WONDERFUL, LURID, POISONOUS

As part of my ongoing fascination with Victorian and Edwardian macabre fiction, I’ve recently finished Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.

Described by Oscar Wilde as ‘the most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale’, The Turn of the Screw is, depending on your point of view, one of the most chilling ghost stories ever written or one of the most disturbing portraits of insanity ever committed to paper.

It is this very ambiguity that makes The Turn of the Screw such a fascinating read, infused with both a creeping gothic sensibility and a modernist approach that foreshadows the twentieth century novel.

At its heart it is a simple enough tale: a governess (who, unnamed, provides the bulk of the narrative) is employed to take care of two small children – Miles and his sister Flora – on a rambling country estate. Initially charmed by the children she begins to suspect that there is a deeper and darker secret lurking beneath the surface, suspicions that are confirmed by the mysterious and sinister apparitions that come and go unheeded in both the grounds and house itself. The apparitions, she believes, are the unquiet ghosts of her predecessor, Miss Jessel and her lover Peter Quint, who have returned to claim the children to keep them company in the afterlife.

What follows is a story that twists and turns from ghost story to psychological study and back again, leaving the reader often as disoriented as the narrator and, ultimately, with more questions than answers. The primary question is of the narrator’s sanity – since no one else can see the ghosts, do they really exist or are they simply the products of a diseased and obsessed mind?

But ghosts or not, Henry James handles the moments of their appearance with an unsettling ease – the absence of sound when Miss Jessel is first seen on the shores of the estate’s lake, the sudden appearance of Quint at the window or high in an inaccessible part of the house, or the moments when the children are lured outside; moments that may be no more than childish games or may have deeper, supernatural, meanings.

There is, too, James’ impeccable handling of the narrative. As the story moves towards its climax the chapters begin to become shorter, the language of the narrator more terse and less prone to embellishment and the sense of impending horror more and more palpable. Similarly, his use of a framing narrative - which, at first, distances the reader before the events of the story proper suddenly pull him in – is an object lesson in creating false security.

As with so many Victorian novels and short stories, The Turn of the Screw is not always an easy or comfortable read. Fashions in prose have changed considerably since the late 1800’s and there are times when it seems as if Henry James prefers to use several words when one would suffice and, for all its short length, novel at times appears to bog itself down in the minutia of the everyday. But this is to underestimate the power of James’ writing and the precise way that he is able to create unease and, at times, to shock the reader out of their comfortable expectations.

Often compared to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a precursor of the modern (and indeed post-modern) novel, The Turn of the Screw is a deeply unsettling story. Wonderful, lurid and poisonous indeed.

ABANDONED TOWERS MAGAZINE

“Abandoned Towers is a unique magazine which provides a wide range of high quality, enjoyable reading material, audio stories, video clips and entertainment. Our online version provides a nice mixture of classic, public domain material and brand new, never before published material, with a sprinkling of enjoyable reprints thrown in for spice.”

Abandoned Towers features a really good and eclectic range of fiction: SF, fantasy, westerns, and a whole lot more.

Well worth your time.

BACK TO THE END OF THE WORLD

I've just received word from the good folks at Fantastic Horror telling me that they've accepted my short story The Deathless Ones for publication later this year.

It's another in my loose series of stories set at the end of the world which I sometimes refer to as the Shining Cities Sequence and, like the others, is a mixture of science fantasy and horror.

The story should be available online in October or possibly February 2010.

http://www.fantastichorror.com/

WHEN IN DOUBT

I’ve been thinking a lot about story construction recently and the business of how a tale gets from its beginning to the moment when the narrative reaches its conclusion.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about those moments when the narrative tends to stick and refuses to budge. Now, if you’re the sort of writer who plans everything well in advance and works out every possible nuance and plot turn this might not be a problem, but since I’m not really that sort of writer it happens to me with alarming (and inevitable) regularity.

There are two great pieces of advice for unsticking narrative. The first is Raymond Chandler’s “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand” and the second comes from the Broadway producer George Abbott via the great William Goldman: “Have them do something. That way we’ll have something to change.”

In essence, both are about moving the story forward and keeping a narrative momentum (although Abbott’s was in response to a choreographer who wailed, “I just can’t figure out what to do next,” it’s still a good motto for a writer.). When the man with the gun comes through the door it forces the protagonist to react in some way and, as long as things are progressing logically, is a convenient way of getting from Point A to Point B. This can be literal if the protagonist is subsequently bundled into a car and taken to Point B, wherever that may be, or more metaphorical if said gunman is delivering news rather than hot lead. Thirdly, of course, it could simply be the jumping off point for some violence, but that violence in itself can provide the impetus for further plot development.

