July 2021 – Blood and Porridge

July 30, 2021July 30, 2021

Seriously Sean – ‘The Wind and the Lion’

© United Artists / Colombia Pictures / MGM

Written and directed by John Milius, released in 1975 and very loosely based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1904, The Wind and the Lion is a tale of derring-do in the Moroccan Rif combined with political intrigue in Washington DC. I first saw it when I was in my late teens and appropriately for a film with ‘wind’ in its title – that’s wind of the meteorological, non-flatulent variety – it blew me away.

Following the death of its star Sean Connery last year, I decided to watch The Wind and the Lion again. I felt slightly trepidant doing so, as there’s more than one film that I admired in my youth but found less-than-brilliant when I saw it again at a more mature age. A prime example is Robert Altman’s 1970 comedy about the Korean War, M*A*S*H, which once upon a time seemed exhilarating in its irreverence and anarchy, but nowadays strikes me as juvenile and mean-spirited.

The Wind and the Lion’s opening sees Connery’s character, master-brigand Mulai Ahmed el Raisuli – the Raisuli – lead a raid on the Moroccan home of wealthy American widow Eden Pedecaris (Candice Bergen) and abduct her and her young children (Simon Harrison and Polly Gottesman). My hopes that I’d hang onto my previous high opinion of The Wind and the Lion took a blow at this early point. It isn’t so much the fact that Eden’s houseguest at the time, Sir Joshua Smith (played by Billy Williams, not an actor but the movie’s cinematographer, who’d later win an Academy Award for his work on Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic Gandhi), gallantly fights off the attacking hordes, is killed and then despite his heroism is barely mentioned by the Pedecarises or anyone else during the rest of the film. No, it’s the fact that Eden, understandably upset by what’s happened, laughs in scorn when the Raisuli is thrown off a recalcitrant horse – and the Raisuli reacts by whacking her across the face. “I am Raisuli,” he snarls. “Do not laugh at me again.”

Yes, it’s 1904, when misogyny was a universal and unremarked-upon fact of life. (It still is in many places, of course.) But Connery’s later years and posthumous reputation were tainted by allegations of domestic abuse against his ex-wife Diane Cilento and by troubling comments he’d made about the acceptability of slapping women. This moment in The Wind and the Lion is a dismaying reminder of that.

The Raisuli and his men carry the Pedecarises off to their camp in the Rif, beyond the reach of the Moroccan authorities. His motive for kidnapping them is to damage Morocco’s Sultan Abdelaziz. By issuing an extravagant ransom demand, he hopes to embarrass the Sultan, provoke the Americans and generally stir up trouble. The Sultan’s uncle is the wily Bashaw of Tangier, the Raisuli’s brother, and he deeply resents how this wing of his family have allowed their country to become humiliatingly and corruptingly mired in foreign influence. As the Bashaw himself admits at one point: “I have been threatened by the French, the Germans, the English… Yes, we have French infantry and German cavalry. Our currency is Spanish. But my nephew is the Sultan of Morocco. As it is, it shall be.”

The Bashaw, incidentally, is played by the Polish character actor Vladek Sheybal, who was memorable as the villainous Kronsteen in Connery’s second Bond outing From Russia with Love (1963). But it has to be said that the strapping, hairy Connery and the sleek, lupine Sheybal look as much like brothers as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito did in Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988).

© United Artists / Colombia Pictures / MGM

Happily, once the main narrative of The Wind and Lion gets underway, the film becomes as good as I remembered it to be. Connery and Bergen make the scenes featuring Eden Pedecaris and the Raisuli a joy. She gradually shifts from being deeply unimpressed by him – “It is not my intention to encourage braggers,” she tells curtly him after he’s given a windy introduction calling himself ‘Raisuli the Magnificent’ and ‘the true defender of the faithful’ with the ‘blood of the prophet’ in his veins – to feeling affection for the twinkly-eyed old rogue. Likewise, Connery’s admiration for her increases, although the banter between them never quite loses its edge. After they start to spend the evenings playing chess, she warns him, “You are in a lot of trouble! You should never have moved that knight or kidnapped me. Both will see you undone.” He responds, “It is not I who determine the outcome of events. It is the will of Allah…”

Meanwhile, the Pedecaris children, removed from an upper-class Western world of manners, gentility and stuffiness, begin to have a whale of a time. For the boy, William, hanging out in a desert camp with the Raisuli and his sword-wielding, rifle-popping Berber militia is like Tom Sawyer’s dream of running away from home and becoming a pirate made real.

