Blood and Porridge – Page 10 – Ian Smith's blog on WordPress

October 28, 2023October 31, 2023

Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

© Duckworth Books

Another Halloween-inspired post…

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema. Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living. But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc. This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War. His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular. Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq. And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes. Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games. With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon. (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.) Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21^st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984). It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report. He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate… Too many opinions, too many feelings. That’s not what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.” So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework. The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc. It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their experiences of the conflict with the undead. The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched. Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense. For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A. I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics… We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.” But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work. And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though. An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly. To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too. It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro. Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener. He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him. Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction. But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism. Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long. I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes. Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London. There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II. She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland. Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’ Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.” That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones. Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis. Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada. They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake. Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food. Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours. “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore. A couple of times I stepped in human shit. Nobody was even bothering to bury it.” By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty. It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency. And the zombies aren’t even around. They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere. The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons. Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients. Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013. No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II. This gives it an oddly historical feel now. Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s. And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023. For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump. Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’. Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all. Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it. If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it. A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023

Jim Mountfield takes to the trees

© Spiral Tower Press

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has been on a roll this month – which, appropriately enough, is October, the month of Halloween. Already in October 2023 he’s had short stories appear in the online publication Schlock! Webzine and in the collection Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023. Now he’s just had a third story, entitled The Shelterbelt, published in Issue 3 of the magazine Witch House.

As its title implies, The Shelterbelt concerns a plantation of trees grown next to a property to shield it against the elements. In the story, the property is a farm in a remote part of southern Scotland. I didn’t have to look far for inspiration for The Shelterbelt. In 1977, my parents sold our farm in Northern Ireland and purchased and moved to a new farm in southern Scotland, near the town of Peebles. But the steading we found ourselves living in was hardly ‘new’ – it was a dilapidated and bleak-looking place at the time, with scarcely a tree anywhere, which was unfortunate because the steading was in a north-south-running valley and in the pathway of any bad weather borne by the north wind. Several times during our first few winters there, we had to dig our way out from our front door, so heavily had snow been piled against it. How long ago that seems now in these globally-warmed times…

My Dad immediately decided to create a shelterbelt on the northern side of the steading. I still remember the day when he, my Mum and a good friend from Northern Ireland, Hugh Buchanon, planted the saplings. Maybe I remember it because I discovered then how seriously my Dad – who was normally relaxed and easy-going – took his work. He was very exacting. He was very particular about how far apart those saplings were placed – not too close, not too distant. After an hour of listening to him, my Mum and Hugh looked ready to plant him along with the trees.

Meanwhile, a literary influence for The Shelterbelt is the 1914 short story Ancient Lights by the author, broadcaster and occultist Algernon Blackwood. And I’d be lying if I said a certain 1973 movie, about an uptight, virginal, Free Presbyterian policeman investigating a possible case of human sacrifice on a remote Scottish island, didn’t provide a little inspiration too.

For more information about Witch House magazine, click here. And Issue 3, containing my story and a dozen others, can be downloaded here for free.

October 19, 2023October 24, 2023

A Russell-ing in the dark

© Penguin Classics

Another post for Halloween…

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles. The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual. Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

Whatever. During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62). (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock). These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20^th-century American gothic. This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences. And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here. I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles. Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’. Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19^th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers. And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles. Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.” In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

© Columbia Pictures

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story. It’s told in the first-person by a 19^th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders. The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’. Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth. Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket. Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes. The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19^th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style. Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved. Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters. With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact. Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16^th / 17^th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay. Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim. The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her. Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young. Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial. Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19^th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music. The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories. But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it. He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore. Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.” A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen. He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus. The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten. However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures. The results, alas, represented neither director at their best. Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films. A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House. (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.) Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial. It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964). This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price. And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans. Nothing good comes of this, of course. Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work. Actually, there still hasn’t. But returning to Haunted Castles… I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

So… How about it Guillermo?

From penguinrandomhouse.com / © Charles Martin Bush

October 12, 2023October 12, 2023

Jim Mountfield is mad about books

© Cloaked Press LLC

Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023 is a new anthology of psychological horror stories published by Cloaked Press LLC. I’m delighted to say it includes a story I wrote under the nom de plume of Jim Mountfield, which I use for scary fiction. My tale is entitled One for the Books and is about weird, then macabre happenings in a second-hand bookshop that might – possibly – be taking place only in the fevered imagination of one of the bookshop’s customers.

