H.P. Lovecraft – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2024

It’s that time of year again – October 31^st, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by displaying ten items of creepy, frightening or unsettling artwork that, during the past year, I’ve stumbled across in my Internet wanderings and taken a shine to. And this time, I’ll feature a few pictures that aren’t just dark in tone but actually relate to Halloween.

So, to set the mood, here’s a picture called Halloween by the Ohio artist Maggie Vandewalle who, her website explains, “has used watercolour or graphite to convey her love of the organic world and that of a really good story.” This has led to her producing many images of animals linked to the occult: cats, bats, crows, hares. She also does a good job of drawing trees, and I find this landscape particularly gorgeous. Few things are more evocative than looking at the colours of an evening sky through a mesh of darkening tree-branches.

© Maggie Vandewalle

Earlier this month – October 7^th – was the 175^th anniversary of the death of America’s premier writer of macabre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Here’s something Poe-esque, an illustration for his story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by the New York-born, New Jersy-raised and Connecticut-dwelling writer and illustrator Robert Lawson. Lawson’s speciality was children’s books – his work adorns such classics as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) – and as this gallery page for the Goldstein Lawson Collection shows, he had a flair for drawing fairy tale and mythological creatures. However, in 1931, he won an award for creating an etching for Poe’s famous tale of familial decline, madness and destruction. As my digital copy of the etching is murky and wouldn’t look good in the cramped confines of this blog, here’s the clearer, preliminary pencil-drawing Lawson made for it. As the late Roger Corman, director of the famous 1960 film version House of Usher, once commented, “The house is the monster.” It certainly looks it in this.

From feuilleton / © Estate of Robert Lawson

From Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker. With yet another Dracula film adaptation, Roger Eggers’ Nosferatu, scheduled for release at the end of this year, I thought it timely to include this illustration featuring Stoker’s legendary vampire count by Spanish painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente. It depicts the scene where Dracula crawls down his castle wall, “face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, fingers and toes grasping “the corners of the stones”, descending “with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.” In keeping with Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is still an old man at this point – but Vicente’s version is an old man who looks like he can take care of himself and whom you wouldn’t want to mess with. Indeed, he makes me think of the late silver-haired American character-actor Dennis Farina, who specialised in playing tough mobsters and cops (and who’d been a Chicago police detective before taking up acting). Though it’s Dennis Farina with red eyes and fangs.

From bookpatrol.net / © Fernando Vicente

And from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft. Just over a year ago, the Scottish actor David McCallum – best known for his TV roles in The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), The Invisible Man (1975), Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and NCIS (2003-23) – passed away. In the tributes that followed, there wasn’t much mention of the fact that McCallum was also a musician and writer. And nothing was said about his prolific career as an audiobook narrator, a career that extended to the weird, baroque and morbid world of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Among the Lovecraft stories he narrated was The Rats in the Walls (which can be heard here on YouTube). I like this cover illustration from the original LP of the recording, designed by Brooklyn artists Leo and Diane Dillon, with its giant skull (composed of normal-sized skulls and other bones) and an insane green face, seemingly spewing yellow bile, emerging from the bottom of the wall behind. More on the Dillons can be found here and here – the latter site featuring some cracking cover art they did for the 1972 Ray Bradbury novel The Halloween Tree.

From pinterest.com / © Leo and Diane Dillon

Old bones are also on view in this image, which I’ve seen called The Boy in the Skeleton on social media. It’s by the Dutch engraver and woodcutter Christoffel van Sichem the Younger, who lived from the late 16^th to the mid-17^th century. I presume the panic-stricken lad, inside the larger and rather insouciant-looking skeleton, serves as a metaphor for how the human soul is imprisoned within a cage of flesh and bone, despite that cage being a fragile and ultimately perishable one.

From x.com

Right, back to the theme of Halloween. I love this picture by the Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort. Entitled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s obviously inspired by the much-loved, animated TV Halloween special of the same name, which was based on the cartoon-strip creations of Charles M. Schultz and first broadcast in 1966. It shows the thumb-sucking, security-blanket-clutching Linus Van Pelt venturing into his local pumpkin patch to await the coming of the alternative Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin. Linus can be discerned in the middle distance of Delort’s composition, while the Great Pumpkin – possibly – can be glimpsed on the end of a faraway cloud. But it’s the satanically-grinning pumpkins in the foreground that command your attention.

© Nico Delort

Also satanic is this picture by British artist Dave Kendall, who’s worked in collaboration with talents as diverse as Pat Mills (founder of the world’s greatest sci-fi comic, 2000AD), heavy metal titans Metallica and the late Lovecraftian author Brian Lumley. Among Kendall’s dark, brooding and frequently twisted creations, I find this one of the most disturbing. Its image of a bloody-faced nun, with grotesquely elongated fingers, is inspired by a short story called The Hands. This was penned in 1986 by the esteemed Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell and can be read here.

© Dave Kendall

More female monstrosities are displayed in this picture. All I can determine about these bat-ladies is that they’re the work of an Austrian artist called Robert Loewe and appeared in the February 11^th, 1913 edition of the weekly satirical magazine Die Muskete.

From thefugitivesaint.tumblir.com

Meanwhile, it’s a female doing the screaming – in impeccable, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed Japanese manga style – on this cover illustration for the appropriately named Halloween Comics. The artist is Kazuo Umezo, known in Japan as ‘the god of horror manga’. For inspiration, Umezo has often drawn on traditional Japanese folklore and legends and he’s made this argument against the many people – parents, editors, educators – who’ve urged him to ‘think of the children’ and tone down the horror content of his work: “Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal. They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life. Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history. It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories.” More of Umezo’s work, definitely not toned down, can be viewed on this entry dedicated to him on the website Monster Brains.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Kazuo Umezu

Finally, to end things on a gentler note, here’s a picture I appreciate both as a cat-lover and as someone who finds graveyards fascinating – one of a cat (black, of course) exploring a graveyard at night. It’s from the cover of a ‘cozy mystery’ novel entitled Witch Way to Murder (2005) by Shirley Damsgaard and it’s by the New York artist Tristan Elwell. A more recent and better-known cover illustration by Elwell, which also involves a cat, is the one adorning John Scalzi’s bestselling and award-winning satirical novel Starter Villain (2023).

From unquietthings.com / © Tristan Elwell

Enjoy Halloween!

February 14, 2023February 16, 2023

More sinister sides of Singapore

© Epigram Books

A couple of months ago on this blog, I reviewed an anthology of horror stories set in modern-day Singapore called, appropriately, The New Singapore Horror Collection, written by local author S.J. Huang. Now I’ve just finished reading a collection called Fright 1, containing 11 more scary stories set in the southeast Asian city-state, which my partner was kind enough to buy for me as a Christmas present.

