The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll

Between 1957 and 1964 Hammer director Terence Fisher worked his way through pretty much all the great monsters of horror - 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (1957), 'Dracula' (1958), 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' (1959), 'The Mummy' (1959), 'The Curse of the Werewolf' (1961) 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1962), 'The Gorgon' (1964) - and in 1960 he brought Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' to the screen from a screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz ('The Day the Earth Caught Fire' & 'Casino Royale') with considerably less success than he did those earlier movies.

In 'The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll'  we find Paul Massie, a Canadian actor with a short history of appearances in British movies of this time, labouring under some ridiculous fake facial hair, as the driven and slightly deranged Dr Henry Jekyll attempting to "free the creature within" at which he succeeds with, for those around him at least, terrifying results unleashing his suave and utterly sociopathic alter ego Edward Hyde.

Massie, as Jekyll, is a bit of a ham but comes alive with wide eyed malice as Hyde whilst those around him, including Dawn Addams ('The Vampire Lovers') as Kitty Jekyll, Christopher Lee as the scrounging, caddish Paul Allen and David Kossoff ('The Mouse That Roared') s Dr Littauer, flounder against an uninspired script that despite some typically garish nightclub scenes and a tour of the lowlights of London never really manages to elicit much of a spark from neither cast nor director.

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1,000,000!!!

Hi folks

Just want to take a moment to mark the occasion of hitting a million pageviews on the Wyrd Britain blog.

Thank you everyone for all your support for the blog.  It makes me really happy that so many of you share my love of the things I share here.

Thank you to everyone who has read the blog, thank you to everyone who has submitted something for review and thank you to everyone who has donated to keeping the blog going.  Wyrd Britain is a labour of love for me and your contributions in every form are hugely appreciated.

Here's to the next million.

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Earl Lavender

John Davidson
Valancourt Books

Following in the tradition of "Don Quixote," "Earl Lavender" is the story of two impecunious gentlemen who run away from their conventional lives, style themselves 'Earl Lavender' and 'Lord Brumm', and set out to preach the new creed of Evolution. Their hilarious romp across London leads them to all sorts of strange adventures, such as a wild hansom cab chase, a sojourn among a subterranean society of flagellants, and the discovery of the evolutionary 'Missing Link'.

'Earl Lavender' or 'A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day; with a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem' to give it it's full title is the story of the man now named as 'Earl Lavender'. Declaring himself the fittest of all men he, along with his new acquaintance, 'Lord Brumm', sets out on a brand new lifestyle claiming evolution as their guiding force and allowing it to provide for them in all things as they rampage through the streets, restaurants and secret societies of London pursued by two ladies and an angry waiter.

Originally published in 1895 'Earl Lavender' situates itself at the heart of the decadent movement lampooning the times which Davidson, a Scotish poet who'd relocated to London, found himself living through.

In truth I found much of the book a bit of a chore.  It's often very funny but the combination of the overly descriptive Victorian prose and the Earl's florid soliloquies kept pushing me from the pages but perseverance proved that behind these niggles was a book well worth experiencing.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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Guardian of the Past

'Worlds Beyond' was an ITV series broadcast in the mid 80s that apparently sourced it's material from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.  We've featured a couple of episodes before on Wyrd Britain - 'The Haunted Garden' & 'Home' - which were, in turn, a light and fluffy ghostly love story and a messy and confused haunted house tale.  

This time out it's script by ITC spy-fi alumni Tony Williamson (The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!, Jason King, and others) keeps things a lot more vigorous.  The cast includes Paul Freeman (Raiders of the Lost Ark's Nazi archeologist 'René Belloq') and Mary Tamm (Doctor Who's first 'Romana') as an entitled middle class couple who stupidly steal a bone from a mummy's tomb as a souvenier of their Egyptian holiday and Terrence Alexander (Bergerac's 'Charlie Hungerford') as a sort of occult detective who just happens to be a member of that intrepid society of psychical researchers.  

Williamson keeps things moving at a fairly breakneck pace and litters the 30 minute runtime with a car crash, two spinal injuries, a blinding, an attempted stabbing, hypnotic trances galore and a not entirely ineffective ghostly figure, well it's more effective than Tamm's American accent at least.  

Personally, I like this one a lot,  it's good, cheap fun. It wears it's lack of budget well and goes all out with what it has and does it well with a cast who all appear fully committed. Storywise there's nothing here that devotees of ghostly fictions won't have seen before but as an adaptation of a 'real' haunting one has to suspect it's been given just enough of an authorial tweak by Williamson to give it a satisfying narrative arc.

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Settling the World

M. John Harrison
Comma Press

Throughout his career, M. John Harrison’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else.
This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.

