The twenty-seventh Bury Me With… and this week it’s Midlands-master of dark subtlety and strange suggestion, Joel Lane, with a choice that is also close to my own heart…
“The book I would like to be buried with is… Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, in any hardback edition that has the original Mugnaini illustrations. For three reasons. Firstly, it sums up for me better than any other book what the supernatural horror genre is about and why it matters. Secondly, it’s the ideal companion for a journey through the land of the dead, as if effectively maps out the territory and lets you know where the best roadside inns are. Thirdly, the ins and outs of how it evolved from Dark Carnival is all that the dead ever talk about. I know, I’ve heard them. But I wouldn’t want to be buried with Dark Carnival because there was no complete mass-market edition, and I wouldn’t want to deprive any living fan of the chance of finding that copy. Hell hath, quite literally, no fury like a thwarted Bradbury fan.”
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About Joel Lane:
Joel is twice winner of a British Fantasy Award, and the Eric Gregory award for his poetry. He is the author of two novels: From Blue to Black (2000)and The Blue Mask (2003). He has also written munerous short stories, predominantly appearing in TTA Press’ Crimewave and Black Static titles, some of them reprinted in his collections Earth Wire and Other Stories (1994), The Lost District (2006), and most recently, The Terrible Changes (2010). His novella, The Witnesses Are Gone, was published by PS Publishing in 2009. He has published two poetry collections: The Edge of the Screen (1999), and Trouble in the Heartland (2005), with the third, The Autumn Myth, forthcoming in December. He is also an editor, having worked on numerous anthologies including the (in my humble opinion) legendary Beneath the Ground (2002), Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop in 2002), and the latest Gray Friar Press anthology, Never Again (co-edited with Alysson Bird) which is launched at Fantasycon 2010.
September 13th, 2010
The twenty-sixth Bury Me With… features Welsh scribe Rhy Hughes, who, (I promise), does eventually decide which book to take with him to the grave. And what a choice it eventually proves to be…
“I have considered this question quite a lot and deemed it probable I would try to come up with a “clever” answer not strictly in keeping with the spirit of the exercise. For instance I thought about insisting on cremation rather than burial and that my funeral pyre should be fuelled with books I don’t like, works by Jane Austen, Henry James and Ian Fleming, among others.
But that is too glib an answer, so my second idea was to insist on a mausoleum rather than a simple grave, a monumental tomb that would contain enough room to house the 44 volumes (deluxe price $3000) of the Vance Integral Edition – every work of fiction ever published by Jack Vance. My corpse could then recline among them like a bloated and stinking bookmark, leaking the occasional stream of purple fluid like a ribbon. (more…)
September 6th, 2010
The twenty-fifth entry in the Bury Me series features a writer recently returned to the county of his birth, Devon-based Quentin S. Crisp. An author who is, in Mark Samuels’ opinion, “the most important writer of his generation.”
“There are two choices here, essentially because this article serves as a kind of recommendation (and primarily, I suppose, for those reading in English) and my chosen author, Nagai Kafū, is Japanese. Therefore, I’ll have to select one translated volume, and one volume in the original.
On the website Goodreads, I notice that my influences are listed simply as, ‘Nagai Kafū’. His name standing alone like that makes it seem as if he is actually my greatest influence as a writer, and at first I wondered if this might be misleading. I suppose it is, to an extent, but perhaps not such a great extent as I first thought. It does seem curious, though, that Kafū has come to assume such great significance for me.
(more…)
August 30th, 2010
One of my favourite short story writers, the very personable Simon Kurt Unsworth, gives us his Book To Be Buried With, in this, the twenty fourth instalment…
“Let’s sort out our terms of reference here. I’m assuming by ‘the book I’d like to be buried with’ that we’re granting me some kind of zombified afterlife in which I can read, and that I’ve been buried with one of those booklights, and maybe some peanuts to keep me going when I get peckish? I’m also assuming that we’re meaning ‘a book I’d like to read again’, which helps – it means I can discard all those books I’ve enjoyed but am unlikely to tackle more than once (Danielewski’s House of Leaves, for example, which I thought was great, but I really can’t be bothered doing all that ‘holding the book upside down and reading great long lists of stuff’ again). In the end, this came right down to the wire in a all-out scrap between three books, all of which I’d have been perfectly happy to read in my coffin at leisure as the Rapture happened around me. The two losers (let’s not call them that, actually: let’s call them the two equally wonderful books that I didn’t pick this time) are The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James and Junji Ito’s three-part graphic novel about a town cursed by spirals, Uzumaki. Both of these are superb, nigh-on faultless, pieces of art which have brought me hours of pleasure, but in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. So, the book I’d like to be buried with is Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
(more…)
August 23rd, 2010
The twenty-third entry of Bury Me… and Allyson Bird, author of the British FantasyAward winning Bull Running for Girls, shares her Book To Be Buried With…
“‘The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman would have made joint first choice but that problem has been decided for me because it has already been mentioned in this series …the other is Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle. A friend in California sent it to me last year and I was devastated when I had to send it back. Quite fortuitously, as copies are hard to come by now, I went into the dealers’ room at WHC Brighton this year and found a copy quickly. I asked Lisa to sign it – a wonderful moment for me.
