A new independent British zombie film following in the footsteps of the adequate The Zombie Diaries, and the more polished, if unseen to date, The Dead Outside (will someone please give these guys a DVD deal? In fact, put all three movies into a cool little box-set please), Colin has been touted around with the story of a £45 budget spent on tea and biscuits. If that’s true then all well and good, but the film itself certainly stands up to geek analysis without the aid of a gimmicky marketing campaign, and will receive a deserved short run and DVD release in October.
Colin is the eponymous central character whom we meet returning home one afternoon. It soon becomes apparent there’s anarchy in the streets of Wandsworth, South London as gunshots and explosions fill the City air and he washes his blood-soaked hands and knife. Colin has been bitten and after fighting off his flatmate we witness his inevitable un-birth. The film then follows our hero around the streets of London as he slowly descends into a state of fully-fledged zombie. For a zed geek like me this is one of the most interesting aspects of the film as, initially, Colin appears to have a certain amount of intelligence to his actions, maybe considering whether or not to tuck into some easily available flesh as the more developed around him flood the streets and chase down the unfortunate survivors. (more…)
FantasyCon 2009 was one of the best weekends of my life.
I rubbed shoulders with many creators and purveyors of fantastic fiction and art. Some of them have appeared on Horror Reanimated already, others I hope to see here soon. Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror are arteries in the body of the world’s imagination and you can be assured these arteries are healthy and well supplied, pulsing with magical blood.
Among the heroes of the world’s imagination whose hands I shook, and in no particular order, were the following:
Graham Joyce, Simon Bestwick, Conrad Williams, Marc Gascoigne, Lee Harris, Carole Johnstone, Gary McMahon, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Sarah Pinborough, Mark Deniz, Guy Adams, Chaz Brenchley, Adam Nevill, Allyson Bird, Andrew Hook, Peter Crowther, Mathew F. Riley, John Lenahan, Lee Thompson, Rio Youers, Andy Remic, Raymond Russell, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Andy Barker, David Flint, Geoff Nelder, Raven Dane, Vincent Chong, Peter May, Alex Davis and several others I can’t remember on account of being variously over-stimulated.
I was nervous about attending the convention even though I wasn’t taking part in any panels or readings. I shouldn’t have been. The warmth of the atmosphere and the obvious camaraderie that goes back generations was a welcome embrace. Like an orphan reunited with its family, I relished every second of it.
There were so many stories about young or inexperienced authors (now renowned) receiving invaluable help and support from those who have gone before them. Similar expressions of gratitude came from established authors who still need the encouragement of their peers to stay on course. It’s so easy to go around thinking about yourself, worrying about your own work and career or the lack thereof. But at Fantasycon, you meet publishers whose sole passion and mission is to bring small voices like your own to the fore, even though it means they will never be wealthy. You meet authors who will write until they die – published or not – because there’s a fire inside them which cannot be extinguished.
All this both humbled and inspired me. The most humbling thing of all, however, was the beautiful shock of winning The Sydney J Bounds Best Newcomer Award. When you consider that my BFS membership had lapsed and that, having had a superb curry instead of attending the deadly banquet, I was half intending to nip to the cinema to see District 9, it’s a wonder I was even there to accept it! But friends in the know steered me to the double doors of the banqueting hall and there we stood, watching the awards ceremony from afar, sometimes barely able to hear the nominations. I remember little of what happened after I heard my own name announced, merely the heart thumping overload as I walked to the stage and made a few stumbling remarks of gratitude. You can see the moment for yourself right here.
And here’s Tim Lebbon winning the award for Best Novella (The Reach of Children)
Not to mention Allyson Bird scooping the award for Best Collection (Bull Running for Girls)
And William Heaney/Graham Joyce accepting the award for Best Novel (Memoirs of a Master Forger)
Whether I’d won an award or not wouldn’t have changed the impact FantasyCon had on me. I discovered something far greater than myself (no mean feat when your ego’s the size of Jupiter), something worth giving to not just for my own sake but for that of others. In our rush to be discovered, get deals, be on the shelf - something writers enjoy - to get bigger deals and to advance, it’s easy to forget what writing is for.
Writing is for magic. Writing is magic. I can’t pretend to understand how or why but I know that much about it.
