Screened in 1975 as an episode of the, for the most part forgotten, ITV series 'Against the Crowd' and written by Wyrd Britain legend Nigel Kneale, 'Murrain' (an old term meaning a disease affecting animals) is a TV play exploring that most Kneale of topics the clash of science and the supernatural, the modern and the archaic, the logical and superstitious.
The story tells of a visit by veterinarian Alan Crich (David Simeon) to a tiny, rural village to investigate a mystery illness affecting the pigs belong to Mr. Beeley (played by James Bond's boss, Bernard Lee). The poorly pigs aren't the only problem in the village with drought, and sickness amongst the villagers adding to their woes. Spurning the scientific minded approach of the outsider vet the villagers have already decided on the cause of the murrain, local odd bod and suspected witch, Mrs. Clemson (Una Brandon-Jones).
For a show with a runtime of less than an hour it maintains a fairly leisurely pace filled with extended silences as Beeley's bumpkin workforce slowly process even the simplest of tasks and questions. The lack of soundtrack is an unexpected joy that allows ambient sounds to add to the growing air of bucolic menace. The cast all give a fairly strong account of themselves with Brandon-Jones' lonely, persecuted and unhinged Mrs Clemson being the standout performance and the very downbeat ending leaves a satisfying ambiguity.
In discussions of Kneales' work 'Murrain', if mentioned at all, is often relegated to a footnote, eclipsed by it's more exuberant siblings like 'Quatermass', 'The Stone Tape' or 'Beasts', but sometimes there's gold in a footnote and I think that's the case here. 'Murrain' with the constraints of it's obviously limited budget makes for a tightly controlled and concentrated exploration of Kneale's interests bereft of the more overt science fiction and horror elements of later work such as 'Baby' and 'The Quatermass Conclusion' and is all the better for it.
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The wolf has always been
a creature of legend and romance, while kings, sorcerers and outlaws
have been proud to be called by the name of the wolf. It's no wonder,
then, that tales of transformation between man and wolf are so powerful
and persistent.
On a recent visit to Hay on Wye I scored a big stack of these Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural books (and then three more in Cardiff three days later) so expect a few of them to crop up here over the coming months. One of the first books in this series that I read was Mark's other Wordsworth Editions anthology, 'The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths', which was about as much fun as a book is capable of being so I jumped at this new discovery even though a fan of monster stories I am not.
Count Stenbock
I've not read many werewolf stories before - there was a short in one of 'The Sandman' volumes and I've vague memories of flipping through an adaptation of one of the 'Howling' movies as a kid and there's a Wyrd Britain regular that I'll come to later - but I've seen a whole host of movies, it is a most filmable creature, but the books have never really interested me. There are some really interesting moments but I didn't really find this volume as satisfying as the other. Much of that must be put down to my love of of the occult detective angle and my ambivalence to monsters but also far too many of the stories here had the feel of a folktale which, as regular perusers of my scribblings will know, aren't my favourite things. There are though several interesting stories lurking here, Saki's 'Gabriel-Ernest' (which I alluded to earlier) is a perennial anthology entrant but I'd not come across his tale of bluster and comeuppance, 'The She-Wolf', before and won't be sorry if I never do again. 'The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains' by Captain Frederick Marryat is a worthy opener with elements of folk tale providing a backbone for a much more interesting story than I assumed from it's first few pages.
R.B. Russell
Count Stenbock's 'The Other Side' is a delicately hallucinatory tale of forbidden flowers and beguiling women and an ambiguously supernatural Sherlock Holmes pastiche called 'The Shadow of the Wolf' by Ron Weighell sticks out dynamic duo on the roof of an old house in the country tracking a savage murderer. The book closes with R.B. Russell's wonderfully strange 'Loup-Garou' which I'm not even going to try and describe to you as it's something you need to experience yourself. Around these stories are a host of other tales that are all worthy of your time as they display interesting takes on the mythos but the above were, for me, the standouts. As I said at the beginning, creature stories aren't my favourites but as a toe dipping exercise into the genre this book has much to recommend it.
