Interviewed: F. Paul Wilson

Interviewed: F.Paul Wilson by Keith B Walters

This interview was carried out in 1996 by kind arrangement of Hodder at the time of release of Sister Night and the paperback release of Nightworld.

Keith B Walters: So, do you come here often?

F.Paul Wilson: This is my third time in England. I was last over for the World Fantasy Convention in ’88.

My father was born here, so I have roots here.

KBW: I did notice a few references to England in your work and wondered if there was some background there.

Okay, if I may begin with a confession; I haven’t as yet read Sister Night (Since this interview I have and it’s a cracking read), but I have concentrated on the set of six paperbacks before me, and I hope that I received these in the order that I should have read them!

The first one, The Keep, has a quote at the beginning by the character of Magda; ‘I’ll still be alive in a way’, she mentions poetry or music as a way of ensuring a kind of immortality through work. Do you see your writing and your career as your own quest for immortality?

FPW: You hope for it.

Not so much going on forever, but that when you’re dead, someone may pick up one of your books.

Also, with horror fiction, if you can do it effectively, if you can get the pulse going, get them a little upset, in a sense you’ve reached beyond the grave and squeezed their adrenals and that is, in a sense, a way of staying alive.

KBW: I’ve heard it said of other writers that part of the thrill of writing is the fact that at any moment it is likely that somebody somewhere in the world is reading your work.

FPW: You hope!

It’s always nice to be walking along a beach and see someone reading one of your books.

That’s much more of a thrill than seeing your book sitting on a shelf in a bookstore.

KBW: Do you get recognized?

FPW: No. Most of my books don’t have my face on them.

As a matter of fact I was just in Forbidden Planet, standing next to a poster with my face on it and nobody recognized me.

Let me take it to the extreme; Stephen King – that’s a nightmare. He can’t go anywhere.

KBW: Do you envy King for his ‘production line’ and all its spin-offs?

Do you envy his success, or is that not as far as you’d like to take things?

FPW: I envy him to the extent that he is basically now able to write whatever he wants. I envy him that. I don’t need that much money – he can’t even spend the interest on the money!

Sure, you’d love to be independently wealthy from the writing and then receive more freedom to write what you want and to have more time.

Me, I could quit my practice.

The thing I envy most is that he can write something like Dolores Claiborne, which is totally off the track of anything else he’s written before, or of what people expect of him.

He’s free to do that.

KBW: Do you worry though that, if you had that level of success and freedom, that your work would suffer? I’ve heard it said that King could give the rights to his shopping list and somebody would buy it.

FPW: Well, what happens is that publishers are afraid to edit you, because you’re so big, no one dares to say ‘excuse me, Mr King, chapter ten shouldn’t be there’, and I think that hurts the work, it hurts the writer.

You can’t think that everything you write is good.

The thing is, if you’re hung over the word processor or typewriter for months, you really lose perspective on the work.

But, there are writers who just think ‘I don’t want to cut at all, I can’t take anything out’.

Maybe I’m not a writer, maybe I’m just a storyteller, I want to tell the most effective story.

Now if someone can tell me that this undercuts the book and I look at it and say ‘Yes, you’re right’, I will change it.

KBW: Staying with The Keep for a while, at the time of this interview I haven’t as yet seen the film of the book, or been able to track it down.

FPW: You are very fortunate!

KBW: Oh really? I thought I’d read that you welcomed its existence, but that it’s not quite as you envisioned it.

FPW: I hated it.

It never had a theatrical release in England, but it is on videotape.

The first thirty minutes are pretty good, there is some wasted film there, lots of shots of close-ups of eyeballs and matches being struck.

Later on it just falls apart.

It deviates from the sacred text of the novel.

I think that Michael Mann (Director) did not realise that it’s a very tightly constructed novel and, if you start changing that, then it starts to fall apart.

That’s when Mann learned to stick to the book for future projects.

I wished he’d learned it one film earlier, The Keep was prior to Manhunter and The Last of the Mohicans – he did fairly faithful adaptations to both of those.

He learned.

KBW: How much involvement did you have with the film?

FPW: Zero.

I was over in Shepperton Studios and I watched an afternoon of filming, during which I think they got 20 seconds of film.

At that point they were doing something straight out of the book, so I was feeling pretty good when I left.

That was during my first trip to England, I guess that was about ’82.

KBW: In The Tomb you have dates, nineteen-eighty dates, but none of them have an end digit to them…?

FPW: Oh yeah.

I didn’t really want to date the book. Right now I’d want to change it. I just didn’t want to put a date in there, but I felt compelled to do it because of all the jumping back to the Raj.

KBW: There is a section in the book in which there are the following two descriptions; ‘the boy went down in a spray of crimson’ and ‘a red flower bloomed on the fabric of his tunic’. That section of the book, that battle, seemed as though you were turning to nature for ways to describe the ways that these people were dying – was that the intention?

FPW: I don’t know.

You know, I was just seeing, you know, the blood spreading out like a flower opening. No, there was nothing conscious as far as looking into what you said there.

KBW: You’re obviously a big fan of movies and The Tomb mentions James Whale’s films. Are they particular favourites of yours?

FPW: Very much so.

The Bride of Frankenstein is one of my all-time great favourite movies. I just love the way he (Whale) would mix pathos and terror and humour and use of certain stock characters like Una O’Connor and all that, they are great movies. I liked Dr Pretorius played by Ernest Thesiger, he stole the movie. There was a wonderful scene when he and the monster were sitting there and having a conversation with that skull, I thought that was great.

KBW: You are still a practicing Physician. So, with that in mind and moving on to The Touch, do you share the medical view of your central character, Dr Alan Bulmer? In the beginning of the book he is picking on the fact that medical work has become dehumanized, that people are talking of operating on an organ rather than on a patient – Do you share that view?

FPW: Yes, I do.

I think that whole thing is a product of specialisation. Unfortunately it’s almost inevitable with the expansion of medical expansion of medical knowledge, that no one can know everything about medicine like they could do even fifty years ago – like you could say, read everything that was written in terms of science fiction. But now, in order to be an expert, you’ve got to narrow your focus, but in narrowing your focus you start treating ‘Joe’s heart’ instead of ‘Joe’ – who has heart disease. It really is a real problem in medicine nowadays. One of the problems of being a general practitioner is well, you can treat Joe – who has a bad heart – but there is no way of knowing everything about cardiology to treat any of the more serious complications that you couldn’t treat in the past. Now you can treat them, but there is no way you could absorb everything you needed to know, so you refer him to the specialist. Hopefully you can become captain of the ship and keep the human element in there while he’s under the cardiologist’s care and then he’ll come back to you and you can treat the whole person again. It’s frustrating when they come back and tell you that they seem to feel that they have been treated like meat, in the sense of people who have never seen you before and will never see you again and they are basically treating Joe as a heart problem, a medical problem, not a person.

KBW: I was actually very surprised to find out that you are not a full time writer.

