Ramsey Campbell's tale of a man revisiting the Lake District mountains where his ex-wife and her new husband had subsequently died was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 1984 and read by Sean Barrett (the cover star of The Smiths' 'How Soon is Now?').
Evoking the eeriness of a lone walk in the British countryside where history and myth exert an immeasurable weight that can descend and smother without warning, it is a gently compelling story of the powerfully haunting nature of loss.
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I can't really remember when I first saw 'Hardware' but it was fairly soon after it's 1990 release but what I do remember was sitting there in amazement wondering how I could have missed the news that 2000AD had made a movie of one of my favourite stories, 'Shok!' from a treasured Judge Dredd annual (1981) and then scouring the credits wondering why there was no mention of writer Steve MacManus or artist Kevin O'Neill or even of 2000AD who subsequently sued for plagiarism and won.
Hardware is a post-apocalyptic tale of mechanical mayhem triggered by the discovery of the dismembered remains of a prototype murder robot out in the desert wastelands by Nomad, played by Fields of the Nephilim singer Carl McCoy, the first of three rock star cameos in the opening 20 minutes and who is presumably just wearing his own clothes. The second cameo soon comes in the form of Iggy Pop's radio DJ Angry Bob, who gives us some background info on the world we're in before Lemmy ferries two of our stars across the river to the sounds of 'Ace of Spades'.
Thanks to Shades (John Lynch) and Moses (Dylan McDermott - perhaps the most recognisable non musician here thanks to roles in various series of American Horror Story) the robot's head soon finds itself part of an industrial sculpture made by Stacey Travis' Jill before it starts drawing the power needed to start itself up and murder everyone in sight except for Jill because in the grand tradition of the slasher there needs to be a last woman standing.
Working on a small budget director Richard Stanley has made a real go of it and parts of it look pretty nice but the limitations do shine through. Most filming took place inside the then disused Roundhouse so everything has a nicely grimy, derelict feel but poor soundproofing meant all dialogue needed to be re-recorded giving the film the look of a poorly dubbed foreign language film. 'Based' as it was on a 7 page 2000AD short what little story there is can only be stretched so far and patience is stretched thin as the robot repeatedly revives itself for yet another bout of murderdeathkill. In amongst this the cast deal competently with a hammy script with Stacey holding the centre stage well and earning her scream queen stripes and William Hootkins as creepy, peepy neighbour Lincoln Wineberg Jr making a memorable cameo.
Truthfully you can't fault Stanley's ambition (you can definitely fault his ethics) and he made a gritty, hissing clanging post-industrial slasher with it's toes in the same fetish club aesthetic that spawned Clive Barker's Hellraiser but like it's tin man antagonist it's lacking heart and is essentially a mish mash of Terminator, Blade Runner and Soylent Green, occasional spaghetti western tropes and a thousand no-budget Italian grindhouse post-apocalypse schlockers all wrapped around a plagiarised core.
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M.R. Carey Absinthe BooksFain has inherited Ocean View, a boarding house in Hove Harbour from her late mother, who’s still hanging around to offer advice where needed and generally keep an eye on the place – when magic of a different sort starts to rear its head within her home, Fain, her mother and friends old and new must band together to protect Ocean View, and each other.
For the last 20 something years Mike Carey has been a pretty constant presence on my reading pile, from his run on the 'Sandman' spin-off comic 'Lucifer' through the occult detective stories of the 'John Constantine Hellblazer' comic and his own 'Felix Castor' novels to the mushroom zombies of 'The Girl With All The Gifts' and beyond to 'The Books of Koli' he's produced a succession of imaginative wonders that have traversed Heavens, Hells, pasts, futures, elsewheres and other heres.
In this novella for the PS Publishing imprint Absinthe Books Carey takes us to a provincial guest house called Ocean View that's populated by owner Fain, the jar that holds her mother's cremated remains, a closed and sealed off magical night club and an assorted cast of gentle eccentrics and, one night, someone or, perhaps, something, other, that takes up residence and begins offering the residents the fulfillment of their deepest wishes. We are told little of the world beyond Ocean View but we know it's one where magic holds a place in society and where it's policed aggressively and so the arrival of this new resident brings Fain and her friends into conflict with the authorities.
As a touch point Carey's urban fantasy has echoes of Neil Gaiman's 'Coraline' and 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' but there's always been a kinship between the two author's work going back to "Lucifer' which the story here is most redolent of both in concept and in execution, the vividly visual nature of the storytelling leaving you with the feeling of having read a comic book more than prose. Carey has long shown himself to be the consummate world builder and storyteller and proves it again here as with the briefest of strokes in the limited page count open to him he weaves a story of family and of love and creates a world that I'd be happy to revisit again anytime soon.