To use a rather tangential example, it’s the moment in Carry On Cowboy where Sid James’ Rumpo Kid guns down three pistoleros in the street and then says “I wonder what they wanted”. This question is never answered in the film since the incident is just there to spoof western clichés, but equally could send a story off in any number of different directions. Why did they want to kill him? Why did it take three of them? What secret is Rumpo hiding or what does he have that’s worth killing for? What will the law do now? Or, to put it another way, there are a lot of possibilities to be explored as a result of the man coming through the door with a gun.

Of course, none of the three elements – the gun, the door and the man - need necessarily be present, since any kind of event or character or item can move the story forward as long as it doesn’t jar. In Philip K. Dick’s novel Now Wait For Last Year the metaphorical man with the gun is the hallucinogenic drug JJ-180 which impels the characters forward, in Iain Bank’s The Wasp Factory it is the phone calls from Eric which serve the same purpose and in Henry James’ magnificent The Turn of the Screw is the periodic appearances of Quint and Miss Jessel that lead the narrator deeper and deeper into the terrifying world of her two small charges.

George Abbott’s words are a little more straightforward in their interpretation, but lean more towards the actions of the characters than the vagaries of the plot. With Abbott’s ‘have them do something’ the caveat should always be ‘as long as it makes sense for the character to do so’. To use that old chestnut: a coward isn’t simply going to turn into a hero for no good reason. In the same way that Chekhov’s Gun applies to physical items ("If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."), it can also apply to the actions and motivations of characters. To return to our hypothetical coward, it can mean that there comes a time when he has no choice but to face up to his or her fears, but the seeds of this need to be planted earlier in the story.

Essentially, though, ‘have them do something’ means exactly what it says’. If it doesn’t work, or doesn’t make sense, then have them do something else until it does work.

I recently completed a short story working upon the twin techniques of ‘doing something’ and ‘the man with the gun’. Now, it may not be the greatest short story ever written (in fact, chances are that it isn’t) but as an exercise in narrative and plot movement it was extremely valuable.

At the first moment I found myself stuck, I had two men walk through the door (carrying swords rather than guns, it must be said, since it was a fantasy story) and discovered that this sent the narrative (rather than the plot) moving along rather nicely since the protagonist suddenly found himself in danger.

Similarly, a later impasse in the same story was solved by having the protagonist react to his situation (or, to put it another way, to actually do something) rather than exist as a passive narrator.

The finished article still requires a certain amount of rewriting and backtracking in order to smooth out some of the bumps but nonetheless during the writing it carried itself through to the end relatively smoothly.

Ultimately, of course, these techniques are not ideal for every story – or indeed for every writer – but they can help to jump start a stalled narrative and perhaps even take the plot in an unexpected direction.

And if you can surprise yourself then chances are you can surprise the reader as well.

THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS

The Flesh and the Fiends (1960). Starring Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasance, Billie Whitelaw, George Rose. John Cairney. Directed by John Gilling.

Something of a forgotten classic, The Flesh and the Fiends is based upon the exploits of Burke and Hare, two infamous gentlemen who plied a murderous trade in fresh corpses for medical research in Edinburgh in the 1820’s.

Pitched somewhere between historical drama and full-blown gothic horror, The Flesh and the Fiends is a sometimes uncomfortable but always compelling tale of murder and misguided obsession.

With corpses in short supply for medical research, it was not uncommon for doctors in the 19th century to turn to other means of obtaining the raw material for their experiments, which led to the rise of the so-called Resurrection Men – or, more plainly, grave robbers. In this case the doctor in question is Robert Knox (Peter Cushing) who, in his drive to advance the boundaries of medical knowledge, is prepared to turn a blind eye - almost literally - to the exploits of William Burke and William Hare (George Rose and Donald Pleasance) as long as they continue to provide his with fresh subjects for his dissecting table.

Burke and Hare, for those who are unfamiliar with them, were not simply Resurrection Men. Two rather feckless Irish immigrants to Scotland they much preferred to avoid digging up any actual corpses and instead murdered some 16 men and women whose bodies they then sold to the duplicitous Knox. Their murderous spree was finally halted in 1828 and William Burke was hanged for their crimes after his erstwhile colleague Hare turned King’s evidence.