Whether we’re just starting out, languishing in a slump or at the top of our game writing will always be our attempt to reach out to something greater than ourselves. And there are few pleasures in this world as lasting or as true as knowing you’ve grasped a tiny thread of the beyond and brought it back for others to touch.
This suits me because, in essence, I function on a mystical level. When writing, I am certain of nothing from one day to the next. What was true yesterday may no longer be true today. Mostly, I take my cues from the mythic voice of nature. No path, artistic or otherwise, leads anywhere worth visiting save that path which appears from direct contact with the mystical, with the unknown and the unseen. Writing is a way of stretching into the abyss. Somehow, The British Fantasy Society works in exactly the same way.
I hope therefore, having found my spiritual kin within the ranks of the BFS, that I will be able to give something back to the society, something that will bring value and richness to its many members.
Or perhaps I can just buy everyone a drink. Like this one…
Joseph D'Lacey celebrating with a very nice cocktail
I had to watch this Danish film twice to make sure I was correct in my initial reaction to it.This film, about a substitute teacher (actually a chicken farmer’s wife who is infected, almost “SLiTHER”-style, by an alien spore) and her wary class of 6th graders is freakin’ hilarious!!
When Ulla Harms (the delightful and delightfully named Paprika Steen) shows up to sub for a teacher who has come down with salmonella poisoning, the students are horrified at how she insults the kids: one boy has buck teeth – she tells him to correct something on the blackboard but be careful not to trip over his teeth on the way.And when she finds something funny, there is no holding back her mirth – she guffaws almost to the point where someone REALLY needs to slap her or she will piddle on herself.
Red Sands is Alex Turner’s follow-up to the undeniably eerie Dead Birds, an American civil war period piece, involving a squad of soldiers coming across a terrifying house situated in a field of corn, haunted by vaguely Lovecraftian horrors. In Red Sands Turner takes the same set-up and updates it to Afghanistan, placing a unit of American soldiers in an isolated location and spooking them out with a series of strange phenomena and bloody deaths; except, this time it doesn’t work.
Charged with seizing and then monitoring an important road the soldiers get lost due to some random artillery fire, come across some ruins and out of boredom (regardless of the fact they’ve just been attacked) set about shooting up the statues carved in the sides of the red sandstone hills. This act of ignorance unleashes a Djinn which then takes its revenge on the soldiers. We know it’s a Djinn because there’s a plaque in the stone that says so.
The 200 numbered hard copies of Horror Reanimated I: Echoes are gone.
Bill, Mathew and I had mixed emotions about where they went. Some of them did find their way into the hands of horror enthusiasts, collectors and those few lost souls who count themselves among our fans. I suspect more of them, however, ended up in the bin unread. We handed copies to anyone who talked to us on the Horror Reanimated UK tour – those were the rules.
Some of those folks took the chapbook and bought copies of either Bill’s or my novels. Others just took the chapbook and walked away delighted, knowing they’d got something for free. A terrifying number hadn’t mastered spoken English, let alone the written kind. Beings who had no place in a bookshop. Men with missing teeth and unwashed hair barely contained by black baseball caps. Yeah, see me? Yeah? I fucking love horror, me. Saw. Hostel. Fucking love it. Then these dirt encrusted individuals would about face with our rare, precious volume and leave the shop without another word. And you just knew they were taking it home to use as a crossbow target in the backyard because all the local cats were already dead.
So, if you managed to get one, great. And if you didn’t, well, all is not lost. We’re now making the chapbook available as a pdf download. Right here. Right now. And we sincerely hope you enjoy it for things other than target practice.
If you fancy hearing a bit about the inspiration for the setting and the psycho-geographical tone of The Absence then head on over to BBC Radio 3 where on the Listen Again service you can hear me chatting away about Tennyson and reading from ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ - a poem that makes a sinister appearance in the book… My bit starts in 7 minutes in
Banquet for the Damned combines several very real elements – night terrors, shamanism, anthropology, witchcraft and heavy metal – in a very real location; St. Andrews. It’s one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. I had shivers across my skin as I discovered within its pages the histories of the covens of Europe and the studies of evil spirits and familiars in the shamanic traditions of South America and Africa.
Into this world of student revelry and stuffy intellectualism, comes a renegade writer and explorer of altered realities, Eliot Coldwell. And he’s brought something nasty with him. Something hungry. Students begin to disappear from the campus.