But this is only half of the story of The Wind and the Lion. For on the far side of the Atlantic, President Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Keith) is seeking re-election. He seizes upon the incident as an opportunity to show the voters his mettle, although his Secretary of State John Hay (John Huston) is less keen on the idea. The garrulous and ebullient Roosevelt has his consul in Morocco (Geoffrey Lewis) and a US military force headed by an admiral (Roy Jenson) and a marine captain (Steve Kanaly) stage what nowadays would be called an intervention. A squad of marines and sailors blast their way into the Bashaw’s palace in Tangiers, determined to knock heads together so that some sort of deal is reached and the Pedecarises are freed. This is regardless of local sensibilities and the interests of the European colonial powers with fingers in the Moroccan pie.

A bargain is made and the three Pedecarises are released into the custody of a group of US marines headed by Kanaly’s character, Captain Jerome. But the Sultan’s Moroccan soldiers and their German allies capture the Raisuli, going against what was agreed. Thus, Eden, his erstwhile prisoner, has to persuade Jerome and his men to rescue him, so that the deal made in Roosevelt’s name is fully honoured…

Images of gung-ho Americans stomping into foreign lands they don’t properly understand, shooting first and asking questions later, trying to get the job (as they see it) done irrespective of local complexities, were not, it’s fair to say, popular in liberal mid-1970s Hollywood just after the Vietnam War. And John Milius himself, co-writer of Apocalypse Now (1979) with Francis Ford Coppola, was obviously aware of the omnishambles Vietnam had been. However, with The Wind and the Lion, he seems to hark back longingly to simpler times when America could do this sort of thing with fewer complications and consequences. He particularly idolizes Teddy Roosevelt for embodying all the things he believes America should be about. Roosevelt has brains, yes, but he has brawn too and is plain-speaking and no-bullshitting, and is none the worse for that.

© United Artists / Colombia Pictures / MGM

This adulation comes to the fore in a few scenes where Roosevelt joins a hunting party that shoots a grizzly bear and then he has the big, fearsome beast stuffed and mounted. “The American grizzly,” he tells a reporter, “is a symbol of the American character: strength, intelligence, ferocity. Maybe a little blind and reckless at times, but courageous beyond all doubt. And one other trait… Loneliness. The American grizzly lives out his life alone. Indomitable, unconquered, but always alone. He has no real allies, only enemies, but none of them as great as he.” Fair enough, you find yourself thinking – but if the grizzly bear is as noble as old Teddy claims it is, why did he have the poor bloody thing shot in the first place?

To be fair, the film gives a more rounded portrayal of Roosevelt than that. He’s shown to be somewhat pompous and smug, annoying in his loquaciousness, and clearly a scheming sort. I wonder, though, how much of this is due to Brian Keith’s performance rather than to Milius’s script.

What redeems the film politically – at least, if you’re a left-wing pinko like me – is the fact that as it progresses, Keith’s Roosevelt and Connery’s Raisuli, though they never get to meet, feel a growing respect and even kinship for each other. By the film’s close, the Raisuli has penned Roosevelt a letter, which says: “…you are like the wind and I like the lion. You form the tempest. The sand stings my eyes and the ground is parched. I roar in defiance but you do not hear… I, like the lion, must remain in my place. While you, like the wind, will never know yours…”

If you’re going to have movies full of jingoistic American nonsense, at least have ones like this, where the American protagonists don’t see foreigners as drone-like commies, gooks or towel-heads but as fellow human beings with equivalent amounts of nobility and courage. It just grieves me that a decade later, Milius had abandoned all attempts at nuance and was directing unashamedly right-wing and brainless shite like Red Dawn (1984).