Without taking too many liberties with the facts, and weaving a dark cinematic spell that can stand proudly alongside the gothic nightmares of Terence Fisher or Mario Bava, John Gilling’s film tells the story of Burke, Hare and Knox in a lean hour and a half peppered with some startling imagery, occasional moments of blacker-than-black comedy and outstanding performances from the lead and supporting actors.

As cool and icy here as in his outings as Victor Frankenstein – in fact, he often likened the obsessed Knox to the equally obsessed Baron – Peter Cushing gives a performance that is, by turns, menacing, detached and, ultimately, sympathetic. His Dr Knox is a man driven to extremes both by circumstance and personal obsession. In contrast both George Rose and Donald Pleasance exude a down-at-heel vileness that practically leaps from the screen. Pleasance is particularly chilling, especially in such moments as the murder of Daft Jamie (played by a youthful Melvyn Hayes) or the attempted rape and then murder of prostitute Mary (Billie Whitelaw), an act which ultimately leads to the downfall of their murderous money-making scheme.

As a sinister double act Rose and Pleasance have rarely been bettered and the black humour which both they and Gilling wring from Burke and Hare is one of life’s great guilty pleasures.

But the real star of The Flesh and the Fiends is director John Gilling himself. Delivering a multi-layered script with great aplomb and staging the often brutal scenes of violence with an unflinching sense of realism (the camera rarely turns away even at the most repellent of moments) Gilling’s direction lifts what might have otherwise been a run-of-the-mill exploitation movie into a genuine piece of cinematic art.

Shot in stark black and white with an atmospheric score by Stanley Black, The Flesh and the Fiends is one of a handful of wonderfully realized horror films that Gilling would direct. The others, including Hammer’s The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies (arguably one of the most influential horrors of all time since it provided the inspiration for Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead) showed the same sense of pace and style as his Burke and Hare movie, but with The Flesh and the Fiends Gilling crafted a genuine classic.

Although it has slipped off the critical radar somewhat – and was never all that successful even on its release – time has not dulled the edge of this fine example of what horror cinema can achieve when it is done with intelligence and style.

Worth checking out if – like so many of us – you have become tired of cookie-cutter horror or simply have a love of old exploitation movies.

KINGS OF THE NIGHT

Just got word from GW Thomas that he has accepted my short story, The Obsidian City, for his rather splendid Sword and Sorcery 'zine, Kings of the Night.

Now that Flashing Swords seems to be trapped in some sort of limbo, with editors coming and going, issues taking a long time to appear and endless problems with submissions (which the folks at FS have been doing their level-headed best to deal with), it's good to see that someone is keeping the flame of S&S burning brightly.

The Kings of the Night Mission Statement speaks for itself:

"This webzine is dedicated to the branch of Fantasy that was created by Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore, practised by the likes of Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, John Jakes, Roger Zelazny and Karl Edward Wagner. It is not interested in vampire boyfriends, unicorn princesses or third generation Tolkien clones or anything ripped off from Star Wars. The editors and contributors believe that 'S&S' is not a swear word and that Fantasy should be fun to read without becoming a parody, a joke or resorting to puns. The title "Kings of the Night" comes from the Robert E. Howard story in which magic and heroism come together in an unforgettable clash of swords and darkness."

The current issue features fiction from C.L Werner, Jack Mackenzie, G. W. Thomas and David A. Hardy as well as links to other S&S on the net and an article on Roger Zelazny's Dilvish the Damned.

If you care at all about Sword and Sorcery, this is well worth a look and can be found here:

http://www.gwthomas.org/kingsofthenight.htm

Breaking Down The Wall

Some things are best achieved with subtlety, others with brute force, yet others are best achieved with some combination of the two. There is a drawing of the meeting between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin which shows Richard breaking an iron bar with his sword – a big European brute of a blade, best suited to smashing and bashing – while Saladin demonstrates the edge of his blade by cutting a piece of silk with it. That particular drawing sums up how I have managed to overcome – more or less – my recent bout with the blank page.

Sometimes the only way to write is to just do it – to be like Richard smashing your way through a problem and not allowing the niceties in life to get in the way – then to come back and do a Saladin – use the edge of your writing ability to shape the prose into a smoother form.

Of course, all writers have different ways of dealing with the problem of ‘lack of imaginative flow’ – this one just happened to work for me. And right pleased about it I am, too.