At the same time, following the break up of their band, guitarists Dante Shaw and his best friend Tom travel to St. Andrews. They plan to meet Eliot Coldwell, Dante’s spiritual hero and author of the notorious cult novel, Banquet for the Damned. Dante intends to make a concept album using Eliot and his work as the theme.
But instead of finding inspiration in St. Andrews, Dante discovers nightmares stalking the town’s ancient streets…
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It’s no secret that Bloody Books and Virgin Horror were in direct competition for the same share of the genre market. When the Virgin line folded, we were kind of pleased to be left in the game.
Horror Reanimated seeks the best in the genre and, as time went by, we featured Virgin titles and talked to their authors. (See our posts on Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams). Having read plenty of Virgin Horror, it now strikes me as tragic that such high quality fiction will no longer issue forth from that elegantly twisted horn of plenty.
My most recent read was ‘Banquet for the Damned’ by Adam L G Nevill. Originally published by PS Publishing, this title gripped me as hard as any supernatural tale ever has. It is a superbly crafted, beautifully told and genuinely frightening novel. As a final tribute to a noble and prematurely buried imprint, I bring you a candid interview with Adam L G Nevill, author of Banquet and editor of the Virgin Horror line.
We honour the genre’s slain; enemy and friend alike, generals and foot soldiers equally. Why? Because when you throw the festering undead into a pit, they stick together!
But that’s not all. Adam has recently proved himself truly undead having risen again with a major two-book deal…
Joseph D’Lacey: Adam, I’m going to thank you in advance for agreeing to what I realise may be an uncomfortable interview for you following the termination of your horror list. (more…)
Seeing this on the shelves was a joy to behold, not only because it’s the latest in Abaddon’s Tomes of the Dead imprint, (the previous tome I read, Al Ewing’s I, Zombie was a successful if somewhat quirky amalgam of sf (alien invasion), noir crime (private investigator), horror (bucket loads of the gory stuff) and the undead (the private investigator)), but also because Simon Bestwick’s name adorned the rather day-glo cover that rather cheapens this powerful and decidedly different take on the zombie-trope.
To this reader, Bestwick is amongst the frontrunners of the niche world of the macabre ghost story; his A Hazy Shade of Winter was the first Ash Tree Press title I bought. Not only did his tales of contemporary hauntings, both in the mind and of the land, take a frim hold on me, they also alerted me to that publisher’s high quality catalogue. His latest collection, All the Pictures of the Dark is available from Grayfriar Press - I’m three stories in and have no hesitation recommending it on the strength of those alone. Plus Bestwick’s up for a British Fantasy Award for Best Novella with The Narrows in September at the Fantasycon in Nottingham. Now he’s been given the chance to write a mass-market paperback and the tantalising possibility of him lending his powers of atmospheric suggestion to a full-blown zombie apocalypse was one I could not deny mself, and I applaud Abbadon for adding him to their roster.
I have moments when I rue the day I started writing. I know I’m not meant to say that in public.
I’m one of those people who has periods of furious activity followed by fallow times. Fallow? Who am I trying to kid? I mean times of famine. I occupy one of two states: Writing or Not Writing. I could call it manic depression or bi-polar syndrome but that would just be an excuse. When I’m Not Writing, I’m miserable. And when I’m Writing, I’m slightly less miserable.
A new independent British zombie film following in the footsteps of the adequate The Zombie Diaries, and the more polished, if unseen to date, The Dead Outside (will someone please give these guys a DVD deal? In fact, put all three movies into a cool little box-set please), Colin has been touted around with the story of a £45 budget spent on tea and biscuits. If that’s true then all well and good, but the film itself certainly stands up to geek analysis without the aid of a gimmicky marketing campaign, and will receive a deserved short run and DVD release in October.
THE SUBSTITUTE
Red Sands is Alex Turner’s follow-up to the undeniably eerie Dead Birds, an American civil war period piece, involving a squad of soldiers coming across a terrifying house situated in a field of corn, haunted by vaguely Lovecraftian horrors. In Red Sands Turner takes the same set-up and updates it to Afghanistan, placing a unit of American soldiers in an isolated location and spooking them out with a series of strange phenomena and bloody deaths; except, this time it doesn’t work.