M. John Harrison is a novelist working, most notably, at the edges of science fiction with a foot in the worlds of weird or strange fiction. He first came to public attention through his work for New Worlds magazine as one of the 'New Wave' writers alongside the likes of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Brian Aldiss and others.  The stories in this collection begin in that period (1970) and continue through to 2020.

Overt sci-fi themes are few and instead we have stories of the lost and the outsider, people trapped by circumstance and made free in the same way presenting the bizarre and the mundane as two sides of the same coin.  In a previous review of one of his books - the only other one of his I've read - I commented on the the Robert Aickman like nature of the story and here again I can feel the venerable writer's presence - most notably in 'Running Down'.

Not everything here worked for me.  I discovered I was generally less enamoured of the earlier and perhaps more obviously science fiction stories ('The Machine in Shaft 10', 'The Causeway') and more of the strangely human later stories ('Doe Lea', 'Cicisbeo') but truthfully this is a collection littered with gems.  A vibrant and colourful selection of stories that speak to and from the heart.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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If 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 blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

Changes to email subscription

Hi folks 

Just a quick heads up that due to Google closing down their email subscription service, Feedburner, I've had to swap over to a different provider, follow.it 

If you've already subscribed then other than it being from a different provider you should continue to receive the notifications as before.  Apparently also for those who are au fait with these sort of things you can tweak the way you receive the notifications.  Personally I haven't a clue about any such shenanigans but I've been informed this is the case.

Obviously, subscribing by email is the easiest way of getting to read Wyrd Britain and we heartily recommend it or you can directly follow the blog via the link in the sidebar or join our Facebook page.

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If 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 blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

The Hand of Kornelius Voyt

Oliver Onions
Valancourt Books 

When Peter Byles’s father dies shortly before the boy’s thirteenth birthday, the young orphan is sent to live at the Victorian Gothic mansion of his father’s friend, Dr. Kornelius Voyt. Peter arrives at the dreary house, surprised to find that he sees nothing of the enigmatic Voyt, instead passing his time in lessons with a young German tutor. But it soon becomes clear to Peter that these lessons are only preparations for something much more sinister that Voyt intends to teach him. Voyt, unable either to hear or speak, has learned to compensate for his disability by developing extraordinary powers of the mind, powers which allow him to communicate telepathically, control the wills of others, and even inflict pain on those who anger him. Voyt has a terrifying vision of the world’s future, and he is determined to use Peter as a pawn in his inscrutable plans. 

 

When he's orphaned at age 12 Peter Byles is sent to live with his father's enigmatic friend Kornelius Voyt, a deaf mute with the uncanny ability to communicate telepathically and to remotely influence the actions of others.  Under his roof Peter is tutored in sign language and German but beyond this he is instructed only to observe and report on those he meets as all the while Voyt slowly indoctrinates his young ward into his misanthropic world view.

Mostly existing off page Voyt is a menacing but ultimately pathetic character whilst Peter is a brat denied the chance to grow beyond adolescent petulance and wilful cruelty.  They are a perfect pairing that'll damn them both.

 

Written with Onions' characteristic intensity the book follows Peter as he both embraces and rebels against his forced destiny and Onions is masterful in teasing out these steps in the young man's development.  Unfortunately when the end comes it all fizzles out a little and the story ends in a very human and undramatic manner.

For those, like me, who know Onions entirely for his superlative short stories this proved to be a fascinating read but one that didn't quite have the power of his shorter tales.

Buy it here - UK / US.
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If 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 blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

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Bewitched

With not a nose wiggle in sight this 1983 adaptation of Edith Wharton's 'Bewitched' from her 1926 collection 'Here and Beyond' was made for the mid 80s ITV series 'Shades of Darkness' which made use of several of her stories alongside stories by Agatha Christie, May Sinclair (The Intercessor), Elizabeth Bowen (The Demon Lover), L.P. Hartley (Feet Foremost) and Walter De La Mare (Seaton's Aunt).

Mrs Rutledge (Eileen Atkins) calls the leading men of her village - Reverend Hibben (Alfred Burke), Sylvester Brand (Ray Smith) and Owen Bosworth (Gareth Thomas) to her farm with the claim that her husband is bewitched and consorting with Brand's dead daughter who is slowly draining the life from him. With discussions of the area's history of witchcraft the 'good' men of the village spring into action and tragedy ensues.

Like the other episodes of the series 'Bewitched' is sumptuously produced thanks in no small part I imagine to the presence of executive producer Michael Cox the man behind the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series.  The story is quick but within it's denoument are layers of mystery and intrigue of witchcraft, vampirism, superstition, conspiracy, murder, madness and revenge. 

(The episode is only the first 50 minutes of the video below)

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If 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 blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

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