Unlike The New Singapore Horror Collection, each story in Fright 1 is penned by a different person. These 11 writers were the top-ranking entrants in a short-fiction competition held last year. As the book’s introduction explains, Fright 1 “showcases the winners and finalists of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, and celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.”

The first thing that struck me about Fright 1 was the preponderance of female writers – eight out of 11. This might be a surprise to the many people who’ve traditionally associated the horror genre with male writers, although anyone familiar with the work of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, May Sinclair, Daphne du Maurier, Anne Rice, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the criminally underrated Dorothy K. Haynes, to say nothing of Mary Shelley, would argue otherwise. Thus, the collection was doubly interesting for me. Not only did its stories have a setting, Singapore, that I’m not very familiar with, but many of its themes were ones that impact on women – arranged marriages, pregnancy, sexting and, generally, being wronged by duplicitous men. These being horror stories, such themes are refracted through a lens that sends them into the realm of the supernatural and macabre.

Fright 1 gets off to a solid start with Meihan Boey’s The General’s Wife, which is set in past times and is about an unremarkable young woman (‘with crooked shoulders and a pockmarked face’) whose family are desperate to get her married off to someone, anyone, so that they no longer have to be responsible for her. When a mysterious, older, wealthy man known as the ‘General’, living on one of Singapore’s little satellite islands, requests her hand in marriage for no obvious reason, they don’t ask questions. She’s hurriedly packed off to the island. What follows is a tale of skulduggery involving deceit and sorcery, with suggestions of Bluebeard and even Jane Eyre (1847), impressively told and grippingly paced. My only criticism is that I found the ending slightly rushed, although it contains a satisfying hint that the story’s narrator is no longer the shrinking violet she used to be.

Also set in historical Singapore is Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree, which is about a kampung – the Malaysian term for village – that’s terrorised by a pontianak when it takes up residence by the tree of the title and starts making “agonised wails that pierced the night and made all the villagers rush to slam their windows shut, bolt their doors and hold each other tight.” According to Wikipedia, a pontianak is a supernatural creature found in Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that “usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a child. Alternatively, it is often described as a vampiric, vengeful female spirit.” A woman in the village – evidently the only person there with a spine – resolves to go and tell the ponianak to, basically, shut up. To her surprise, she finds herself developing a bond with the creature. She also learns that they have more in common that she could ever have imagined.

Meanwhile, a non-folkloric and very modern supernatural being is devised for Kelly Leow’s story Breakwater. This posits the idea that people subjected to extreme humiliation on social media, so that their lives are ruined, they end up living in shame and they vanish from their former social circles, actually, to a certain extent, ‘die’. Not enough to leave behind a ghost, as many people believe happens when you physically die, but enough to create a semi-ghost, a ‘shade’. Breakwater features a serial online-abuser being trailed, unbeknownst to him, by the shades of his former victims – one of which partly narrates the story. I liked Breakwater a lot, not only because its central conceit feels genuinely new, but also because it’s set in Singapore’s East Coast Park. The park is at the back of my residence and is an evocative place at night, one where, as Leow observes, “Cargo ships form a ghostly city out on the horizon, lights glittering in rows like the windows of apartments.”

Among the male writers represented, Teo Kai Xiang’s Untitled Train Story uses another well-known part of Singapore as its setting, the city’s MRT system. Workers digging out a new MRT line discover a mysterious tunnel that seems to have existed a long time before trains began running underground. It’s apparently man-made, its walls are covered in strange symbols, and it’s formed out of some ‘sleek and almost metallic black substance’. I began the story wondering if it would turn into a Singaporean variant on H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal story Pickman’s Model (1927), which helped establish the trope, now common in the horror genre, of fleshing-eating, ghoul-like creatures living in secrecy under the streets of a modern-day city – see, for example, the movies Death Line (1973) and C.H.U.D. (1984). Later, however, it becomes clear that Xiang’s story has more in common with a different strand of Lovecraft’s work – his tales of cosmic horror. There’s something at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just deadly. It also has the power to do disturbing things to the minds of those who encounter it and manage to survive.

For my money, however, the collection’s best tale is Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau, which in Malay means ‘green ghost’. It’s narrated by a young girl who becomes obsessed with a ghost, a female one, that’s said to haunt her Singaporean public housing estate: “Some doubted her existence; merely a hyper-localised myth to get children to return early and in bed before eleven, but I knew she had always been here, biding her time.” The story is atmospheric and also manages the important trick of making the reader both frightened of its ghost and sympathetic towards it. At the same time, Chua makes it believable by lacing the supernatural plot with descriptions of the block and its assorted inhabitants (“Despite the decrepit state of some of the storeys, the residents were full of kindness and humanity”) and with accounts of the girl’s mum – a hard-pressed single mother whose desperate attempts to make money and keep them afloat gradually become shady and even criminal. With its blend of the ghostly, the grittily realistic and an urban myth that might not be so mythical, Hantu Hijau reminded me slightly of the Clive Barker story The Forbidden (1986), which later became the basis for the Candyman movies.

Not quite everything in the collection was to my tastes. I felt a few stories had rather too much happening for them to be properly frightening. Also, a couple of times, the social issues being explored were used for ‘body-horror’ moments that had me thinking of films like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) – good, grotesquely-surreal fun, yes, but too far-fetched for the build-up that’d preceded them. Maybe it’s just me. I feel that to be truly scary, a story has to be at least partway believable. But if it contains too many incidents, or too much over-the-top gloop, it becomes less believable and hence less scary. Overall, though, I was impressed by Fright 1 and I strongly recommend it.

For the record, the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize judges ranked Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree as the third-best entry, Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau as the runner-up, and Kelly Leow’s Breakwater as the winner. The collection can be purchased here, as can an audiobook version of it.

November 8, 2022

Rab Foster gets starstruck

© Aphelion Webzine

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion. The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh. It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke. The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer. If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.

The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine. So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’. Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.

For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.

September 2, 2022September 2, 2022

Rab Foster gets a book deal

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new short story published in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. It’s entitled The Library of Vadargarn and is about a tough, unscrupulous swordsman – is there any other type in sword-and-sorcery stories? – who agrees to transport a strange book in a city where books, reading and libraries are banned.

I should say I’ve always been fascinated by stories involving imaginary, fantastical and / or sinister books, such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Book of Sand in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1975 short story of the same name; The King in Yellow in Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 short-story collection of the same name (okay, actually an imaginary play rather than an imaginary book); and the granddaddy of spooky made-up books, The Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, which was supposedly written by ‘the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ in the 8th century and translated into English in Elizabethan times by Dr John Dee, no less.

I’m also a sucker for fantastical or sinister libraries, like the one featured in the short story The Library of Babel (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges again; or the one that appears near the end of Umberto Eco’s medieval detective novel The Name of the Rose (1980) – Eco gently takes the piss out of Borges by having it run by a blind, malevolent librarian called Jorge of Burgos.