This is a special Xmas edition of the fabulous BBC Radio 4 series 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' dealing with that most Wyrd Britain of topics, ghosts. Woooooooooo (sorry, I promise I won't do that again)
Alongside hosts Robin Ince and Brian Cox this episode features Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, actor and writer Mark Gatiss, cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde and Nick Baines, the Bishop of Leeds.
It's not the most coherent of discussions - too many people pulling in too many directions - and I'm well aware that many people find Brian Cox to be entirely marmite but it is entertaining.
I don't know how long the link will last and as it's the BBC those of you living beyond these shores may have to use a proxy server to get it to play.
Proud and solitary, Eel
Marsh House surveys the windswept reaches of the salt marshes beyond
Nine Lives Causeway. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to
attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant,
unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered
windows. It is not until he glimpses a pale young woman, dressed all in
black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take
hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the
woman in black - and her terrible purpose.
I've avoided the Harry Potter version of this like the plague but the Nigel Kneale adaptation was particularly good so I was pretty intrigued to read the book at some point and so when I finally came across a copy I dived in. As a pastiche of the ghost books of old it is absolutely spot on and Hill has nailed both the voice and the vibe. There is a little wobble in that at times it's quite difficult to pin down exactly when the various parts of the story are set - at one point Arthur (Kipps, our narrator) makes an allusion to something being like a Victorian melodrama (or some such, I stupidly forgot to make a note of the page) which is when I thought it was meant to be set so I revised forward to early Edwardian and in the opening sequence to possibly pre-WWII.
But anyway, it's pastiche credentials notwithstanding the book has to stand on it's own account and it absolutely does. Hill has created a genuinely creepy and disquieting tale wherein the Black Lady's presence and the spectral goings-on on the marsh are palpably upsetting. Kipps is a sympathetically human character that we first meet as a gentle if somewhat melancholy character before we get to view the terrible events that turn the ambitious and slightly starchy younger version into the man we meet at the outset. The supporting cast are, for the most part, fairly sketchily drawn which is unsurprising in a novella but Hill uses a lovely light touch to give them anima such as Tomes the clerk with his constant sniffing. The books conclusion is both inevitable and horrible and drenched with vindictive and pointless malice leaving the reader drained and as bereft as our protagonist.
There are a few of these collaborations between Aiken and Pienkowski with this one being the second I've managed to track down. The first was a collection of Eastern European folk and fairy tales with the art interlaced through and framing the words (my review is here). This time it's a much more straight forward writer / illustrator relationship with Pienkowski providing a series of paintings and Aiken writing stories to accompany them.
It's an engaging collection with a mix of stories seemingly written for adults alongside ones undoubtedly produced with younger people in mind. It gives rise to occasionally jarring tonal shifts such as from the creepiness of the 'Movable Eyes' of Zia Tisna's dolls to the comedy of the outraged ghosts and their officious saviour in the books title piece.
These jars are few though and Aiken's storytelling flair and peerless imagination sends us into various places both mundane and unusual that are populated by the charming, the pathetic, the doomed and the damnable such as the screaming ghost infant in 'Beelzebub's Baby', an imaginary land populated by two brothers and an Italian graveyard amongst others.
It's a quick and thoroughly enjoyable read with a light hearted touch that belies the sinister aspect of both the stories and the stark expressionist artwork.
Broadcast in 1971 'The Horse of the Invisible' is so far the only live action adaptation of one of William Hope Hodgson's 'Thomas Carnacki' stories.
Created as an episode of the TV series 'The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' a series which featured an adaptation of a different Holmes contemporary in each episode such as Guy Boothby's 'Simon Carne' and Emma Orczy's 'Polly Burton'.