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Remembering legendary comic artist Kevin O'Neill on what would have been his 70th birthday with this fascinating two part interview where the artist talks about his long career in both British and American comics.
An early job as an office boy at IPC led to him being one of the original staffers on a new science fiction comic being developed at the company called 2000AD. For the new comic he drew covers and posters and occasional Future Shocks before he became a regular artist on the Ro-Busters strip working with writer Pat Mills with whom he would have a long and productive association on strips and titles such as Nemesis the Warlock, ABC Warriors, Metalzoic and Marshal Law.
O'Neill's other collaborator of note would be another 2000AD alumni, the grand wizard of comics, Alan Moore with whom he enjoyed a 20 year collaboration on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen having also, in 1986, collaborated on Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual No. 2 for DC Comics which contributed to the downfall of the censorious Comics Code Authority who objected wholesale to O'Neill's entire art style much, I imagine, to his delight.
O'Neill died on 3rd November 2022 leaving a gaping, lurid, flamboyant, spectacular hole in the world of comics having forged a singular path through the industry by producing some of the most memorable work in the field. For me as a young kid discovering comics in the 1970s and 80s it was always his art that shone through, that unmistakable air of the macabre, the underlying violence, the explosive dynamism, the irresistable humour and, above all, the incomparable character of this quintessential artist and storyteller.
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Released by Hammer in 1957, 2 years after both the release of their first Quatermass movie and the showing of the original 6 episode TV series, Quatermass 2 (or II if you're feeling slightly Roman) is perhaps the least regarded of the three Hammer Q movies which I think is a real shame even if I do mostly share that opinion.
Treading similar ground to 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', which was released in the intervening year, we find the Professor and the members of The British Experimental Rocket Group investigating a meteor shower that falls on the isolated location of Winnerden Flats where he finds an industrial complex eerily similar to his own proposed moon base staffed, it soon transpires, by people under the control of little alien blob things that had arrived in cute little rocket shaped meteors and which planned to transform themselves into very large alien blob things.
Compared to the first there's a notably bigger budget on display here and director Val Guest (who had also directed Xperiment) keeps the pace high but allows Kneale space to explore some of his favourite themes of totalitarianism, of indifference and incompetence amongst the British classes and the rejection of rational science characterised by the downtrodden but dogged Professor.
Returning to the role of Quatermass (the only actor to do so) Brian Donlevy plays him as a notably less abrasive character here than he was in Xperiment cowed perhaps by his failure with Victor Carroon but certainly by his dealings with British governmental bureaucracy. As with his first appearance in the role Donlevy's performance is often clumsy and his delivery less than perfect a result no doubt of his alcoholism but he's supported by a very capable cast of recognisable character actors including Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn and Sid James who was also appearing at that time in his breakthrough TV role in Hancock's Half Hour whose presence lighten the load.
The film concludes with a finale that while undoubtedly spectacular with it's 200ft tall blob monsters is somewhat of a let down after the intrigues of the film and leaves something of a bitter aftertaste that it was just another monster movie but that aside it is a movie with a solid premise, reasonably well executed and with an intriguing message at it's core that perhaps deserves to be better regarded than it is.
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Fiona Snailman (ed) British Library Tales of the WeirdChurches, monasteries and convents have long been associated with sanctuary: sacred spaces should offer protection from evil in all its forms. This new anthology raises questions about the protection offered by faith, bringing together a collection of tales in which holy places are filled with horror; where stone effigies come to life and believers are tormented by terrifying apparitions. In a host of uncanny stories published between 1855 and 1935, Holy Ghosts uncovers sacrilegious spectres and the ecclesiastically eerie.
The British Library continues apace with it's collections of the strange and the supernatural with a collection of stories based around churches and those who inhabit them. These collections have on the whole been pretty solid and some indeed have been excellent - the Pan and the occult detective collections spring to mind - this one is somewhere in the middle.
Theme wise it seems strange that it's taken them this long to get around to a churchy collection and I'm glad they have as there were a couple of stories in here that I didn't know and enjoyed very much. Sheridan Le Fanu opens the book strongly with the temptations of 'The Sexton's Adventure' and John Wyndham's rather slight 'The Cathedral Crypt' is good pulpy fun to finish the book. In the intervening pages both Amelia B. Edwards' 'In The Confessional' and Robert Hichens' 'The Face of the Monk' provide engaging stories of redemption and I'm reminded that I need to further explore Hichens who was the author of one of the great strange tales, 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea'.
