Spell of Evil

From a script idea by legendary Wyrd Britain writer Brian Clemens ('Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde', 'Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter' 'And Soon the Darkness', 'Danger Man', 'The Avengers', 'The Professionals' and many, many more), who created the series, providing all the stories and a large number of scripts, the final episode of the first series of mid 70s ITV  'Thriller' focussed on the matrimonial, magically Machiavellian, mischief of a money hungry witch.

Following the unexpected death of his wife Tony Mansell (Edward de Souza - 'Kiss of the Vampire') remarries the sultry Clara (Diane Cilento who that year also appeared as the schoolteacher 'Miss Rose' in 'The Wicker Man') who slowly begins to magically murder him.  With the death toll growing and Tony fading fast it's left to faithful secretary, Liz, (Jennifer Daniel - de Souza's former screen wife in 'Kiss of the Vampire') to save the day.

There's an obviously limited budget, but with  an often fairly camp and occasionally funny script, solid performances from an experienced cast including a fabulously over the top performance from Cilento who seems to be  channelling Fennella Fielding in 'Carry on Screaming!' it all makes for an enjoyably 1970s slice of wyrd TV.

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NEWS: A Year In The Country publish new collection, 'Other Worlds'

Our friend Stephen Prince over at the fabulous 'A Year In The Country' has just announced the latest of his collections.  

Stephen's books are always a fascinating read and are heartily recommended.

Here's the blurb...

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds

Searching For Far Off Lands Via Witchcraft Battles, Spectral Streets, Faded Visions Of the Future And The Secrets Of The Stones

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds intertwines and cross pollinates the A Year In The Country project’s core exploration of wyrd and hauntological culture with journeys to far off lands and seeks out hidden links in the cultural undergrowth.

Amongst other wyrd and far off lands it wanders to the Winter of Discontent witchcraft battles of the 1979 television adaptation of M.R. James’ Casting the Runes and the timeslip folk horror Cold War dread of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’s And The Wall Came Tumbling Down…

Takes a trip into the surreal dreamscape pop fantasia of Nancy Sinatra’s Movin’ With Nancy television special and spends a night in the triple bill genre melding wonderworld of the Scala cinema…

Visits the ghosts of city streets via The Sandbaggers, The Gentle Touch and Adam Scovell’s Local Haunts and opens the time capsules of faded history in The Likely Lads and the modernist’s photozines…

Steps into the shadows of the 1980s secret state cycle of British film and television via Menace Unseen and Bird of Prey and crosses over the thresholds of Kate Bush and Suzanne Cianni’s boundary breaking worlds…

Unearths the hidden histories of The Profumo Affair, Mitch Glazer’s Magic city and Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn and explores the frontier-like autonomous zones of Walter Hill’s The Driver, Ryan Andrew Hooper’s The Toll and John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard…

Enters the endless “wilderness of mirrors” espionage games of Andrew Williams’ Witchfinder and conjures the lost visions of the future that are buried inside Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux and Robert Longo and William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic.

The book reflects and records a wide ranging personal cultural journey through the byways, highways, darkened alleys and edgelands of culture and variously visits, revisits and at times brings to the surface the sometimes subterranean themes and culture that have inspired and underpin A Year In The Country’s journeys amongst the wyrd spectral tales of culture.

More details and ordering info can be found here...

https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/a-year-in-the-country-other-worlds-book-released/

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Mervyn Peake documentary

Author, illustrator, poet, playwright and artist Mervyn Peake, the celebrated author of the 'Gormenghast' series, was born on this day in 1911.

The 1998 documentary below features family, friends, and contemporaries such as Quentin Crisp and celebrates his work and a life cut short by illness.

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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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NEWS: Egaeus Press reissue 'Soliloquy for Pan'.

This is a real one that got away moment for me as i was skint when this was originally published and still skint when it reprinted so I'm really happy to be able to say that there's a brand new 10th anniversary edition of 'Soliloquy of Pan' available now from Egaeus Press limited to an edition of 300 copies.

From the website...

HARK! HE HAS RETURNED.

One of Egaeus Press's most sought-after publications, SOLILOQUY FOR PAN has returned in a new edition, on this, the tenth anniversary of its original publication. Featuring a mammoth array of fiction, essays and poetry along with lesser-known archive material, in praise, in awe, in fear of the goat god, this new edition features all of the original contents, along with different endpapers, several new illustrations, AND a brand new, specially written story by the great BENJAMIN TWEDDELL.

The full contents are as follows...

• A Magical Invocation of Pan by Dion Fortune
• The Rebirthing of Pan by Adrian Eckersley
• Panic by R.B. Russell
• The Maze at Huntsmere by Reggie Oliver
• The Secret Woods by Lynda E. Rucker
• Faun and Flora: A Garden for the Goat-God Pan by Sheryl Humphrey
• The Game of the Great God Pan by Benjamin Tweddell
• Pan With Us by Robert Frost
• A Song Out of Reach by John Howard
• Lithe Tenant by Stephen J. Clark
• Pan by A.C. Benson (from an epitaph in The Greek Anthology)
• A New Pheidippioes by Henry Woodd Nevinson
• Goskin Woods by Charles Schneider
• Pan's Pipes by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The House of Pan by John Gale
• The Company of the Lake by Jonathan Wood
• The Role of Pan in Ritual, Magic & Poetry by Diane Champigny
• Leaf-Foot, Petal-Mouth by Bethany van Rijswijk
• The Rose-White Water by Colin Insole
• The Death of Pan by Lord Dunsany
• Meadow Saffron by Martin Jones
• The Lady in the Yard by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• An Old God Almost Dead: Pan in the 1940s by Nick Freeman
• A Puzzling Affair by Ivar Campbell
• South-West 13 by Nina Antonia
• In Cypress Shades by Mark Valentine
• Honey Moon by D.P. Watt
• Summer Enchantment by Harry Fitzgerald

Edited by Mark Beech

Order here: https://www.egaeuspress.com/Soliloquy_for_Pan.html

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Where Furnaces Burn

Joel Lane
Influx Press

Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands.
Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape.
First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

I read my first Joel Lane book - 'The Earth Wire and Other Stories' - in 2022 and have picked up a couple of these nice new Influx Press editions since but this is the first I've had the opportunity to get stuck into and being a occult detective collection it was always going to be somewhere near the top of the tbr pile.

The 26 stories here follow the trials and travails of a copper in what's known as 'The Black Country' - the post-industrial, urban sprawl around the city of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands - as he navigates an unfortunate affinity for cases of a distinctinctly weird and supernatural nature.

Lane was a fabulously gifted writer and the stories here are wonderfully strange.  As you progress through the 26 tales you can feel the strain our hero is under pulling at the threads of his life and sanity.  He's dragged deeper and deeper into, sometimes literal, underworlds, navigating cases of abduction, of dismemberment, of loss, of neglect, of ghosts and of gods.

The only problem I had is that these stories - many of which appeared in various journals and anthologies - are very short and follow a distinct pattern so when read together they do start to feel a little samey but spread out and peppered in amongst other writers / stories they made for a great read.

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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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