James' story, taken from his first collection 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', is of an engraving of a manor house, an engraving that changes each time it's viewed.
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This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Christopher's 1956 novel 'The Death of Grass' was broadcast in 2009 in five fifteen minute episodes that tells the story of John Custance, his family and their friends as they race across country to reach his brother's remote farm hoping to find refuge from the deadly global blight that has killed all forms of grasses and plunged the world into famine and genocidal chaos.
Narrated by David Mitchell and with a cast including Darrell Brockis as John, Bruce Alexander as the terrifyingly pragmatic Pirrie and Rebecca Egan as Ann Custance, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation keeping to the same time period so the post war callousness and the 1950s sexual politics of the original have not been updated to align with modern sensibilities. The unrelenting bleakness of Christopher's story means this is not necessarily a fun way to spend an hour but it's certainly an engaging one as this tale of selfishness and survival remains a powerful experience that still raises as many questions now as it did almost 70 years ago.
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I first became aware of Carly Holmes via a story in another Honno book, 'The Wish Dog and Other Stories' and subsequently via her Tartarus Press collection, 'Figurehead' (recently reissued in paperback by Parthian). My impression of her work is of a writer with a delicate and thoughtful touch for whom the strange, the uncanny or the weird is inextricably linked with, or can be found almost incidentally within, the workaday to the extent that it can be easily missed or miscontrued in potentialy devastating ways as is the case in this, her second novel, where she tells a story of madness and magic and most importantly of family with all it's associated turmoils.
When Annie's marriage breaks down and irreparably fractures the fragile unity of her family she takes flight with her two youngest children, the unnaturally beautiful Kitty (Doll Face) and her dark shadow Leila (Crow Face), two children with a seemingly unbreakable and potentially magical bond. We watch as Annie slides ever deeper into her own broken psyche, tormented by her perceived failures, exacerbated by the lingering guilt associated with an earlier bout of postnatal depression that had blighted her relationship with her elder daughter Elsa, obsessed with what she has lost and increasingly spellbound by her two youngest and her belief in their uncanny natures.
Holmes relates the story of Annie with gentle care teasing out her story and keeping it balanced on a razor's edge with the conflicting concerns of sanity and the supernatural held in a deliciously enigmatic consonance as we are slowly allowed to discover how reliable a narrator Annie actually is and we are never entirely certain as to what parts of her story are fact and what is fantasy, what is madness and what is manipulation and what is selfish and what is selfless.
With this book, particularly coming on the heels of the 'Figurehead' paperback, Holmes has placed herself squarely among the first rank of contemporary writers of the weird. I see a kinship in her work with many of the folks we've championed here on Wyrd Britain such as Rosalie Parker, Andrew Michael Hurley, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Alex Older. She is a writer for whom the strange is as mundane as the mundane is strange and 'Crow Face, Doll Face' beautifully encapsulates that fascinating ambiguity with a story of dreams, delusions, fallibility and frailty that lingers in the imagination.
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First published in 1955 in Cynthia Asquith's 'Third Ghost Book' it's the story of Caroline, the young wife of the domineering Neville, who decides to strike out on her own for some solo siteseeing at the end of which, with evening closing in, she spots and decides to climb the 420 steps of a tower stood amidst a ruined village.
Laski's story, one of very few short stories that she produced, has long been a staple of anthologies of supernatural fiction and deservedly so. A deceptively simple seeming tale, beautifully written and with a devastating sting at it's end that floored me when I first read it.
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'Scorpion Tales' was an ITV anthology series shown in 1978 for one series of six episodes, of which one episode, the third, had a superatural theme.
'Great Albert' tells the story of Matthew Ward (Max Harris) who uses a photocopy of an ancient spell book in an attempt to summon Lucifer to help him stop his antique book dealer father, Peter (Kenneth Gilbert), and contemptuously bored mother, Virginia (Lynn Farleigh), from divorcing which, inevitably, leads to unfortunate consequences.
Written by John Peacock who had, a couple of years earlier, scripted Hammer's 'To The Devil a Daughter' and who would later write 'And the Wall Came Tumbling Down' for 'Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense', it's an entertainingly "Hammer" premise that wouldn't have been out of place in that later series but it takes a tad too long to get going and runs out of time and slightly out of steam in its final act but the cast are strong and there's a pleasingly claustrophobic aura that allows us an insight into Virginia's predicament and the toll it takes on Matthew before the story concludes with an intriguing and ambiguous flourish.