Overall, then, I’m pleased and relieved to say that The Wind and the Lion still holds up well. Milius directs with aplomb. His orchestration of the sequence where the Americans storm the Bashaw’s palace is worthy of Sam Peckinpah while the desert scenes, accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s sumptuous and yearning score, are frequently gorgeous. Brian Keith and Candice Bergen are excellent and Connery, intoning such great lines as “Ignorance is a steep hill with perilous rocks at the bottom,” or “If I miss the morning prayer, I pray twice in the afternoon – Allah is very understanding,” or finally, “I’ll see you again, Mrs Pedecaris, when we’re both like golden clouds on the wind!”, has never been better.

Although how this Moroccan Berber brigand ended up speaking with such a mellifluous brogue is a mystery. Perhaps his English teacher came from Edinburgh.

© United Artists / Colombia Pictures / MGM

July 24, 2021July 24, 2021

Travellers at the bar

As I mentioned in my previous blog-entry, the latest Covid-19 lockdown in Sri Lanka, which was imposed for a good part of May and June, has recently been relaxed. This relaxation has allowed some eating and drinking places to re-open.

However, one place that my partner and I have often retreated to in the past, when we’ve felt the need for calm and a touch of soothing, old-school luxury (to convey the illusion for a few hours that we’ve actually got money), remains off-limits to us. This is the Traveller’s Bar and its lovely outdoor verandah, which overlooks the Indian Ocean, at Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel. For now, the bar and verandah are open only for hotel guests, not outside customers. This is a shame because few things are as good for the soul as sitting there between six and six-thirty on a clear evening and watching the sky segue from one gorgeous colour to another while the sun sinks behind the distant waves.

The Galle Face Hotel will soon be a venerable 120 years old and it’s prestigious enough to have featured in Patricia Schultz’s 2003 travel book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Predictably, during its long history, it has accommodated some very famous guests. Many of these are commemorated by a gallery of framed photographs adorning the interior of the Traveller’s Bar, with information about the years, occasionally just the decades, when they stayed there.

Among the earliest people featured in the gallery are writers. You see Anton Chekov (credited with being at the Galle Face in 1890), George Bernard Shaw (in the 1930s), W. Somerset Maugham (the 1920s), Noel Coward (1944) and Evelyn Waugh (the 1950s). D.H. Lawrence showed up there in 1922, presumably either on his way to or from the 99-day sojourn he had in Australia that gave rise to his novel Kangaroo, published the following year.

One literary hero of mine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, stayed at the Galle Face Hotel in 1920 and, unimpressed by its prices, described it as ‘a place where the preposterous charges are partly compensated for by the glorious rollers that break upon the beach outside.” He was also unimpressed by the equally famous Mount Lavinia Hotel, which in those days stood beyond the southern edge of Colombo. “There are two robbers’ castles, as the unhappy visitor calls them, facing the glorious sea, the one Galle Face, the other the Mount Lavinia Hotel.” At least he appreciated the journey between the castles: “They are connected by an eight-mile road, which has all the colour and life and variety of the East for every inch of the way.”

At this point Doyle was heavily into spiritualism and had been gullible enough to believe that the notoriously faked Cottingley fairies were real. However, he retained enough of his wits not to be taken in by a display of the famous ‘mango-tree’ trick, which a Sri Lankan magician did for him just outside the hotel. Doyle praised the magician’s skill, though: “He did it so admirably that I can well understand those who think that it is an occult process.”

I’m perplexed by the presence of a portrait of James Joyce, supposedly a guest of the Galle Face in 1904. (Coincidentally, June 16^th, 1904, was the date of ‘Bloomsday’, the day during which all the events of Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses take place). To the best of my knowledge, he never travelled outside Europe, let alone visited southern Asia. In fact, the only connections I can dig up between Joyce and Sri Lanka are that: (1) he makes mention of the ‘Cinghalese’ in Ulysses; and (2) he was known to own a copy of Henry Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism According to the Sinhalese Canon – Olcott was the American army officer who became the first president of the Theosophical Society and was an important figure in the revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, so much so that he’s honoured with a statue in front of Fort Railway Station today.

Perhaps somebody else with the name ‘James Joyce’ stayed at the hotel in 1904?

One writer not displayed in the Traveller’s Bar is legendary science-fiction scribe Sir Arthur C. Clarke, even though it was in the Galle Face that he supposedly wrote the last chapters of the last volume of his Space Odyssey series, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). However, Clarke had lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, so he wasn’t really what you’d call a ‘visitor’ or a ‘guest’.