In Nest of Nightmares Lisa Tuttle gives me the mystery I long for and everything isn’t neatly tied up. I don’t always want that. And, there is much more going on than the literal meaning of the words. Her fiction is enigmatic and all the stronger for being so. Her characters are ordinary people facing the strange and I remember the imagery long after the final page has been turned. Women are mad, or are they? They are taken over, as are some of the ones they love — but by whom or what? They feel trapped. One protagonist is belittled (Robert Holdstock mentioned this when he talked of the story, Flying to Byzantium in Horror 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman) and others are driven by ‘forces’ supernatural or otherwise. They face life and death and we wonder if they live …what will be the outcome? They are never let off easily. The way back can be fraught with danger and some make the choice to stay or can’t get away from the ‘supernatural’ knowing a price will be paid.
And then we come to The Nest at the end of the collection. A real horror story for me, and as with many of Lisa Tuttle’s stories, it can be read on many levels. There is so much pain and yet hope in that story. We are all mortal and just perhaps… whether it is something we shouldn’t wish for… there might just be more about our world that we can’t comprehend.”
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About Allyson Bird:
Allyson’s debut collection, Bull Running for Girls, won The British Fantasy Society award for best collection in 2009. Her second, Wine and Rank Poison from Dark Regions Press, will be launched at Fantasycon this year. Autumn sees the publication of her first novel, Isis Unbound, from the same publisher. She is also co-editing an anti-fascist, anti-racist anthology, with Joel Lane, called Never Again. This is due out from Gray Friar Press in September.
A little on Wine and Rank Poison.
Revenge. Best served cold. Here are ten stories involving most of the deadly sins: greed, lust, envy, wrath, and pride. Strange stories woven in time and place from Ancient Greece to 1929 Odessa, Italy to the modern United States…stories that mix reality, mythology, legend, half-humans, and the inhuman…
Allyson lives near the South Yorkshire moors with her husband and young daughter.
Visit her website here: www.birdsnest.me.uk
August 16th, 2010
The twenty-second entry in the Bury Me… series features US-based Weston Ochse, aka El Elvis Rojo, a man who killed me off in one of his stories in a signed, slip-cased, leather bound, 26-copy edition of Scary Rednecks, co-authored with David Whitman.
“Although the Fifty Years of Playboy comes to mind because of the continually deviant workings of my fourteen-year-old mind, not only am I not sure that it is really a book, but even if it was, the experience of looking at pictures would eventually grow tiring and pale in comparison to the universe one can be transported to with cannonical writing.
Such is the case with Dandelion Wine. If I was to be buried with any book, it would be with my own first edition signed by Ray – Bigger Elvis – Bradbury. Not only did Ray introduce me to the coming of age (Bildungsroman) style of writing, but this truly magical novel contains everything I should ever want to read; it is a tale of horror, it is science fiction it is fantasy, it is mystery… it is truly an iconic book because it is uncategorical.
(more…)
August 9th, 2010
Won Ton Baby is nothing if not a pertinent reminder that we should never reproduce; that anyone under four feet should be shackled to a wall with a cast-iron chain and their putrescent little bodies wrapped in razor wire – The Bad Seed, carrion-eating brats, caged here in The 9th Circle of Horror Reanimated would pose less of a threat than Suzi Lorraine’s Baby Won Ton. But enough about my neighbourhood; Baby Won Ton makes the kids in my neighbourhood look like ponies! Warm milk will never pass Baby Won Ton’s lips; he is more interested in making couture out of your entrails, that is, after he has choked you with his umbilical cord.
Suzi Lorraine first came to my attention when I picked up a copy of the horror magazine Gorezone, which was, at that time only a demented little fledgling. Her column Diary of a Scream Queen was the reason I began picking it up and it has since grown in popularity with sales of up to 90,000 issues sold per month. I can’t help but feel Suzi had a large part to play in the success of this rag. With over 40 films under her belt, most of which are in the horror genre, her acting career has allowed her to travel all over the world, filming in Italy, Canada, London, Germany, Argentina, Amsterdam, and the British Virgin Islands. She also co-hosted The Gorezone Film Festival in London last October and was honoured by fans in Torino, Italy during ‘Suzi Lorraine Night’ at the Empire Theatre with several of her films being screened that night as part of a Suzi film retrospective. Some of the films Suzi appeared in are Claang: The Game, Sea of Dust and Bikini Girls on Ice. Won Ton… sees her working both in front and behind the camera.