In the story Carnacki (played by Donald Pleasence - forever beloved of Wyrd Britain for being the voice of the 'Dark and Lonely Water' public information film) is engaged by Captain Hisgins (Tony Steedman) to save his daughter, Mary (Michele Dotrice, who amassed an impressive Wyrd Britain pedigree in her early career) from the family curse, an invisible horse that begins to terrorise her on the night of her engagement.
Pleasence is, of course, excellent but personally I've always pictured Carnacki as a younger and more dynamic man so Pleasence's portrayal as a rather sedate, distracted and bookish character took a little getting used to. The screenplay is faithful to the story and the ending looks every bit as
daft in reality as I pictured it when I first read the story but you do get to see Carnacki's trademark electric pentacle in action (kind of).
It is a well-mannered and fairly placid example of early 70s TV that was obviously made on a pretty tight budget but the cast all throw themselves into the story and the end result is entirely enjoyable and makes one wonder why no one else has taken the opportunity to bring Carnacki to the screen.
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This is the story of
Robert Caligari - a thoroughly evil 13-year-old who gets his kicks from
kicking pigs. After a humiliating episode with a bacon butty, Robert
realises just how much he loathes the human race - and his revenge is
truly terrible.
This one has sat on my book shelf for a good long while. It's sat there for the same reason I didn't buy it for years after it was released. I didn't want to read it and find out it was a bit shit. I'm the Tom Baker era type of book geek. I was 4 when he woke up on the floor of UNIT HQ and 11 when he swan dived off the TV mast. His is the face I picture when I think of madcap eccentrics and his is the voice I hear when I think of the same. I really didn't want it to suck. It didn't. Phew!
This fun little novella is entirely Baker. So entirely him that you hear his voice as you read his words. His irreverence, his absurdity, his contempt for authority and his anarchic spirit all shine through as he tells the story of the malicious little boy, Robert Caligari, of his misdeeds and his misstep that leads to his grizzly end.
On holiday in Cornwall,
the three Drew children discover an ancient map in the attic of the
house that they are staying in. They know immediately that it is
special. It is even more than that -- the key to finding a grail, a
source of power to fight the forces of evil known as the Dark. And in
searching for it themselves, the Drews put their very lives in peril.
This is the first volume of Susan Cooper's brilliant and absorbing
fantasy sequence known as The Dark Is Rising.
In the literature of Wyrd Britain a few authors work has come to define the various aspects of the aesthetic, James, Wyndham, Wells, Kneale, Garner and a few other worthies reign supreme but there are other authors whose impact has yet to be fully assessed none more so than Susan Cooper. 'Over Sea, Under Stone' is the first book in Cooper's Arthurian(ish) story collection known collectively as 'The Dark is Rising' (also the title of the second book in the sequence). It tells of three young children and their enigmatic 'uncle' and their search for the grail.
Barney, Simon and Jane along with their parents relocate for the summer to the small Cornish seaside town of Trewissick to stay with Great Uncle Merry. Once there the three kids are drawn into Merry's search for the Arthurian grail and are subjected to all the associated dangers that entails.
In this first book the storyline is a fairly typical quest story with the 3 kids up against some remarkably ineffective adults and a rather stupid bully of their own age. The three manage to dodge their way through the peril spouting vague (and not so) period sexist drivel (the book was written in 1965) whilst working out the clues they stumble across along the way.
It's a fun little romp with one foot firmly in the 'Famous Five', 'Secret Seven' tradition and the other in the more lively and interesting forms of children's fiction being established by contemporaries like Alan Garner. This duality does leave the book feeling a little uneven as the two halves occasionally make for odd bedfellows but it does give the whole thing a definite period charm.
"Klytus, I'm bored. What play thing can you offer me today?"
Cheese, Sire! Pure, unadulterated cheese.
