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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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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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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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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Number 13

Adapted from the M.R. James story of the same name published in 1904 in 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' this BBC version stars Greg Wise as Professor Anderson a repressed and slightly pompous Oxford academic investigating finds in a cathedral archive. These papers hold claims of devil worship on the part of a previous bishop and a man named 'Nicholas Francken' who had practiced his nefarious deeds in the house that had previously stood on the spot now occupied by the hotel in which Anderson is currently lodging.

With a sympathetic script by Justin Hopper (author of the hauntological memoir 'The Old Weird Albion') and an excellent cast that includes Tom Burke (now more known for his portrayal of J.K. Rowling's 'Cormoran Strike') and his father David Burke (Jeremy Brett's first 'Dr Watson') who had coincidentally also featured in the previous years 'A View From A Hill'. 

It's not entirely successful, the cast, Wise in particular, look more costumed than clothed, the early outdoor scenes are too crisp, bright and summery which sets an initial mood at odds with where the story wants to lead us and the director, Piers Wilkie, never quite manages to inject the required level of bacchanalian excess onto the oneiric orgies emanating from the ghostly room of the title but presents a convincing environment and for the most part succeeds in creating a tense atmosphere of encroaching dread leading to an unostentatious but satisfying climax.  

Buy it here - Ghost Stories from the BBC: A View From a Hill / Number 13 (DVD) - or watch it below.

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Peter Zinovieff (26 January 1933 – 23 June 2021)

Today we mark the sad passing last week of electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff following a fall at his home the week before.  

In the 1960s he was a member of Unit Delta Plus along with Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and formed the company EMS with David Cockerell and Tristram Carey which developed the VCS3 and Synthi A synthesizers so beloved of purveyors and connoisseurs of early electronic music.

I thought we'd take this opportunity to celebrate his life and work with these two videos.  The first is the slightly more irreverent made using footage from the documentaries "What the Future Sounded Like" and "The New Sound of Music" whilst the second was produced by Sound on Sound magazine in 2016.

If you would ike to hear more of his music then I heartily recommend tracking down a copy of 'Electronic Calendar/The EMS Tapes', a fabulous retrospective of his early work at the EMS studio.

Peter Zinovieff (26 January 1933 – 23 June 2021)

Thank you for all the wonderful sounds.

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The Beast in the Cellar

When several soldiers are found brutally murdered and the authorities decide that a leopard is to blame elderly sisters Ellie & Joyce Ballantyne (Beryl Reid & Flora Robson) soon realise that the cause of the problem is closer to home than that, right under their feet in fact, bricked up in their cellar.

Produced by Tigon films and written and directed by James Kelley ('Doctor Blood's Coffin') 'The Beast...' was pretty much panned on release and has yet to truly find it's audience but personally I think that's a shame.  Yes it's a bit talky, there's little in the way of suspense and the ending doesn't quite achieve the necessary level of pathos but at the heart of this proto-slasher there's a nice idea dealing with a little explored topic that makes for an intriguing premise for a horror-thriller and there're two great performances from the neurotic Reid (who made a bit of a habit of appearing in great wyrd movies, 'Psychomania' and 'Dr Phibes Rises Again') and the cool calculating Robson ('The Shuttered Room') as the two sisters with the rest of the cast which includes T.P McKenna ('A Child's Voice') and John Hammill ('Tower of Evil') providing able, if maybe a little unispiring, support.



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Feet Foremost

'Shades of Darkness' was a mid 1980s series for Granada TV that presented adaptations of unsettling tales by authors  - some famous names (Agatha Christie) and some less so (May Sinclair) -  this particular episode is based on the short story of the same name by L.P. Hartley originally published in 1931 in his collection 'The Killing Bottle'.

The story here revolves around a house haunted by the vengeful ghost of a young woman murdered by her violent husband whose revenge involved possessing the bodies of those she asks to carry her across the threshold of the house and in whose corpse she leaves again in the manner suggested by the title.