The bookshop in the story is inspired by the real and wonderful Armchair Books, which resides at 72-74 West Port in Edinburgh. It’s been many years since I was last in the shop. I haven’t been in it since 2014, in fact. Back then, I wrote of it: “A guddle of boxes of super-cheap books on the pavement outside, its walls inside stacked to the ceiling with thousands, if not zillions, of tomes, it is actually two premises – number 72 mostly sells fiction, number 74 next door sells non-fiction… It does seem a bit better organised these days… In times past, the supposed alphabetical arrangement of the books’ authors would lead you on a merry dance, back and forth and into all sorts of awkward nooks and crannies. Also, the cranky and entertaining notices that used to be stuck on the walls, in which the management expressed its disdain for health-and-safety inspectors – I assume at some point the council criticised the place, with its vertiginously high shelves, for exposing customers to possible death-by-avalanche-of-books – seem to have all come down now.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic I worried about how Armchair Books was faring. And, although I was in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago, I didn’t have time to venture down to West Port to check if it was still on the go. Thankfully, according to its website, it is still operational. I hope the same applies to the other second-hand bookshops that I used to visit on West Port and along the adjoining Bread Street – Peter Bell Books, Edinburgh Books, Main Point Books, Pulp Fiction, etc. – and that made the neighbourhood such a pleasure to explore.

Meanwhile, Nightmare Fuel: Mind Terrors 2023, among whose 219 pages of madness my story lurks second from the end, can be purchased on Kindle or as a paperback here.

October 10, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 2)

© Penguin

One nice thing that’s happened to me during the past couple of years has been my discovery of how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was. I’d long been aware of her reputation, but until recently the only thing I’d read by her was her famous short story The Birds (1952).

However, I have lately rectified this by working my way through her best-known novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), as well as her short-story collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (1971). Regarding the collection, I didn’t think its title story was quite as good as the famous film it inspired, also called Don’t Look Now, in 1973 – but I thought some of the other stories in it, like A Border Line Case and The Way of the Cross, were crackers.

Now I’ve just completed another book of du Maurier’s short fiction called The Blue Lenses and Other Stories, which was originally published in 1959 as The Breaking Point. I’m happy to report that the tales in it are every bit as satisfying.

Much of the Don’t Look Now collection had a common theme, that of English people travelling abroad and having problems – by turns humorous, serious and horrible – as they leave their comfort zones and encounter the new and the strange. This theme reappears in a couple of stories in the The Blue Lenses one. Ganymede even uses the basic scenario of Don’t Look Now itself, i.e., an English visitor coming unstuck in Venice. The tale, though, isn’t a macabre one but a painful comedy of errors. An older gay Englishman lusts after a teenage Venetian waiter and gets his comeuppance from the lad’s shady relatives, who happily lead him on whilst milking him of his money. Ganymede has a few uncomfortable moments where you wonder if it’s being anti-gay or, alternatively, anti-Italian. But du Maurier – herself believed to have had a lesbian relationship with Gertrude Lawrence – gets away with it, balancing our sympathy for the pathetically naïve Englishman with our satisfaction at him getting his just deserts from the Italians. For all his pitifulness, he is still a predator.

The Chamois has an English couple travelling to some far-flung Greek mountains because the man, obsessed with hunting the goat-antelopes of the title, has been tipped off about the sighting of a notable and shootable specimen there. To get to the peaks that are its territory, they entrust themselves to the care of a goatherd-cum-mountain-guide with a primordial appearance. The woman, narrating the story, describes him as “wrapped in his hooded burnous, leaning upon his crook…” with “the strangest eyes… Golden brown in colour…” There follows a series of psychological revelations about the couple. The man hunts to make up for inadequacies in his psyche and the woman, shall we say, is simultaneously turned off and turned on by his hobby. And a weird, almost mythical narrative unfolds wherein they find it harder and harder to distinguish between the beast they’re seeking and man-beast who’s escorting them.

