I remember it so well. It was shown, I would guess from the evidence, on a Sunday evening and I would make a small bet it was on ITV, their Sunday evening schedules always being more fluid than the BBC's.

Sunday evening, and we settled down to watch a film called Jason and the Argonauts." I'd never heard of Jason, either the original myth or of the film. In fact, The name "Jason" only suggested to me at the time Peter Wyngarde being louche -- I had never heard the name in any other context. I had seen no trailers, I had no preconceptions. I had just been told it was an adventure film with "monsters in it."

That was enough to make me excited, but then the film delivered all that and so much more.

Next day at my primary school, it was all any of the boys in the playground were talking about. We just kept riffing through our favourite bits again and again. There were skeletons! And the big statue! And the flying things! (Nobody got very excited about Poseidon, as he was obviously just a bloke, and not magically animated). And the hydra! And the skeletons! And the big statue!

Talos, the Big Statue, was my favourite at the time, and the sheer nightmarish implacability of the great bronze man as it methodically hunts and kills the terrified Argonauts is a striking image to this day. I think Jason and the Argonauts started my fascination with Greek myth and the legends and folklore of many nations in and of itself. I certainly remember reading a children's retelling of the tale at about the age of nine and being disappointed that, in the original, they only encounter Talos on the way back and not, as in the film, a dramatically more satisfying encounter en route. The film also skips all the subsequent unpleasantness with Medea as well as perhaps the most humiliatingly mundane and ironic death for a hero in any of the myths of Ancient Greece (if you don't know it, I'll let you find out for yourself. Suffice to say, it isn't glorious).

The original story is also inferior in lacking a Bernard Hermann soundtrack. Those silly Ancients Greeks.

As an adult, although the lead-up and staging of the Talos sequence is undoubtedly brilliant (the foreboding valley of the monuments raises the hackles before Talos moves even a millimetre), it's the sheer intricacy of the skeleton fight -- the Children of the Hydra -- that is probably my favourite scene.

And now I screech to a halt, because the man who raised those skeletons, who made Talos step down from his plinth, that made the harpies bedevil poor blind, Patrick Troughton, has gone, and I can't quite believe it. Yes, Ray Harryhausen was 92, good innings, la la la and all that. But... somewhere inside myself, I was sure he'd turn out to be immortal. I mean, he did all the grunt work for Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts, and again in Clash of the Titans. He attacked San Francisco with a giant octopus (actually a hextapus, because there wasn't enough budget to animate eight legs) and Rome with a Venusian. He knackered the Washington Monument by whacking it with a flying saucer, and made Tom Baker look cool by animating a statue of Kali. How can a man who does all this just die like a normal person?

Of course, his work has made him immortal for the foreseeable future, the clear adoration with which film-makers have spoken of him has marked him out as one of the greats, and the sheer imagination and energy he put into his creations will continue to delight for a very long time to come.

But I don't know. Can a man like that ever really die? I have a belief, held more seriously than an atheist should, that up on Mount Olympus, Hephaestus has cleared space at his workbench and he and a new god are making plans.

"That's a lot of legs."

"Is that a problem?"

"No. Not if we have the budget for them." 

I can hardly believe the news that Robin Sachs has died (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21343137). When Christopher Cazenove died, Robin took over the role of reading the second Johannes Cabal audio book Johannes Cabal the Detective. He called me and we had a long and pleasant chat where he asked a lot of salient questions about pronunciations and so forth. He was fun to talk with. Then, late last year, he dropped me a line to ask if I was interested in him doin Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute? At that stage, the contracts weren't done and I wasn't sure of the rights would be available, so we chatted about this and that at length. As it turns out, the rights were still available and, if not for my own recent illness, we would have been moving ahead on an audiobook version by now. Now he's dead, and at the ridiculously early age of 61. I am truly shocked. There's no indication yet of what happened. 

I can't call myself a friend of his, just somebody who worked with him once and was very much looking forward to working with him again. I chatted with him on a couple of occasions, but they were good chats. He was funny, and droll, and namedropped some huge names into the conversation precisely because, "I like hearing you go, 'Whaaaaaat?'" and then he'd laugh. 

