More classic weirdness

Just a quick reading update, to prove that I still exist as a blogging entity! Most recently, I’ve finished Transition by Iain Banks (or Iain M Banks, if you’re American). I’ve always felt that Banks’ mainstream work was at its best in the early days, when there was less of a division between it and his sci-fi work – ‘The Bridge’, and ‘Walking on Glass’ being favourites of mine. Since the success of the sci-fi work, that surreal element has gradually been removed from his mainstream work, and I think it’s suffered as a result. Sure, ‘The Crow Road’ and – in particular – ‘Complicity’, were excellent, but I’ve never really enjoyed any of his mainstream stuff since then. Only ‘A Song of Stone’, I think, ever matched the quality of his early work; whereas, ‘The Business’ was especially woeful (Banks struggles with non-sci-fi female characters).

‘Transition’, therefore, was an exciting prospect for me. Finally, a novel that pulls together both sides of the man’s writing together. Or at least that seems to have been the plan. In reality, it’s a bit of a mess. The core notion – a group of operatives named The Concern who travel across all the dimensions of Earth attempting to tweak reality to their own ends – is sound, and strong. But too often, Banks is tempted away from his core story and characters. At least two of the multiple narrators seem extraneous to the main story (a London stock-exchange whiz seems to be there solely so Banks can pontificate about the banking crisis, and his final fate is somewhat pat), and despite setting up an interesting and persuasive world, Banks fails to go in to any great depth. This is a shame, because there’s a lot of fun stuff here, and the story is an exciting one. But it doesn’t quite come off. Perhaps future Concern novels will build on this shaky start.

Since finishing ‘Transition’, I’ve spent a bit of time catching up with some classic weird tales. ‘The White People’, by Arthur Machen (which can be read online here, although it’s virtually unreadable on-screen due to the solid wall of text which makes up the central block of the story). It’s well deserving of its classic status, both unnerving and mysterious. To say more is to deprive it of its power, but do spend some time with it. Its influence on horror from Lovecraft to Campbell to Klein can’t be understated.

Unfortunately, the tales of Robert W Chambers which kicked off ‘The King in Yellow’ mythos aren’t of equal quality. The central conceit, of a play named (funnily enough) ‘The King in Yellow’, which drives all who read it insane, is a strong one. But Chambers doesn’t seem to have any other ideas, and it eventually fritters out after the first four stories. That said, at least one of these tales ‘The Yellow Sign’ is strong enough to claim its position as a classic weird tale. Alas, Chambers turned his attentions to romantic fiction and largely left the genre behind. The image of The King in Yellow, however, has been carried on and built upon by other authors since, although never to Cthulhu-esque levels. Shame, I think…

That’s it really. I’ve been a bit tardy with new short stories lately, mainly because I’m bashing back and forth between three attempts at novels (one of which is an expansion of Final Girls, which can be found on this blog – part two should be coming soon, although I realise I’ve promised that before…). I’m hoping to have at least one finished by the end of the year, but we’ll have to see. Need focus… maybe starting three wasn’t the best idea in the world!

Happy birthday, Herbert!

I’m a day or so off (it was actually yesterday), but here’s a little sketch celebrating good old H.G. Wells on the anniversary of his birthday. The War of the Worlds – not only the novel, but the 50s film and Jeff Wayne’s incomparable musical version – have been a huge influence on me down the years. It’s amazing that over 100 years on, it remains the definitive account of an alien invasion. Anyway, here’s a doodle of one of Wells’ Martians to celebrate.

A Martian from War of the Worlds

In addition, this also had a connection to a secret(ish) project I’m working on which ties in with The War of the Worlds. More info will no doubt follow at some point, but I’m keeping this one close to my chest as I think it’s a cracking idea (Gromit).

One thing I’ve always loved about TWotW is the various interpretations of the Martians and their machines that have cropped up down the years. A favourite resource for checking these out is this great collection of War of the Worlds book covers and interior illustrations. There’s some really great stuff on there, and well worth having a look at.

One thing that’s always gutted me is that Ray Harryhausen never got to make his own version of War of the Worlds. He was planning to set it in the Victorian era, but for several reasons the project never got off the ground. Instead we’re left with what could have been, and some Martian test footage, which you can see below:

In other alien-related news, I got around to going to see District 9 at the cinema on Sunday. I can happily say that it shot to the top of my movie’s of the year instantly – a great movie which has just about everything I could ask for: aliens, humour, excitement, pathos, sad bits, funny bits, tragic bits, moments of extreme violence, walking battle robots, and a sensible, serious head holding it all together. Basically, it’s done everything that James Cameron will try to do with Avatar and succeeded wildly. Based on the trailer for Avatar, it’s hard to see Cameron topping this.

