Selway attempts to do a lot in just two-hundred pages. At its most basic, The Godfathers of Horror Films is a triple-duty biography of Karloff, Cushing, and Lee. While the three stars have several significant things in common—they're all British, they all became stars by making Frankenstein movies after many years of toiling away as bit players, they all had major and prolific careers as horror stars thereafter, they were all the faces of studios intrinsically associated with horror, they all fought in world wars—their careers overlapped infrequently enough to make weaving their stories together a challenge.
Okay, that's not the case with Cushing and Lee, whose careers both spanned the same era, who were both Hammer's top stars, who were good buddies, and who, as I've already indicated, have been profiled together before. Karloff doesn't fit into the discussion as naturally because, although he did work with Lee, he did his most iconic work decades before Cushing and Lee's heyday and because he did that work in America for Universal while Cushing and Lee solidified their stardom in England with Hammer.
Selway's method for dealing with the challenges of her premise is telling her story/stories thematically instead of chronologically. Chapter titles define these themes in the simplest of terms: Youth, Acting, Hollywood, Television, Love (in which she explains their personal romantic relationships), War (in which she explains their experiences during the world wars), Downtime (the most charming chapter, which describes the eccentric ways the trio enjoyed spending their spare hours), etc. But this makes the narrative feel fractured and jumpy.
However, because the three subjects of The Godfathers of Horror Films are so very iconic, and should be so familiar to anyone who would read this book, Godfathers never plummets into confusion. The stars remain well defined throughout: Karloff, beloved but elusive; Cushing, sweet-natured but sad; Lee, a bit chilly and self-regarding. Selway enlivens and personalizes the storytelling with personality-revealing snarky asides, yet she still clearly admires her three subjects. The Godfathers of Horror Films is a bit of a mess when you're in it, but by the end you'll likely feel you have a pretty good sense of who Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee were.