Suzi created the story idea for (and co-produced) Won Ton Baby, collaborating with James Morgart to develop the script. Together they’ve created a fusion of comedy and horror; a riotous celebration of the perverse, the ghoulish and the zany all done in spectacular bad taste. Suzi was kind enough to brave an interview with me – she is, after all currently devising sadistic torture techniques for serial killers in Hell – and answers all my questions with great honesty. For those who want to know more, read on….
Alan Kelly: Hello Suzi, welcome to Horror Reanimated. Could you tell me a bit about what first inspired Won Ton Baby?
Suzi Lorraine: Thanks! I’m thrilled to be here at Horror Reanimated. Couldn’t think of a better place to dwell, for a spell….
The idea of “Won Ton Baby!” was conjured up by yours truly about 3 years ago, when I was working on a short horror film. (more…)
August 7th, 2010
The twenty first Bury Me… features young whippersnapper Johnny Mains, a man who has risen to notoriety in horror circles thanks to his enthusiastic resurrection of The Pan Book of Horror Stories.
“The book I’d like to be buried with is a non-fiction travel book called Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon. I stumbled across it in a charity shop when I was 18 and it has become one of the most important books I own.
In the early ‘80’s, after a painful divorce and redundancy from his job as a Professor, Least Heat-Moon buys a van, decks it with a bed, table, cooker and toilet so it is liveable and in accordance with Native American resurrection rituals, calls it Ghost Dancing.
He then drives for 13,000 miles on the ‘Blue Highways’ of America, the small back water roads (coloured blue on the old Rand McNally maps) that take him through forgotten and lost towns; he purposely steers clear from the fast motorways and big cities. He retells the histories of the areas he passes through, talks to the people he meets along the way – be it a born again Christian who hitchhikes for no other purpose than to spread the word of God, a family who have a book recording every death in the community for several generations and take solace in the fact that one day their names will also be added to the book – to Brenda, the waitress he meets in a roadside diner, with whose dialogue (as with everybody he meets) he recreates on the page, and it’s beautiful to read.
Blue Highways is wistful, witty, heart warming and painful. The knowledge that many of these people knew that they were the last of their kind before they were swallowed up by faceless consumerism that lurked at the edges of their communities is extremely sad and touching.
The book inspired me so much, that I took my own road trip, at 19, all around the UK. I spent one year on the road, just me with a tent and a rucksack and I hitchhiked and found work in whatever town I landed in and met many amazing people, some who I’m still in touch with 15 years later. And the book went with me every step of the way, and it holds pride of place on my best bookshelf, battered and dog-eared, next to the signed Pan Horrors and the Not at Nights…”
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About Johnny Mains:
Johnny Mains is a relative newcomer to the genre. He has had a couple of short stories published in the Black Book of Horror series, has written for SFX and interviews cult authors and artists for The Paperback Fanatic Magazine.
He has just edited Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories and has written the introduction for the re-issue of the 1959 Pan Book of Horror Stories, out in October.
He lives in Norwich with his wife Lou and dog, Biscuit.
August 2nd, 2010
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).
Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.
(more…)
July 26th, 2010
A well-intentioned supernatural covert-ops thriller from the writer of The Blair Witch Project that may culminate in frustration for some, as the ending is speculative to say the least. On the other hand, there are those of us who appreciate such room for interpretation, and The Objective cannot be accused of being anything but original given the recent trend towards inept war/horror movies such as the tedious Red Sands and the atrocious Zombies of War.
The Objective of the title is itself cloaked in mystery as CIA Agent Ben Keynes is assigned a small Special Ops team to locate and interview a local mystic. This old man may or may not know about the massive radioactive heat signature discovered by satellites deep in an unforgiving terrain of mountains and desert. It becomes apparent that this search is only a part of Keynes’ mission, but whether or not he knows the reasons behind the team’s steady disintegration as they travel deeper into the wilderness is also unclear.
What is clear is the formula Myrick has chosen to apply to The Objective: this is The Blair Witch Project without trees (and witches). He develops a gradual unease as the lost group stumble across wooden triangles stuck in the barren landscape, possibly placed as warnings. Water turns to dust in their canteens and they see vague shimmering shapes in the distance, hazy figures walking into the triangular phenomena before ascending into the sky. As they are picked off one-by-one by a rarely seen force that literally disintegrates its victims (its geometries looking like something that might have come from a mind-meld of pseudo-scientist and new-age sf maverick Eric Von Daniken, and H.P.Lovecraft) the team is no nearer knowing what it is supposed to be doing.
The Objective suffers by its director’s reputation, and by comparison to the aforementioned Blair Witch Project, but it is relatively well-acted and fresh enough to be worthy of your time. Having said that, I’d like to see this script worked into a short story or novella – the reader would undoubtedly enjoy a more subtle and gritty supernatural experience that would make a much greater and longer-lasting impression, as suggestion is often more effective on the page than on screen.
The Objective, 2009
Directed by Daniel Myrick
July 21st, 2010
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