{horror} – Page 104 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 241

• The usual imbalance of heat versus light this week but Kenan Malik and Teju Cole had some worthwhile things to say. Related: Atlantic illustrators respond to the events of Wednesday. And some history: covers of Charlie Hebdo‘s parent magazine, Hara-Kiri, whose legacy of bad taste and confrontation was overlooked in the rush to express disapproval.

• At The Quietus: Virginie Sélavy, Mark Pilkington and Stephen Thrower of the Miskatonic Institute talk to Mat Colegate about horror old and new. There’s more horror cinema in Mat Colegate’s interview with animator Carla MacKinnon.

• Mixes of the week: Sleepwalkers of the Montgomery Canal by The Geography Trip, and Secret Thirteen Mix 142 by Helena Hauff.

• Jazz legend Julian Priester reflects on his fusion classic Love, Love, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock, and a lot more.

• “No gays, no blacks, no fat people”: Ryan Gilbey on how film advertising continues to betray filmmakers.

• Paul Gorman on the drumheads that Barney Bubbles painted for Hawkwind’s Simon King in 1972.

• Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It, edited by Anne Ishii & Graham Kolbeins.

• NASA’s exoplanet travel bureau wants you to pack your bags.

• The New Humanist on imagining a world without work.

• At Strange Flowers: 15 books for 2015.

• Ghosts in the TV

• Prologue/Love, Love (1974) by Julian Priester | The Jewel in the Lotus (1974) by Bennie Maupin | Rima (1975) by The Headhunters

A Mountain Walked

Art by David Ho.

This may be a frustrating post for some since it concerns a limited edition anthology that sold out almost as soon as it was announced a year or so ago. Even though the book was published last year it’s taken a few months for my copies to arrive. A Mountain Walked is a collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories compiled by leading Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi, and published in the US by Centipede Press. Anyone familiar with Centipede’s more luxurious volumes will know that they don’t do things by halves, and this weighty tome is no exception: a large-format hardback (the signed edition is also cased), with heavy paper stock, colour printing, tinted sheets and a bulk that runs to almost 700 pages.

Art by David Ho.

Many of the stories are reprints but there’s also new material from contributors including Thomas Ligotti, Neil Gaiman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, the late Michael Shea (to whom the book is dedicated), Patrick McGrath, TED Klein, Gemma Files, Ramsey Campbell and many others. The artwork also ranges widely; I’d not seen anything by David Ho before but he’s very good, hence the samples shown here. But there’s also a variety of other work, even a Lovecraftian Peanuts comic strip by Julien Baznet. I was pleased that my Cthulhoid picture was placed with the introduction, it makes up for my never having responded to Mr Joshi when he wrote to me years ago asking if I’d be interested in contributing something to Necronomicon Press.

Since the book was so successful there’s been talk of doing a cheaper reprint. In the meantime, bloated Lovecraftian plutocrats (Yuggothcrats?) will find very expensive copies for sale on eBay. A few more page samples follow.

Continue reading “A Mountain Walked”

The Incredible Robert Baldick

This is an odd one-off TV drama whose title I’ve known for years but which I hadn’t seen until this week. The Incredible Robert Baldick was broadcast in 1972 in a slot used by the BBC to test dramas that might later become series. The writer was Terry Nation, creator of Doctor Who and the dour post-apocalypse series, Survivors. Robert Hardy plays Robert Baldick, an aristocratic occult detective who we’re informed “cannot resist the inexplicable”. We’re also told he’s one of the finest scientific minds in 19th-century Britain. The exact period is vague but we first see Baldick and cohorts playing with an “electrical telepathy” communication device which would fix the time around the turn of the century. Baldick has a country estate, a bulletproof Russian train (“The Tsar”), a valet who is also an expert in Classics and ancient languages, a gamekeeper with preternatural senses, and a pet owl named Cosmo.

The one-and-only 50-minute episode is entitled Never Come Night, and plays like something Nigel Kneale might have written, a combination of supernatural horror, suspicious yokels and archaeology, with an abrupt swerve into outright science fiction at the end. The cast features many familiar faces from film and television of the period: James Cossins as a fearful clergyman, Barry Andrews playing the same type of rustic he also played in Blood on Satan’s Claw, Julian Holloway as Thomas the valet, and John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in The Lord of the Rings) as Caleb the gamekeeper. All the ingredients are in place for what might have been a promising series along the lines of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, the first season of which had been running on another channel the year before, and which may have been an inspiration. A shame that the only women in the cast are a couple of barely visible servants and a corpse; even Holmes and Watson had Mrs Hudson. The timecoded copy on YouTube has evidently been hijacked from the BBC archives but it’s watchable enough.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Horse of the Invisible
• “The game is afoot!”

The Return: a ghost story

Another obscure film, The Return (1973) isn’t a television drama, more a miniature for the cinema, and as such may have been produced as a double-feature short. Director and co-writer Sture Rydman only has one other film to his credit but the music for The Return is by film composer Marc Wilkinson while the photography is the work of the very distinguished Douglas Slocombe.

The story is a blend by Rydman and fellow writer Brian Scobie of two ghost stories: Nobody’s House by AM Burrage, and The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce. Nobody’s House is surprisingly one of the few Burrage stories I have on the shelves, and it provides the bulk of the script, the Bierce story being a very different piece concerning a duel in an abandoned building. Rydman’s film is a two-handed affair for two very good actors: Rosalie Crutchley, here playing a less sinister housekeeper than she did in The Haunting, and Peter Vaughan who the year before had been the lead in one of the best of the BBC’s MR James adaptations, A Warning to the Curious. The Return runs for 30 minutes, and to say much more would be to spoil it. The copy at YouTube does Slocombe’s photography no favours but you can at least watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nigel Kneale’s Woman in Black
• “Who is this who is coming?”

Weekend links 239

The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier.

• “I had to resort to extreme violence”: how Hipgnosis revolutionised the album sleeve. Aubrey Powell, last surviving member of the design team, talks to Joe Muggs.

• Mixes of the week: Radio Belbury: Programme 14; The Conjurer’s Hexmas by SeraphicManta; Secret Mix 139 by A Closer Listen.

• Social progress, high-speed transport and electricity everywhere: Iwan Rhys Morus on how the Victorians invented the future.

• At Cinephilia & Beyond: “The most complete investigation into the origins and making of Citizen Kane.”

• Poor Souls’ Light: seven curious tales for the end of the year, and a dedication to Robert Aickman.

• Music and the Occult: Stuart Maconie and Rob Young spend an hour in the magick circle.

• Alejandro Jodorowsky and Iain Sinclair in conversation at the British Library, July 2014.

• From 1972: An unpublished Victor Moscoso interview by Patrick Rosenkranz.

• The Spooky Story Behind Hollywood’s Favourite Mansion.

• The Lost World of British Tape Recording Clubs.

• 2014 was a year of outrage.

• Wyrd Daze issue 11

• Inspirograph

• Pepper-Tree (1984) by Cocteau Twins | Otterley (1984) by Cocteau Twins | Aikea-Guinea (1985) by Cocteau Twins