While we're on the subject of classics, there's a line in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 'Good Omens' about how every cassette left long enough in a car will eventually turn into 'Best of Queen' well, I'm making a corresponding prophecy that into every unsuspecting supernatural anthology will eventually appear Edith Nesbit's 'Man-Size in Marble'. I'm pretty sure the number of copies of this story I have in my collection far exceeds the number of books I have. It's fabulous and deserves it's reputation but by god it's also ubiquitous and it is, of course, here.
Most of the other stories here are quite readable but perhaps not re-readable such as Edith Wharton's devious but obvious 'The Duchess at Prayer' and Mrs Henry Woods' equally obvious 'The Parson's Oath' but Elizabeth Gaskell's 'The Poor Clare' is far, far too long for it's scanty plot and Marguerite Merington's 'An Evicted Spirit' is sentimental claptrap rescued by an occasional enjoyably pithy phrase.
In summary a solid but stolid collection that I can't help but think would have been enlivened by replacing Gaskell's 70 pages with something a little more maverick like 'The Cicerones' by Robert Aickman or enigmatic like Arthur Machen's 'Opening the Door'.
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Rosalie Parker Tartarus PressThe humans who inhabit Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories seem destined to test the limitations of rational existence. Some have accidentally strayed into no-man’s land, such as the narrator of ‘Bipolarity’ who must decide how to learn to live (or not) with her mental illness; or the protagonist of ‘Beguiled’ who may be forced by family attitudes into social obscurity; or, in ‘School Trip’, unpromising June’s unexpected discovery of her own ‘special powers’. Other stories, such as ‘Home Comforts’, are more playful, although the uncanny is never far away.
Over the last few years of Wyrd Britain I've had the pleasure of reading a couple of books by Tartarus Press co-publisher Rosalie Parker and have found them to be a wonder of the strange and the sublime and this most recent collection - the first of hers from the publishing house she so expertly oversees - is no different.
In previous reviews I've made mention of how the essences of Rosalie's literary influences are occasionally apparent in her stories which gave them roots in stories past and which showed the vigour that remains in the work of those authors to inspire new and unique creations of such quality but, with the exception of the two stories originally written for a Zagava homage to L.A. Lewis, her stories here, while still springing from the same soil, feel like they come from a more distinctly individual place.
In stories that are as likely to speak of love as they are of loss and of hope as much as of despair and where the strange or the supernatural is often only suggested we find ourselves beguiled by the tantalising glimpses Rosalie allows us into her worlds. There is an empathetic delicacy to her writing that infuses these stories of place, of love lost and found and of family in it's many and varied forms with a feminine focus that imparts a sinuous and thoughtful subtlety to the underlying frisson of the strange.
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Spinning off from the 2000AD series Caballistics, Inc - which happily got a 'complete' story reissue recently - Absalom is the story of Inspector Harry Absalom who polices the agreement between the respective ruling powers of Britain and Hell known as 'The Accord' and he's not entirely happy about it.
For Caballistics, Inc. writer and artist Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon created a recognisably current shared world setting where characters and events we know from core Wyrd Britain texts such as Quatermass and the Pit and the formative eras of Doctor Who were canon. In Absalom, Rennie along with artist Tiernen Trevallio, further developed this world adding some venerable British cops including Harry Trout from the Dr Phibes movies and the tea loving Inspector Calhoun from Death Line to the story world.
The story of Harry and his associates ran between 2011 and 2019 in the comic and has since been reprinted in three collections that tell of the ups and downs of supernatural coppering alongside the slowly building story of Harry's bigger plans; a distinctly personal quest. Harry is an old school 1970s style copper very much in the tradition of Regan and Carter, always ready with a handy quip, a well deserved slap or a pint down the boozer and with the proverbial heart of gold underneath his shabby trench coat.
"He's not so bad, once you get used to him, old Harry. Actually, that's bollocks. He's a god awful old git most of the time but he'll never let you down."
To keep him on the job he's been given a nasty form of cancer that is held in abeyance as long as he tows the magical line and which he deals with using an ever present hip flask filled with a heady mix of booze and laudanum. Supporting him are an unlikely crew of coppers, spies, church sponsored vigilantes, vat grown homunculi, occultists, a psychic pavement artist and a partly mechanical - formerly demonically inclined - Victorian valet.