Carol Royle gives a predominantly strong performance in the lead and Peter Machin is entertainingly manic as her doomed fiance, there's a fun and barbed performance from Heather Chasen and Ken Kitson (Last of the Summer Wine's 'P.C. Cooper') is the de rigeur rake leaning local with the all the information on the legend of the ghost, Lady Elinor (played by Samantha Gates who, trivia fans may like to note, was one of the two children on the cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Houses of the Holy' album).  

Directed with a fairly gentle hand by Gordon Flemyng (director of both Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies) from a script by Alan Plater, who also adapted May Sinclair's 'The Intercessor' for the same series, this is a less satisfying story than that other that never quite manages to be spooky and has a spectacularly unlikely conclusion.  It is though eminently watchable and, like the rest of the series, an always welcome stab at producing sympathetic adaptations of golden age supernatural tales in the vein of the BBC's M.R. James adaptations at a time when they weren't being made.

Oh and cat lovers please consider yourselves warned.



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The Body Beneath

The Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) is the head of a clan of vampires that live in (Dracula's) Carfax Abbey (relocated by the director from Purfleet) and haunt the nearby Highgate Cemetery - for "21 centuries" despite it having only been there since 1839.  The (not very) Reverend Ford is looking for new victims from within his extended family with which to improve the bloodline of the vampiric branch of the clan.  Finding a suitable candidate in the young and pregnant Susan (Jackie  Scarvellis) he kidnaps her and sets out to establish her as a one woman breeding colony.

US director Andy Milligan made some 27 movies (mostly exploitation and horror) between 1967 and 1988 with this being one of a flurry of films made during a brief sojourn to London in the very early 70s.  'The Body Beneath' is a no budget, camp as Christmas version of the Hammer template as imagined by a third rate theatre troupe.  Beyond its awful script, dreadful direction and diabolical editing it's filled with woeful acting, pointless pregnant pauses, inane gurning and bizarre costumes.  It is entirely terrible and entirely without merit but I've always been of the opinion that those weren't necessarily bad things in a movie.

Buy it here - UK / US.

(please be aware that in the vid below the sound goes slightly out of sync about halfway through - truthfully though that's the least of it's problems - there is a shorter edited version on youtube if you'd prefer)

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Audiobook

May 25th 
Happy Towel Day.

"More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

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The Book of Koli

M.R. Carey
Orbit

Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable world. A world where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly vines and seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don't get you, one of the dangerous shunned men will.
Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He knows the first rule of survival is that you don't venture beyond the walls.
What he doesn't know is - what happens when you aren't given a choice?

Mike Carey has destroyed the world before in his fantastic mushroom zombies novel 'The Girl With All The Gifts' and its sequel prequel 'The Boy on the Bridge' and here he's up to apocalyptic shenanigans once again with his new 'Rampart Trilogy' beginning with 'The Book of Koli'.

Now I absolutely love a post-apocalypse novel but I generally prefer a more immediately post scenario than we have here.  Koli's world is several hundred years on from ours in a UK devastated by war and by genetic tampering that has left the world over-run by plants and animals with a real taste for all that squishy stuff that humans are made of.

This first book provides an easy and nicely straight-forward story that allows for some comprehensive world building as we follow young Koli on his travels from the relative safety of his village out into the wilds of Ingland.  

There are the inevitable shades of the two Johns (Wyndham & Christopher) along with hints of Walter M. Miller Jr's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz',  Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age' and Patrick Tilley's 'Amtrak Wars'.  With its undercurrent of botanical menace its debt to 'The Day of the Triffids' is the most notable but Carey has rejigged, reinvented and revived it for a new era and his story is fun and fleet of foot, never settling and thoroughly enjoyable and I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into the next one.

Buy it here - UK /  US.

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The Haunted House of Horror

Director Michael Armstrong's 1969 debut feature 'The Haunted House of Horror' (also known as 'Horror House') has become well known as an example of studio hackery over directorial vision as his taut proto-slasher was re-edited and added to by studio (Tigon) diktat turning it into a bit of an overlong and meandering mess.