Between District 9 and Moon, it’s been a decent year for sci-fi hits from nowhere. Shame horror isn’t following suit. However, I did get the chance to watch Lucky McKee’s The Woods the other night, which is a wonderfully old fashioned story of nasty goings on at a strict girl’s school in the 1960s. It mixes Suspiria with MR James and comes up trumps, and even contains some added Bruce Campbell.

I also watched The Burrowers – a fairly low-budget horror/western which was very effective, all the more so for taking the time to introduce and build its characters before facing them off to horrible creatures which live in the Western badlands. It sounds a bit like Deadwood meets Tremors, but it’s a more serious and sensible film than that (which isn’t to diss Tremors – I love it!). Worth seeking out.

Finally, I did get around to putting up another, fairly inconsequential, short story a couple of weeks ago. It’s called ‘Fingers!’ and can be found here. Enjoy, please!

New short story up

“Let Me In, Let Me In” was salvaged from the opening sequence of Ragazze Finali, originally intended as the second story of the ‘Final Girls’ series. It started strongly enough, but ended up being such a direct pastiche of gialli that the fun rather fell out of it. Regardless, I was fond enough of the opening (the original version of which can be found a few posts down) to re-work it today in to a standalone short story, which can be found here.

On the giallo front, I’m going to a showing of Dario Argento’s ‘Giallo’ next week. Not sure how low to set my expectations for this, as he’s not made a great film since Opera, or a halfway decent one since Trauma, (Mother of Tears was jolly enough, but when placed against Suspiria and Inferno, it looks pedestrian and adolescent), so it could go either way. Shall report back after the showing.

In terms of reading/viewing over the last few weeks, I’ve been fairly busy. Read Ramsey Campbell’s Midnight Sun – one of the few of his mid-period works that I’d never gotten around to. Alas, it was another disappointment, which I’m not going to go on about at length as I’ve already given some of his later work a bit of a kicking elsewhere on this blog and I don’t want to make a habit out of it. I’m hoping that Needing Ghosts, which is on the reading pile, will give me the dose of vintage Campbell I really need.

On a related note, Paranormal Magazine are giving away free DVDs with their latest edition, one of which is The Nameless, the acclaimed adaptation of Campbell’s novel. I haven’t watched it yet, but I’m looking forward to it greatly. It’s currently sitting in the DVD pile along with In The Loop (which I saw at the cinema and loved – funniest thing I’ve seen in years), the box-set of the short-lived series The Lost Room, and various other odds and sods.

Last night  a bunch of us watched The Sentinel – Michael Winner’s 1976 attempt to cash-in on The Exorcist and The Omen – which was far better than it had any right to be and contained some  genuinely disturbing images, though it took a while to get going. We also watched The Exorcist III, which is a long-term favourite of mine. Not only is it superior to the original, it’s also one of the most unsettling and peculiar horror movies of the last 25 years. I can only hope that one day William Peter Blatty will find the missing footage and get a chance to release his original cut without the tacked on exorcism forced on him by the studio (who, having forced the ‘exorcist’ name on Blatty – he’d wanted to keep the novel’s title, Legion – realised that there was no exorcism in the movie and forced re-shoots. Ridiculous).

For a laugh, we also watched Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus. There were no laughs.

Back with the reading, I finished the first collection of Arthur Machen’s stories – which included The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors, which was wonderful. I’m very much looking forward to starting on the second volume, which includes The White People of which I hear great things, but it’ll have to wait. Back to Ray Bradbury’s short stories now, and I’ve also started Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, though I’m not far enough into to form any thoughts on yet.

Today, though, is lazy Sunday and will likely consist of a little writing, a bit of Angel season 3 (we finished Buffy Season Six last night – jesus, what a miserable series that was. It ended on a high, though), and maybe some gaming. I’m back in to my Halo again. Anyone fancy a deathmatch, the gamertag is ‘Auld Scratch’.

And so on.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse

I think I’ll take a break from plugging my writings and bitching about the general state of horror today to consider Joss Whedon’s latest effort, ‘Dollhouse’. Again, I’ve come late to his work, having dismissed Buffy and Angel as adolescent bollocks when they were first released and despised his screenplay for Alien Resurrection with a rare passion only recently surpassed by my hatred for Transformers 2.

But, as time has passed, I have come to realise that I was (take a photo, because this admission doesn’t come often) horribly and stupidly wrong. Watching Buffy and Angel all the way through for the first time (I’m currently at the start of seasons six and three respectively) made me realise what a fool I’d been. I’m now an official convert. The problem was that when people tried to get me in to it previously, they would show me individual ‘classic’ episodes, usually from about three or four seasons in.