Similar weirdness occurs in the stories The Pool and The Lordly Ones – the former about a pubescent girl staying at her grandparents’ country house and experiencing strange dreams involving a pond in the woods beyond the garden, the latter about a misunderstood mute child who runs off with some unidentified ‘beings’ who come in the night while he and his family are holidaying on a remote moor. Both contain dashes of W.B. Yeats-style mysticism and Arthur Machen-style folk horror and are among the best stories in the book, even if in The Lordly Ones I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The remaining stories are admirably varied. The Menace is a comedy with a slight science-fictional element, about a movie heartthrob called Barry Jeans who sets hearts aflutter by communicating as few words and expressing as little emotion as possible onscreen. Offscreen he’s not much more vocal or expressive and listlessly leaves all decisions to his bossy wife and his sizeable entourage of hangers-on. Then some new technology ushers in ‘the feelies’, which promise to be as game-changing for the film industry as the arrival of ‘the talkies’. In the feelies, film stars are wired to a machine that transmits their sexual energy – what Austen Powers would call their ‘mojo’ – to the audiences watching them in the cinemas. Barry’s entourage are horrified when preliminary tests suggest that the inscrutable star’s mojo is almost non-existent. So, they embark on a drastic campaign to pep that mojo up. The Menace sees du Maurier taking the mickey out of Hollywood and I suspect it might have been inspired by some unedifying experiences with the place – for example, she was sued for breach of copyright after Rebecca was made into a film in 1939.

The Alibi is the collection’s most twisted tale, about a well-to-do and respectable man who one day seemingly flips: “He was aware of a sense of power within. He was in control. He was the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling.” He walks away from the routines, conventions and obligations of his upper-middle-class existence, invents a new identity for himself and secretly rents a room in a seedy part of London. Initially, he plans to commit murder – but his Nietzschean madness subsides somewhat and instead he starts living a parallel life as an aspiring artist, using the room as his studio. But his project gets knocked for six when the story reaches an unexpected and nasty conclusion.

Different again is The Archduchess, an exercise in magical realism. It describes the final days of a ruling dynasty in a Ruritanian microstate called Ronda, somewhere in southern Europe, which has discovered the secret of immortality. It’s difficult to know where du Maurier’s sympathies lie here. Is she writing in favour of the dynasty and, by extension, of aristocracies and the status quo everywhere? Or is she satirising it? One thing I will say – her account of a devious revolutionary named Markoi, who edits the main newspaper and uses it to seed the minds of the population with doubts, suspicions and eventual paranoia, so as to engineer the downfall of the ruling order, strikes a chord today. Markoi seems all too familiar in a modern world of fake news, where Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News helped propel Donald Trump into the American presidency and, in Britain, the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph did something similar with Boris Johnson.

Finally there’s the title story, The Blue Lenses, which I found terrifying. Its set-up is a familiar one, about a woman in a hospital recovering from an eye operation who discovers that things suddenly aren’t as they’re supposed to be. But unlike the hero in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), who removes the bandages from his eyes and finds that the world really has gone to hell, the nightmare experienced by the heroine of The Blue Lenses is ambiguous. The surreal, if not grotesque things she sees have a subjective quality and you wonder about her sanity. What makes the story more effective is her decision to pretend to the hospital staff around her that nothing is amiss, while she tries to figure out what’s happening. Her desperate efforts to stay composed heighten the horror of the situation.

As a collection, The Blue Lenses and Other Stories ticks off the checklist of things I want to find in a collection of short fiction: clear, lucid prose, plenty of incident, a variety of tones and genres, the writer’s willingness to use their imagination whether the story is grounded in reality or not, and a commitment at all times to telling an entertaining yarn. It’s another package of du Maurier marvelousness.

From famousauthors.org

October 6, 2023October 19, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

© Penguin Books

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later. And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20^th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971). When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly. Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment. Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1. I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic. Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too. Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect. Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras. The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness. Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable. Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

Then there’s the presentation of the story. Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film. As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play. (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.) It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium. The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively. And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside. Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work. Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured. We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides. When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain. John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat. Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter? But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping. But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art. That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality. As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one. And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting. In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths. However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier. The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.” Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father. She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.” She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird. Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type. She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots. However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos… It was the end. She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men. Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one. It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem. The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times. It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman. Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility. Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule. Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia. There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die. The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale. Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror. Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…

October 3, 2023January 1, 2024

Jim Mountfield eats his neeps

© Schlock! Webzine

We’re now into October, a month that climaxes with the festival of Halloween. Thus, it’s appropriate that I have just had a Halloween-themed short story published in the October 2023 of the online fiction publication Schlock! Webzine. Entitled The Turnip Thieves, it appears under the name of Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for horror, ghost and generally ‘dark’ stories.