Not that any of the above works had any influence on The Library of Vadargarn. Weirdly enough, the only thing that might have influenced it was the novel I was reading at the time I wrote it, Still Midnight (2009) by the Scottish writer Denise Mina. This ‘tartan noir’ crime thriller is about a businessman getting kidnapped and, while his family try to put together the ransom money, being held prisoner in a disused furnace in an old Glaswegian factory… Which may have had some bearing on where the climax of my story takes place.

For the next few weeks, The Library of Vadargarn can be accessed here.

June 25, 2022

Literary things

© The Turman-Foster Company / Universal Pictures

I reckon John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing is one of the best horror films ever. Its story of a shape-shifting alien organism that infiltrates a base in Antarctica, absorbing and assuming the forms of more and more of the base’s human (and canine) personnel, is a masterpiece of claustrophobia, paranoia and all-round scariness.

And its special effects, courtesy of make-up / effects genius Rob Bottin, massively raised the bar for what was achievable in horror movies at the time. During those moments when it reveals itself, Bottin’s alien Thing is a hellish, glistening, squirming, tentacled nightmare made of bits and pieces of all the Earth creatures it’s consumed already. It resembles a canvas painted and splattered simultaneously by Hieronymus Bosch and Jackson Pollock.

What makes Bottin’s work all the more remarkable, and believable, is that it consists of real, solid, practical effects. For The Thing was made in the days was before digital technology took over and filmmakers went crazy using cartoonish and insubstantial-looking computer-generated imagery. That’s the reason why I’ve never bothered watching Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s 2011 prequel to Carpenter’s movie, also called The Thing. Although practical special effects were used during the prequel’s shooting, studio executives later lost their nerve, decided 2011 audiences couldn’t handle an absence of CGI and had the wretched stuff superimposed over those practical effects in post-production.

Anyway, today – June 25^th – is exactly 40 years since Carpenter’s The Thing was first released in cinemas. Which, as well as making me feel bloody ancient, makes we want to post something about it on this blog. But rather than write about the movie itself, as countless film critics, commentators and enthusiasts have over the years, I thought I’d look instead at its literary roots. Because The Thing is an adaptation (scripted by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt) of a novella called Who Goes There?, written by science-fiction writer and editor John W. Campbell and published in 1938.

Who Goes There? had already been filmed in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby and produced by the legendary Howard Hawks. The 1951 version keeps the story’s basic premise of the crew of a polar camp coming up against a malevolent alien. But instead of depicting it as a shape-shifting beastie, which would have been difficult to do convincingly in 1951, the Hawks / Nyby film merely depicts it as a lumbering, pasty-skinned, dome-headed muscle-man played by none other than James Arness, later to star in the 1950s-1970s Western TV show Gunsmoke. Howard Hawks’s trademark no-nonsense directorial style and brisk, punchy dialogue are much in evidence in The Thing from Another World and it’s often been speculated that he, rather than Nyby, shot much of the film.

© Winchester Pictures Corporation / RKO

John Carpenter was well-known for his admiration of Howard Hawks and his 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13 in particular shows a big Hawksian influence. So, when Carpenter’s version of The Thing was announced, I suspect many critics assumed it’d be a straightforward remake of the 1951 movie. And I suspect that’s why it got such a hostile reception when it was released in 1982. For although the movie has since been reappraised and is now regarded as a sci-fi / horror classic, it initially earned Carpenter some of the worst reviews of his career. I seem to remember, for instance, the Observer slamming it under the headline JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER. Those 1982 critics got something very different from what they were expecting and didn’t react well.

What they got, in fact, was a film capturing the shape-shifting concept of the alien in the real source material, the 1938 story by John W. Campbell – a story most of those critics were probably unfamiliar with.

I recently came across and read Who Goes There? online. What did I think of it?

Well, what I immediately thought after reading it was “Phew!” Experienced in 2022, with its dollops of torturous pose and pages upon pages of dialogue-framed exposition, Campbell’s story is hard going indeed.

It’s fun to see so many character-names that crop up in Carpenter’s film – McReady (in the film spelt ‘MacReady’), Blair, Copper, Garry, Norris, Clark, Benning – but the descriptions of those characters are madly overwrought. The hero McReady is likened by Campbell to “a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood… And he was bronze – his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath the heavy brows were bronze.” This Wagnerian, and bronze, version of McReady is far removed from the morose, tetchy git played in the film by Kurt Russell.

The scientist Blair, meanwhile, is described with this peculiar sentence: “His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy grey underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial quiff of stiff, greying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow’s head.” At least he sounds more like his cinematic incarnation, who’s played by the character actor Wilfred Brimley.

© Barnes & Noble

How the characters discover and bring into their camp their soon-to-be-unwelcome visitor is related in three pages of conversational backstory, which includes such unlikely pieces of dialogue as: “Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.” Later, as the Thing starts to imitate the base’s inhabitants, there are many talky pages where people speculate on its biology, its capabilities and how it can be detected; and also, where they start to crack up with paranoia. “You sit as still as a bunch of graven images,” exclaims one man while his colleagues regard him suspiciously. “You don’t say a word, but oh Lord, what expressive eyes you’ve got. They roll around like a bunch of glass marbles spilling down a table. They wink and blink and stare and whisper things.”

There are moments when Campbell’s prose conveys the bleakness of the situation, recording how the Antarctic wind created an “uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove” and how “the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp”. But overall, thanks to its dire writing, Who Goes There? is a work to be endured rather than enjoyed. It isn’t a patch on that other famous 1930s tale of Antarctica-set horror, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936).

Still, the story provides the film with its most celebrated scene, the ‘blood-test’ one wherein McReady hits on a method of identifying who’s-been-got and who’s not. However, while John W. Campbell has McReady laboriously testing the blood of some 35 base-members, in the movie John Carpenter waits until there’s only half-a-dozen men left standing, which makes his enactment of the scene much more intense, focused and suspenseful.

And to be fair to Campbell, his story clarifies the Thing’s modus operandi. At times the film is hazy about just what the humans are up against. For example, watching The Thing, I was initially puzzled by the idea that the intruder could take the form of more than one victim at a time. In the story, it’s made clear that when it absorbs an organism it adds the organism’s body mass to its own; and when the organism is replaced, that hives off again with the original’s mass. Meanwhile, the original Thing goes back to its original bulk too, free to absorb and replicate something else.

Then there’s the sub-plot with Blair. In both the novella and film, Blair loses his mind as the horror unfolds and is locked up for his own and everyone else’s safety. It later becomes apparent that he’s part of the Thing too, has its alien intelligence, and has spent his time in captivity assembling a mysterious machine. The novella describes how he’s imprisoned in an equipment storeroom, where he uses pieces of the equipment to fashion a small anti-gravity device that’ll transport him from Antarctica to a populated continent where he can start replicating. The film is murkier about what he’s up to. We get a glimpse of some sort of capsule, like a mini-flying saucer, but there’s little explanation why and nothing about his place of incarceration being an equipment storeroom. I was left with the impression that Blair for some reason had managed to construct a spacecraft out of empty soup cans and pieces of string.