This approach doesn’t work. For example, if you watch ‘Hush’ with no knowledge of the characters, their history or their relationship to one another, then all you’ll see if a moderately entertaining monster of the week show. In order to get the full effect of even the simplest episode, you need to get the cumulative effect of watching from the start, growing to know the characters, and following them through thick and thin. Only now that I’ve done this do I see why everyone goes nuts about it.

Not so Firefly/Serenity, which I thoroughly enjoyed from the first viewing. Although, again, it took me a while to bother with it (due to that pesky Alien script, which I still think was an utter dog’s dinner, although Jeunet’s direction probably made it a thousand times worse).

And now we have Dollhouse – his new(ish) sci-fi thriller. And it’s… a bit of a mess. If you’re reading this, you probably know what it’s all about. Porny-faced Eliza Dushku plays ‘Echo’ and operative for the titular Dollhouse which provides deals in people hard-coded with whatever personality trait you want. So if you need a hostage negotiator, you’ll get her with all the knowledge she needs plus a librarian’s hair-do and specs to boot; if you want a crack art-thief, then in she comes in leather pants and oodles of attitude.

But something has gone wrong, and one of Echo’s fellow operatives ‘Alpha’ has gone berserk, slashed up the staff of the Dollhouse and fucked off. Also, Echo – who is wiped after every engagement – is starting to show signs of renewed self-awareness.

Meantime, we have Helo from Battlestar Galactica as an FBI agent with jaw set to gurn and the walk of a man whose spine has been forced about a foot higher in his body than it should have been, and various problems with the NSA and psychotic clients.

Dollhouse suffers in its early episodes from too much studio interference – the opening six episodes are intended as stand-alone shows, with little of the arc-work or character interplay of Whedon’s best work. Also, the missions Dushku is sent on are… well, a little bit shit. Some work on a dumb but entertaining level, some are an utter disaster. Of particular note is the one where she has to play a backing singer to some Britney/Beyonce hybrid pop singer. It’s embarassingly poor, and impossible to watch without a cringe twisting your body into Helo-esque shapes.

The second issue is Dushku herself. As Exec Producer, she’s clearly seen Dollhouse as a chance to show her range – taking on a new persona every episode. Alas, all this does is show that she’s not a great actress. She was fine as the psychotic bad girl Faith in Buffy, but here she simply cannot cope with the range of characters she has to play. Sometimes she gets away with it (her portrayal of an old woman downloaded into a new body trying to find her own killer is actually pretty good), but generally she just flails wildly at the character. Having seen some of Tru Calling (dear god, what a hellish experience that was) I have decided that the only thing she can do with any great competance is, as I said above, look a bit porny. Although I appreciate that for a lot of her fans, that’s probably enough.

She’s not helped by the fact that the two actors portraying the other operatives who appear most frequently (Victor and Sierra) blow her out of the water at every turn. Each slips effortlessly into a new character whenever the story demands it of them, and make Dushku look like a rank amateur at every turn. The rest of the supporting cast are similarly strong – Olivia Williams’ ice-queen DeWitt is full of subtle menace, and Firefly alumnus Alan Tudyk is fantastic when he arrives late in the series.

As I mentioned, the first few episodes are on the rank side. Then something strange happens, and it suddenly gets a bit more interesting. Previously dull characters are shown to have hidden motives, things start to go a bit wrong in the Dollhouse and, finally, the arc kicks in. I’m trying to avoid too many spoilers here, but it’s worth stating that the show is worth persevering with. It never quite reaches the heights of Whedon’s best work, but there’s plenty of promise here and we can only hope that the second series delivers on it.

That’s about the sum of my thoughts on it, and I’m flagging now as there’s a cat lying across my forearms. Foolish Ming. But I’ve been thinking about the characters of Dollhouse, and of the operatives we’ve seen so far – Echo, Sierra, Victor, Whiskey, Alpha, Tango briefly – and who else is still to come. The ones so far have been lucky, they’ve had normal names. But what about the others. Let’s give it some thoughts:

Beware Spoilers below

Alpha – Psychotic ex-Doll with a penchant for cutting people’s faces up. Not to be confused with Alfa – 80s alien driving a hatchback.

Bravo – first name Juliet, most often hired out by people looking for a dumpy British policewoman to shut down their illegal raves (note: joke may make no sense if you’re under 30 and not from the UK)

Charlie – popular with furries, most often clad as a nonsence-talking cat. Once sung on a Prodigy record (disclaimer for Bravo also applies here)

Delta – orange-beared commando. Known for round-house kicks.

Echo – Porny-faced and out of her depth.

Foxtrot – elegant Englishwoman and popular dance instruction doll

Golf – very sporting, comes with an alarming array of chequed trousers

Hotel – for all of your bag-handling needs. Known to play guitar for The Kills.