FPW: I need to do both.

KBW: Is that so you get some sort of balance, or is it due to time? Could you not fill the other time writing?

FPW: Maybe I could.

I think the writing makes me a better Doctor, and I think being a Doctor makes me a better writer. I’m in contact with people all the time, I meet a lot of different types of people and have an intimate knowledge of their lives which they don’t tell anybody else. You see them when they are afraid and when they are at their most vulnerable.

I think it helps with my characters, it helps me keep the humanity in my work and the other thing is that writing is now fun for me. Even though I make more money writing than I do as a Doctor, writing is fun, it’s my golf game. It would become work if I quit medicine.

KBW: At the end of the book, where the ‘touch’ is passed on to the young character of Jeffy, was that planned from the beginnings of the book that you would leave it open ended in that way?

FPW: Yes. I usually outline, I usually like to know where the book’s going to end up. I will often change the course of how I’m going to get there, but I know that I will get there. Because my writing time is precious, I don’t want to get two hundred pages into a book to find that I don’t know where it’s going or that I’m lost – that would be a major catastrophe for me.

I like to leave books open, not because I had any intentions of doing anything more with the characters, trust me – this is the truth! I like to leave them open because I like it when you close the book and you’re thinking, you’re still thinking about it, rather than tie up all the threads and you close the book and say ‘Oh, that’s done’. I’d rather have you close the book, turn out the lights and say ‘Jeez, I wonder what happens, I wonder if Alan’s going to get all his senses back?’ – To me that keeps the book alive and keeps the reader just a little bit longer, I guess I’m loathe to let go!

KBW: With the final scene in The Touch, where Alan’s heading towards Jeffy, about to touch him, did you put yourself in that position? Knowing that the touch is damaging himself, did you stop and think ‘what would I do?’

FPW: I think he wasn’t all there at that point.

There was a question as to who was in control, even from the beginning. I think that became a fixed idea and, as he lost a lot of other parts of his consciousness, his mind so to speak, that thought remained there and became a sort of obsession. Even though he was a noble character, I don’t know if he was that noble!

KBW: Moving on to Reborn.

Jim Stevens at the beginning of the book - you mention that his early attempts at writing horror fiction and that Doubleday Publishers tell him they don’t think it’s such a good idea. Is that in any way autobiographical? Did you have similar dealing s when you started out?

FPW: No. I wrote Science Fiction at first and Doubleday was the first publisher I sent my novel to, and they bought it. But, in the nineteen sixties, before Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, you could not sell a horror novel. You wouldn’t even think about writing a supernatural type of horror novel. I was trying to hint that there was some sort of evil in there, I was trying to hint at horror.

KBW: So, when you started out, how much had you submitted before you became published?

FPW: I wrote short stories for years, we had a reading circle class at school and for it I wrote a haunted house story in fact. One day the reading circle teacher came over and I asked if I could read my own story, I’d only written half of it so that was what I read. The teacher could tell that I hadn’t finished it so she said to finish it and the come back and read the rest. But, as we were straightening our chairs away and getting up, kids were coming up to me and asking ‘what happened? What happened to the guy? What happened?’ and I thought ‘I’ve got ‘em’. I had this sort of power!

I think I can trace the desire to write back to, well obviously I had the desire or I wouldn’t have written in the first place, but something was there then and I wanted to keep doing it. I got rejected, I can do the literal papering the walls with rejection letters. I was very methodical about this though – I’d get a rejection from one magazine and straight away I’d turn it around and send the work to another and so on. The first story I sold to John Campbell of Analog magazine was a science fiction story but it ended up with the guy being eaten alive by rats, so you can see I was always putting a little bit of horror into things!

KBW: With regards to the series of six books we have here, were they published in the correct order originally?

FPW: Well the first three books were not meant to be related, I had no idea that I would be linking them up later. They were published in the order they were written basically.

Sister Night was written in the middle of Reprisal. I’d been thinking about the idea for years and suddenly I was down in Baltimore on a medical thing and was up in my room alone at night, just watching tv, and I was thinking about that plot. The last twist suddenly came in and I just jumped up and started scribbling things down. By the time I got home the whole story was right there in my head. I got to it and typed it out in seven weeks, which has never happened to me – ninety thousand words in seven weeks, that was like taking dictation, that book was like a gift. Almost for that reason, it’s my favourite novel, plus I like all the twists and turns in it.

KBW: Do you have a cumulative name for this series of books?

FPW: I always call them The Nightworld Cycle. John Klute and Peter Nicholls did that new Science Fiction Encyclopedia and they referred to it as The Adversary Books – I sort of like that, so I might start calling them The Adversary Cycle.

KBW: Are they to be re-issued in bookstores all together, because without actually reading in depth, the order and the relationship between the books is not clear?

FPW: I don’t know if they’ll actually change.

Reborn, Reprisal and Nightworld are really one novel and maybe it wasn’t fair to break them up, but unless you’re Stephen King you can’t do thousand page novels, especially if it’s horror.

Maybe it really wasn’t fair in leaving people hanging around for about a year between each book. But I was looking down the line to the release of Nightworld, by which time it really wouldn’t matter because you could then go into bookstores and pick up the whole deal. I was looking at the long run.

KBW: Okay, back to Reborn. The theme of genetic research is obviously quite strong. Is this an area which bothers or worries you?

FPW: There is always the Frankenstein worry with genetic research.

For instance, they’ve located the gene which causes bowel cancer and, if they can find a marker for it, if they can identify it, then people will know if they are at risk. Other people who’ve been worried about it because three people in their family have died from colon cancer, can stop worrying.

Take ovarian cancer, which has a very high genetic relationship, you don’t have to have the vaginal ultrasound every six months. That’s the kind of things and changes that genetic research is going to do.

Even the Frankenfruit – genetically altered produce which doesn’t rot as fast, why would you be afraid of that?

When you think of all the hunger in the world, if you can keep things from rotting you can give fresh vegetables to people who need it! Even Jurassic Park is sort of a warning about it, to me that’s a kind of yellow journalism.

KBW: Would you give the green light to somebody to make films of any of the other books?

FPW: Oh yeah!

The Tomb was optioned by New World Pictures, they had the script done, the script was absolutely horrible – they moved Jack to Pasadena, he didn’t belong in Pasadena at all! But a British movie called The Tomb came out at about that time in its development and they really wanted to use the title The Tomb, even though there is no tomb in the book. Once New World Pictures got the bad script and then lost the title, they lost interest. Reborn has been optioned for a theatrical movie, The Touch has been optioned for a tv movie-of-the-week, but….you know…

KBW: You say that The Tomb wasn’t your title, have any of the others changed?

FPW: The Tomb was changed against my will.

My title was Koshi and they said ‘we’re getting retailer resistance to that title because it’s a foreign word’. They wanted to have a building on the cover and they wanted a two word title starting with ‘The’. They couldn’t call it The Temple because it would sound like some Jewish novel. Finally they came out with The Tomb and I said that there was no Tomb in it, and they said ‘well, no one’s gonna mind!’.