Finally, I should point out that Who Goes There? isn’t the only literary work connected with the scary world of The Thing. In 2010, Clarkesworld Magazine published a short story called The Things, written by Peter Watts, which retells the events of Carpenter’s movie through the eyes, if that’s the word, of the Thing itself.

Here, the Thing isn’t such a bad old thing. It genuinely believes it’s doing the humans a favour by taking them over, which it describes as an act of ‘communion’. It views their biology as ‘ill-adapted’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘disabled’ and wants to ‘fix’ them. At times, it’s repulsed by their physical circumstances, calling their brains ‘tumours’ and their bodies ‘bony caverns’. No wonder it’s upset when the humans respond to its kindness by using flamethrowers on it.

A thought-provoking and bleakly-amusing take on John Carpenter’s movie from the very last character in it you’d expect, Peter Watts’ The Things can be read on this webpage. Meanwhile, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? is available for reading here. The 2010 story is 7,000 words long while the 1938 one clocks in at a hefty 30,000 words. Comparing them, I have to say I agree with the old adage that the best Things come in small packages.

© Shasta Publishers

January 1, 2022January 1, 2022

My 2021 writing round-up

© Midnight Street Press

On this blog one year ago, I remember writing a post that bid an unfond adieu to the outgoing hellhole plague-year of 2020. However, the post also welcomed 2021 with some expressions of mild optimism. After all, vaccines were being developed against Covid-19, the main reason for 2020’s hideousness. And that man-slug of evil, Donald Trump, had just been defeated in the US presidential election.

Well, I’m not making that mistake again. I’m not expressing even faint optimism about 2022, seeing as 2021 was nearly as dire as its predecessor.

While the vaccines arrived – and having been double-jabbed and boosted courtesy of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system, I’m feeling a lot safer personally – it’s depressing that much of the world’s population remains unvaccinated. Economics and politics have denied many people access to vaccines in the Global South. Gordon Brown isn’t someone I normally agree with, but he’s absolutely right when he argues that the estimated 23.4 billion dollars it’d cost to roll out vaccines to everyone would be a wise investment for the world’s rich countries. (It’s also a fraction of what’s been spent on certain recent wars.) Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers continue to boggle the mind with their stupidity. It takes unfathomable levels of dumbness to believe that getting a vaccine means having Bill Gates seed your body with micro-transmitters. As a result, for years to come, unvaccinated humans will provide a giant petri dish for new Covid variants to mutate and develop.

As for the USA, it looks increasingly likely that the Republican Party, with Trump quite possibly at its head again, will be back in control of the White House in 2024. They won’t win the popular vote, but the voter suppression, voting-law changes and replacement of election officials they’re currently enacting by stealth in the crucial ‘swing’ states will get them over the line. At which point, the world’s most powerful nation will become a totalitarian state.

Anyway, enough of the gloom. For me, 2021 wasn’t a disappointment in one respect, at least. During the year I got a fair number of stories published, under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (used for my horror fiction) and Rab Foster (used for my fantasy fiction). There follows a round-up of those stories, with information about where you can find them.

© DBND Publishing

As Jim Mountfield:

In January 2021, my story Where the Little Boy Drowned was published in Horrified Magazine. A ghost story (with a smidgeon of J-Horror), it was about a flooded river, a forgotten childhood tragedy and – appropriately for January – a New Year resolution that goes wrong. It can be read here.
February saw The Stables – another ghost story, this time about three girls on holiday in the countryside who enter a seemingly deserted farmstead searching for a riding school – appear in Volume 16, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine. Kindle and paperback versions of the issue are available here.
Later in February, When the Land Gets Hold of You, another story set on a farm, was featured in an anthology from DBND Publishing called The Cryptid Chronicles. As its title suggests, the stories in this collection concerned cryptids, that pseudoscientific category of animals that some people claim to exist but nobody has ever conclusively proven to exist, such as Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil and Nessie. The cryptids in my story were based on redcaps, the malevolent fairies that legends say inhabit the peel towers of Scotland’s Borders region. The Cryptid Chronicles can be bought here.
Shotgun Honey, a webzine devoted to the ‘crime, hardboiled and noir genres’, published my story Karaoke in March 2021. The story is about – surprise! – karaoke and it can be read here.
In July, I was pleased to have my story Ballyshannon Junction included in the collection Railroad Tales, from Midnight Street Press. The stories in Railroad Tales involved both ‘railroads, trains, stations, junctions and crossings’ and the ‘horrific, supernatural or extraordinary’. Ballyshannon Junction met this brief by being set in an abandoned railway station in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and featuring a main character who’s plagued by possibly supernatural visions. It also allowed me to use as inspiration the real-life Bundoran Junction station-house and grounds in County Tyrone, where my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Railroad Tales can be purchased from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.
A story inspired by a very different period in my life – when I worked in Libya – appeared in Volume 16, Issue 21 of Schlock! Webzine in October. The story was called The Encroaching Sand and the issue is available in kindle and paperback forms here.
Also in October, my story Bottled Up was included in the anthology Horror Stories from Horrified (Volume 2): Folk Horror, published by Horrified Magazine. Folk horror is defined by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror… which uses elements of folklore to invoke fear in its audience. Typical elements include a rural setting and themes of isolation, religion, the power of nature, and the potential darkness of rural landscapes.” Accordingly, Bottled Up was set in that rural and folkloric part of England, East Anglia, and featured the remnants of a cult that worship a pagan sea deity. The anthology can be purchased here.
Finally, my story Problem Family – about, unsurprisingly, a problem family, but also with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft – appeared in Horla in December. Currently, it can be read here.

© Horrified Magazine

As Rab Foster:

In May, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn was published in Volume 16, Issue 16 of Schlock! Webzine. This tale attempted to subvert the more macho, musclebound, boneheaded conventions of that sweaty sub-genre of fantasy fiction, the sword-and-sorcery story. For one thing, it was told from multiple viewpoints and, for another, it was written in the present tense. Conan the Barbarian would not have approved. Kindle and paperback versions of the issue can be obtained here.
In July, my 13,000-word story The Theatregoers appeared in the Long Fiction section of Aphelion. It can be accessed here.
October saw The Orchestra of Syrak, a story inspired by the phantasmagorical (if overly verbose) work of pulp writer Clark Ashton Smith, appear in the 116^th issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. You can read it here.
And in November, Parallel Universe Publications unveiled a collection entitled Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3, which included my story The Foliage. An extremely handsome volume (thanks to its illustrations by the talented artist Jim Pitts), kindle and paperback copies of it can be ordered from Amazon UK here and amazon.com here.