India – mostly hired out for cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-offs

Juliet – see Bravo. Also, see patronising bitch in Lost

Kilo – weighty sumo, sometimes drug dealer

Lima – long-necked, camel-like beast for dyslexics

Mike – dullest Doll ever. Seen sometimes in The Young Ones

November – full-figured lasagne making machine (as seen on the show)

Oscar – for all your speech-writing needs

Papa – relive all those fantasies of sharing tequila with Hemingway on the beach

Quebec – christ knows!

Romeo – “Why, sir, we really shouldn’t? Sir! I must protest! I… oooh, ooooooh….”

Sierra – the opposite of Echo

Tango – glimpsed once in the series, wearing leather sex gear. It takes two to… and all that.

Uniform – played by R. Lee Emery. Will shout at you until you die. “DID YOUR MOTHER HAVE ANY CHILDREN THAT LIVED?!”

Victor – as seen on TV. Probably the best actor on the show.

Whiskey – Amy Acker. He spoiled. She doesn’t have much to do in the first series, but it looks like she might come more in to it in the second one

X-Ray – Probably some bad 70s superhero with a particularly obvious power

Yankee – add your own stereotype

Zulu – “Men of Harlech stand ye steady…”

My god – sometimes it astounds me just how unfunny I can be…

Final Girls update

I’ve just dumped 11 pages of the original draft of ‘Final Girls Part Two’. I’d started it as a continuation of the first one, telling the tale of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the finale of the original short story. But the more I thought of it, the more I think it devalued the cliffhanger ending of the original story. There’s definitely a lot more to do with the Final Girls idea, but I think it would work better if each story focused on a different girl, and the broader picture was built up from the background information provided in each story.

So, with that in mind, I’ve kicked off the next story in the sequence. It’s entitled Ragazze Finali and is a pastiche of Italian Giallo movies such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Profondo Rosso, Strip Nude for Your Killer (possibly the only film to end with the hero making a joke about anally raping the heroine) with a bit of Argento’s more supernatural work – Suspiria and Inferno – in there. But, of course, all giallo have to start off with an abstract flashback murder scene which hints towards the culprits (usually painfully Freudian) motives and so will Ragazze Finali. Indeed, by way of teaser for my imaginary audience (or are you all just very quiet), this first section is posted below. Like the rest of the story, each sub-section will have Giallo-esque multiple titles. After all, it’s never a truly great Giallo unless it has about four different names in each territory.

I’m planning to skip back and forth between Final Girls stories and more classical weird tales over the next few months, although it depends on my mood. The next FG story will probably be Final Girls UK, which is self-explanatory, followed by Final Girls 1976 – an ‘origin’ story for the characters in the first story. Not sure what’ll come after that – though the title Final Girls Go Wild keeps sneaking in to my head. Oh dear…

Anyway, here’s the first section of Ragazze Finali, with the rest to come at some point in the next few days (time permitting).

In the Garden of the Violated House (AKA Then Came The Whistling)

Eyes hardening, Mother pulled the black leather gloves over her long fingers, whistling all the while. “Does this mean that we’re going for a drive, mama?” asked the little girl in the summer dress, standing in the kitchen doorway.

Mother looked at her, a gentle smile on her face. The whistling had finally ceased. It felt as if Mother had been droning out that same tune since the moment she had woken up that morning. The woman crossed to her child and lay one gloved hand on the small one’s cheek. Despite the coolness of the clammy leather, the little girl leant her head in to it and smiled.

“No driving today, child. Mama just doesn’t want to get her hands dirty, that’s all.” She nodded to the chalk stairway on the other side of the kitchen. “Why don’t you go and play with your dollhouse while I spend some time with Papa?”

“Okay,” said the child, running off across the stone floor of the kitchen. Various herbs and garnishes hung from the rack above the great wooden table by which her mother stood, and in one corner long strips of freshly slaughtered meat hung amidst a cloud of flies. The stairwell was dark and cool, a relief after the warmth of the day. When she reached her bedroom she fell to her knees before the large dollhouse, a crude depiction of some southern mansion, and swung open its front. The little wooden dolls stood amongst intricately carved and tiny pieces of furniture. The Mama stood in the kitchen, the Papa in the living room. In one of the bedrooms was a little girl in a violet dress and in a neighbouring room, a little boy is short pants. She moved him first, to the landing at the top of the stairs, and then reached around the side of one wall to produce a fifth figure, hitherto hidden from the rest of the occupants.

He was her favourite. Not much more than a long peg wrapped in black cloth, he nonetheless stood tall over the rest of her tiny wooden dolls. His face was crude – a couple of lines for the eyes, a jagged line for the mouth and teeth – but still somehow conveyed a sense of cruel jest. Last summer she had fashioned for him a brimmed hat out of some off-cuts of her mother’s cloth, but it had refused to sit on his head. Now it was held tight by a pin, driven from one side of his skull to another.