Thoughts, of course, to his family and close friends. 

I'm sorry. I am truly sorry. I have no idea how this could have happened. 

I am the bearer of bad tidings. 

It transpires that, for reasons that remain obscure, Thomas Dunne, the respected publishers of books such as Peter Ackroyd's six part History of England, through to striking new works of fiction like David Wong's John Dies at the End has, and I can hardly bring myself to say it, decided to publish Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute in North America, a continent hitherto spared that terrible contagion. 

I can barely see to type, the tears are streaming so. 

But, before you run off to stockpile batteries, ammunition, and canned food prior to walling yourselves up in the cellar, it is my unhappy lot to tell you that the coming apocalypse will be yet more terrible still. 

In an act of elemental villainy that has left doomsday cults around the world nodding appreciatively, Thomas Dunne has requested -- Nay! Demanded! -- that a fourth Johannes Cabal novel be written, presumably to finish off any survivors. 

The timeline is not set in stone, but I believe the intention is for Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute to be released approximately a year hence in North America, and the as-yet-unnamed fourth Johannes Cabal novel to follow a year later in the autumn of 2014.

Indeed, the autumn of the whole of that once proud continent. 

Go to your families, your loved ones. Hold them close, now that you know your time is so cruelly limited. Tell them everything is going to be okay, though the lie curdles in your throat.

I'm so sorry. 

Well, I'm off to my first convention in a while -- FantasyCon 2012 at Brighton this weekend. As is always the way, there are things I'd really like to attend that are dead opposite other things I'd like to attend, for example Mark Gatiss talking about TV writing is on at the same time as an interview with Mary Danby. Much as I'd love to hear Gatiss speak, Danby has been a literary heroine of mine since primary school (she'd probably be mortified to hear) when I started reading the Armada series of ghost anthologies she edited and wrote for.

Those books had a profound effect on me, to the extent where, with hindsight, I can point at a detail in Johannes Cabal the Necromancer that is inspired by one of the stories I read from those collections. I didn't write it as a nod to them, even though Necromancer in particular contains a great many wilfully obscure and very deliberate cultural references. I don't think it was a conscious decision at all. It was only later when happening across one of my surviving Armada books (I still have a couple and am loathe to part with them), that it struck me that I'd been holding an image in my mind all these years and it had finally expressed itself in my own writing. 

Which detail? Well, here's a fat sort of hint:



As an aside, while I was hunting down that image, I found the cover of book 5 on Mark Morris' site, and he, too, notes them as a formative influence. 

Morris will be there, as will assorted other folks of much awesomeness such as Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Volk, Kim Newman, Rob Shearman, Adam Christopher, and... well, look, there's a list at the bottom of the site's index page, you can see for yourself. As you can see, it looks to be more of a literary fest than general media (although there's some film stuff). I'm excited. 

And then... come October, I'll be at BristolCon. I went last year and it was good fun, so I'm looking forward to that. I'll write more about that closer the time, but I will point out that the hope is to launch the Colinthology collection then. This is a memorial anthology with profits going to the charity the late SF writer Colin Harvey worked for. The aim was to make it a collection of tongue -in-cheek or generally upbeat stories, and I have a bit of silliness in it that I hope will engender a least a faint sense of amusement in the reader. It also has a beautiful cover. Colin was, by all accounts, a sterling chap and I can attest to him being a good writer -- he deserves to be remembered. 

I'm terribly sorry -- I haven't been keeping this up at all despite me doing stuff that was worth blogging about. I shall endeavour to get back into the habit of posting more frequently. 

Right, things that are happening.

This Saturday, the 15th, I shall be making an appearance at the Trowbridge branch of Waterstone's at midday. I wish I could give you a link for that, but the web page is down for maintenance at the moment. Anyway, I'll be boring the pants off anyone with the patience to bear it for an hour. It's going to be mainly about Johannes Cabal, talking about the genesis of the character, doing a reading, a Q & A and then, time permitting, a little bit on Katya's World with a brief reading. 