I have films that serve certain roles in my life. There're a few films that I pretty much only watch when I'm ill because they are guaranteed to make me feel better; 'Singin' in the Rain' is one of them, the Peter Falk wrestling movie 'California Dolls' ('All The Marbles' in the US) is another and the pitch perfect creature feature 'Tremors' is a definite. When I'm feeling at odds with the world then 'Amelie' or (the original) 'Harvey' goes on but when I just want to be entertained then the gloriously camp extravaganza that is 'Flash Gordon' is the only candidate.
I have watched the film so many times. I love everything about it. Sam Jones' outrageously wooden acting (although he's still better than ex-Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan having his manhood tested), Peter Wyngarde's magnificently sleazy Klytus, Brian Blessed BELLOWING EVERY LINE whilst dressed in feathery underpants and gold wings, Max von Sydow's lecherous tyrant Ming and, of course, there's the lurid, day-glo plastic sets made with all the restraint of a toddler in a sweet shop and all the better for it.
And then there's that soundtrack.
When Queen recorded the album in late 1980 they were riding high on the back of a series of massive selling albums and two recent global hit singles with "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "Another One Bites the Dust" so a synthesizer heavy, predominantly instrumental soundtrack to a sci-fi B-movie could be seen as an odd move but this is a band that put an opera bit in the middle of their signature tune so odd moves were par for the course. The soundtrack is a glorious mess of rock licks, ambient synthscapes and radiophonic electronic twiddles interlaced with choice pieces of dialogue with the tracks running into each other so the whole thing sounds like a massive prog rock concept album.
In those pre home video days if the TV wasn't showing it albums like this alongside the novelisations were the only way you had of reliving a favourite. As a sci-fi obsessed 11 year old in 1981 listening to this album (along with Jeff Wayne's 'The War of the Worlds') through giant headphones on a beaten up Panasonic cassette recorder got me through a bout of chicken pox quarantined at my grandparents house for a week with only one comic to read. As a result I know every wibble, wobble and word and it holds a special place in my heart.
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Chambers has amassed an impressive array of talent for this volume with only two names out of the ten being unfamiliar to me. As it's themed to children you'll be unsurprised that 'Lost Hearts' makes an appearance but the rest of the contents are pleasingly fresh although of varying degrees of success.
The book gets off to a poor start with August Derleth's 'The Lonesome Place'. A nice idea told well at first that loses it's way terribly and ends with a thud. It's followed by 'The Empty Schoolroom' by Pamela Hansford Johnson whose tale of bullying and loneliness at a French boarding school is readable but ultimately too hackneyed to be entirely satisfying.
August Derleth
R. Chetwynd-Hayes' 'Brownie' is the story of an encounter between two precocious boys and a rather dim ghostly monk. Again, enjoyable enough as a story of childish mischief and the triumph of common sense and compassion but with no real substance it's a little forgettable.
Jumping over the aforementioned M.R. James classic we arrive for 'Tea at Ravensburgh'. Now, I'm a huge fan of Joan Aiken's 'Armitage Family' stories but the light hearted whimsy feels out of place here particularly as it follows in the footsteps of 'Lost Hearts'.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
The gloriously named Manly Wade Wellman gives us access to the 'School for the Unspeakable' in a tale of devil worship and revenge before Ray Bradbury's 'The Emissary' is sent out into the world again. It's a story that crops up in these things fairly often and whilst not being one of his best it's very much at home here.
'The Lamp' by Agatha Christie treads similar ground to Algernon Blackwood's 'The Attic' (which I reviewed here) and is kind of lovely which is more than can be said for the unrelenting grimness of Brian Morse's 'We'll Always Have Tommy'. It confronts us with two grieving parents and what could be madness, ghost or child in an interesting but slightly too jumbled tale to fully satisfy.
Ray Bradbury
The book ends with a piece by the editor called 'Dead Trouble' which isn't anywhere near as funny as it thinks it is as it tells of a ghosts attempts to let his family know where his body is.