She brought him to the kitchen door first and tapped him against the wood. In a deep voice the girl said, “Let me in. Let me in.”

Then she moved the mother to the kitchen, taking care to keep her far from the door. In a higher, shrill voice, she said, “No, Signore, no. I will not let you in.”

“Why? Why will you not let me in?”

“Because I have heard of you and your cruel deeds, Signore. I will not let you in.”

Deep concentration on her face, the little girl left the mother where she stood and walked the dark figure to the back of the house. She held him up by the window of the brother’s room.

“Let me in. Let me in,” she said, nodding the peg to indicate speech.

Another voice for the brother, not as deep. “Ah! Mama, Mama!”

“No, little boy. Do not cry for your mama.”

“But Signore, you are the bad man. They tell such stories of you. They speak as if you are the Devil himself.”

“Ah, child. Can you not see that I am but a travelling man in search of shelter and, if your kindness permits, a small bite to eat? I do not know why these lies are told about me, but I assure you I am harmless.”

The girl paused for a second, brow tightening, and then again she manipulated the brother. “No, Signore. Your face is bad and frightens me greatly. I cannot allow you to enter. Please go away and scare me no more.”

Now she moved him to the window of the little girl’s room, and could not help but allow a tight smile of anticipation cross her face. She moved the sister doll to the window and held the black-clad peg close.

“Let me in. Let me in.”

She spoke normally. “But who are you?”

“Dear child, I am but a traveller who seeks food and shelter before tonight’s storm. But your family has shaken my faith in the good of my fellow man by thusfar refusing me access to your warm and comfortable home. Won’t you help them see the sense of their ways and permit me to enter?”

“But my mother is a good woman, and my brother a kind and helpful boy. If they did not allow you to come in then I am sure that they must have had good reason. Why, pray, would they refuse your entry?”

“Lies,” said the peg. “Black lies have been spread around the countryside about me. By men who dislike me greatly.”

“What lies have they told?”

“They have said that I am a thief, and a villain.”

“That is all?”

“If only it were. They have said also that I am of low standing and that I covet married women.”

“Truly these are awful lies, if lies they are. What else have they said?”

“I cannot say, young lady. It disgusts me to think of such things.”

“But I must know these lies, lest I cannot convince my parents that they are untruths.”

“I see your wisdom, child, and though it pains me I will recount the lies they tell of me.”

“Go on.”

“It is said that I would steal into a house of an evening, when all are asleep, and commit terrible misdeeds.”

“What misdeeds are these?”

“That I will take from a family their hard-earned food. That I will drink their beverages.”

“That is all?”

“No, lady, it shames me to say that I stand accused also of stealing their money and other valuables.”

“Dreadful. This is all they say about you?”

“I desire that it was, but alas… they say that I will find the young lady of the house and have my way with her and then slit her throat like that of a pig.”

“Oh my!”

“Yes, and that I will find the young man of the house and do likewise if I can.”

“How awful.”

“It is! It is! And more, that I will display to the parents that which I have done to their children. That I will tie them up and take a long and slow time over carving up the woman while her man watches.”

“I should hear no more, and yet I feel that I cannot stop you speaking.”

“No, lady. No, you cannot. What else do they say about me? They say that when my cutting is finally done that I will feast on the flesh as if it were that of an animal. That I will cavort in the spilled entrails of those I have slaughtered. That I will dance naked in the garden of the violated house draped in the skin and viscera of the dead in tribute to my one and true lord, The Great Beast.”

The child took a breath, then continued in the deep voice. “So you see, I must shelter from those who would do me such harm, who would drag my name to such terrible deaths. Let me in, child. Let me in.”

“Signore, I see that you are hated and despised by many and that to leave you out in the cold of the night would be to leave you to the mercy of those who would see you stabbed and drowned. I will let you in,” and with that she reached out a single finger and pushed open the tiny bedroom window.

Clumsily, she pulled the peg through and stood it in the bedroom. Its head almost touched the ceiling. “Pray tell,” she started. “Where might I find the lady of the-”

The lady was talking. Not in the voice of the child, but in her own firm Mama voice. It was muffled by the floor, but loud enough to be audible. The girl reached down and moved the mother doll in to the living room with the father doll. Then she crouched down and placed her ear to the cold stone floor and tried to listen to the conversation. There were two voices then, both growing louder, but the stone was too thick for them to penetrate. The scream came after a moment or two, a long and masculine howl. Something smashed and thumped down. Then quiet. The girl waited a second and then stood up and looked to the dollhouse. Delicately, she pinched the dark figure in her fingers and used it to flick over the father doll.