© Aphelion

And that’s that – proof that 2021 wasn’t so bad for me writing-wise, even though it sucked on most other levels.

I shan’t tempt fate by making any optimistic predictions about 2022, but let’s just hope it turns out to be better than its two predecessors. And yes – I’m touching a large wooden surface as I write this – a Happy New Year, everyone!

December 17, 2021December 18, 2021

Jim Mountfield keeps it in the family

© Horla Magazine

A new short story of mine, Problem Family, is now available to read online at Horla Magazine. As it’s a horror story, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write macabre fiction.

The main inspiration for Problem Family was a real-life incident that happened to me in Colombo a couple of years ago, when I was living in a different apartment building from the one I live in today. An extremely noisy family lived in an apartment on the floor below mine. For some reason – the building’s acoustics, the way the stairwell was positioned – the noise they generated seemed to flow straight up to my front door. Indeed, it sometimes seemed like the loud melodramas they were enacting were taking place right on the other side of my door. One evening, I heard adult male and female voices screaming at each other and became convinced that, if this went on for much longer, the woman was going to be assaulted. So, reluctantly, I ventured downstairs, ostensibly to tell them to shut up, but really to find out if I needed to report something to the police. Thankfully, the situation proved to be non-violent – and at my appearance, the pair of them did shut up.

© SpectreVision / RLJE Films

Also, in part and completely differently, Problem Family was inspired by the famous 1927 sci-fi / horror story The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. This is an account what happens after a meteorite strikes a remote area of Massachusetts. A nearby farming family begin to succumb to what initially seems to be a weird, creeping, expanding poison but is actually a grotesque alien lifeform exuding an indescribable colour – it was ‘only by analogy that they called it a colour at all’. The Colour Out of Space has been filmed several times, starting with a rather duff version starring Boris Karloff and directed by Daniel Haller in 1965, and most recently in 2019 with a phantasmagorical version courtesy of director Richard Stanley. The 2019 film is slightly too reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), but benefits from a striking colour palette – it’s difficult to depict unknown alien colours on celluloid, so Stanley settles for making everything a garish purple – and from Nicholas Cage in the lead role, doing the sort of acting things that only Nicholas Cage is capable of doing.

You can also hear The Colour Out of Space being read aloud on this video from the BBC’s ‘interactive culture magazine’ Collective. Brilliantly, the reader is none other than the late, great Mark E. Smith, vocalist with and guiding light of abrasive post-punk / alternative rock band the Fall. The sound of Smith’s thick Mancunian accent and the Massachusetts accents of Lovecraft’s characters battling for supremacy is something else. I have to say, though, that the bit at the beginning where Smith sticks out and wiggles his tongue is as terrifying as anything in the story itself.

Fittingly for a magazine that takes its name from The Horla, the classic 1887 story by Guy De Maupassant, Horla describes itself as ‘the home of intelligent horror’. Its main page, which gives access to a bevy of cracking stories, can be reached here. Meanwhile, Problem Family itself can, for now, be read here.

© Librairie Ollendorff

October 31, 2021November 1, 2021

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2021

From unsplash.com / © Nicola Gambetti

It’s Halloween today and as usual I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by displaying ten of the most interesting pieces of macabre art I’ve come across in the past year.

And what better way to start than with this illustration by the Italian-born, American-reared artist Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury’s 1972 fantasy novel The Halloween Tree? Never having read that novel, I don’t know what the winged, cadaverous, hooked-nosed figure represents, but he makes an elegant and cosmically weird image.

© Yearling Books / From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

In these art-themed Halloween posts I usually include something featuring skeletons, as a nod to the festival that comes immediately after Halloween – Mexico’s skeleton-obsessed Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November. This year’s skeletal number is by Vincent Van Gogh, no less. Known as Skeleton with a Lit Cigarette in its Mouth, it now resides in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. The museum’s website describes it as “a juvenile joke”, painted by Van Gogh “in early 1886, while studying at the art academy in Antwerp… Drawing skeletons was a standard exercise at the academy, but painting them was not part of the curriculum. He must have made this painting at some other time, between or after his lessons.” I find the painting discombobulating, not just because of the cigarette or, indeed, the revelation that Van Gogh, associated with intensity and misery in most people’s minds, actually had a sense of humour. No, it’s more that the skeleton is such a complex assemblage, of corners, ridges, crenels, shelves and slats. It’s almost machine-like – slightly reminiscent of the lethal, metal endoskeleton that pops up at the climax of The Terminator (1982).

From vangoghmuseum.nl/en

Going further back in time, I have to say I love this depiction of a devil, which occupies the front side of the right-hand panel in the triptych Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation. It was painted in the 1480s by the German-born, Bruges-based artist Hans Memling and is now on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg. It’s the merriment with which the little fellow is dancing, on top of those sinners suffering in eternal hellfire, that gets me. Why, he’s practically riverdancing.

From musees.strasbourg.eu

Now for a devil from a different culture and different part of the world. This bloated, pustular apparition is what’s known as a ta-awi, a Philippine ogre / demon. I happened across it on Cryptid Wiki, which describes the beast as “a large hideous humanoid from Philippine mythology.” It “raids villages and devours people alive, but doesn’t eat their eyeballs because it can’t digest them for some reason.” All I can determine about the artist is that his name is Isaiah Paul and he has a page on deviantart.com here.

© Isaiah Paul

Less in-your-face and more ambiguous – the figure depicted may not even be supernatural, but just an odd person who likes to immerse herself among water lilies – is this painting, which I believe is called Hidden Things and is by modern-day Welsh artist Kim Myatt. In fact, I’d say it evokes the subtle strangeness of the fiction of Robert Aickman.

© Kim Myatt

In 1980, when I was both a spotty adolescent and an aspiring writer, the first stories I ever submitted were to a handsome little magazine called Fantasy Tales. (The stories weren’t accepted, but the editors were kind enough to write back and offer me advice like “When you’re typing, try leaving a space after commas and full stops,” or “It’s probably not a good idea to have six single-sentence paragraphs in a row.”) What made Fantasy Tales so visually appealing was that it featured the artwork of Lancastrian Jim Pitts, whose exquisitely detailed and atmospheric illustrations, often in black-and-white, recalled the great artists of the 1930s and 1940s pulp-fiction magazines such as Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok. Here’s a gothic and vampirical item that Pitts did for issue four of the magazine Dark Horizons.

© Jim Pitts

Another English illustrator I remember fondly from my youth is Les Edwards, whose work adorned the covers of paperbacks like Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone (1975) and Robert Holdstock’s novelisation of the movie Legend of the Werewolf (1975). I like Edwards’ work for being unpretentious and upfront – you certainly knew what sort of book you were getting when you saw his art on the cover – but also for its precision and colour. This piece is called The Shade and achieves a chill despite its graveyard scene being pictured in daylight. There’s a suggestion of mist creeping ominously in from the distant trees and the stone angel in the foreground adds to the discomfort.