Then, on the 12th October at 18:30, I shall be cluttering up Waterstone's in the Bristol Galleries, along with some other reprobates associated with BristolCon, specifically Emma Newman, Gareth L. Powell, and Tim "The Maughan" Maughan. It's going to be a panel and Q & A dealy, with signings afterwards, and -- if Gareth L. Powell starts channelling Ack-Ack Macaque at any point -- the scaling of bookshelves and the random flinging of poo. 

Then in the week following, I shall be at BristolCon itself. In all likelihood I shall be on one or more panels, but that's not finalised yet. If I got drunk at the Waterstone's thing, it was me up the bookshelves with the poo, and they don't want me on any panels as a result, I shall at the very least be there as a punter. 

If you're in the Bath/Bristol area for any of those dates, you'd be more than welcome. 

It's almost a month now since we heard the sad news that Ray Bradbury had died. I wrote the following at the time, but couldn't bring myself to post it. Time has lent a little perspective and I feel okay about doing so now. 


( There's a single piece of crude though heartfelt invective ahead. If that's the sort of thing you don't like, perhaps you should skip the following paragraph.Collapse )

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to win some Hammer goodies from the House of Horror itself, which was nice. The prize was five DVDs bearing eight films. Unhappily, the envelope turned up with its flap open and only one DVD inside. Happily, Hammer leapt into the breach as soon as they heard my distant cry of anguish and sent me new copies of the missing discs.

I’ve been watching these in episodic form during my lunch ever since and have now seen all eight films. Most of them I haven’t seen for a very long time indeed, and in the case of the Dick Barton films, I had never seen them at all.

The DVDs are the new Icon editions and are very much at the budget end of the market. This not only means that a lot of extras that earlier releases included have been jettisoned, but they are now even missing subtitles, which seems extraordinary. Some of the prints – the Bartons and X the Unknown— have been in the wars a little, but all of them are certainly watchable. I recall there being a fuss when Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter was released in a very poor version where the night scenes were pitch black and the day scenes were washed out, but this was the correct version where everything was properly balanced.

The eight films span the period from 1948 to 1957, before leaping forward to 1974’s Captain Kronos. The ‘fifties films are historically interesting because the cover the period when Hammer evolved from a production company making smallish films of all (cheap to do) genres into its most famous manifestation as the House of Horror. The pivotal moment is generally said to be 1955 when it secured the rights to Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, which had been enormously successful as a BBC series.

In 1957 it released The Curse of Frankenstein, its first colour film, and the one that started the trend that we generally think of when we think of Hammer horror; supersaturated colour, a bit of sex, some Grand Guignol style gore, and ideally Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. If you look at Hammer’s releases after that, the other fare starts to vanish as horror and psychological thrillers come to dominate their output. This continued through the ‘sixties and into the early ‘seventies, when a new form of unspeakable vileness came to Hammer – yes, On the Buses, I’m looking at you – and the House of Horror started to look rather unsteady on its foundations. A bit more on that when I talk about Captain Kronos.

Here then, in very nearly the order in which I watched them, are my capsule reviews of the eight films, kicking off with…

( With one bound..!Collapse )

Yes, my friends, the time has come at last for me to unleash the sheer, shocking masculine power of my Movember moustache on you. I warned you about this a month ago, so if you're not ready by now, I can take no responsibility for any consequences. Stand by, because when the sheer awesomeness of my moustache is revealed, you will not be unchanged. Men will wither with envy, and forever hesitate before using the "Gents" toilets in future. Women... well, your near future experiences will involve the word "gusset," y'know what I mean?

I hope you do, because I've slightly confused myself now and can't explain it.

In any case, and astounding masculinity aside, please remember that there is a serious purpose behind all this. Please, please visit http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1793088/ and donate something. Apparently one chap has made £12,000,000 in Movember donations. I'm not expecting that you'll be delighted to hear, but whatever you can give will be gratefully received. Remember, if you're a UK taxpayer, the testicular and prostate cancer charities can claim back the tax on your donation, which is a significant amount. Please take a moment to do so.

Right. Brace yourselves.

( No, seriously, brace yourselves...Collapse )

I found the following while going through my files, and own myself vaguely astonished by it. I have only the very vaguest memories of writing it back in 2002, as a self-imposed writing exercise, I think. Make what you will of it. 



( Read more, if you feel you must.Collapse )