The silence was momentary. The next set of screams were smaller, high-pitched and panicked. The slap of bare feet on stone ran from one side of the house to another, followed by harder, heavier steps. The girl heard a voice, “Mama! Mama, no!” and then the scream dwindled into a thick gurgle and was gone.

The girl moved the black peg higher, and knocked over the brother doll.

It was quiet now. The little girl sat before the dollhouse, twiddling the peg between her fingers. Then came the whistling, her mother striking up the tune from earlier. There were footfalls on the stairs, a scuffing, dragging sound. The girl kept her back to the door, reaching out one hand to move the mother doll to the stairs. Then up to the landing. The scuffing grew louder and the girl became aware of the shape behind her, filling the narrow wooden frame of the door. Its breath was strained, hissing, barely human.

The little girl turned to her Mama, lips moving, though the voice that came from her was not her own.

“Let me in,” she said. “Let me in.”

Illustration for Final Girls

Spent a little bit of time this afternoon doing a ‘cover photo’ for the first episode of Final Girls. See below.

Tommy pursues 'Wendy' and friend through the woods

Ideally I’d like to give all of the episodes (and possibly all future stories) at least one image. I’m not the greatest artist in the world, but I think it helps people know what they’re getting in to at a glance. That’s one of the annoying things about writing – it’s difficult for people to tell whether they like your stuff or not with just a look. They need to spend quite some time with it, which I think puts a lot of people off.

If you haven’t checked it out already, the first episode of Final Girls can be found by clicking on the short stories tab at the top of the page. The second episode will be coming along soon(ish).

Dead horses, and other woes

I had a rather depressing experience in Borders the other day. I don’t often shop for novels there (cheaper online) but I do like to go and have a look during my lunchbreak, just to see what’s new. They’ve never had the greatest of horror sections – two sides of two standing shelves on the border between Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Crime – but for a quick overview of what’s popular and in vogue at the moment, it’s useful enough, although the selection in Waterstones is generally a bit better.

Anyway, on reaching the usual spot on the top floor I quickly realised that there was no horror section to be seen. Where it had once stood was now a shelf full of TV/Movie tie-ins. I browsed, wandered towards the end of the fiction isles and there, at the point where fiction ended and the children’s section started, was the horror section.

It was a pathetic sight – a single standing set of shelves, sparsely populated. And, as has been the way of things since time immemorial (the 80’s), half of the books were by either Stephen King or Dean Koontz, with healthy support by Richard Laymon. Now, I don’t subscribe to the slightly snobbish disdain some people in the genre have for King (S.T. Joshi in particular appears to hate him), although do think Dean Koontz is a fucking stain on the genre. I’ve enjoyed a Richard Laymon novel in my time – lowest common denominator stuff, but a lot of fun. But there’s a lot more to horror than that, as we all know. Now, Waterstones at least has the good sense to have some of the Penguin Classics stuff in there, some good anthologies, and some select historical authors (Richard Matheson, Lovecraft, etc), but Borders don’t seem to have bothered even with that.

This nasty little horror ghetto would have been bad enough on its own. But then I looked around to see what company the section was in. That’s more or less when I recoiled in horror – for towering over the horror section was a wall full of what is now commonly termed ‘Paranormal Romance’. Basically Twilight and a host of teenage girl fan fiction about hunky boy vampires, werewolves. The death of the vampire in book form, reduced to a de-fanged, dull, safe version of the original concept.

‘Fine’, I would have thought through gritted teeth if such a thing were possible. ‘It’s fine for its audience’. But jesus, it didn’t have rankle me to see how much of that crap there was compared to the paltry little horror section. To add insult to injury, as I left I noticed that on the other side of the alcove in which this section was housed was the basic ‘Romance’ section – essentially the very nadir of fiction. ‘Is this the company that  the genre is forced to keep these days?’ I wondered. ‘Have things really gotten so low?’

The answer’s ‘yes’, of course, and I walked away with the sense of having backed a dead horse. That doesn’t mean I’ll change what I write – I love the genre, after all, but it didn’t half knock the wind out of my sails for a while.

I do wonder how it’s come to this, but there’s no easy answer. A lot of shit was published in the wake of Stephen King’s success (Koontz being a fine example), and little of it had any staying power. When the wave of popularity receded there was little there to take its place, the mainstream publishers having decided that it didn’t sell any more. Horror became more and more relegated to the small presses and, while I’m grateful that they keep the genre going, I sometimes wonder if they’re part of the problem.

For example, P.S. Publishing produce some great stuff, but generally at collectors prices. Will T.E.D. Klein’s work ever get more widely noticed if his latest collection is priced at £30 and limited to X amount of copies? I doubt it. Joe Hill is a wonderful writer – but I’m not going to pay £12-£15 for his latest Gunpowder which comes in at the grand total of 70 pages. It’s almost as if they want to keep horror as a niche for the fans and the other writers. I’m not sure I agree with this approach at all.

