Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft

Well, I finally relented and bought myself a copy of Necronomicon: the Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft. I've got various different editions of my favourite Lovecraft tales, and have had numerous others over the years some of which I've really treasured. However, I am now a fan of substance, a middle aged, middle class nerd, and I am allowed - perhaps even obliged - to treat myself to little indulgences like this.

It's a classy package. Needless to say it's got nice clear print, on smooth, creamy paper. It comes as a black, leather-look hard cover binding with gold leaf lettering and a rather nice depiction of Cthulhu, similarly in gold leaf. It's very dramatic. I feel like should read it by candle light with a velvet dinner jacket and glass of sherry.

Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

We all want to be heroes. We all want to think we fight the good fight, that we stand by our moral principles, that we do what's right regardless of the odds. That's one of the main attractions of genre fiction in whatever medium – while life is full of compromise, defeat and cowardice, in our dreams we are always right and noble and our opponents are always wrong and insidious.

For a little while we can live vicariously as a hard boiled private eye or a brave soldier or a wise-cracking rogue with a heart of gold. That's one of it's chief attraction, and that's where the escape in escapism takes us.

In the pursuit of these fantasies, our own righteousness is guaranteed by the author, of course, who's always on our side, and we are freed to exercise our angry and violent impulses without concerning ourselves with their consequences. Heroic righteousness allows us to kill, main and brutalise our enemies without restraint. There's nothing we can't excuse ourselves if we know our cause is right.

Science fiction and fantasy give us a further out: in these genres our enemies can be literally non-human (rather than the literary inhumanity that more Earth-centred foes in other forms of adventure fiction, the Soviet spies, yellow peril and Middle Eastern extremists). Perhaps most famously, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings set out a kind of enemy one can kill guiltlessly, as they have no admirable qualities whatsoever, and this has certainly set a pattern in heroic fantasy that's been formalised in the D&D generation of writer with their weird numerical categorisation of racial characteristics and the literal moral compass of alignment.

Norman Spinrad spotted the worrying aspects of all this in the 70s and highlighted it with brilliantly cold clarity in his wonderful novel, The Iron Dream. Spinrad saw beneath the harmless fantasies at the murky longing for power and violence that lay beneath.

The Penguin Book of Ghosts

I saw a ghost once, or at least what I thought was a ghost. I was six years old or so, and we lived in a big Edwardian semi in Surrey. It was a winter evening and I was on the landing. I was alone, and I'd turned the lights out to get a better look at the flashing red lasery things on the front of my battery operated robot. Out of the corner of my eye, in the very periphary of my vision, I saw a flicker of light that I interpreted then as a woman in a crinoline drifting up the stairs and out of my view.

The sighting must have lasted just a second or two. If I shut my eyes, I can still see it now, both the image of the old fashioned lady passing across the landing, and the striated lights of a car passing by refracted through the windows and curtains, which is what I now think I actually saw. 

More than the image, though, what lingers for me is the sensation – the liquid cold of apprehension, the prickle of hair raising on my arm and neck like the unexpected – uninvited, unwelcome - stroke of a cold hand. It was a moment of vertigo during which the material world seemed to shake and shudder away from me.

I think this sensation of transportation – as unpleasant as it can be – lies behind our obsession with ghosts and spirits. It's a somewhat mystical thing, and I have to say that I have found the experience of reading The Penguin Book of Ghosts a somewhat religious one.

An Interview With Jerry Cornelius

This interview was published in the June 2003 issue of Magic Bullet - The Monthly Magazine for Assassins, Hitmen and the Murder trade. (I believe the magazine stopped publishing in 2007; a web search turns up nothing after this date). It didn't get a huge distribution, so I'm sure Cornelius fans everywhere will be interested to see this rarity back in circulation. It was written by the then-up-and-coming murder critic Bevan St Michael, who disappeared in 2008. If he's out there, please get in touch, Bev, as I still have the "package" in my loft.)

Read more after the jump!

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

I don't talk much about my job here. It's not very interesting, and irrelevant to the subject matter here, so there's usually not much to say. I just spend the day pushing mouse in my humble capacity as a fluke on a leech on a rat in the sewer of global finance and then go home at night and try to forget all about it.

Recently, however, life and reading have collided.

Happy Birthday David Bowie

Sixty-four today!

My Reading Year 2010

Well, another year gone, another twelve months' worth of dreams sailed down and away to be lost forever in the ineffable oceans of the past. Before establishing a new set of friendly hopes to set about dashing, I'll take a few moments here to consider my year.

Let's get the highlights out of the way for the impatient. My book recommendations of the year are:

Beyond Black and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The City & The City and Looking for Jake by China Miélville
The Still Point by Amy Sackville
Elizabeth's Misfits by Arthur Freeman
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Moxy Land by Lauren Beukes

Short stories:
The Red Bride by Samantha Henderson
Bridesicle by Wil Mcintosh
Clod, Pebble by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz

Comics (no links as I haven't written specific posts on these, though maybe I should... perhaps a review...):
Dark Avengers
Batman & Robin

Okay, that's the highlights. For a more detailed look at my year, and a real wallowing in boring crap about me, hit the link!