KBW: Another theme that is quite strong, particularly in one scene which is very graphic, is the anti-abortion subject. You have a family of your own – was that your point of view coming across there?

FPW: I don’t know if it was anti-abortion, but yes I am against abortion. I see great value in human life. To me it is killing another human being. I don’t care if you say it’s not a real human being until the eighteenth week or the twelfth week, it’s all arbitrary. It’s got forty-six human chromosomes, I just think it’s a legalism. I’m not religious, it has nothing to do with the Pope, I’m a devout agnostic, life is just precious to me. That’s one of the reasons I’m in medicine.

KBW: The reference to Rosemary’s Baby is obviously very strong, is that from the film, the book, or both? Or is it just a the theme that appealed to you?

FPW: Basically , I didn’t want to do another Omen or Rosemary’s Baby, therefore I used the Anti-Christ as a kind of red herring but I wanted another evil entity to be incarnate, so to speak. This is how it became linked to The Keep. I was wracking around for some evil entity when I said ‘Jeez, I have one in The Keep. I can bring him back, he’s been reincarnated before’. So when I did that, I also said we’ll set it in a small town, but near enough to New York, where I can get into the city. Then I thought, I’ve got a town just like that in The Touch, so if I bring in the other book I can make this a nice full circle. But all this would require a third book. I’d originally planned one book, but eventually my first thoughts for the new book had to be divided into two books and then an extra book, Nightworld, was required to finish it all off.

KBW: With Reprisal, did you decide in the early stages of Reborn not to mention Rasalom, leaving his named return for the following book?

FPW: Yes, I didn’t want to make such an obvious link to The Keep, I wanted it to grow as it went on. It was just not ready in that part of the story to reveal who he was. I laid a lot of hints in there through some of the other characters to carry through to the next book.

KBW: How much involvement do you have in the book-jacket designs?

FPW: Zilch.

Actually I shouldn’t say that. I’m thinking of America.

Art departments in America are very independent, even the editors have very little input. Here, I must say, I get more input from my British Publisher than any other. They always send me cover proofs, they ask me for my approval. I’ve never really had any real qualms with them. I thought that the cover for The Keep was a ‘killer cover’ – it certainly grabs the eye, and I like the way the foiled lettering has all the little crosses within it.

KBW: Okay, well that leaves Nightworld. Thank you for all the movie lists throughout the book, I’ve certainly got some catching up to do.

FPW: They all came out of the Psychotronic Movie Guide.

KBW: So are they all favourites of yours?

FPW: No, I chose them for the theme. They had to do with night or the end of the world or something that had to do with Jaws, or that type of thing. As things went on, they get darker and darker towards the end, there is even one film called Nightworld! I had a lot of fun composing those lists, but it was also a lot of work, typing out all the dates and the producers and all that kind of stuff. Joe Bob Briggs is on Saturday nights on cable with a drive-in movie show. He is a real person, so he’s kind of an expert on these things.

KBW: Was the radio station made up or does that exist too?

FPW: It’s a real radio station, Joe and Freddy are Flo and Eddie who were DJs on another station in New York City and they happen to be fans of the books, so I gave them a little tip of the hat.

KBW: Was it very difficult to kill off some of the characters after staying with them so long?

FPW: Yes, it was, it was.

The toughest killing I had to write was little Danny – it took me three months to sit down and type that out. I was sick, but in order to destroy the priest I had to take away his entire support system, everyone he loved. That was tough.

Killing Alan, I had a lump in my throat. But, when you fight a war it’s unrealistic to think that everyone’s going to be sitting around having a drink at the end. There are going to be casualties in any war.

One of the questions in Nightworld is that there’ll be the person who’ll be stomping on the little old lady to get the last can of beans and there’ll be the person who’s not – In that situation, which one are you gonna be? Alan was an example of the nobler end, Carol’s new husband was at the other end and so were the State cops and so on.

In a sense it served two purposes, there are casualties in any battle worth fighting, and try asking the question in different ways – what side do you fall on?

KBW: Do you have any regrets about any aspect of the writing of this series of books?

FPW: I probably should have written them in a different order.

It might have been better if I’d written The Touch, The Tomb and then The Keep, for more of a crescendo effect.

But, no. No regrets. I can’t open any of my books without wanting to change paragraphs, but that’s because these were written over a ten year period and I’m a different writer now than when I started. Hopefully these six books will be part of my little bit of immortality, I think they’re quite unique in horror fiction, that there is an epic, cosmic scale to them, they are a self contained series of novels that can be read individually or also all interlinked.

KBW: What can we expect from you in the future?

FPW: Smaller scale horror.

Sister Night is a much smaller scale, almost claustrophobic when compared to these books. But, if something cosmic occurs to me again, I’m certainly not going to shy away from it.

KBW: Is the F of F Paul Wilson a close kept secret?

FPW: Oh no. It’s for Francis.

I’ve never been called Frank or Francis. My father was always the Frank of the family, so I was called by my second name.

Thanks to F.Paul Wilson for giving his time and illuminating discussion of his work and thanks for Hodder for the arrangement of the interview.

This interview originally featured in the Cinema, movie and books fanzine, Anything Goes.

Thanks to Steve Langton (editor of Anything Goes) for agreement for its re-use here.

Post 2 - Magus:Transpisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore

(Melinda & Alan)
Saturday
We were straight in with the Panel on "Schizo Alliances"
Starting with Gary Lloyd (musician and producer) talking about "Moore and Music".
It was an interesting presentation on Moore's use of music over the years, from reading poetry to music, to the reference by PWIE (Alan Moore knows the score) and his own vocal range. Hearing Moore described as "oddly designed as an instrument" was amusing. It was a nice way to start the morning, something entertaining and less academic.

Next up was Cyril Camus (University of Toulouse) on "Neil Gaiman: A Portrait of the Artist as a Disciple of Alan Moore". Cyril considered the practical and extra fictional influence on Gaiman. He looked at Gaiman's willingness to pull characters from a blend of mythologies and religions, reality and his own mind and throw them together in his stories, also his use of mythological characters in a real setting. Similarities between 'Whatever Happened to the Man or Tomorrow' by Moore and Gaiman's 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader' were also drawn.

Finishing off the first session was Jasmine Shadrack (University of Northampton) on "V vs Hollywood: A Discourse on Polemic Thievery". Jasmine gave a very animated talk, obviously passionate about the political issues raised in V and talking about the impact the book had on her. She confesses to liking the film in spite of herself an dbeing pleased with some of what it did, but disappointed at the removal of the other female plots leaving only Yvie. She talked about Brian McFarlane's assertion that when adapting it is most important that the filmaker finds some sort of truth for themselves and the audience.

The panel I missed for this was on Chronotopia with Michel De Dobbeleer (Ghent Uni), Jochen Ecke (Uni of Mainz) & Charlie Blake (Liverpool Hope). Since I only just discovered what a chronotope was i'm not sure i'd have followed anyway.