The Turnip Thieves takes place on a Scottish hill farm in the early 1980s. It begins with a farmer noticing strange activity on a distant strip of ground where he’s planted turnips – ‘neeps’ as they’re called in the Scots language. As it’s one day before Halloween, he thinks he knows what’s afoot. Kids from a nearby town, he assumes, must be trying to steal his neeps, so they can make lanterns from them for the upcoming festival. And, vengefully, he sets off to intervene…

The story is a nostalgic invocation of a time before pumpkins became widely available in Scottish supermarkets and when Scottish trick-or-treaters – or ‘guisers’, to give them the correct Scottish terminology – had to make do with the turnip, the pumpkin’s humble root-vegetable cousin, as a substitute for fashioning Halloween lanterns. Actually, the shrunken, wizened visage of a turnip lantern is, to my mind, much creepier than that of a pumpkin one. On the other hand, howking the hard, pale flesh out of a turnip required a lot more effort than gutting a pumpkin did. And once you had a candle burning inside it, a turnip lantern stank… Or, as they say in Scotland, it reeked.

The main page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2023 edition – Volume 17, Issue 15 – can, for the next few weeks, be accessed here. The Turnip Thieves itself can be read here.

And during the run-up to Halloween, I hope to post a few things relating to the macabre, ghostly and generally dark on this blog, in keeping with the spirit of the season.

© Dave Cockburn

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023

Now expose it to garlic, holy water and sunlight

A while ago on this blog, I conducted the following thought-experiment. Imagine that current trends result in the world becoming a globally-warmed, war-ravaged hellhole inhabited by only a few surviving remnants of humanity. But those remnants somehow manage to lay their hands on a time machine and realise they can send an assassin back in time, in the manner of the James Cameron / Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator (1984). Who would they have their assassin target in, say, the late 20^th century to change the course of history and prevent the world from turning into crap?

As I mused at the time, “The young Donald Trump? The young Vladimir Putin…? Neither. I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the one the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.”

Wizened 92-year-old media mogul Murdoch was recently in the news because he announced his decision to step down as head of News Corp and the Fox Corporation in favour of his son Lachlan. Murdoch certainly looks his age, but it sometimes felt like he was going to live forever and keep running his media empire forever. Regular nocturnal blood-meals sucked from the throats of helpless victims are evidently good for the constitution. That said, lately, the old monster had begun to look a little vulnerable, both in his business dealings and in his personal life.

April this year saw his Fox News network fork out nearly 790 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the voting-equipment company Dominion. This was after the network told outrageous porkies about the company switching votes in the 2020 US presidential election so that Donald Trump wouldn’t win it. Among the guff peddled by Fox was the claim that the company was owned by Venezuelans and had experience of swinging elections for the late Hugo Chavez.

Meanwhile, though old Rupe had once wooed the ladies with confident charm, like an extremely shrivelled George Clooney, he’s also looked less sure-footed on the romantic front recently. In 2022, he ended his fourth marriage, to Jerry Hall, by unchivalrously sending her an email to inform her that she’d been dumped. Hall was unsurprisingly miffed, as during the Covid-19 pandemic she’d gone out of her way to ensure her aged husband stayed isolated and avoided getting the virus, which for someone of his years would probably have been a death sentence. Earlier this year, he announced his engagement to former radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but this lasted just two weeks. That’s even shorter than a Liz Truss premiership. Apparently, Murdoch started to panic at Smith’s loopy evangelical-Christian pronouncements, which included the assertion that Tucker Carlson was ‘a messenger from God.’

But you can’t keep an old horn-dog down. Rupe is currently engaged again, this time to Elena Zhukova, who was once married to the Russian billionaire – don’t mention the ‘O’ word – Alexander Zhukova. At this rate, Murdoch will have got himself betrothed 16 more times before he reaches treble-figures.