The Traveller’s Bar gallery is mostly a collection of the great and good, but it has at least one rogue in it, namely Richard Nixon. He stayed at the hotel in the 1950s, sometime before he became the second-most crooked US president in modern history. Other political dignitaries who were guests there include father and daughter Indian Prime Ministers Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1950) and Indira Gandhi (1976); and iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, whose portrait says he stayed in 1958, although according to a feature in Sri Lanka’s FT his visit was actually in August 1959. He’d come to Sri Lanka because it was one of the first countries to recognize Castro’s Cuba.

From the mid-20^th century onwards, Sri Lanka began to appeal as an exotic location to Western filmmakers and so the Galle Face Hotel had Hollywood movie stars stay while on their way to or from film shoots. These include Sir Alec Guinness (1957), in town for the making of Bridge on the River Kwai and, I have to say, looking a bit shifty in his photograph; Harrison Ford (1983), there to make Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (whose production had switched from India to Sri Lanka after the Indian government objected to the ‘thuggee’ elements in its script); and Ursula Andress, whom I trust enjoyed her stay in Sri Lanka in 1976 even though she probably prefers to forget the film she made there, the Italian horror movie The Mountain of the Cannibal God, directed by Sergio Martini and considered so offensive in Britain that it was classified as a ‘video nasty’ and banned until 2001.

Andress, of course, found international fame as the very first Bond girl. Meanwhile, the man responsible for the third cinematic incarnation of James Bond, Roger Moore, appears in the Traveller’s Bar too. He’s said to have stayed at the hotel in the 1960s, but he’s depicted in his famous 1970s Bondian bowtie and dinner-suit, so the photo obviously wasn’t taken at the time.

One star in the Traveller’s Bar who’s rather forgotten nowadays is Lex Barker, who took over the role of Tarzan from Johnny Weissmuller in 1949. Barker’s picture says he was there in the 1950s, although the only thing I can find in his filmography that was made in Sri Lanka was a 1963 movie called Storm Over Ceylon. While Barker’s Hollywood Tarzan movies were too low-budget to be filmed on location in a tropical country like Sri Lanka, money was not a problem for Bo Derek and her director-husband John Derek, who used Sri Lanka for the jungle scenes of their notorious, mammary-obsessed Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), while using the Maldives for its beach scenes. For their salacious take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord of the Jungle, Bo, John and their crew imported some decidedly non-native wildlife into the country. According to an article in the New York Times, they brought with them a lion (called Dandi), an orangutan (called C.J.), three chimpanzees, two Irish wolfhounds and an 18-foot, 120-pound python. Thus, Ms Derek is now commemorated by a portrait in the Traveller’s Bar as well.

A nice story is attached to Gregory Peck, who stayed in 1954 whilst making a film called The Purple Plain. Apparently, he came down with a nasty bout of flu, but recovered with the help of a traditional local remedy of plain tea incorporating inguru and kothamalli (ginger and coriander). In the 1950s Peck was a global heartthrob and his use of this remedy didn’t go unnoticed by his lady admirers in Sri Lanka. As another article in the Daily FT observes: “It used to be said in lighter vein those days that many upper-class ladies of Colombo 7 began drinking ginger / coriander tea only after Gregory Peck told them about it.”

Finally, the gallery sports a picture of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, symbolically holding a white dove. The great Russian cosmonaut came to Sri Lanka in 1961 and among the things done to mark the visit was the planting of a tree in his honour at the botanical gardens in Peradeniya, close to Kandy. According to a piece published by the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Colombo, the tree was said to have stopped growing at the time of Gagarin’s death in a jet crash in 1968. However, mysteriously, it continued to live, so that it’s resembled a young tree for the past half-century. This is contradicted by an article in Ceylon Today, which claims it merely fell ill at the time of Gagarin’s death, but recovered and kept on growing. I was at the botanical gardens a few years ago and really wish I’d examined the Yuri Gagarin tree to find out which of these accounts was true.