After Lunch I opted for "Leaping Mediums"
Starting off with Stephen Keane (Uni of Northampton) whose field is film rather than Moore and who was looking a "Watching the Watchmen: From Panels to Frames in Watchmen".
Keane considered techniques that can be used in films to create the sense of recreating the comic experience, such as not moving the camera during the scene so we have the controlled view a panel provides.

Aine Young (Queen's University Belfast) presented "From Hell: The Adverse Journey from page to screen". Aine looked at the need to compress the extensive books into a movie and the level of comprimise this lead to. The part of her talk that interested me most was her discussion on Moore's effort to create a realistic vision of Victorian London and the move away from typical comic book art against the film using familiar cues to remind viewers they were watching a comic book movie.
In the last paper of the weekend Ian Dawe (Selkirk College, Canada) presented on "The Moore Film Adaptations and the Erotic - Grotesque". The focus was on From Hell and LXG. The discussion of Moore's use of groteque and carnivalesque was interesting and the role of Carnivalesque in society was particularly interesting to me as an almost anthropological perspective. The analysis of the films looked at how they had variously altered or removed these elements.

Alan Moore:
Ok this is what you all really came to hear about. Alan and Melinda turned up toward the end of lunch, mingled for a little while, were totally delightful and then headed into the hall for interviews and q&a.
(quotes may be slightly paraphrased rather than exact but are as close as I could get)
Asked what he made of the even Alan expressed his pleasure at discovering there were people out there considering levels he'd put into the books believing he would be the only person ever to notice them. He talked about the importance of language as a means of consolidating reality and the interdisciplinary approach to art in the 60's. Moore described artists as all being 'propagandists for their own state of mind'.
Asked about cruelty for transformation Alan said he felt it was neccessary in comics and expecially super hero comics where characters are polarised well beyond real life.
'Transformation requires a hot crucible'. Moore also agreed 'I am quite apocolyptic' defining apocolypse as meaning a shattering revelation.
Talking about magic Moore explained that he had gone as far as he could with rationalism and needed something beyond rationality which took him into magic which he considers a linguistic phenomenon. Quoting From Hell 'the one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind'.
Talking about Moore's revelation on his 40th that he was a magician conversation then moved onto his 50th and the withdrawl around that time from the comic and film industries. Moore has been following his desire to focus on his home town and the issues in the neighbourhood he grew up in, which lead to the creation of his underground, paper only magazine, Dodgem Logic.
It is Moore's belief that globalism and globalisation will disapear and people will become more community based again.
Talking about the future it appears that the opera planned in collaboration with the Gorillaz will not be forthcoming, however the Bumper Book of Magic, with a Moore designed tarot deck will be.

Melinda Gebbie
Melinda talked about her work on Lost Girls and the need to include the darker elements of sex and sexuality as well as her role in the underground movement of 70's San Francisco. She is presently working on her memoirs where she will discuss this part of her life and the people around her. She talked about her artisitc influences, Kuniyoshi, Klimt and Rousseau. Melinda talked about art as a personal language needing midwifery rather than castigation when asked about the formal teaching of art, stressing the ease with which the self the artist puts into their work can be destroyed.

Alan & Melinda answered a number of questions together on various subjects and i'm afraid I was so sucked in I just have a handful of quotes and comments, which are in some cases paraphrased and I can't tell you who said all of them.
Discussing the nature of time - 'Live every moment as though we have to live it forever' AM
& 'Persistant illusion of transcience' AM
Describing humanity and earth if we are the only planet with sentient ife 'the last box of crayons' MG
Moore decribed artistic influences as a form of 'serial possession' and suggested that losing the empire had given the British more depth of character culturally.

And that is all I wrote. Well, I didn't give you all my notes on each paper but that would be a post per paper and who has time! There are rumours though of some of the papers being gathered in a journal and published so if and when that happens I shall let you all know. It was a brilliant weekend and all the papers led to interesting discussions in the q&a sessions.

For those of you who are interested a couple fo Alan Moore's books have been reviewed here on Un:Bound:
Moore, Alan - Watchmen , Watchmen (2) , Voice of Fire , From Hell ,
and my picture from this and other events are here.

Post 1: Magus - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Alan Moore

(kate laity and Mac singer)

On the 28th and 29th May I headed to Nottingham for an academic conference on Alan Moore. It's a strange thing to someone without a Phd to spend two days listening to papers providing deep analysis of particular aspects of Moore's work. Strange, but fascinating and i'm pleased to say that in addition to learning some fantastic new words (chronotopes is a fave) I did manage to follow most of it. About 40 people attended over the weekend and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The team did a good job pulling the event together and everything appeared to run smoothly (appearance is everything). I'm not going to go into detail on every panel I went to or we'll be here days, I took copious notes though.

Friday
Once everyone was gathered and registered Nathan did a short and entertaining introduction to the weekend followed by a keynote paper by Paul Gravett who focused on the idea of "something from nothing" and focused on some of Moore's less commercially popular works like "big numbers" and "small killings", outside of the fantasy work he is so well known for. After a q&a with Paul (who is lovely) and several more titles added to my wishlist, we moved on to the first panels.

The first panel was "The Magic of Place".
Starting off was Rikke Cortsen from The University Copenhagen on "Building Fictional Worlds: On the Construction of Place in Alan Moore's 'Top Ten'.
Rikke has explored the 'construction of chronotope' through this particular series of comics and it's spin offs identifying many of the specific event spaces, in describing chronotopes she quoted Bakhtin naming them as 'the place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied'. I'd never heard the term before but it was a good presentation and I was mostly able to keep up.

The next paper on the panel was Kate Laity's presentation "Rite here: Ritual, performance and the magick of place". Kate came from The College of Saint Rose USA.
This was an entertaining and informative panel looking at Moore's performance works and indeed Kate began by casting her circle and her watchtowers to cast a spell on us all, which she definitely did. Physical place is important in Moore's work and Kate examined the speculative city and the personal geography that people create. Walking around her own London, listening to Moore in his London exploring Blake's London. There is a physical city of London and none of us experience it the same way.

Later I had to choose between two streams.
"I attended Chaotic Criminality: The Villains of Alan Moore"
Starting with a video conference presentation by Geoff Klock (Borough of Manhatten Community College) on V for Villain. Geoff covered the issue of V being a villain, certainly not everyone would see him that way and the character is kept in every way ambiguous, not even revealing the face or enough of the body to determine gender (keep in mind the focus is on the novel not the film). He compared V to Macbeth and considers that perhaps V is set up as a hero in part because the people and structure that he is fighting are so much more abhorrent. It was an engaging presentation although the thoughts at times seemed a little scattered.