Now this doesn’t mean that the recently completed story is of any worth (although I rather like it) but more that I’ve conquered a personal demon.

The spectre of the white page can be one of the most daunting things for any writer to face, particularly on those days when you really don’t feel like writing, when the clichés pour from your mind and hands in an unstoppable torrent. But, and here’s the strange thing, once you manage to get those clichés out of the way, it very often frees the mind to move on to more original thoughts (original in this case being a very, very subjective thing).

I think that sometimes you have to have the courage to write badly and realise that not every word that you put on paper will be the ideal one, that not every sentence will be beautifully constructed or indeed that every plot will be a logical and gripping one.

No one sets out to write badly, but sometimes it helps to do just that.

AT HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD (REDUX)

The very lovely Carol Hightshoe recently accepted my short story Whisperthief for publication in the rather splendid ezine Sorcerous Signals, due to appear in October this year (and it will also appear in print in its sister publication Mystic Signals).

The story is part of what I frequently (and perhaps rather pretentiously) refer to as The Shining Cities Sequence – a series of stories set at the mythical end of the world – which currently consist of a grand total of four published or accepted, (The Glass Cage/ What Dread Words/ All That Grows/ Whisperthief) one still looking for a home (Pale Nations of the Dead) and at least three at the ‘where the hell does this go now’ stage (none of which currently have titles) and one ‘orphan story’ (The Bone House) which is thematically and stylistically linked to the others.

Of all the stories I have written in the last while, the Shining Cities tales are among my favourites, possibly because I rather enjoy writing them. This is not to say that the stories themselves are light and fluffy pieces packed with witty one liners (quite the reverse, if anything, coming as they do from the darkest part of the doom ‘n’ gloom aspect of my psyche) but rather because the creation of them gives me a lot of pleasure. Their basic set up is rather a grab bag of influences (although very much in the shadow of Clark Ashton Smith’s masterly Zothique stories) mixing together sword and sorcery, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, elements of the comedia del arte and anything else that takes my fancy at the time.

More than that, I tend to make them up as I go along. I know that, as a creator of the fantastic, there are certain ‘rules’ that my fiction should obey within their own framework (although these ‘rules’ are, by definition, rather elastic and open to interpretation) but sometimes it’s more important for a writer to enjoy his own work than to worry too much about pleasing others. Again, this is not to say that the stories lack either internal logic or narrative structure (at least I hope they don’t) but rather that they give me a certain freedom in their creation.

It’s a radical thought, I know, but works upon the principle that if you don’t enjoy your work then the chances are that no one else will either. In part it’s about chasing the muse, or allowing the muse to take you where it will.

It’s also to do with the fact that I find it difficult to tailor my imagination to strict parameters (I recently tried to write a story aimed at a very specific anthology which fell apart after two pages simply because I couldn’t get my initial idea to alter itself sufficiently). Not that there is anything wrong with chasing the market – some writers do it extremely well and are capable of creating great work in virtually any genre (the brilliant Roy Thomas, for instance) - unfortunately, I’m not sure I’m one of them.

Of course as a writer it’s both selfish and potentially damaging to your work to please no one but yourself, but the base line should always be ‘is this a story I want to write?’ or perhaps ‘is this a story I want to read?’ and if the answer to either (or preferably both) of those question is Yes then there is a good chance that both you and your audience will enjoy it.

HITTING THE BRICK WALL

I’m sure that every writer, at one time or another in his or her creative life, hits that brick wall where the prose simply won’t flow.

I’ve just hit mine. Again.

It’s been a terribly frustrating time for me, beginning and then discarding a number of stories over the past few weeks - although nothing is ever truly lost and ideas, characters, scenes and concepts that I simply couldn’t make work once before have a way of worming themselves into my subconscious and re-emerging at a later date.

As such, I am taking some small consolation that even the false starts and pages that go nowhere have become part and parcel of my writing method. In a vain and vague attempt to kick-start my muse, I went over some old files and discovered that several recently published stories had their genesis in earlier pieces that somehow fell apart during the writing but nonetheless provided a seed for later tales.

However it is just that - small consolation.

In part, too, it’s to do with my notions of how a writer should be. My mythical version of the writer has him or her sitting at their typewriter/ pad/ computer at nine o’clock every morning, full of inspiration and wonderful ideas, writing two thousand words before lunch, another two thousand in the afternoon and then off to some wonderful literary gala to chat endlessly with other enormously talented people about the business of writing.