It's late 60s London and a group of pretty young things bored by their own party head off to a derelict and supposedly haunted house to hold a séance where one of them is brutally murdered.  Realising there's a murdering lunatic among them they decide to simply cover it all up and hope for the best which of course is exactly what doesn't happen.

At its core is a solid thriller with some strong performances from much of its cast especially Jill Haworth - who made a few horrors around this time including 'Tower of Evil' - but one has to wonder if some of Armstrong's original casting choices - including David Bowie as 'Richard' - would have made for a stronger movie with US popstar Frankie Avalon - cast at the insistence of US investor AIP - making for a very ineffective lead right up to his eye-watering end and both the subplot featuring a stalkery George Sewell and the final reveal drag somewhat but this is a movie that despite its many flaws I have a real soft spot for although it is tinged with a hankering for what could have been.

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Hellraiser: Soundtrack Hell - The Story of the Abandoned Coil Score

In 1984 Coil member Stephen Thrower struck up a friendship with author Clive Barker after a chance meeting in a London Forbidden Planet shop and played him some tracks off the not yet released first Coil album, 'Scatology'.  

From this friendship and mutual artistic appreciation the band were soon asked by Barker to provide the soundtrack to his movie 'Hellraiser', an adaptation of his own novella 'The Hellbound Heart'.  Alas, beyond some preliminary recordings, it was not to be and at the studio's insistence the movie eventually went the more typical orchestral route via composer Christopher Young.  

In the video below Stephen Thrower tells the story of the soundtrack; its development and it's demise.  Obviously for a Coil (and Cyclobe) fan like me it makes for a fascinating watch and it's a joy to see Thrower's enjoyment in the telling.  Personally Hellraiser was never a film I had any particular love for; I thought it had some striking visuals but body horror was never really my thing. I can't help but feel though that an undiluted version formed from those initial discussions between the author and the musicians would have been quite something to behold.

And then there's the music.  Within Coil fandom the story has long been debated and endless "What if's" and "If only's" discussed over how different the film could or should have been.

The small amount of music they made in that week in the studio has long been available and with it's very of the time sound palette and strong John Carpenter vibes it ably shows just how good it all could have sounded and makes the decison to drop them from the project all the more bizarre and obviously one made by corporate dictat.



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The Silent Scream

The seventh episode of Hammer Studio's and ITC's 1980 television series 'Hammer House of Horror' sees a newly released convict with the action movie name of Chuck Spillers (Brian Cox) taking a job with the man who had visited him in prison, Martin Blueck (Peter Cushing).  The job entails helping him look after the wild big cats in his basement zoo that he's using in his experiments to create a prison with no bars.  Unfortunately, temptation soon proves too much for Spillers and Blueck's true nature and plans are revealed.

Cushing, in his last role for Hammer, is, of course, as brilliant as ever and plays both aspects of Blueck's nature - the facade of banality that conceals the psychopathy underneath - to perfection whilst Cox is perfectly cast opposite him as the incorrigible and fairly hapless jailbird and as an actor of note in his own right able to hold his own aganst the Hammer legend in full flight.  Being more of a psychological thriller than the outright horror that either the venerable studio or the lead actor is famed for it's great fun to see, even at this late stage, their take on something different and as such it's always been one of my favourite episodes from the series.

Buy it here - UK /  US 

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The Creeping Flesh

Professor Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns from an expedition to New Guinea with the skeleton of a mythological evil giant that he soon discovers can be revived through contact with water.  Having being denied further funding by his asylum running half-brother Dr James Hildern (Christopher Lee) he begins to rush his experiments to use the skeleton to immunise the world from evil injecting his serum firstly into his lab monkey and, soon after, into his daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron).  Needless to say things soon start to deteriorate for all involved as several storylines begin to converge leading to a grim but pleasingly ambivalent ending.

Here, director Freddie Francis has perhaps made a movie with slightly too many loose ends for them all to be successfully and fully explored in the time given but in the tradition of a number of other Tigon movies ('The Blood on Satan's Claw' & 'Witchfinder General') it's ambitions are to be celebrated and with Francis' cinematographer's eye it looks lovely.

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