© Les Edwards

A third illustrator whose work was familiar to me in my teenage years was the American science fiction and fantasy artist Rowena Morrill, who sadly died in February this year. Morrill blazed a trail as a rare thing in 1970s paperback illustration – a woman. Her work graced the covers of the first collections of stories by H.P. Lovecraft that I managed to lay my hands on, The Dunwich Horror (1978) and The Colour Out of Space (1978). Her depictions of Lovecraft’s ‘Elder Gods’ as amalgamations of bits of wildly-different creatures may not be how most people imagine Cthulhu and company nowadays, i.e., with lots of tentacles, but they’re grotesquely and baroquely weird. Here’s the picture that adorned The Dunwich Horror.

© Jove / HBJ Books

I’ve seen the Czech artist Jindra Capek described online as a ‘children’s book illustrator’. Hmm. I don’t know if the following picture, showing a hungry ghoul-type creature (though one civilised enough to be wearing what looks like a pair of boxer shorts) taking a bite out of a newly-dug-up corpse, is what you’d expect to see in the pages of a children’s book. Come to think of it, though, my ten-year-old self would have been delighted by it.

© Jindra Capek

One sort of image I’ve always found unsettling is that of an insect, or general creepy-crawly, sporting the facial features of a human being. I’m thinking of David Hedison in The Fly (1958), playing a hapless scientist whose experiments with teleportation go astray and end up grafting his head onto the bug of the title; or the scuttling, insectoid, human-faced aliens in The Zanti Misfits, the famous 1963 episode of the TV anthology show The Outer Limits. Needless to say, I find this item disturbing. It’s by the Belgian artist Henri Lievens, who in his lifetime created the covers for more than 200 books. Entitled L’Araignee, its lady-faced spider is icky-looking but also, with those large doe eyes, worryingly fetching. The lurid blue and black palette heightens its effect.

From unquietthings.com

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween!

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021

Horror before it got panned

© Pan Books

One more horror-themed reposting just before Halloween…

Michael Gove, well-known cokehead, Aberdonian nightclub boogie-king and England’s Education Minister from 2010 to 2014, would be disappointed in me. When I was a lad, my usual reading material was not the likes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which in 2013 Gove famously said he wanted to see the nation’s youth reading.

Rather, when I was 11, 12 or 13, I commonly had my nose stuck in works by such authors as Sven Hassel, James Herbert and Guy N. Smith, meaning that I didn’t become conversant in the effects of the Great Reform Act of 1832 or in the gradual diminution of the ideals of Dorothea Brooke, which Eliot wrote about in her 1871-1872 masterpiece. I did, however, end up learning a lot about German Panzer divisions wreaking bloody havoc on the Russian front during World War II, about chemical weapons leaking out of military laboratories in the form of thick swirling fogs and driving all who come in contact with them murderously insane, and about giant mutant crabs going on the rampage and eating people. Knowing such things prepared me a lot for adult life.

I also spent a lot of time reading, in the form of tatty paperbacks that in the school playground and on the school bus were constantly borrowed, read, returned, borrowed again and read again, a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories. The first of this series had been published in 1959, under the editorship of the strikingly named Herbert Van Thal, a literary agent, publisher and author whom the critic John Agate had once likened to ‘a sleek, well-groomed dormouse’. The first few volumes of horror stories that Van Thal edited for Pan Books consisted largely of classical stories from well-known horror writers and more ‘mainstream’ (whatever that means) writers who’d dabbled in the genre; and their quality was generally held to be high.

By the late 1960s, however, Van Thal was filling each new compilation with more and more stories from new writers, many of whom were taking advantage of a more permissive era to see what they could get away with in terms of violence, gore and general unpleasantness. Serious horror writers and fans became quite sniffy about the books. Ramsey Campbell, Britain’s most acclaimed living horror writer, has said: “I did like the first one when I was 13 years old, but I thought the series became increasingly illiterate and disgusting and meritless.”

When my schoolmates and I started reading them in the 1970s, the latest editions of The Pan Book of Horror Stories were low in literary quality but high in disgusting-ness, which suited our jaded, beastly little minds fine. I’m still psychologically scarred by Colin Graham’s The Best Teacher in the ninth collection, which was about a psychopath who decides to write a manual for aspiring horror writers, instructing them in what dismemberment, disembowelment and various acts of torture really look and sound like. To this end, he kidnaps a horror writer and starts dismembering, disembowelling and torturing him whilst recording everything with a camera and tape recorder. Anyone who thinks that the horror sub-genre of ‘torture-porn’ began with Eli Roth’s movie Hostel in 2005 ought to check out Graham’s grubby epic from a few decades earlier.

© Pan Books

To be fair, the later Pan collections did feature then-up-and-coming, now-well-regarded writers like Tanith Lee, Christopher Fowler and, ahem, Ian McEwan. However, by the 1980s (and after Van Thal’s death), the series was clearly on its last legs. It resorted to ransacking Stephen King’s famous anthology Nightshift (1978) and reprinting stories like The Graveyard Shift, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man. This was unwise, since anybody inclined to read the Pan horror series had probably read Nightshift already. The final volume, the thirtieth, had a very limited print run and if you ever lay your hands on a copy, it’s probably worth a lot as a collector’s item.

A while ago in a second-hand bookshop I discovered a copy of The First Pan Book of Horror Stories. This, alas, was unlikely to be sought by book collectors, since the copy looked like something had chewed, swallowed, partly-digested and regurgitated it. At least it was still readable, so I got a chance to sample the original instalment in this famous, or infamous, series. I was curious to know if it deserved the praise Ramsey Campbell had given it and also to see how different it was from the more disreputable stuff that came later.

My first impression was that the stories in this collection weren’t how I’d have organised them. I’ve heard writers whose works were printed in the later Pan books grumble about Van Thal’s abilities as an editor, and it’s hard to see why stories as similar as Hester Holland’s The Library and Flavia Richardson’s Behind the Yellow Door (both about hapless young women who are hired as private secretaries by older, plainly-batty women and who meet gruesome fates), or Oscar Cook’s His Beautiful Hands and George Fielding Eliot’s The Copper Bowl (both about exotic, grotesque revenges and tortures inflicted by East Asian people – at least one of them struck me as racist) should end up in the same book. In fact, Eliot’s story follows immediately after Cook’s, thanks to Van Thal’s strange policy of arranging the stories by the alphabetical order of their authors’ surnames.