I know that it doesn’t really work that way and that, in reality, writing can be a difficult process where every word has to be torn out and put on the page. All too often, the business of real life intrudes upon the creation of fiction and this is as it should be, I suppose, since nothing is ever created in a vacuum and every writer – no matter how fantastic the work they create – needs to be grounded in reality every now and again.

What makes this particular lean creative time doubly frustrating for me, though, is the fact that I’ve been able to intellectualise it.

Of course, the only real way to across a creative desert is to work through it – let those false starts and unsatisfying pages happen, let the characters get away from you and attempt to live their own lives. When I first started writing again a few years ago I suffered exactly the same problems, where nothing seemed to make sense, or at least nothing seemed to make the sense that I wanted it to make.

Or to put it in another fashion. The only way to write is to write.

There I go intellectualising things again.

Influence

I read a lot. I mean, I read an awful lot. Mostly (in fact almost entirely) because I enjoy it. There’s nothing quite like a good book – and, on occasions, there’s nothing like a bad book, either. (I think it was the British writer Chaz Brenchley who once opined that every book has at least one Ideal Reader).

Over the last while my constant fictional companions have been writers such as Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, M.R James, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, writers whose work has always had a profound effect and influence on me.

Lately, though, I have found myself delving back into much older fiction – novels such as Charles Maturin’s splendid Melmoth the Wanderer, Horace Walpole’s masterpiece of atmospheric terror The Castle of Otranto and such perennial favourites as Stoker’s Dracula, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and, always, the fabulous tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

In part, it’s about going back to the deeper roots of fantastic fiction, seeking out those writers who shaped the modern concept of the fantastic. Lord Dunsany, for instance, exerted a great influence upon writers such as Howard and Lovecraft (HPL once wrote ‘there are my Poe pieces and my Dunsany pieces but, alas, where are my Lovecraft pieces?’) and even writers such as H.H Ewers had an influence despite the fact that they were contemporaries: Ewers’ short story The Spider, for instance, helped to shape Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark.

It’s also about understanding where you come from as a writer, I think, and about understanding the way in which fiction is and was crafted.

To modern eyes, novels like Melmoth the Wanderer are difficult, ponderous things: even The Castle of Otranto, coming in at a scant hundred pages, can be a challenge to read, while Dracula, that paragon of vampire fiction, has little in common with the current trends in the modern vampire story. Yet those novels and others like them have an undeniable power – the language is rich, the imagery vivid – books that celebrate rather than apologise for the written word.

Every writer has his or her influences, but sometimes you have to look beyond that, to find out who and what influenced the writers you admire. My love of Jack Vance, for instance, led me to Clark Ashton Smith, my love of Stephen King led me to Franz Kafka and Shirley Jackson, it was Karl Edward Wagner who led me to Melmoth the Wanderer and Robert E. Howard who led me to Lord Dunsany.

Reading, or re-reading, the work of older writers is, I think, always a valuable thing to do. After all, if you don’t know where you came from, how are you ever going to know where you’re going?

Elric of Melniboné

Collecting together the early Elric stories of Michael Moorcock, the 2008 Gollancz edition of Elric of Melniboné is a book that no aficionado of sword and sorcery can afford to be without. While later novels and stories added to the saga, these tales –The Dreaming City, While the Gods Laugh, The Stealer of Souls, Kings In Darkness, Caravan of Forgotten Dreams and Stormbringer - comprise the original Elric cycle that turned sword and sorcery on its head when they were first published in the 1960’s.

One of the most influential figures in fantasy fiction, Michael Moorcock’s doomed Prince Elric of Melniboné brought doubt, angst and a seriously Jungian vibe to sword and sorcery, a genre where heroes rarely suffered from any problems more daunting than which monster to kill first. A king who loses a kingdom, rather than a barbarian who usurps one, a physical weakling who relies on drugs and his hell-forged sword for strength, rather than a muscle bound warrior and an intelligent sorcerer rather than a sword-swinging warrior, Elric represented shades of grey in a genre where black and white was the order of the day.

The gift that both Moorcock and Elric brought to fantasy was to give it a cerebral edge whilst, at the same time, refusing to sacrifice the wild imagination and non-stop action that made (and makes) sword and sorcery so much fun. Granted that Robert E. Howard had also given S&S a similar edge with his King Kull stories, but with Moorcock it was a vital component of his fiction.