Mervie Miettinen (University of Tempere) was up next considering "The past as multiple choice? - Textual Anarchy in the Killing Joke".
Mervie's focus is on Joker's loss of memory and alternate origin stories (for movie fans, not dissimilar in concept to the Joker's alternate stories in Dark Knight). She considers that different writers have reimagined the Jokers origins over time and none is more true than the others, however familiar tropes of the Batman/Joker relationship always appear in some form to maitain the relationship with the reader or viewer.

Finishing the panel Laura Hilton (University of Birmingham UK) presented her paper on "Reincarnating Mina Murray: Subverting the Gothic Heroine" where she looked at the figure of Mina in the original Bram Stoker and considered her varying roles as Gothic Heroine and New Woman in the books of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the movie by the same name. It was interesting to see how elements of her original character had been used or ignored.

The last panel of the day was "No More Heroes Anymore?
First up was Antonio Venezia (Birkbec College) on "A Sense of History's Patterns" Mapping Northamption in The Voice of Fire and Big Numbers. The paper centred around psychogeography, the coreography or place and the cronology. The paper was interesting but the delivery a little dry makin git less memorable.

The final paper of the day came from Deneb Kozikowski Valereto )Leiden University) on "Philosophy in the Fairground The Killing Joke and Thoughts of Madness".
Couched in academic terms and referring to an ongoing disagreement about the nature of madness between two contemporary philosophers Deneb was essentially contemplating the same thing many batman fans have over the years, really who's the crazy one, The Joker or The Batman. Batman who really believes in what he is dong and lives with his psyche might well be crazier in some ways than the Joker who indulges in crazy as an "emergancy exit".

So it was a long and fascinating day and I was thoroughly worn out with thinking by the end of it. I took off with Kate Laity for a drink at a nearby dive and finished off Friday by unterviewing her but we will get to that in a few days.

I will write up Saturday tomorrow, but clearly it's a lot for one post, even dramatically compressed.

Blood Spring - Erik Williams

Blood Spring
by Erik Williams
Pub Bad Moon Books

Some books you you can't help but feel really only have enough going on to support a novella. Less often a novella touches on themes and ideas that make you wish they were twice as long so they could be explored more thoroughly.

We are presented with a married couple, and although Henry is not particularly likeable his wife is sweet, kind and can't bring herself to eat a rabbit to survive, but with a quiet strength of character it seems. They head out to return a young deer to the wild and find themselves lost in a forest with an unsettling reputation.

The horror in Blood Spring is sudden and visceral, making me feel a little nauseous at times (I am very squeamish and have no stomach for maggots) and I suspect that was deliberate, horror of that sort is hard to maintain but works well in short bursts. Still I found myself wanting to know more about Henry's relaitonships with other people, it seemed to me that there were touches of agression and something not quite right about his thinking that was the basis for a fascinating character. Henry's moments of internal darkness bring a different thread of horror to the story. There is something worrying about this amiable suburban man having the dark thoughts he has.

The strange family in the woods and their twisted religion was a hint at something dark and fascinating beyond the obvious texas chainsaw behavior and Nate, leading the searches had depths the reader didn't get to explore. Maybe that was the point too. Maybe the reader is supposed to wonder what drives Nate, what potential for violence Henry would have had if not pushed to extremes and so on without offering answers. Maybe it's good to appear, deliver the punch and leave us wondering where the hell that came from.

A visceral horror novella that delivers a kick to the gut.

Ghost Hunt 10- The secrets are revealed!

I've reviewed Ghost Hunt in the past, (I love it! You can find it using the tags Fuyumi Ono and Shiho Inada) but the latest release, volume 10, is when the characters really get interesting; a lot is revealed about the characters' backgrounds, and true to form, this volume's plot looks to be the scariest yet!

The books do get progressively scarier and more intense as the plot continues, and yet the humour is still kept up by the lighthearted banter between the characters.

In this volume, the group chance upon a lake (After getting lost on the way back from picking up Nari at the hospital) and on Naru's command, they call in divers for an unknown reason.

Naru and Rin are keeping their true aim secret, and the other men seem to know more than they're letting on. Mai is also frustrated when she ends up being the only one who doesn't know what's going on, and so confronts Naru, finding out the truth behind the psychic investigation business...

It was set up for the sole purpose of finding this place, and the secret that is buried in the lake.

During all this, the town's mayor approaches the group and offers them a case to pass their time. Unconfirmed rumours about an abandoned school? Not something that would usually interest the narcissistic employer, but he's on edge, and takes it up to keep himself active.

Of course, things soon turn sour when the group is trapped inside during a rainstorm, and members of the group begin to disappear one by one, accompanied by the sound of children's laughter.

Spooky stuff!

The book ends on a cliffhanger, and I'm frothing at the mouth for volume 11, which I think will finally reveal everything about Naru!!! EEK!

Kitty's House of Horrors - Carrie Vaughn

Kitty's House of Horrors
by Carrie Vaughn
Pub Gollancz
Cover: Nick Castle Design

When Kitty is asked to take part in a reality TV show with a group of other paranormal's in an isolated location she's concerned it might be a bad idea. When she wakes up to discover the power out and one of the guests dead she knows something is seriously wrong.

The Kitty series has tended to be among the lighter Urban Fantasy novels, well written, entertaining, with a few moments of deeper emotion to really tie the reader to Kitty and the main characters.

In house of horror's it all becomes somewhat darker, everyone is in danger and looking to Kitty to help them survive. The paranormals are being hunted, separated and killed off but who by and why? Kitty is cut off from her pack, her friends, all her usual sources of support and help and it's great to see Kitty having to figure it out for herself again. She has to draw on everything she has learned from her friends and keep her wolf in check if she is going to survive.

I love this series and House of Horror's is really stepping up the game. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone!

It's been a hectic few weeks. Loads of new, exciting developments. Blah-blah-blah. The biggest one is probably my decision to move in with Mr Choohoo.

In all fairness, he did ask me to. It's not as if I just announced one day that he was about to be the proud co-owner of a sheitload of lamps and throwpillows. Moving in with Mr Choochoo also means moving out of the country. To Denmark, to be spesific. I'm going to tell everyone that Pooch is a great Dane. And we'll eat pastries. Or I'll eat pastries and Pooch gets to watch. Or..well, the way it usually goes is Pooch stares me down until there's food flying through the air.

This momentous occasion is taking place in the middle of August. The moving. Not the pastries and the staring. Although that too. I'm digressing.

Hey, you wanna know what else will happen in the middle of August, should I not be able to find a job over there before I move? I become a frikkin housewife. Those of you who know me, and/or have been hanging around here for a while, will be able to appreciate just how hysterically funny that really is.

Time will tell.

Un:Covered #4

It's a long way to the Froxteth Nebula

This week, I’m going to do things a bit differently. I’m going to keep things short(ish) for one thing and for a second thing, I’m not actually going to say what element of storytelling I’m covering this week. All I’m going to do is present two versions of the same sequence and what lessons you learn from them is up to you.