Now that Murdoch has stepped back from the media-controlling activities that have kept him busy for the past 71 years, ever since the age of 21 when he inherited an Adelaide newspaper, the News, from his dad, what legacy does he leave? If he had a shred of conscience, morality and decency – which of course he doesn’t have, which makes this an academic statement – he’d surely howl in despair and incarcerate himself in a Trappist monastery for the rest of his days to do penance for his multiple sins. Or just top himself. Murdoch’s media operations have, over decades, caused massive harm to the well-being of humanity.

He pushed the rapacious neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with its credo that greed is good, the market should be worshipped and the financial safety nets and infrastructure that held societies together, and looked after their most vulnerable members, weren’t worth bothering about. Thatcher said it all when she declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society.” His outlets have gone to great lengths to ignore and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade climate change is happening and poses a terrifying threat to our civilisation’s future. In Australia, a country that’s already baking and burning as the climate catastrophe unfolds, Murdoch newspapers like the Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph cheer-led right-wing moon-howler Tony Abbott into power in 2013 – Abbott once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’. And in the USA, Murdoch has used Fox News to build up a vast, paranoid, delusional, far-right-wing ecosystem whereby millions of gullible people now accept the lies of Donald Trump as gospel truth. Fox could very well see to it that Trump wins the presidency again in 2024. At which point, the world’s biggest superpower will make the transition into authoritarianism.

Murdoch is truly the man with the reverse-Midas touch. Everything he sticks his finger in turns into manure. Yet this never seems to stop him generating huge amounts of money, so he’s happy. No wonder his son James, that rare thing indeed, a Murdoch with a conscience, quit the board of News Corp in 2020, sickened by the horrors his old man had empowered.

In the UK, Murdoch has long exerted his toxic influence through the swathe of national newspapers he owns: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday. His reign of terror began when he acquired the Sun in 1969. The history of that particular tabloid since then, when it hasn’t devoted itself to gleeful, lowest-common-denominator stupidity with headlines like ‘WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND’ and ‘FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER’, has been an unrelenting saga of horribleness.

In the 1980s, when the Sun was under the stewardship of the repugnant Kelvin MacKenzie, it revelled in homophobia and gloated over the AIDS epidemic, which it dubbed the ‘gay plague’ and insinuated straight people had nothing to worry about. It catered for the ‘dirty mac’ brigade with its ‘page three’ girls, at least one of whom, Samantha Fox, was only 16 when it displayed her topless. And it lied through its teeth about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans at the 1988 Hillsborough Disaster, to cover up the failings of the police that day. That led an embargo of the Sun in Merseyside, which is still in force now. If only the British population generally treated the rag with the same contempt that the Scousers do. (I also admired the attitude of the late playwright Dennis Potter, whom the Sun dubbed ‘Old Flaky’ on account of his crippling psoriasis. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he named his cancer ‘Rupert’.)

More recently, the Sun provided a platform for Katie Hopkins, someone even more repellent than MacKenzie, who likened migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and advocated the use of gunboats to stop them. And its incessant abuse of the European Union, European countries and European people (‘frogs’ and ‘krauts’ to a man and woman) climaxed with the newspaper’s enthusiastic support for Brexit – ‘BELEAVE IN BRITAIN’, its front page declared on the day of the referendum in 2016. It was no surprise that Murdoch welcomed Brexit, regardless of the economic, diplomatic and reputational damage it inflicted on the UK. He famously commented that while he could impose his will on one country’s leader, at No 10 Downing Street, he wasn’t powerful enough to do that with the combined force of 28 countries’ leaders, in Brussels.

Meanwhile, during the noughties, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, under the editorship of flame-haired gorgon Rebakah Brooks, was so determinedly on the sniff for a good story that it hacked into the phones of, among others, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, dead British soldiers and victims of the 2005 London bombings. This proved too much for even its ghoulish proprietor and he axed the News of the World in 2011. Mind you, he soon replaced it with the Sun on Sunday, so not much changed.