July 16, 2021July 23, 2022

Still ruled by the Queen

© EMI / Elektra Records

Back in 2018, I found myself in a Colombo pub one evening having a blether with Suresh De Silva, the vocalist and co-founder of the Sri Lankan heavy metal band Stigmata. Within seconds of the start of our conversation De Silva had asked me if I’d seen Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie biopic of the 1970s / 1980s rock band Queen, which’d been released in Colombo cinemas a few weeks earlier. The unexpectedness of the question threw me a little. It also reminded me of the hugeness of the phenomenon that is Queen.

It’s a phenomenon that transcends place. National boundaries seem not to matter when it comes to liking Queen. Meeting a Sri Lankan heavy metaller in 2018 who wanted to talk about the band wasn’t my first experience of this. I remember working long ago at a language school in the UK that had weekend discos for its kids. At one point there were a lot of self-consciously trendy and streetwise teenagers from Milan at the school and the DJ who oversaw that weekend’s disco thought he’d please his audience by playing then-modish big beat, drums and bass, UK garage and hard trance tunes. But he ended up nearly causing a riot. What did those trendy Italian teens want him to play? I Want to Break Free by Queen. All bloody evening.

Their popularity also transcends time. They remain fabulously popular today even though they’ve been creatively inert since 1991, when their singer Freddie Mercury passed away from AIDS.

I find this interesting because back in the days when they were a properly functioning band, friends of mine who considered themselves serious and knowledgeable connoisseurs of music would tell me that though they tried to be broad-minded, they just couldn’t stomach bloody Queen, whom they saw as purveyors of bloated, corny, stomp-along, guitar-twiddling shite. Meanwhile, other folk, who bought at most three CDs a year and barely knew the difference between Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley and Reg Presley – the majority of the British population in other words – believed Queen were the absolute bees’ knees.

Incidentally, it seemed ironic to me how popular Queen were in the 1970s and 1980s among guys who were unreconstructed, macho and laddish and who, in all likelihood, were pretty homophobic too. They were liable to punch you in the face if you suggested they were into anything that might be classified as ‘gay’ culture. But after a few moments of hearing the unashamedly camp Freddie Mercury crooning, “Oooh, you make me live… / Oooh, you’re my best friend!”, they’d be hugging each other, shedding sentimental tears and singing along in emotion-cracked voices.

I wasn’t greatly impressed by Bohemian Rhapsody when I caught up with it, sometime after speaking to Suresh De Silva. It takes many liberties with the truth. For example, the band weren’t on the wane before their barnstorming appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, which the film claims pulled them back from the brink. On the contrary, during the previous year and following the release of their 1984 album The Works, I remember them being as popular and prominent as ever. And there was no big emotional moment before they took the Wembley stage when Freddie told his bandmates he was HIV positive. In reality, he didn’t know this until 1987.

Meanwhile the film airbrushes away the band’s real-life moral warts and carbuncles. We get nothing about, for instance, their misguided and money-fuelled decision to play at the Sun City Super Bowl in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. This act of unprincipled greed earned them a ban by the British Musicians’ Union. Also doused in a tankerload of whitewash is the issue of Freddie’s promiscuity. In 1984, the real Freddie bragged to the DJ Paul Gambaccini with hedonistic and, considering the times, reckless abandon: “Darling, my attitude is ‘f**k it’. I’m doing everything with everybody.” But in Bohemian Rhapsody he’s presented as a victim, insecure about his sexuality and led astray by his personal manager Paul Prenter, who introduces him to a world of partying, orgy-ing and general dissolution.

Still, the sequence in the film with Mike Myers as a (fictional) record executive called Ray Foster, who’s aghast at the idea that Bohemian Rhapsody-the-song should be released as a single, is funny. “It goes on forever. Six bloody minutes!” To which Freddie retorts: “I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever.”

Personally, I thought 1970s Queen were great. They produced albums like Sheer Heart Attack (1974), A Night at the Opera (1975), A Day at the Races (1976) and News of the World (1977) that were studded with classic songs and, though they sometimes felt all over the place stylistically, were admirable for trying to explore a wide range of musical genres, everything from music-hall singalongs and salsa-y Spanish guitar workouts to blues and jazz and even, with 1974’s Stone Cold Crazy, nascent speed metal. The rip-roaring Death on Two Legs, which kicks off A Night at the Opera, is one of my favourite songs ever.