I also noticed how stories I’d read elsewhere and greatly enjoyed in my youth now, sadly, seem a bit duff. I loved Hazel Heald’s The Horror in the Museum when I read it as a 13-year-old. Heald, incidentally, wrote it under the tutelage of H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence is obvious in the ornate prose-style. However, a modern rereading suggests that Heald (and Lovecraft) could’ve cut the story’s length by about 20 pages without losing any of its plot points.

Meanwhile, Bram Stoker’s The Squaw, another tale I had fond memories of, seems much poorer now thanks to one of its characters being an American tourist called Elias P. Hutchinson. If Hutchinson was what Stoker believed all Americans sounded like, spewing toe-curling things like ‘I du declare’ and ‘I say, ma’am’ and ‘this ole galloot’ and ‘durned critter’, I can only say that Stoker needed to go out and do some research. Still, despite some glaringly obvious failings, both The Horror in the Museum and The Squaw benefit from having cracking denouements.

From wikipedia.org

The Horror in the Museum is one of the few stories in the collection that contains a monster. (And what a monster it is: “globular torso… bubble-like suggestion of a head… three fishy eyes… foot-long proboscis… bulging gills… monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers… six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws…”). Apart from The Kill by Colonel Peter Fleming, a werewolf story penned by none other than Ian Fleming’s older brother, the rest of the stories are fairly monster-free, depending on psychological terrors for their impact. Indeed, C.S. Forester’s The Physiology of Fear is a horror story in an unusually literal sense. It deals with a particularly horrific episode in human history, the Nazi concentration camps. It also features a German scientist engaged in research, with the Third Reich’s support and with prisoners from the camps as his guinea pigs, into the emotion of horror as it arises in the human psyche. And the story’s ending isn’t conventionally horrific. Instead, the scientist is ensnared in an ironic and satisfying twist worthy of Roald Dahl.

Also not a horror story in any conventional sense is Muriel Spark’s The Portobello Road. It qualifies as a ghost story, but most of all it’s a mediation on the nature of friendship as it survives, or doesn’t survive, from childhood into adulthood. This being Spark – whose most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie, was simultaneously a prim middle-class Edinburgh schoolmistress and a fascist – the story has a bitter, vinegary flavour. None of its characters are particularly pleasant and none seem to deserve long-term friendship. In fact, the one character who tries to keep those friendships alive is the one who, ultimately, commits the story’s single, shocking act of violence.

Meanwhile, I reacted to the sight of Jack Finney’s Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket as if an old friend had suddenly hoven into view. Not that I’d encountered this particular story before, but it conjured up fond memories of American writers like Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont, who in the 1950s seemed to keep their rents paid by pumping out short stories for the likes of Playboy magazine and TV scripts for the likes of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960-62). In admirably direct and diamond-hard prose, their tales would detail the world turning suddenly and inexplicably weird for citizens of conformist post-war America, for both dutiful suburban wives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses and office-bound men in grey-flannel suits.

From fictionunbound.com

Finney, most famous as the author of the sci-fi horror novel The Body Snatchers (1955), which has been filmed four times and shows conformity taken to a nightmarish extreme, starts his story thus: “At the little living room table Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable.” A half-dozen pages later, events have lured Benecke away from his portable typewriter and embroiled him in a vertiginous life-or-death struggle just outside his apartment window. It calls to mind the Stephen King short story The Ledge, another one that appeared in his collection Nightshift. I doubt if the similarity between the two stories is a coincidence, King being a big admirer of work from this era of American story-telling.

Also deserving mention are Oh Mirror, Mirror, a claustrophobic item penned by the great Nigel Kneale; Raspberry Jam, Angus Wilson’s poisonous take on the snobbery of old people who no longer have anything to be snobbish about; and Serenade for Baboons, a colonial horror by Noel Langley.

Inevitably, a couple of clunkers find their way into the book too. Anthony Vercoe’s Flies wouldn’t be such a bad story if the writer hadn’t swamped his prose with exclamation marks. I can’t remember encountering so many of the damned things in ten pages of prose before and the result is almost unreadable. Meanwhile, The House of Horror is one of a series of short stories that American pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a psychic investigator called Jules de Grandin. De Grandin is French and seemingly meant to be a supernatural version of Hercule Poirot (who, I know, was actually Belgian). Unfortunately, Quinn gives him a patois that is as cringe-inducing as Elias P. Hutchinson’s Americanisms in The Squaw: “Sang du diable…! Behold what is there, my friend… Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!”

On the whole, though, I found The First Pan Book of Horror Stories a rewarding read. I now look forward to tracking down the other, earlier instalments in the series – those ones that came out before Herbert Van Thal decided to crank up the levels of nasty, schlocky stuff, in order to satisfy the blood-crazed savages amongst his reading public.

Blood-crazed savages such as my twelve-year-old self…

© Pan Books

September 11, 2021September 11, 2021

21st century metal

Such has been the fanfare recently over the return of Swedish 1970s pop darlings Abba, with a new ten-song album and a supposed ‘virtual concert’ where ‘digital avatars’ will perform in the shoes of the band’s now somewhat long-in-the-tooth members, that I’ve wondered if I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t actually like Abba.

Okay, ‘doesn’t like’ is a bit strong. A more accurate verb-phrase would be ‘is totally indifferent to’.

There are a couple of Abba songs that get me tapping my foot in a vague, mindless way, like Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! or Money, Money, Money (both 1979) or the song with which they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, Waterloo – which, come to think of it, was an appropriation of the breezy, sax-laden sound of Roy Wood’s glam-rock band Wizzard. But unlike, say, the entire population of Australia, a country that’s given us such Abba-obsessed cultural phenomena as the cover band Bjorn Again and the movies Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding (both 1994), I don’t worship the ground that the shiny, 1970s, high-heeled boots of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn have walked on.

However, while the planet’s airwaves turn into the equivalent of the soundtrack of Mamma Mia! (2008), though thankfully without the pained, raspy sound of Pierce Brosnan attempting to sing, I will seek solace in the one type of music that truly matters… heavy metal.

Here’s a quick guide to the heavy metal bands, all of whom have become prominent since the beginning of the new millennium, that I’ve been listening to lately.

Al-Namrood

As this 2015 feature in the magazine Vice noted, “Al-Namrood have never played a live show, because it could result in the entire band being executed.” That’s because the band Al-Namrood (a) play black metal and (b) are Saudi Arabian, two concepts that go together about as harmoniously as serpents and mongooses. According to their guitarist and bassist Mephisto, who, like all the band’s members, has never revealed his real name for his own safety, “Al-Namrood is the Arabic name of the Babylonian king Nimrood, who was a mighty tyrannical king who ruled Babylon with blood and defied the ruler of the universe.” Yes, those sound like pretty black metal things to do. It’s a shame that the band has had to operate so far off the grid because the music by them I’ve heard, its growling vocals and relentlessly thunderous guitars and drums laced with delicious Arabic folk stylings, I’ve found irresistible.