With the Sun leading the way, Britain’s other, supposedly more ‘respectable’ right-wing newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express – happily dived into the same midden of lies, slander and xenophobia, with the result that over the past half-century the popular press in Britain has done much to cheapen public discourse, making it shrill, prurient, mean-spirited and pig-ignorant. Murdoch can also take credit for inspiring the birth, or spawning, of alleged news channel GB News in 2021, which clearly wanted to become the British equivalent of his ghastly Fox News. The conspiracy theories it peddled about the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines, often voiced by that havering bawbag Neil Oliver, mirror the work Fox News did in the USA to make people resistant to vaccinating themselves against the virus. The fact that Murdoch was one of the first people on the planet to get the vaccine, yet he happily let his media outlets promote scepticism of it among their audience – who tended to be older and more at risk from Covid-19 – shows his ethics are non-existent.

Sadly, in Britain, non-Conservative politicians are so frightened of Murdoch’s newspapers that they feel obliged to cosy up to him. In the late 1990s, Labour Party leader Tony Blair got so thick with Murdoch that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids. In return, the Sun displayed the front-page headline ‘THE SUN BACKS BLAIR’ prior to the 1997 general election that saw him win power. Murdoch’s newspapers subsequently supported Blair during his participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an operation founded on lies and resulting in disaster. I have no doubt that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Party leader, and basically Tony-Blair-lite, will prostate himself before Murdoch in a similar, craven manner.

Though the Nosferatu-esque Murdoch is no longer at the helm of the media empire he’s built, he’s made it clear that he still intends to exert influence from the sidelines. And his son Lachlan is such a piece of work it sounds like that empire will conduct its business with even more malevolence in the future. The fact that Lachlan has just appointed Tony ‘climate-change-is-crap’ Abbott to the Fox board doesn’t bode well.

When Murdoch informed his employees of his decision to step down, he told them to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.” Really, Rupe? Improve? You did nothing to improve the world. Rather, your shitty news outlets helped turn it into a sewer.

September 21, 2023

Rab Foster does fear the reaper

Vision of the Reaper, a short story by Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fiction of a usually sword-and-sorcerous hue, is one of the tales in a new collection called Fall into Fantasy 2023 from the publisher Cloaked Press. The story takes place in a giant wheatfield and has among its ingredients not only the titular, fearsome Reaper but also windmills, crop circles, corn dollies and pretty-much everything connected with the culture of crops and harvesting that I regard as cool. (Not scarecrows, though – I think scarecrows are overused in the fantasy genre.)

The story also introduces a character called Cranna the Crimson, about whom I hope to write more fiction in the future. She’s a swordswoman who, in addition to having to deal with the usual sword-and-sorcery fixtures of evil magicians, monstrous creatures and so on, has to deal with medieval-style male chauvinists as well. Cranna is well-equipped for this, being the sort who takes no shit from anyone.

Offering 16 stories and 343 pages of fantasy-related goodness, Fall into Fantasy 2023 is available on kindle and as a paperback here.

And of course, this gives me an excuse to link you to one of the greatest songs in American rock-music history. Guess which song.

September 11, 2023September 19, 2023

A Dad story

Back in 2006, I returned to my family’s home in the town of Peebles, in southeastern Scotland, for a fortnight’s vacation from a job I was doing in a particularly authoritarian, under-developed and hard-to-live-in country. As that country offered little in the way of social life, I had plenty of free time on my hands when I wasn’t at my workplace. And to fill in that free time, I’d spent the past year working on a project initiated by my brother Gareth and his mate Douglas Swan. Basically, Gareth and Douglas wanted to publish a book about the history of a local football team, Peebles Rovers. They conducted the research for it and sent the notes, newspaper cuttings, interview transcripts and so on to me. I’d always fancied myself as a writer, so I took on the job of turning their research into prose.

The research had all been written up and the book was soon to be published when I arrived home that August. As a thank-you for the work I’d put into it, Gareth and Dougie bought me a present: a ticket for the Rolling Stones concert on Friday, August 25^th, at Hampden Stadium in Glasgow, which coincided with my return to Scotland.

This was a little sudden and unexpected. Also, my parents’ house, where I was staying, was offline and I didn’t have a phone – so dictatorial was the country I was working in that private citizens weren’t allowed to carry one. Thus, I was somewhat unprepared that Friday morning when I set off, via bus from Peebles to Edinburgh, and then train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. I hadn’t, for example, been able to search for accommodation that night in Glasgow, after the concert. “Och,” I thought to myself in my haphazard way, “I’m sure something will turn up.”