Issue number two is that because horror has become such a small field, its core supporters feel a need to keep it going regardless of the cost. So we end up with a whole lot of small press authors who feel inclined to support the efforts of other literary horror fans for the sole reason that they belong to the genre. This results in a great swathe of back-clapping and name-dropping within the circle, and a lot of praise for works that are mediocre at best. The line-up of Virgin Books’ horror imprint suffered from this especially. Most of the stuff they published had already been pushed out by P.S. Publishing, and met with acclaim from the field. Alas, a lot of the higher profile stuff was stunningly poor. Head honcho Adam Nevill’s Banquet for the Damned was an astonishingly poorly written book, the sentences tying themselves up in knots in search of an oppressive atmosphere. Instead he finds only cliche (has anyone’s scrotum ever really shrunk through fear?) and nonsense – an early struggle for survival is likened to a ‘drunken piggy-back ride’, maybe the least fearsome image ever. In addition we had a collection of Thomas Ligotti’s short stories – Ligotti is fine in small doses, but tends to rake over the same old images time and time again and over the length of a book this can be wearing indeed; and then there was Ramsey Campbell’s two efforts, both of which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post. All of these books had gone to print in dire need of an editor’s hand – but seem to have been published as if they were some untouchable gospel.

Nonetheless, they all came with the usual plaudits from Campbell (I love the man’s works, but he seems to suffer from extreme genre blindness when it comes to literary horror), Cemetery Dance, and so on and so forth. Mediocre writing supported by the usual suspects. That is the state of mainstream horror right now, and if the way it’s being treated by the large book chains is indicative, then it’s in major danger of falling away altogether.

Reads, watches, listens

Took a trip to the cinema last night to see Duncan Jones’ Moon. I really appreciated that film for a variety of reasons. The story was nothing new, but it was told with wit and a sense of melancholy which worked wonders for the material. Sam Rockwell is excellent, playing multiple versions of the same character was clear distinction between the two and perfect understanding of where each version is at mentally at all times. It was also nice to see some old-school model work in the special effects – you don’t realise how much you miss it until you see something like that on the big screen.

Compare that to Transformers 2 – a movie so bad that it made me completely redefine my concept of what a bad movie was. Not only is it dumb and loud (the same could be said for the fairly enjoyable original), it’s also offensive on multiple levels and is entirely lacking in self-awareness, humour, pacing, storytelling or anything that makes up a decent piece of fiction. I may go on about it at length at a later date, but I’m all ranted out just now. Needless to say, it’s terrible beyond belief.

Reading-wise I’ve mostly been making my way through a massive collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, the majority of which are excellent. The clarity of his writing is a real antidote to some of the try-hards working in genre fiction at the moment. Favourites have included The Scythe and The Fox and The Forest, as well as The Fog Horn, which I mentioned in an earlier blog.  But I can comfortably say that none of the stories I’ve read so far have bored me or made me want to skip past. Amazingly consistent.

I’ve also just finished Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. I’ve been meaning to read it since I saw a review of the hardback back in 2003 when it came out, but never got around to it. The impending Scorcese film of it spurred me on. It was… okay. A bit clumsy from time to time, and the twist was fairly apparent from quite early on. But it was exciting and intriguing enough. I got through it in about three days, so it must have been doing something right.

Writing-wise I’m still working on the second part of Final Girls (because all slasher stories must have multiple sequels) and have re-started The Prophecy House again. It’s a tricky one to get right, but I think it’ll be worth the effort in the end. In the meantime, it’s good to have Final Girls to fall back on, as I do enjoy writing that a lot. I think I might have found the right balance of projects to work on – they’re very different, but they complement each other and make sure that I keep writing one when I’m not in the mood for the other. I think that momentum is important.

That’s all – curry and a couple of episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer for me tonight (I resisted watching it for a longtime due to my own – ironically – snobbish view of what it’s indirectly responsible for – see above – but am now thoroughly enjoying them). It’s Gay Pride down here tomorrow, so the town will more or less shut-down. I doubt I’ll re-emerge until the geek pub quiz on Sunday. The team, having won it for the first four months of this year, have slipped in the last couple of months, so we’ll be looking to reclaim our crown.

Wish us luck!

p.s. Final Girls Part Two will probably be up in a week or so. Maybe less if I get a good run at it.

‘Final Girls’ arrives

And yet another new story posted today. ‘Final Girls‘ has been in my mind for a while now. It started when I watched a documentary about the making of the Friday the 13th films a few months back. During it, one of the women who had played a final girl in one of the early films said she thought she, and all her fellow final girls from the series, should all come back to finish off Jason in the end. The image of half a dozen dumpy failed actresses queuing up to stab Jason Voorhees in the manner of the passengers waiting to slap the hysterical passenger in Airplane seemed ridiculous, but at the same time the notion of a league of final girls appealed to me, and gradually evolved over the following weeks.