I've read more than a few of these kid themed ghost anthologies over the last few years and this one is on a par with most of them giving an interesting if not entirely wonderful selection.
The fabulous Josh Kirby cover art made this one leap off the shelf at me in a dingy bookshop basement. That the author was responsible for 'Night of the Big Heat' certainly didn't cause any problems to my mind either.
Here Lymington tells a very Wyndham-esque tale of two lone survivors trapped in a village filled with inhabitants who have lost - almost - all their inhibitions (and marbles) and which is surrounded by killer plants that are growing at a phenomenal rate.
Now, any of these things are enough to get me excited so this was a tantalising prospect but unfortunately Lymington has neither the chops nor the charm of Wyndham and his story is clunky, the characters are deeply unlikeable and the denouement is risible. Further to this the titular creatures seem entirely tacked on; they are barely mentioned and never satisfactorily explained leaving you wondering just what the point was, something could be asked of the entire book. Still, you've got to love that cover art.
A collection of horror stories, many with a humorous turn.
One of the real joys of reading for me these days is cracking open another of these anthologies of late 19th / early 20th century ghostly fiction especially when it turns out to be full of stories I've not read before. This one transpires to be a really nice cross section of the famous and the less so with Wilde, Dickens and Wells rubbing shoulders with folks such as Dora Broome and Richard Bartram. The book opens with the venerable Oscar Wilde and his lovely tale of penance paid as a thoroughly modern American family drive the resident spirit to despair in 'The Canterbury Ghost', a story I must have read before as many years ago I read the complete works of Mr. Wilde but I had no memory of whatsoever. Next up is one of several anonymous stories, none of which really bear much scrutiny but here goes. 'Teeny-Tiny' tells of a stolen bone and the disembodied voice demanding it's return, 'The Strange Visitor' is a truly dreadful piece of poetry, 'A Ghostly Wife' finds a ghost taking the place of a Brahman's wife whilst 'The Ghost- Brahman' finds the husband being replaced. The final one, 'The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Being Bagged' is a silly folk tale about a barber tricking a gullible spirit into helping improve his fortunes and is easily the best of the five but as I said none are really worth the bother.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Charles Dickens is represented by one of his most famous and ubiquitous stories, 'The Signal-man', the story of a man haunted by a ghostly figure at the head of a railway tunnel whose appearance precedes a disaster of some kind. This is followed by J.Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Madam Crowl's Ghost' where a young girl hired to work in the house of the dying Madam Crowl experiences several terrifying events that eventually bring forth the grim truth about the old lady. Richard Bartram's 'Legend of Hamilton Tighe' is the second, and thankfully last, poem in the book. Now, I'm not averse to poetry but this was a load of old 'dum-de-dum-de-dum' tosh but it's nautical theme does filter nicely in Captain Marryat's tale of the Flying Dutchman, 'The Phantom Ship'.
H.G. Wells
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Brown Hand' makes a fairly common appearance but it's story of a ghost seeking the return of the titular appendage is one that stands up to an occasional reread as does Richard Middleton's jokey romp 'The Ghost Ship'. Less successful but continuing the watery theme is 'The Water Ghost' by John Kendrick Bangs which tells of the vindictive ghost of a drowned woman and the attempts to thwart her.
H.G. Wells goes for the more whimsical route as should be expected from a story titled 'The Inexperienced Ghost'. Here a drunk man finds, berates and eventually aids a pitiful ghost he finds lurking in the corridors of his club in an amusing little ditty of a tale with an ending you can see coming a mile off.
W.F. Harvey
Dora Broome's 'The Buggane and the Tailor' has the feel of a folktale about it and, as is often the case with stories of that ilk, ends poorly.
Another author who is a regular in these books is Saki, especially in the form of his werewolf tale, 'Gabriel-Ernest' but this time out it's a story about vindictiveness and reincarnation as the titular 'Laura' continues her habit of picking on her friends husband in various forms following her demise.