More than that, there was always a sense of doom in the Elric stories. Rarely did the characters triumph utterly and frequently found that the object of their desire was less than they believed and, in some cases, cost them dearly. In The Dreaming City, for instance, Elric not only destroys his ancestral home but also inadvertently kills his true love and then, if that were not enough, witnesses the slaughter of his allies so that, ultimately, the actions of the character lead to nothing but death and destruction. In “While the Gods Laugh”, the quest for answers leads to more bitter disappointment and in Stormbringer itself, the ultimate fate of the world and the characters calls to mind Ragnarok and the end of all things.

This is not to say, however, that the Elric stories are all doom and gloom. Moorcock’s imagination in these early stories is mercurial and flamboyant and has an almost punk rock ascetic, and incorporating elements from both pulp sensibility and literary experimentation.

Re-reading the original stories, freed from the constraints of later additions, the thing that strikes most about these tales is how wild and fanciful they are as if Moorcock’s prose is struggling to rip itself free from the page and, above all, how unusual a hero Elric really is.

If you’ve never read Elric before, this is the place to start, and even if you are familiar with the character and his world, this edition should still be resting on your shelves, if only to remind you how joyous good sword and sorcery can be.

THE BONE HOUSE PODCAST

I'm rather pleased to say that the audio version of my short story, The Bone House, is currently available at the very fine magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

You can find it by following this link:

http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=42

HORROR EXPRESS

HORROR EXPRESS (1972) Directed by Eugenio Martín. Starring Christopher Lee. Peter Cushing. Telly Savalas. Alberto de Mendoza. Julio Peña

There are certain actors that bring a certain amount of sheer class and professionalism to even the most ropey of movies, actors who steadfastly refuse to give the audience a knowing wink or acknowledge in any way that, in fact, they are doing something rather silly and beneath them.

The 1972 Euro-shocker Horror Express is thankfully blessed with not one, not two, but three such actors in the shape of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and, in one of the most riotously over-the-top performances ever committed to celluloid, Telly Savalas.

Penned by Arnaud d'Usseau & Julian Zimet, the same team that brought you the campy and downright daft Psychomania, Horror Express is a sort of European Hammer-lite (mostly due to the presence of Cushing and Lee) that involves reanimated Neanderthals, brain sucking aliens and, in its bravura climax, zombie Cossacks.

The plot involves Professors Saxton and Wells (Lee and Cushing) transporting a Peking Man style missing link from China to Russia via the Trans-Siberian Express only to discover that a killer walks among them, a killer with glowing eyes who not only sucks clean the brains of its victims but can also transfer its consciousness from one body to another. What is this strange entity from beyond the stars? Who will it possess next? Father Pujardov? Inspector Mirov? Countess Irina? Professor Wells? Professor Saxton? (Hardly the last two: as Cushing says rather archly: “Monster? We’re British, you know.”) Or will overacting Captain Kazan save the day?

Moving from its creature feature first half into a zombies on a train second act, Horror Express is an odd film that strives for the Hammer feel but lacks the vibrancy of Hammer at its best. It is, however, always a pleasure to see Cushing and Lee together and the film manages a creeping sense of claustrophobia along with some inventive shocks, solid supporting cast – particularly Alberto de Mendoza’s repellent Father Pujardov and Julio Peña’s Inspector Mirov - and really rather disturbing zombie Cossacks.

Pitched somewhere between of Quatermass and the Pit and Plague of the Zombies, Horror Express is a film that tries its hardest to be intelligent – asking questions about the nature of faith and mankind’s role in the universe – but ultimately has to settle for being mildly good fun.

SHAMELESS PROMOTION DEPARTMENT

The past few weeks have been something of a bonanza for me, with various bits of fiction appearing here and there, most notably in the first issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Silver Blade and The Absent Willow Review.