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There is, perhaps, little new information here for horror devotees but as an introduction and an overview to the genre it's hard to beat and Gatiss is always an engaging host.
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Mair (Siobhan Brooks) and her brother Peter (Ifor Williams) are new to the village of Charlton Underwood, living in the controversial new housing estate on the edge of the old town. Chasing their dog into the nearby wood one day they meet a local man named Goacher Tranter (John Branwell) and the remains of the even older town of Astercote that had been wiped-out during the black death. Hidden in the ruins and guarded by the innocent Goacher is a chalice, the communion cup from the devastated vilage church, which the locals believe protects them from the return of the plague. However, when the chalice goes missing things deteriorate quickly in the town as a sickness takes hold and the already tense relationship between the working class villagers and the middle class new arrivals threatens to boil over.
Director Marilyn Fox has a track record for television of this type being responsible for, amongst other things, 288 episodes of 'Jackanory", along with adaptations of Edith Nesbit's 'Five Children and It' and C.S. Lewis' 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' and it's immediately apparent that she has a real eye for the uncanny in a story with Astercote's obvious similarity to M.R. James' 'A Warning to the Curious'. Based on the 1970 children's novel by Penelope Lively it's an enjoyable enough story of fear of change and of the other, timeless themes but presented in a manner that feels really quite dated and, like the novel, there's almost no actual supernatural forces at work here beyond belief, superstition and suspicion but they all cast heady spells.
The cast are, mostly, competent if uninspiring with the two leads being too shrill for my ears and too drama school for my liking and there are far too many suspect Somerset accents on display but the various members of the Tranter family are convincingly rustic without degenerating into bumpkins and Janis Winters is an enjoyably no nonsense district nurse, "Mother, you can't have a touch of the black death!"
'The Bells of Astercote' is certainly not on a par with the classics of supernatural television made for young people but it has it's moments and almost certainly deserves the opportunity to reach a wider audience.
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I'm possibly stretching my own rules for Wyrd Britain to the very edge of breaking point with this one but personally I'm fascinated by the times and the music covered in this BBC radio documentary and in Berlin of the cold war era in particular and thought there was just enough of a relevance to some of the things I feature on here to justify it's inclusion - click here if you disagree. If you were to search through my music collection I would hazard a guess that at least half, if not more, of the music in there was either made in Germany during the 60s, 70s and 80s or was profoundly influenced by it.
The documentary takes David Bowie's relocation to Berlin as it's focus discussing what drew him to the city and from there looks at some of the astonishing music being made in Germany by the likes of Can, Cluster, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Faust and later Einsturzende Neubauten and others but all the time keeping the history in the context of how these musical mavericks influenced musicians in the UK (and beyond) amongst them Brian Eno, John Foxx and Katharine Blake (who all feature here in some form) that would in many ways define music through the end of the 20th century and well into the 21st.
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Pat Mills (writer) Tony Skinner (writer) Jim Elston (artist) Kevin Wicks (artist) Liam Sharp (artist) 2000AD Finn is a cab driver by day, and a witch by night, part of a coven dedicated to protecting humanity from the agents of the old 'Great Ones', the ancient intergalactic beings who separated humanity from their beastly nature, and have maintained control ever since. These arcane and anarchic adventures from Pat Mills, Tony Skinner, Jim Elston, Kevin Wicks, and Liam Sharp are collected for the first time.
Jumping from the pages of Crisis' 'Third World War' the character of Paul, otherwise known as the eco-warrior Finn, got his own relatively short lived series in 2000AD. Going for a much more fantastical storyline than the near future dystopia of 3WW, here, Finn is the hit-witch for a Cornish coven battling the alien 'Newts' and their human agents, 'The Shining Ones', who run the world as opposed to the 'eco-terrorist' character at war with the corporate state.
This version of Finn is magically endowed and his enemies are intergalactic aliens and super-powered yuppies which for me isn't as interesting as the other incarnation but it's certainly good cosmic pulp fun. Whilst Mills and Skinner have had to tone down the pagan politics and disguise it's ecological agenda for this swap to 2000AD it's definitely still there at the root of the story so it's heart remains in the right place and the artists are perfectly suited to this more fantastical and superheroic iteration so I'll definitely be there for a second volume but superheroes aren't particularly my thing so I'd love to get the third 'Third World War' collection first.
