As I get older
November 14th, 2009 · Uncategorized
I find I am listening to more jazz. It’s like cancer and country music, you get to a certain age and it’s just there waiting for you.
It’s, what, twelve years later?
November 2nd, 2009 · Uncategorized
and the end of Alien Resurrection STILL really pisses me off
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Handling The Undead, by John Ajvide Lindqvist
October 25th, 2009 · Uncategorized
Lindqvist received a lot of attention earlier this year for the film Let The Right One In, for which he contributed the script from his original novel. That was an unusual vampire story, as much about an unlikely friendship between two outsiders as it was biting necks. In Handling The Undead he twists another horror trope, the zombie, and gives us a far more radical reworking than his earlier book delivered.
The zombies in this novel are neither Romero-esque shamblers or their fastrunning 21st century upgrades, intent on brainzzz with an unstoppable appetite for flesh. These are purely and simply the dead returned to…not life, exactly, but to some kind of animation.
Something has caused the dead of Stockholm to rise, and we follow the consequences through three bereaved families. A wife and granddaughter, a husband and son, and a grandfather and mother are all reunited with their loved ones, though the undead have little recognition of them, hardly any cognitive abilities and poor motor skills. They are little more than unresponsive bags of meat, but the differing way the families deal with their return is the heart of the novel. What would you do if the walking corpse of your grandfather appeared at your front door? Welcome him home? Reject it in horror? Wonder if this animated flesh can really be your relative?
Like all the best genre writers, Lindqvist uses the fantastic to examine our mundane lives. He has reinvented the zombie as a reification of grief, a physical manifestation of the loss and heartbreak felt on bereavement. There are a few plot holes and threads left hanging that it would be spoilerish to describe, but overall he has produced one of the most emotionally affecting books I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommended.
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50 reasons why Tokyo is the best city in the world
October 6th, 2009 · Uncategorized
according to the new CNNgo Asia site
Can’t really argue with any of them, but I could add 50 more without even thinking about it.
I miss it every day 
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Phill Jupitus On Calvin & Hobbes
September 22nd, 2009 · Uncategorized
Phill Jupitus celebrates Calvin and Hobbes, the comic strip about the little boy and his stuffed tiger named after eminent philosphers. Over the course of ten years, the strip became an international phenomenon, being syndicated in 2,500 newspapers worldwide. It tells the tale of a young boy whose stuffed tiger is as real to him as the people around him, and deals in the process with philosophical issues about free will and the meaning of life, via the perspective of a child with an extraordinary imagination. Its creator, the reclusive Bill Watterson, could have become a multi-millionaire through merchandising deals and film offers, but turned them all down without hesitation.
Phill sets out to discover more about the characters and the man behind them. In Watterson’s absence, Jupitus heads to Oxford to speak with artists, merchandisers, booksellers and philosophers to find out what makes the strip so popular, over a decade after Watterson drew the final frame.
on the iPlayer here
from the tourist information leaflets in Nantwich
September 10th, 2009 · Uncategorized
“The best recorded disaster is the Great Fire of 1583 which, encouraged by constant winds, lasted for 20 days and destroyed most of the town. Four bears, released for their own safety from their cage in the town’s bear pit, considerably hampered the firefighting operations.”
Awesome
Black Static 12
August 25th, 2009 · Uncategorized
Nina Allen’s “My Brother’s Keeper” is an evocative ghost story, where the ghost is secondary to the main thrust of the story about time and childhood secrets. It works well, apart from one slightly clunky moment where the narrator quite literally trips over and is injured by the buried past.
“Bryson Feeds Families” by TF Davenport is a very short, but very nasty, piece based on the horrors of modern factory farming that slowly gives up it’s secrets…it’d be unfair to reveal anymore but this is one that sticks in the mind.
Sarah Totton’s “Flatrock Sunners” is the best story of the issue, telling the story of an encounter with the creatures of the title and the subsequent fallout. It’s tremendously vivid, with strong colour imagery all the way through.
“Stone Whispers” by Tim Casson is up next. An understated story of a married couple living alone on a Channel Island and their reactions to a group of interlopers, it is effective and memorable, especially for those of us who have reached a Certain Age and realised that life doesn’t always work out the way you thought it would.
Steve Rasnic Tem’s piece is another short short, called “Charlie”, about a mother’s visit to her eponymous son. In it’s brief length, Tem packs in parental guilt, helplessness and despair, making this hands down the saddest story of the issue.
A strong issue is a little let down by the final story, Kim Lakin-Smith’s “Unearthed”. A promising idea, ghostly tanners in the caves under Nottingham, was spoilt for me by dialogue that just didn’t sound right. A shame, as I remember enjoying a story of hers in Interzone fairly recently. Bonus points for setting part of the story in a pub I used to drink in though.
The non fiction is the usual mix of columns and reviews, all worth reading – I’m particularly intrigued the piece on Gary Braunbeck, and will try to investigate some of his books. As ever, Black Static is available via TTA Press
The Resurrectionist, by Jack O’Connell
August 9th, 2009 · books
This is the first book I’ve read by Jack O’Connell. It won’t be the last.
It’s the story of Sweeney, a pharmacist by trade, and his son Danny. Danny is in a coma following an accident, and Sweeney has taken a job at the Peck Clinic, an unusual forbidding institution that offers the hope of a cure for Danny. We see Sweeney’s first days at the clinic and his dealings with Dr Peck and his daughter, the other workers and a biker gang who have some unspecified business with the doctor. But running alongside this is another story, that of a fantasy comic called Limbo that Danny was devoted to. This follows a group of circus freaks and their perilous travels from the land of Old Bohemia to Gehenna. At first almost entirely seperate, the story of the freaks impacts more and more on the real world storyline.
O’Connell’s previous work seems to have been marketed as crime fiction, but this is a stranger beast than that straightforward tag. There’s definitely a noirish tinge to the novel, but there’s also touches of the gothic in the description of the Peck Clinic and Mansion, and most obviously, contemporary fantasy – I was very strongly put in mind of Jonathan Carroll’s Bones Of The Moon and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman arc A Game Of You. (and, although the two books couldn’t be more different, it’s worth noting that I read this immediately after Steve Toltz’s A Fraction Of The Whole, also recommended and also about fathers and sons). By the end though, we are entirely in O’Connell’s territory, as both stories slide into something darker and stranger than expected at the outset.
Probably one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, well worth picking up.
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