Version 1:

Archie ran across the sky-way, a corridor of steel and glass reaching out from one tower to the next. Ahead lay a lift crowded with a gaggle of tourists. The doors were closing and Archie knew if they shut with him outside, the Mognar Slavers chasing him would have an easy capture.

He tried to run faster, but his lungs already burned and his muscles were heavy with lactic acid generated by running too far and for too long. In fact, it seemed as if his limbs grew heavier with each frantic step and his progress toward those closing lift doors slowed, rather than increased at the sight of them sliding inexorably together.

Archie wanted to glance over his shoulder, look back to see how close his pursuers were, but he dared not risk stumbling or seeing them at his back and panicking his heart more than it could bear. Instead he kept his eyes fixed firmly ahead, which left him staring at the lift doors as they finally drew shut.

He skidded to a stop and thrust his fingers into the narrow gap between the doors, but what meagre purchase he found could not prise them apart. A sinking feeling grabbed at his stomach as the floor indicator above the door counted the gaggle of tourists down from the five hundredth floor.

Archie spun around and saw the Mognar Slavers advancing. The chase had only made them look uglier to Archie – the warts were bigger and more pustulant, the tusks pointier, the exposed bladders fit to bursting with acrid urine. Their fearsome Mognar war-blades were drawn and the electro-nets they carried pulsed and sparked and promised his capture would be painful.

With the lift gone and the skyway blocked by slavers, Archie looked around for another means of escape. He was surrounded by glass and beyond that, bright blue sky.

“You’re doomed!” growled one of the Mognar slavers, saliva dripping from its tusks as it spoke.

Archie planted his feet in a combat stance and reached into the pocket of his Bermuda shorts.

“Not while I have my trusty Deus Ex Machine Gun,” he said, producing the weapon in question and taking aim at the vile aliens marching toward him.

“Ha! Give it your best shot,” said the slaver, confident in his military-grade personal force-field.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Archie, lowering the barrel of his gun and unleashing a volley of bullets that cut into the floor and then across the walls and ceiling; each impact puncturing panelling, ripping holes that let through the wind whipping around the sky-way.

The roar of the gun was joined by howling from the Mognars, who began to lumber forward. The floor shook under their passing, but Archie kept his finger tight around the trigger, emptying the last of his clip into destabilising the structural integrity of the suspended corridor such that the next step the Mognars took caused the sky-way to break away from the tower, pitching downwards in wails of tortured metal and alarmed Mognars.

Archie began to expel a sigh of relief, but an electro-net was thrown toward him and caught his foot. He reached down to free himself, but a touch of the dire mesh shocked his fingers with electricity. He tried to ignore the pain, but the weight of a falling Mognar suddenly pulled the net taut and yanked Archie off his feet.

The polished floor offered no means of arresting his desperate slide toward the broken edge of the sky-way, an edge that drew rapidly toward him and cut up across his stomach and jaw, leaving two kilometres of fresh air beneath his feet. Only his feeble fingers saved him from a plunge that would provide far too long to contemplate death by pavement.

Archie glanced down at a city floor made hazy by the thin cloud that wreathed its most towering structures and saw two dwindling dots; unfortunate Mognars tumbling earthward, war-blades still in hand. A third was closer, its fist gripping the end of the electro-net that did not spark and fire Archie’s foot with electric pain that numbed his senses. He was almost glad of that, because it almost made him forget the agonising pain in his fingers as they protested against the weight they held.

And then their protests ended, because they couldn’t hold Archie any longer and he fell after the electro-net and the Mognar slavers with his only thought being that he would have preferred a quick death, rather than one that still lay a long minute or two away.

Version 2:

Archie dashed across the sky-way. The lift doors ahead were closing…

He tried to run faster, but his lungs already burned.

Closing…

He didn’t know how close his pursuers were…

Closing…

But it didn’t matter if he could just reach…

Closed.

Archie skidded to a stop and tried wedging his fingers between the doors. No dice. The lift was already gone.

He spun around. The Mognar Slavers advanced, sparking electro-nets in hand, eager to snare him.

Save for the departed lift and the skyway ahead, there was no other exit from the glass-dome atop the tower.

“You’re doomed!” growled one of the Mognar slavers.

“Not while I have my trusty Deus Ex Machine Gun,” quipped Archie, whipping the weapon in question from his shorts.

“Ha! Give it your best shot,” said the slaver, confident in his military-grade personal force-field.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Archie, unleashing a volley of gunfire.

But he did not fire at the Mognars. His energised bullets ripped into the skyway. Floor, walls, ceiling; all began to splinter and crack under the barrage.

The Mognars howled and ran forward, but it was too late. The sky-way could no longer support its own weight. Tortured metal cried out as the corridor in the air buckled and broke away from the tower.

Archie did not have time to savour the sight of his pursuers falling toward a ground two kilometres below. An electro-net flung in desperation caught his foot. He reached down to free himself, but a sudden pull yanked him off his feet.

He slid across the polished floor toward the edge and then over, his fingers arresting his fall at the last moment.

Archie glanced down. The city was a dizzying distance beneath his feet. Closer to was the last of the slavers, gripping the other end of the net – the end that did not spark and fire Archie’s foot with electric pain that numbed his senses and almost made him forget the pain in his fingers that warned he would not be able to hold on for even one... more... second...

Archie fell.

Thus concludes today’s lesson. Oh, but in case you wondered what happened next in either case:

Archie woke up three days later in hospital. He remembered nothing of his fall to a certain death and last minute rescue at the hands of his trusty pilot Deus Ex MacReady, so when MacReady insisted this made them even for the time he broke Archie’s lawnmower, Archie wasn’t having any of it.

“But I’ll tell you what, MacReady,” said Archie, “if you come with me on one last job to the Froxteth Nebula, I’ll let you buy me a Martian Vodka on the rocks and we’ll call it quits.”

And they both laughed, though the robot nurse in the room hadn’t a clue why. Perhaps it was another nitrous oxide leak.

MangaCat's TBR pile

Well this summer looks to be a busy one! I have all these books to read/review over the next couple of months, added to which is a manga my sister has demanded I read called Fairy Tail :/ Apparently it's about magic and stuff, which sounds good... but... you have to admit it looks a lot like One Piece, which I love... but I don't want to have to read a crappy rip-off of it. Even the title font is the same! Argh.

And no it's not the same author (damn it)

Anyway, most of these books were bought when blitzing Waterstones the day I finished all my assignments (yay!) and you might notice that the second new book by L.J Smith is there (yes! it's out!) I'm actually a few pages in, but I'm also a couple of pages into the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... so it's gonna be a choice of which to read.

Theres also an anthology of Victorian ghost stories, which I'll be reading by the light of my phone for extra effect :D I love scary stuff!

Which is reflected in the purchase of World War Z (Shotgun/Bagsy the reviewing of this!) which is a reporter's account of the war against... zombies?!?! Haha Adele! We need to tell Zombie Ed about this! (Though he probably knows already!)