But for me they seemed to lose their creative mojo at the beginning of the 1980s. The last song by them that I liked was probably their 1981 duet with David Bowie, Under Pressure. Actually, I didn’t think much of Under Pressure at the time, but it’s grown on me since then. It’s certainly a zillion times better than Vanilla Ice’s dire 1990 single Ice Ice Baby, which appropriated Under Pressure’s memorably nagging bassline. (I remember being at a Saturday-night disco in my hometown in Scotland – the clubhouse of Peebles Rugby Club to be precise – when the DJ put on Ice Ice Baby. The bassline started and everyone cheered and hurried onto the dance floor, thinking it was Queen and David Bowie. Then the lyrics started: “Yo! Let’s kick it! Ice, ice baby…” Everyone threw up their hands in horror and shouted, “Och, shite! It’s Vanilla Ice!” The dance floor immediately cleared again.)

Anyway, a few days ago, taking advantage of the fact that Sri Lanka’s most recent Covid-19 lockdown has been lifted, I went for a walk and ended up at the area where Colombo’s Dehiwala Canal meets with the Indian Ocean. It’s a pleasantly grassy and leafy neighbourhood although, thanks to the condition of the water in the canal, it’s a bit smelly too. And lo and behold, on a wall standing at the canal’s southern bank, I saw further evidence of the global love for Queen.

Yes, it was a mural of Freddie Mercury in his moustached, short-haired, white-vested Live Aid incarnation, which presumably someone had painted after seeing Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018.

As I’ve suggested in this post, I have mixed feelings about Queen overall. But the fact that in the 21^st century a Sri Lankan graffiti artist was inspired to paint their iconic vocalist and master showman on an out-of-the-way, canal-side wall makes me feel strangely happy.

July 11, 2021

Rab Foster gets theatrical

I’m pleased to announce that my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers has been published in the July 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion. The Theatregoers is a sword-and-sorcery story in, I hope, the tradition of such revered pulp writers as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore and, as usual with my fantasy fiction, I have published it under the pen-name Rab Foster.

On this blog I’m not normally presumptuous enough to offer other writers, or aspiring writers, advice on how they should go about creating stories. On this occasion, though, I’ll suggest two strategies that helped me to put The Theatregoers together.

Firstly, when you have an idea for a story, get that idea written down as quickly as you can before it flits from your memory again. (At my age, things flit from my memory with terrifying speed.) I have a 17-page-long document on my computer hard drive containing more than 400 ideas I’ve had for stories over the years and I’m constantly adding to it.

Admittedly, many of those ideas will probably never see the light of day as stories and, to be honest, looking at some of the ideas I wrote down long ago thinking they were bolts of divine genius, I don’t think the world will be missing anything if they don’t. I doubt if anyone really wants to read a story about the notoriously bad Dundonian poet William McGonagall building a time machine in order to travel back in time to prevent the Tay Bridge Disaster from happening; or about a Sri Lankan tuk-tuk driver who’s secretly a superhero; or about ‘a fashion show for serial killers’, where the dresses have been fashioned out of… Well, you can probably guess what they’re made of.

The other writing strategy I’d suggest is to keep reviewing your list of ideas and particularly think about how two or more ideas can be incorporated into one story. In other words, don’t see each idea as a single seed from which a single story is grown. Many times, I’ve had an idea that’s looked good on paper but that has resolutely refused to develop into a story – until it’s occurred to me to try splicing it together with another, seemingly totally different idea elsewhere on the list.

In fact, with The Theatregoers, I ended up throwing no fewer than four disparate ideas from my 17-page list into the creative blender. I’d always wanted to write: (1) a story set in an abandoned city out in the middle of some inhospitable desert (similar to the setting of the 1921 H.P. Lovecraft story The Nameless City); (2) a story set in a theatre, where the characters would have adventures falling through trapdoors, scrabbling down stage curtains, flying about on wires above the stage, running through storerooms full of assorted props, and so on; (3) a story about vampire-like creatures that don’t drain their victims of blood but of moisture; and (4) a story about a tattooed person whose tattoos aren’t as inanimate as you’d expect, reminiscent of the title character in the classic Ray Bradbury collection The Illustrated Man (1951). Somehow, I came up with a single, hopefully coherent narrative.

For the next few weeks, the main page of the July 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here, while The Theatregoers itself can be accessed here.