At first the idea was for them to be hunting slashers across America, but that seemed just a bit too straightforward. What was going on behind the scenes? What happened after the end credits rolled after all those Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels? The answer more or less presented itself.

There are some elements in the story which may feel like they’ve been left hanging or unresolved (the whole Amy Freidrich thing, for example). It may feel a bit like the first episode of an ongoing series. That’s because it is. Final Girls should really be read as if it’s the first episode of an ongoing series, mainly because that’s exactly what it is. I can see myself coming back to the girls and their attendant slashers. It’s a lighter story than the last few I’ve written (albeit one that starts with a massacre) and it’s been a lot of fun to work on. Might be a motto worth remembering: WRITING = NOT ALWAYS HARD WORK.

Anyway, that’s enough waffle for now. Final Girls can be read here.

And yet further new tales…

Quick update before bedtime. I’ve just posted another new story. Two in the space of a couple of days – I don’t think I’ve managed that rate of production for about ten years. Anyway, the new one is called ‘The Other One’ and is generally a lot shorter and more successful than ‘Beanfield’.

It came together from a few things – a dream that I had a few nights ago about a large nasty grey cat, which was only referred to as ‘the other one’. I suspect that the malevolent cat snuck into my subconscious as a result of a reading of The Events at Poroth Farm, although I think my use of it is a little different from Klein’s.

In addition, it was interesting to try and write a horror story about something that I love – I believe that whoever called cats ‘nature’s masterpiece’ (was it DaVinci?) was spot on. I’m also quite happy with the development of the subtext came through in the final story – it should be clear what the grey cat and the orange cat represent, other than a big nasty bastard in the former’s case.

Anyway, you can read ‘The Other One’ here if you feel so inclined. Enjoy! But be careful next time you feed that stray cat that’s hanging around…

Recent reading

Since finishing The Ceremonies (see below) I’ve cracked through a few very different pieces of work, all of which have their strong points. For a change of pace I went straight in to Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a work of non-fiction which proposes to be the definitive story of the 1999 school-shooting by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Fascinating stuff from start to finish – challenging even the concept of the crime as a ’school shooting’. It turns out that it was actually a massive bombing gone wrong. Cullen’s been on the story since it happened and it’s hard to imagine anyone approaching the story with the same degree of impartiality and lack of hyperbole. He’s also incredibly thorough and comfortable pricking some of the myths that have built up around the massacre – the ’she said yes’ tale leapt on by the religious is well and truly debunked, as is the notion of the shooters and bullied loners who belonged to some sort of shady ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’. Cullen approached his material even-handedly, building up a gradual portrait of the murderers, and tracing their path to the massacre carefully using the documentary evidence left behind by Harris and Klebold. Cullen’s writing style is clipped and clear; unspectacular, but perfectly suited to the material. It’s a fine piece of journalism, stripping the sensation from the story, leaving only something that looks very like the truth.

After finishing Columbine, I read Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft ‘Against the World, Against Life’. Interesting enough, but it probably told me more about Houellbecq than it did about Lovecraft. It did leave me with a taste for the Weird Tale, though, and so I picked up S.T. Joshi’s anthology American Supernatural Tales. Actually, the main reason for picking it up was to read The Events at Poroth Farm by T.E.D Klein, the story on which The Ceremonies was based. It’s certainly a tighter and more satisfying telling of the tale, although I missed the denseness of Klein’s descriptions of New York, and the deft characterisation of Sarr and Deborah Poroth. The main character Jeremy, however, is far more sympathetic in the story than he was in the novel and most of the key scares were transposed almost directly from the original. I still maintain that Klein is far better with the short form than with a novel, but until he produces a bit more work for us to consider it’s impossible to say. His second novel, Nighttown, is supposedly all but finished, but Klein is blocked at the start of the climax. Maybe one day he’ll find the inspiration he needs to finish it off.

The two other standout tales in the anthology so far (I’m about two thirds through it) are The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber, an effortless take on the long-stale vampire story written in an entertainingly hard-boiled style; and The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury. I’m woefully and embarassingly under-read when it comes to Bradbury, although the first volume of his collected short stories is currently waiting on my bedside table, but if The Fog Horn is anything to go by, I’m in for a treat. It’s possibly the best and saddest short story I’ve read in a long time. A synopsis of the plot does it no justice, as its power lies in the persuasive power of Bradbury’s writing. It’s masterful stuff, perfectly composed, and it makes me realise that I’ve a long way to go before I can even hope to matching the perfect simplicity of The Fog Horn.