However, before I left the house in Peebles, my Dad told me: “If you can’t find a place to stay, and have problems getting home, call me from a pay-phone. I’ll come and collect you.”

“Sure,” I said. But as I prided myself on being an independent, ‘low-maintenance’ sort of person, I had no intention of phoning him late at night, and probably getting him out of bed, to lament that I needed help getting home.

Anyway… I got to Glasgow and first of all visited the Tourist Information Centre in George Square to ask if the city had any hotel rooms free that evening. “Not really,” the lady at the desk replied. “There’s a big concert here today, you see…” Well, I knew that, having come to attend it. From what she said, it sounded like the nearest hotel that did have vacancies was halfway between Glasgow and John O’Groats. Oh well, I thought. I’ll just have to head back to Edinburgh afterwards and see if I can get to Peebles from there. Because the Edinburgh Festival was in full swing at the time, all accommodation in the Scottish capital was already booked too. It’d been snapped up months ago.

From mixcloud.com

I enjoyed the Rolling Stones and the Charlatans, their support band, at Hampden that evening. Following the show, I hopped on a late train to Edinburgh. Unfortunately, I arrived in Edinburgh sometime after the final bus of the day had left the city for Peebles. What to do? Well, from previous experience of the Edinburgh Festival, I knew it was virtually impossible to find a taxi at night-time. But there was a very late bus, leaving at around three o’clock in the morning, for the town of Penicuik, which was halfway between Edinburgh and Peebles. From Penicuik, home was another ten miles away. First, you had to traverse the wilds of Leadburn Moor, then you had to make your way along the more sheltered and scenic Eddleston Valley.

Ten miles, I thought to myself in a gung-ho manner, having downed quite a few pints that day and being full of Dutch courage. I could walk that in two-and-a-half hours. And, just in case there are any cars using the road at that late hour – I can always try hitchhiking. Maybe I’ll strike it lucky and get a lift, and get back to Peebles sooner.

Because it was Festival time, many of the pubs in Edinburgh were open very late. And because I felt I could do with just a wee bit more Dutch courage, I spent the run-up to three o’clock sinking more pints in the Scotsman Lounge on Cockburn Street. Finally, it was time to go. I got on the three o’clock bus and a half-hour later got off in the centre of Penicuik, which was utterly still and silent.

From there, I walked down a street towards the southern edge of the town. I didn’t see another soul on the pavements. Neither did a single vehicle pass on the road. The outskirts of town neared and, beyond, the darkness of Leadburn Moor beckoned. I steeled myself. Okay, I thought. This is going to be a hell of a walk. But I can do it…

As I got to the town’s edge, and the beginning of the darkness, a pair of headlights went blazing past on the other side of the road – northwards, into Penicuik, the opposite direction from where I was going. A pity, I thought. But there’s at least one person on the road at this hour. Maybe there’ll be others, heading my way…

And sure enough, a minute later, I heard a car engine approaching behind me – driving southwards, towards Peebles! I turned just before the headlights reached me and stuck out my hitchhiking thumb. The car passed, and slowed, and stopped a few yards ahead. Fortune was smiling on me for sure. I ran to the car, grabbed the passenger’s door, yanked it open, stuck my head in and blurted: “Are you going towards Peebles – ?”

My voice died. For sitting in the driver’s seat was… my Dad.

I spluttered, “What are you doing here?”

“Och,” he said, “I woke up a while ago and thought to myself, that fellah hasn’t come home yet. So I wondered what you would do. I figured you’d be daft enough to get the bus from Penicuik and try walking home from there. So I thought I’d get in the car and take a wee scoot up the road and have a look for you. I spotted you on the pavement there a minute ago, found a place to turn and came back.”

I didn’t know whether I should feel annoyed, insulted, pleased, amused or relieved. I probably ended up feeling a mixture of all five, but the biggest feeling was one of relief.

That wasn’t the only occasion that my auld man, kind and shrewd, came to my rescue. But it was perhaps the most memorable one.

My Dad passed away at the end of last month, aged 88. So I thought I would share this Dad story with you.

Four years after the event described above, I met up with my Dad for a week’s holiday in Malta. Yes, we did end up one day in the pub in Valetta where thirsty movie star Oliver Reed breathed his last whilst filming Ridley Scott’s Gladiator there in 1999.