It's beautifully drawn with a gritty dynamism by Trevallio who looks like he's having fun with it but not as much as Rennie who is channelling his inner Gene Hunt filling Harry's mouth with unrepentantly un-pc dialogue while encouraging his characters to punch as many racists, toffs, demons and racist toff demons as he can fit in the pages whilst telling a story of regret, rebellion and redemption.
As I said the Absalom story has been issued as three trade paperback collections - Ghosts of London, Under A False Flag and Terminal Diagnosis – and are hugely recommended (as is Caballistics, Inc) and anyone with a love of the type of movies and TV shows we feature here on Wyrd Britain or of an occult detective romp in the vein of Garth Ennis' run on John Constantine, Hellblazer will find much to love here.
Finally, as a taster to the series 2000AD released a two minute animated prequel to the strip which you can watch below. It's missing the characterful black and white art from the books and it's more cartoony renderings don't quite have the required level of grit and grime but it makes for a fun watch nonetheless.
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The Road is one of the lost television plays of Nigel Kneale. Originally filmed in 1963 for the BBC's First Night series no copies are known to exist thanks to the corporations trigger-happy delete and reuse policies. With only the script to remind us of what was, The Road has long been a Holy Grail for Kneale fandom. Whilst 'lost' recordings do still appear occasionally from the dim, dark recesses of production and distribution company vaults the chances of ever getting to see these missing shows are slim to say the least so it was with excited trepidation when, in 2018, news was received that a new version was in production with writer and comedian Toby Hadoke given the go-ahead by both the BBC and the Kneale estate to take a run at remodelling the script as a radio drama.
Making only minor adjustments and assembling a small, strong cast Hadoke and director Charlotte Riches make a solid go of telling the story of a night in the woods in 1768 as amateur scientist Sir Timothy Hassall (Adrian Scarborough) and renowned philosopher Gideon Cobb (Mark Gatiss) along with Hassall's wife Lady Lavinia (Hattie Morahan - the daughter of the original lost play's director, Christopher Morahan), Cobb's educated slave Jethro (Colin McFarlane) and others investigate strange noises amongst the trees.
It's a convincing adaptation of a solid and fairly typical Kneale story that exists in that hinterland between horror and science fiction that he made his own and has similarities with his more famous works, The Stone Tape and Quatermass and the Pit. As ever Kneale makes good use of his opportunities to comment on the vicissitudes of our times and his pessimistic outlook on the future. The ending, whilst generally easy to anticipate, hits suitably hard and the whole thing is helped along by some uncovered, archive recordings from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that had been used in the original play.
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Between 1974 and 1981, at the height of the Cold War, the British government engaged in a project of civil defence and readiness in the event of nuclear attack consisting of the production of pamphlets, newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts and public information films (PIFs) under the umbrella title, Protect and Survive.Originally secret but following letters and articles in The Times the pamphlet was made available to the general public in May 1980, who could buy a copy from the Post Office for 50p. The PIFs however were intended only to be broadcast within 72 hours of an imminent attack until they were leaked to CND and the BBC and featured on an episode of the channel's flagship current affairs show, Panorama.
Richard Taylor Cartoon Films - makers of the 'Charley Says' PIFs - we're commissioned to make the 20 short films for which they employed Patrick Allen - a character actor well known in the UK for his voice-over work - to narrate and Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to provide the music. Mixing animation with still photographs and looking like the bleakest possible episode of Play School the films include such episodes as...
What to Do When the Warnings Sound - if outside lie down in a ditch.
Make Your Fall-out Room and Refuge Now - hide under a table covered with luggage.
What to Put in Your Fall-out Room - don't forget string.
Water and Food - don't forget your tin opener either.
Sanitation - make sure yourpoop bucket has a lid.
Fire Precautions - paint your windows white.
Life Under Fall-out Conditions - remember to brush any fall-out off your wellies after going outside.
Casualties - make sure your loved ones are accurately labelled when you bury them in the garden.
The entire Protect and Survive project has, since it became known, been the source of much well deserved rebuttal (E.P. Thompson's Protest and Survive) and ridicule (Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, Threads, The Young Ones episode Bomb). As a cultural artefact it makes for fascinating viewing that'll satisfy every hauntological itch in your body and show just how depressingly close to the mark folks such as Richard Littler, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz were when they created pastiches like Scarfolk and Look Around You but in real terms it's farcical, reeks of "Keep Calm and Carry On" and would be catastrophically useless in the face of what would be an apocalyptic event.
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