unbidden psychic talent. With the power to see the future, the protagonist gains unwanted knowledge of kidnapping, adultery, a shooting, and other violent and nightmarish occurrences. It defies belief that all this happens in a week or two on a formerly quiet suburban street, but A Stir of Echoes is an entertaining story with a nice twist ending. We haven't seen the movie but we're curious now.

You know by now that yesterday in the U.S., crooked fund manager Bernie Madoff was handcuffed and led away to jail after pleading guilty to all counts against him. By declining to take the normal route of a plea deal with prosecutors, he sidestepped the requirement to divulge information about his accomplices and the disposition of the stolen money. Financial observers agree that Madoff could not have run his Ponzi scheme without help, and they certainly agree that the money didn’t just disappear.

The New York cover pictured here labels elderly Madoff a monster, as if he’s some atrocity never before seen by human eyes. While he may be the biggest swindler of all time, and he certainly isn't Kevin Bacon's favorite person, he’s not new. No, he’s just the latest in a long line of elegant grifters, though a particularly efficient one. What makes Madoff truly pulp is that he took the hit for his financial clan like a good mafia footsoldier, and though he’ll never get out of jail, neither will he—let’s face it—do time in Attica’s supermax wing with the child rapers and guys who ate their grandmothers’ kidneys. It’s easy to imagine Madoff is smiling inside just a little. Does that sound strange, and perhaps cynical? Yeah, it does until you think about it.

Consider for a moment how, in this post-millennial reality, we’ve become so jaded regarding the term “billions”. Not too many years ago you rarely heard that word uttered aloud by anyone other than an astronomer. So to put this Madoff thing in perspective, let’s just pretend the word doesn’t exist. Thus restrained, we now have to refer to him as a guy who stole—not one million, not fifty million—but 999 million dollars 60 times, and walked into jail without divulging where any of it went. Still think he isn’t smiling just a little? 

Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick reportedly are the latest Tinseltowners taken in by Ponzi-schemer extraordinaire Bernie Madoff. We haven’t touched on the Madoff story here at Pulp Intl. because you can get the info from virtually any paper or website in the world. But when we heard the scandal had snared Kevin Bacon, we went, “Oh, hell no.”

No reports yet how much money the couple lost, but they can take solace from the fact that even luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg were fooled by Madoff. In the meantime, we have a feeling financial need might bring that rumored Footloose sequel a little closer to fruition.

Now, on another note, Pulp Intl. would like to present a challenge: Read up on the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme and please inform us how it’s different from the U.S. Federal Reserve. Because try as we might, the only distinction we can see is that when the Fed doesn’t have enough money, it prints more. We’re just saying, that’s all.