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After walking out on her controlling boyfriend, Paul (Peter Blake), and being hassled at some traffic lights by a couple of drunk 'punks' (Ray Burdis & John Blundell), Mandy (Julie Neesam) takes pity on an old lady (Avis Bunnage) waiting at a bus stop in the rain at night and offers her a lift. Unfortunately Mandy's good deed won't go unpunished as she begins to suspect that the hairy handed old lady isn't quite what she seems.
Taking a well known urban myth as it's basis and at under 20 minutes long it's a perfectly formed, bite sized short made on an obviously tiny budget most of which probably got spent on the Porsche. I'm guessing this is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copied VHS video tape that someone found in a pond so the picture quality will evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for people of a similar age to me and who also grew up watching knock-off copies of video nasties but it means most of the film is really dark and it's quite difficult to make out much in the scenes inside the car - this one is the brightest of the ones currently online - but it's well worth sticking with.
There's very little available info that I can find beyond cast, crew and the 1978 release date and that those who have seen mostly saw it in the cinema as a support (let's bring those back?) but there are a couple of memories of TV showings so if you know any more please comment below.
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"You must learn to live with your own conscience, your own morality,
your own decision, your own self. You alone can do it. There is no
authority but yourself."
Made by Dutch film-maker Alexander Oey this documentary charts the history of the anarchist punk band, Crass.
Visiting with founding members, drummer Penny Rimbaud and artist Gee Vaucher at the band's Dial House home and singer Steve Ignorant at his local pub (and in his garden) this fascinating documentary explores the history of one of the most important and yet under-appreciated groups to come out of the punk scene and one that fully embraced the counterculture ethos of earlier generations and tied a generally experimental ethos to both life and music.
Released in 2006 the documentary predates much of the renewed activity by various band members and the critical and popular reappraisal that has followed and the band members seem at ease and content with their lives and their legacy. I was too young to experience Crass during their existence but they came to mean a tremendous amount to young me when I first heard them at the tail end of the 80s, a few years after they called it a day, and the artistic and social ethos they championed is still very much part of my life to this day.
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New edition of the author's only book, first published in 1934 by Philip Allan as part of their "Creeps" series. This edition adds an eleventh story, "The Author's Tale," and introduction, "The Quest For Lewis," by Richard Dalby.
Somehow I'd managed to completely miss out on the limited output of L.A, Lewis, the author of 11 stories that more than live up to the title they were given
Squadron Leader Leslie Allin Lewis was a veteran of both the first and second world wars flying Sopwith Camels in WWI and Hurricanes in WWII before being invalided out in the early 1940s. In the time between the wars he wrote the 10 stories that were published in 1934 under this title with anthologist and ghost story expert Richard Dalby tracking down and adding the 11th some 60 years later having discovered it published in a 1935 anthology.
It's a very - and I really do mean very - fine collection. Unsurprisingly, some stories work better than others and Lewis' aviation background makes several appearances which were of the least interest to me mostly due to my indifference - bordering on antipathy - to stories of flying which I sure goes a long way towards my feeling that they were the weakest stories here.
Lewis is perhaps best remembered - if he's remembered at all - for his story 'The Tower of Moab', a tale - based on a real building - of Heaven and Hell and of obsession and madness which is a sublime piece of writing. The rest of the book tells stories of ghostly revenge ('The Dirk'), astral music ('The Chords of Chaos'), possession ('The Meerschaum Pipe') and demonic children ('The Child') that show an imagination willing to travel to the darkest limits and show what a shame it was that he destroyed his later stories in a fit of manic depression as he deserves to be far more widely read.
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To date Paul Magrs has written nine novels featuring the dynamic duo of Brenda, a Whitby B&B owner with a past as unconventional as her present, and Effie, her junk shop owning, witch neighbour, six of which have been featured and praised here on Wyrd Britain.
This three part radio play version, starring Joanna Tope as Brenda and Monica Gibb as Effie, was aired on BBC Radio in 2009 and features the stories of, 'The Night Owl', 'The Vintage Costume Hero Ball' and 'Our Frank', which will be mostly familiar to readers of the novels but, for those who aren't, what you'll get is - if you'll excuse the horribly reductive analogy - Alan Bennett does Hammer Horror. Magrs has an often gloriously silly imagination that is steeped in the classics of British sci fi and horror and his stories are joyous, celebratory, and occasionally vicious, mash-ups of said classics interlaced with that very British, bawdy 'Carry On...' sensibility - "I know what I'm talking about when it comes to people putting the willies up ya!" - and they are fantastic fun.
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