R. Blakeborough's 'The Betrayal of Nance' is another folktale-esque story this time filled to the brim with betrayal, loss and attempts at redemption from beyond the grave whilst redemption is the last thing on the mind of 'The Beast With Five Fingers' as W.F. Harvey spins a terrific yarn about the murderous creature and the attempts to thwart it.
Andrew Lang
Harvey's tale is really the last hurrah of this fun collection as the final two stories, 'The Night the Ghost Got In' by James Thurber and Andrew Lang's 'The Story of Glam' are amusing but very slight in the case of the former and veering once more into pesky folktale territory with the later which is hardly surprising given his status as the author of the 25 collections of variously coloured 'Fairy Books'. And so the book ends - for me at least - on an undeserved low note. Undeserved because for the most part this was a thoroughly enjoyable set that offered a number of highlights whilst the few disappointments were also relatively short lived.
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the death of one of the finest writers of the ghostly and the weird, Algernon Blackwood.
Born in Kent in 1869 Blackwood spent much of his early adulthood travelling through Europe, Canada and the US before returning to the UK in his thirties where he began a prolific writing career that was to spawn over a dozen novels, a number of plays and short stories by the score.
Happily for us Blackwood also had a small sideline in radio where he would read his stories. It seems likely that most of these broadcasts are lost to us forever but happily one remains. It's far from being one of his best stories and he's not a great reader but the opportunity to hear the man himself is too good an opportunity to pass up.
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you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
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A tense and gripping
tale of horror and desire. In a pyramid-shaped tomb, in the forest, lie
the last remains of Doctor Septimus Carr. An evil necromancer, he
believed the bodily fluids of virgins could rejuvenate him; his grisly
experiments claiming the life of a servant girl. Now, two centuries
later, another girl is in mortal danger. Enter Gilray. Short and chubby,
with a turn of speech as bizarre as his attire, Gilray has flown back
in time to prevent the wickedness he fears is looming. But it's no
simple task. For a start, who is the girl? Is it Linda Blake, Pauline
Withers, Cassandra Ashe? Their teacher, flirtatious, poetry-loving Bob
Wheatley, is the man whose help Gilray needs most, but he is preoccupied
with passionate affairs of his own. At the same time, unknown to
Gilray, the sinister Rosa and Robin Underleaf are planning to resurrect
their "Master". The key, it seems, is the malign doctor's lost book of
spells, if only Gilray can find and interpret it in time. The book
explores a number of very different male-female relationships as it
moves towards its chilling climax.
This is the third book by John Gordon that I've read over the last year or so. The first was the one about the woman who was scared of a stick, the second was about some flying kids and a chalk giant and this one is about a time travelling bicycle repairman baker who traps people inside a walking stick. Traditional plots are not where Mr. Gordon likes to travel. So, how do I explain that plot? You know what? I'm not going to try. 'Gilray's Ghost' is another intriguing oddity from the good Mr. Gordon but, much like the others, it just doesn't quite hit the mark for me. The daftness of the concept and the distasteful hints at necrophilia and paedophilia alongside his characteristic jumbled dialogue and unlikeable characters make it a bit of a gruelling and ultimately unfulfilling read.
'The Blue Notebooks' is an album by British composer Max Richter originally released in early 2004. Written as Richter's response to the prospect of the Iraq War this beautifully haunting suite of compositions has slipped the shackles of it's composers intentions and has featured in a number of movies over the years most recently in 2016's 'Arrival'.
The music is often fragile, sometimes brittle and always deeply poignant. It features several spoken word extracts from Franz Kafka's 'The Blue Octavo Notebooks' and Czesław Miłosz's 'Hymn of the Pearl' and 'Unattainable Earth' as read by Tilda Swinton.
It's a stunning piece of music and one I find myself returning to again and again.
- or you can watch it below. 
- or watch it below.
- or listen below. 
- or listen below.