So, by way of promoting both myself and a number of very fine magazines…



The Bone House: Beneath Ceaseless Skies # 20
I like to carve. I like to sculpt. But the ironwood trees in the forest shatter even the finest blades. Father says that the war has changed them, that the magic of the battlemages has infected the land, and I have no cause to doubt him—he has been my educator and my window on the world. Bone is easier to shape.
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=42

The Black Flowers of Sevan: Heroic Fantasy Quarterly # 1
Carrion feeders scattered at our approach. Crows and buzzards, their bellies swollen with meat, took to the air with an ungainly flurry; wild dogs slunk away, glowering at us with red-rimmed eyes. The stench of violent death hung thick in the air, a ripe, sickly smell that even the heaviest rain could not wash away.
http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=196

The Dark Blessing: Silver Blade #3
There are shadows on the salted plains. Even in the darkest of nights and the dullest of days they are there, moving over the rocks and scrub. Furtive things they are, as befits their nature, fleeting things man-sized and man-shaped, but with a greater substance than mere shadows should possess.
http://www.silverblade.net/issue3/shortstories7.html

All That Grows: The Absent Willow Review June 2009
By right, none of these plants should have survived their transplantation: for the ancient earth was no longer an hospitable place, even to those who had been born on her surface, but the love and care furnished by the old man upon his alien plants, supplemented by dark incantations supplied by His Eminence Cardinal Kirill, brought forth such blooms as had never been seen before in the history of the world.
http://absentwillowreview.com/archives/all-that-grows

The Sins of the Land: Dark Fire # 40
The tavern was empty, no sign of Madelina or the elderly cook. A faint metallic tang hung in the air and there was dust on everything — coating the tables and chairs, crunching under his boots as he walked to the door.
"Alesandro."
The sound of her voice startled him. He turned and looked at her standing behind the tavern counter — she was pale and drawn, her skin sallow as if she, too, were covered in dust.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“The storm got in,” she said.
http://usersites.horrorfind.com/home/horror/darkfire/fiction_2.html

PSYCHOMANIA

PSYCHOMANIA (1973). Directed by Don Sharp. Starring Nicky Henson, Beryl Reid, George Sanders, Ann Michelle.

There are certain films in the world that are more than the sum of their parts, films that somehow manage to transcend their limitations to become something really quite staggering.

One of the best examples of this is the early 70’s British horror romp, Psychomania.

Slightly camp, cheaply made and with a plot that doesn’t bear too close an analysis, Pyschomania is a film that almost, but not quite, defies description. Its ‘bikers back from the dead’ storyline would at first glance promise great things, after all, what’s better than the undead… why, the undead on wheels, of course.

Posh boy rebel Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) is head of a chapter of Home Counties Hell’s Angels who go by the convenient moniker of The Living Dead, a name that becomes literal once Tom discovers the secret of returning from beyond the grave. Aided and abetted by his witchy mother (Beryl Reid in fine, better-performance-than-the-film-deserves form) and the sinister Shadwell (George Sanders, who wanders through the whole thing looking slightly puzzled and embarrassed) Tom sets about to persuade the members of his gang to take the plunge with him. Most do, and they set themselves on a course of rather gentle mayhem that is mostly on a par with Richard E. Grant leaning out of his car and shouting ‘scrubbers’ at some passing ladies.

Things take a turn for the worse when they begin to up the stakes, killing assorted lorry drivers and policemen and generally making a nuisance of themselves until Mother Beryl revokes the pact that she has made with the Devil (who may or may not be George Sanders, even he isn’t sure) and the gang literally turn to stone. Or something like that.

Actually, the plot of Psychomania is largely redundant, particularly since it makes no real sense – the secret of coming back from the Great Beyond, for instance, is wishing really, really hard and other than a few off-screen murders, the gang’s hi-jinks are limited to frightening some dolly birds and driving their motorcycles rather fast (‘doing the ton’ is, I believe, the correct term).

But its very flaws and lack of logic are the things that make Psychomania so hugely enjoyable, combined with some brilliantly kitsch interiors in the home of La Reid and a soundtrack that manages to be both atmospheric and inappropriate all at the same time. This is given its finest expression when Tom is laid to rest for the first time (upright on his motorbike and in a grave that’s just a little bit too shallow for him) and one of the gang sings him a farewell song that contains the lines ‘the world never knew his name, but the chosen few know of his fame’.

The montage of the Living Dead finding different ways to shuffle off this mortal coil is, quite simply, one of the most hilarious sequences ever committed to film (drowning, throwing themselves off tall buildings and overpasses et al) and there’s a trainspotter’s delight in recognising some of the supporting characters such as June Brown and, in a very early role, Robert Hardy.

Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Don Sharp and with a script by Julian Zimet & Arnaud d'Usseau (who also penned the cult favourite, Horror Express) Psychomania is one of those films for which the term ‘guilty pleasure’ might have been coined.

Unfortunately they don’t make ‘em like this anymore - brisk, silly and unintentionally hilarious.