I'm also reviewing We need to talk about Kevin, which is the correspondence between parents after their child is arrested for starting a massacre against his classmates.

A softer storyline in The Sisters who would be Queen, a tudor docunovel (haha rather than docu-drama, geddit?) since I can pass that on to my mum after.

ALSO I've got The Tale of Genji, which is the most famous piece of Japanese historical literature to be translated to English (think famousness on the scale of Will Shakespeare) which is about a womanising Shogun and his life. (He falls in love with his stepmother and tries to forget her by taking an endless string of lovers from court...)

Lovely!

And of course, the historical non-fictions about the Nuremberg Trials.

Wooah. Fun :D

Chris' TBR Pile for June

Beverage: Guinness (2)
Music: Anathema - "We're Here Because We're Here"

As May 2010 winds its way down the puddle-strewn path we call the Past it's time to set aside pesky things like the six or seven books left forlornly in a small pile next to the bed, read but un-reviewed, and instead turn a fresh eye to the future: namely, the books sitting in a different (though no less forlorn) pile, quivering as only unread books can do in the perhaps vain hope they will be read, and - hope against hope! - reviewed.

JOE KUBERT - FAX FROM SARAJEVO

Joe Kubert is one of the colossal names in American comic book art, alongside such luminaries as Jack Kirby and Wil Eisner.  And at 83 years old he's producing some of the best work of his life.  Having cut his bones on a number of titles for DC Comics, most notably Sgt. Rock and Hawkman, Fax From Sarajevo is something completely different - a true story about the two years Ervin Rustemagić, a comics distributor and friend of Kubert, was trapped in a ruined building during the Seige of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.  The title comes from Rustemagić's only means of communication with the outside world - a series of faxes.  The book illustrates Rustemagić and his family's struggles alongside reproductions of the actual faxes.

STIEG LARSSON - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Everyone and their mother is talking about this book right now, the first in a trilogy of mysteries written in a surge by Larsson, who tragically died before seeing them in print.  I've heard nothing but good things about the series, especially the characterization of the main protagonist, a computer hacker punk named Lisbeth Salander.  Normally when a book has this much hype I tend to stay away, but the price for the eBook was just right for a try, so we'll see what happens.

DAVID GRANN - THE LOST CITY OF Z

I have to admit - the beautiful cover and intriguing title had me before I even knew what the book was about. Turns out (sadly) it has nothing to do with zombies, but rather is a nonfiction novel in the style of John Krakauer's best work (Into Thin Air and Into the Wild being my favorites), about Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor and adventurer in the same vein as an Indiana Jones or Allan Quatermain, who in the early 1900s was convinced of the existence of an ancient lost city in the Amazon.  The books details Fawcett's life and search for the fabled city (he went missing in 1925, never to be seen again) as Grann, a reporter for The New Yorker, attempts in 2005 to re-trace Fawcett's path, only to become just as obsessed by the allure of the vanished city.

TOM RACHMAN - THE IMPERFECTIONISTS

One more before we call it a night.  I recently experimented with newspaper subscriptions on my eReader, reading approximately 1.5 issues of my beloved NYT Sunday Book Review before realizing that as much as I love my nook, it can never replace the tangible joy to be had by flipping through an over-sized newspaper on a Sunday morning, your cup of coffee leaving faint rings on the sections already read.  However, in the 1.5 issues I did read, this debut novel by Tom Rachman, an experienced international journalist turned fiction author, stood out.  The Imperfectionists is the story of a bizarre group of people working for a - surprise - struggling international English language newspaper.  Give me a quirky cast of characters, humor derived from the everyday insanities of the workplace, and a wry look at the human condition through the lens of the absurd, and I'll roll over and let you scratch my belly.  Here's hoping Rachman's book delivers.

Right now a pretty small pile, one that I'm sure will change and grow as the first real month of Summer here burns away every ounce of ambition to get things done I have.  Which should mean plenty of good reading right around the corner.

So...what are YOU planning on reading this month?

City of Ruin - Contest

Ok folks you all know how much I loved Knights of Villjamur and City of Ruin even more than that. So, sadly it didn't arrive in time to get signed, but I have an unsigned hardback of City of Ruin to give to one commenter. Check out reviews and an interview with Mark Charan Newton and get your name in the hat (or randomizer). Just need to make sure I can contact you so include an email if your profile doesn't have one.
Open internationally until June 1st 2010.

London Days.

I've been to London twice in the last two weeks for Forbidden Planet signings. It's all been rather lovely, bunk off work and head out to spend my time indulging in book obsessions.

Last week was Gollancz, with 5 authors, the ones I was there to see primarily being Stephen Deas, and Mark Lachlan. I've reviewed Wolfsangel and have Stephen's books two waiting their turn. Also there were Sarah Pinborough, John Meaney and Adam Roberts. I indulged in Sarah's book too while I was there. Spent far too much.

It was a nice relaxing event with everyone getting their stuff signed and then a few beers after. An extra highlight from my point of view was that Guy Adams whose book The World House I loved and who we have interviewed here turned up. I also got to hang out with fellow bloggers Neil C Ford and Sharon (dark fantasy reviews).



This week I was back and really made a day of it. At 12:30 at Victoria I met up with Stray who posts here from time to time and Kate Laity/CM Kempe who is one of our Ravenous girls as well as a fantasy author and very interesting lady. The three of us ate noodles and yapped till sadly Stray had to return to work. Kate and I then made our way across to Shafetsbury by foot stopping for liquid refreshments at a number of pubs en route (including Feathers Stray).

At about 5pm we headed into Caffe Milan and joined some of the other bloggers for a soft drink and to gather and chat before we headed across to FP as a mob. Sadly at that point Kate had to leave us to go and do stuff with other people. I also go to hang out with Cat Connor's lovely daughter in law Lizzie and eventually Cat's eldest cub Caleb.

Signing this time were Adam Nevill, Mark Charan Newton and Chine Mielville. Much to my amusement in spite of the free form nature of the event queuing still occurred. Seems we just can't help it. Everyone bought lots of books, especially Amanda who I think managed to stick to her less than ten rule. *grin*

Once again it was relaxed and enjoyable and everyone got everything they wanted signed. We all then moved to the Phoenix again for the rest of the evening. Sadly I had to head home at a reasonable hour so didn't stay as long as i'd like and missed one or two latecomers. It was really great to meet the bloggers and lovely to finally get to chat to Adam Nevill (who I reviewed yesterday) and it's always a joy to talk to Mark Newton. I didn't get to talk to China at all except to say hi, but I should be reviewing something of his soon, possibly going back in time to UnLunDun.

Great job and huge thanks to everyone involved in both signings, it's been wonderful fun. Lots more pictures on Flickr.

Tell All | Chuck Palahniuk

Tell - All
by Chuck Palahniuk
pub: DoubleDay
Cover: Rodrigo Corral Design

I would never have picked this book up in a shop. I found the cover jacket irritating (without the jacket the book actually looks rather elegant and much more pleasing), the writing style with it's bolded text for the many names being dropped would have been off putting had I flicked through it in store and the idea of a part homage part mockery of "Old Hollywood" would not have appealed anyway. To borrow from Stray "I am not your target demographic".