Behemoth

Polish black metal and death metal band Behemoth are similarly unloved by their country’s political and religious establishment. And though the repercussions obviously won’t be as serious as those risked by Al-Namrood in Saudi Arabia, Behemoth’s frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski has recently been convicted of blasphemy and could face imprisonment in the increasingly authoritarian Poland of Andrzej Duda. Actually, politically, Nergal has proved to be a bit of a knobhead in the past and once gained notoriety for wearing a ‘black metal against Antifa’ T-shirt, so it’s ironic he’s become a martyr in the struggle against the forces of extreme, right-wing knobhead-dom.

Behemoth first caught my attention when I listened to their 2018 album I Loved You at Your Darkest, which begins with a choir of creepy children chanting, “I shall not forgive… Jesus Christ… I forgive thee not…” Thereafter, the album is a brilliantly Wagnerian parade of tunes with such titles as God = Dog, Ecclesia Diabolica Catholica and If Crucifixion Was Not Enough. Can’t imagine why those pious Polish politicians don’t like them.

Cult of Luna

Proof that, musically, Sweden has considerably more to offer than just Abba, Swedish doom metal band Cult of Luna serve up tunes where big, booming slabs of guitar lumber ominously along, accompanied by hollering and shrieking vocals, creating a sound that suggests a world teetering on the brink of collapse while simultaneously being strangely exhilarating and even uplifting. The earliest album of theirs I’ve heard is 2003’s The Beyond, the most recent one 2021’s The Raging River. Though there’s evidence of development and exploration between the two, the basic template is reassuringly the same.

Electric Wizard

Hailing from County Dorset, England, the original members of Electric Wizard bonded in the 1990s over a shared love of horror films, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the music of legendary Brummie metal band Black Sabbath. It was from the titles of two Sabbath songs, Electric Funeral and The Wizard (both 1970), that they devised their band’s name. For me, they just seem to get better and better – from early albums like Dopethrone (2000) and Let Us Prey (2002) to their most recent opus, Wizard Bloody Wizard (2017), which contains the deliriously catchy track Necromania.

In fact, someone has stuck a fan video for Necromania on YouTube, its visuals stitched together from such lovable old horror-movie schlock-fests as The Dunwich Horror (1969), Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), All the Colours of the Dark (1972), Baron Blood (1972), Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). It captures the essence of Electric Wizard perfectly.

© Roadrunner

Gojira

Several bands have named themselves after Godzilla, Japan’s favourite, radioactive-breathed, city-destroying kaiju, including Godzilla in the Kitchen and Bongzilla. In my opinion, the best of the bunch is the one using the giant reptile’s original Japanese moniker, Gojira. This French death / progressive metal outfit combines shrieking vocals, wailing guitars and thunderous drums – courtesy of drummer Mario Duplantier, whose sound suggests the footfall of the giant lizard itself – with a surprising degree of melody. Well, the melodiousness is perhaps not so surprising, giving that the bandmembers cite Led Zeppelin as a key influence. The 2012 album L’Enfant Sauvage made me fall in love with Gojira, although their most recent one, Fortitude (2021), is pretty good too.

Melechesh

I first heard of the band Melechesh through the artist John Coulthart, whose blog I read regularly and who’s designed the covers for their albums, including 2015’s album Enki. Soon afterwards, I saw Enki on sale in a record shop and bought it out of curiosity. It’s a great album, its storming metallic sound embroidered with such eastern-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern instruments as the sitar, bouzouki, saz and bendir. Melechesh, it transpires, are the propagators of ‘Mesopotamian metal’ which, according to their Wikipedia entry, aims to “create a type of black metal incorporating extensive Middle Eastern influences mainly based on Assyrian and occult themes.” They formed in Jerusalem in 1993 but later relocated to Europe. In the mid-1990s, the city authorities in Jerusalem accused them of ‘dark cult activities’, which probably didn’t encourage them to hang around in Israel.

Orchid

One afternoon I was in the FOPP record shop on Edinburgh’s Rose Street and the guy behind the counter decided to play a heavy metal album over the store’s PA system. “What’s this?” I demanded, intoxicated by the album’s old-school sound – although as this was Rose Street, I may have been slightly intoxicated already. “It’s The Mouths of Madness,” he replied, “by Orchid!” Then he produced another copy of the album, recorded in 2013, which I bought on the spot. I would have remarked: “ORCHID – obviously stands for OZZY Osbourne / RAINBOW / the CULT / Rob HALFORD / IRON Maiden / Ronnie James DIO!” But I wasn’t able to think that fast.

As I’ve suggested, San Francisco metallers Orchid wear their influences on their sleeves, but especially the influence of Black Sabbath. Now while Black Sabbath, with their doomy sound and the occult preoccupations of their song-titles and lyrics, have been a huge influence on heavy metal generally, later bands have taken that sound and those preoccupations and made them more extreme and exaggerated. But Orchid are reminiscent of Black Sabbath as they were, in a purer, simpler form. I don’t mean that they copy the original band’s songs. Orchid sound like Black Sabbath in their early 1970s prime, if they ‘d existed in a parallel universe where they’d been able to churn out a few extra albums. Similar riffs, but not the same riffs.

Reverend Bizarre

As far as I can tell, quaintly-named doom-metal outfit Reverend Bizarre are the only band on this list who no longer exist. They disbanded in 2007, having produced three albums during the noughties. I own two of those, the excellent In the Rectory of the Reverend Bizarre (2002) and II: Crush the Insects (2005). Sounding like a sludgier, more primordial version of Electric Wizard, this Finnish band was notable for, among other things, its vocalist, the also quaintly-named Albert Witchfinder. He eschewed modish doom-metal growling and shrieking and mainly just crooned forebodingly.

Wolves in the Throne Room

Their name may conjure up images of Game of Thrones, but Wolves in the Throne Room come from the relatively un-sword-and-sorcerous environs of Washington State in the northwestern USA. One of their objectives (to quote Wikipedia again) is “channeling the ‘energies of the Pacific Northwest’s landscape’ into musical form.” Thus, their song titles contain such words as ‘fields’, ‘fog’, ‘lightning’, ‘rain’, ‘rainbow’, ‘stars’, ‘storm’ and ‘woodland’ and their sound has been described as ‘atmospheric black metal’ or ‘ambient black metal’. But there’s still enough ‘black metal’ present in Wolves in the Throne Room’s formula to prevent them sounding serene and bucolic. I have three of their albums – 2006’s Diadem of 12 Stars, 2009’s Black Cascade and 2011’s Celestial Lineage – and think they’re all blisteringly brilliant.

Having finished writing this blog-entry, I now feel an urge to listen to the above nine bands’ albums again, at maximum volume. I’ll probably be deaf afterwards, but at least then there’s no danger of me hearing the new Abba album.