All that said then, it was a surprising treat of a book. The writing style is slightly disconcerting at first, the book set up in acts that our narrator introduces us to and comments on. Palahniuk trades "blah blah blah" for a series of mocking farmyard noises and general clunkings, skipping chunks of trite dialogue to good affect. Once acclimatised to that I was able to really enjoy the delivery and the series of scenes and acts the reader is lead through.

The story sends up the hidden dramas and personal dealings of Old Hollywood through Hazie Coogan whose life is spent managing and caring for Kathryn Kenton, navigating her through the trials and pitfalls of Hollywood life. Hazie is describing the scenes as they roll out and offers a slightly distanced take on events. It's not an emotional journey, it's a cool, witty, commentary well delivered, delightful, sharp and a little subversive.

There are some moments that stand out either as very funny or as more gentle and slightly sad than the rest of the book, which is often touching on deliberately abrasive reflecting some of the personalities involved. The tinge of sadness and faded glory that permeats Tell All in juxtaposition with the humour and harsh presentation is almost a comment on the time and it's stars in itself, the offensive braying conversation against the desperation not to fade into oblivion for the stars themselves.

Not at all my usual sort of reading material but an enjoyable departure. I'm tempted to go and investigate the back catalogue if the same humour and joyful subversion occurs.

(so much prettier without the jacket to my mind.)

The precious lifeblood of a master spirit

I am going to try something different here. Coming as I do from the land of Saints and Scholars, with ever the spectre of Joyce, here comes a post written in one go. My thinking here is to brook no explanations, so do keep up! I apologise now, this might come out as an asymmetric mess that makes no sense. Normal service, then. However, I amn't going to give supporting links (as to put in hrefs as I go slows me down. *deep breath*)

The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake by Prof A. D. Nuttall

I read a lot of theology, amongst everything else I read, so whether it counts as lot overall could be debated, but I do read it. Couple that with my unremitting love of William Blake, and indeed John Milton, that makes up two-thirds of the authors, and the binding philosophy, of this book. Of the last, Christopher Marlowe, well, having first read Dr Faustus when I was still in single figures, and seeing a stage adaptation not long after, and many times since, I can bring him into my own personal orbit quite easily.

Blake first saw angels as a child, and while his parents come from the same (esoteric of sorts) tradition as myself, he went further and deeper. (Oh, wait, now I am starting to head down the track of another ace book, 'Why Mrs Blake Cried', as that is part of what I do, everything is context, nothing is isolated, and I can bring all threads together, at least in my head, for holding contradictory premises isn't hard, if you are legion.) Lots of Blake is about the light of truth, and is very heretical. But is it steeped in γνῶσις? Well, there are strands, and strands that reach through the years to the other titular dead white males.

Of course the link from Blake to Milton is obvious, and I won't insult you by making that statement, but reading through even the first great speech given by Satan to his fallen troops shows the knowledge filtered through Σοφíα. And I have to say, of all literary speeches, from Shakespeare to Mamet, my favourite has to be that from Satan in the opening sequences of Paradise Lost. Oh to have such a way with words.

How can we bring in the good Doctor then? Well, the easy themes of rebellion, and rebellion against creation, for creation is an antipathy to γνῶσις, and at this point I we reminded of Joeseph Campbell's take on mythologies. I found the treatment of Marlowe to be interesting, and wished it was expanded somewhat, especially when he can (almost) hold his own against the heavyweights of Milton and Blake.

The sections that deal with Calvanism are treated with the late Professor's usual wit and verve, pointing out the logical conclusion of such a bizarre theology. Of course, roll in that with the very Blakean thinking on the duality of good and evil, rather than in opposition, and you can the sense that he could take this message out wider, should have taken it wider, but maybe the intricacies of the discussion, much like the inherent secrecy of γνῶσις, the hidden esoteric knowledge that isn't available, or acceptable, to all, negate such an approach. For even those (and we are specifically talking of a late 18th century Western European Protestant theological variant) who are open to listening to the context, cultural leanings deny them the capacity to hear. Yes, I still lament the iconoclasts.

But to return to the book, not a wander through my head and the ideas I have picked up over decades. The main heresy, in the purest form of the word, comes from the unintentional chaos and renewal of Satan in Paradise Lost, and the renewal of Christ in Blake as the rebellion to the endpoint of γνῶσις. Both of these are cast against if not the intrangience of heaven, at least the stale stasis.

The is not, like some other papers I have read, a difficult book. Mostly due to the lively writing style, engaging wit and the fact I love all three protagonists. If you know no Blake, or even Milton, I would suggest at least the first few books of Paradise Lost, and a 'best of' collection of Blake. As for Marlowe, the themes espoused in Dr Faustus are part of our (harking back to Campbell) heritage, and the story gets retold by Hollywood more-or-less ten times a year. So you would be able to follow the strands Prof Nuttall weaves without intimate knowledge of his works. But I also recommend those, too.

I am aware that Blake is, these days, taught in some schools. I would eschew that, Blake, of all three, is the hardest, the most visionary and certainly the most consciously heretical. Milton, it could be argues, did so unintentionally, however this book leans towards the at least underlying implication that he was also of the esoteric wing of beliefs.

The summation of the book, trying to negate that smug middleclass cosy theology of C.S.Lewis, shows that Lewis was totally mistaken, and many English works were riddled with heresy, γνῶσις and esoteric ideas before the 17th century. Again, Lewis shows his total lack of knowledge on anything other than 'mere Christianity' of a single, narrow flavour. But no, I won't mention the iconocalsts again, not that I am bitter, eight centuries later.

This was a great book, probably a bit narrow in readership, more is the pity. Now, I should read back over what I have written, given this text box is small, and most of it has scrolled up, up and away. I am aware this review was somewhat self-indulgent, playing on things I like, but isn't that the point? Anyone can review a Harry Potter book and point out its disasterous style, ropey content and dubious editing, anyone can lift a Jodie Picoult and laugh at the same story every time, but that is nowhere near the point. I am sure there was a point.

Original picture from the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

Waiting!

I am really looking forward to the release of this one. I've read the story and it lends itself perfectly to being read. Ian Stuart is a great choice to read The Forgetting Wood.

Here's the Blurb

The Forgetting Wood

by Steven Savile

Narrated by Ian Stuart

Forgetting Wood Audio Sample

The death of a beloved children’s writer, Hoke Berglund, draws Jon Sieber into a world he cannot hope to understand – a world filled with Hoke’s creations, including the vile Mr. Self Affliction who is the cruel master of this place. In a world where angels are beautiful women and the by-blows of nightmares people the mythical Forgetting Wood, Jon, heir apparent to all that Hoke created, falls for Kristen, the writer’s daughter, but cannot let her secret remain secret.

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