The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

Just to don my crimson-lined Prince of Darkness cape for a short moment: there was a nice review of Doctor Forrest in Scotland on Sunday recently, and before that another very pleasing one from The Scotsman. Scotland is certainly doing me a world of good right now, for I am also (with Kevin MacNeil) the first act on at the 2011 Edinburgh Book Festival. Meantime the Forrest blog continues to be a crypt-like repository for my blackest and gravest thoughts, with recent musings on Hammer Horror, Robert Aickman, Doctor Who and Yukio Mishima...

Sylvain Marveaux is a Geordie. As is Demba Ba.

In a fortnight NUFC return to action, as they say, with the first pre-season outing at Darlington Arena, followed by a US tour and games against Sporting Kansas City, Orlando City and Columbus Crew. How's the recruitment plan looking then? Alan Curbishley, sorry, Pardew has said "I am really pleased with the way the squad is taking shape." But Al, shouldn't that be more like "Je suis vraiment heureux avec la façon dont l'équipe prend forme."? Because aside from those long-term crocked lads who "will feel like new signings" (and actually this does go for one of them too) we seem to be entirely in the business of adding Frenchmen or French-speakers to the ranks.
No, since you ask, I'm not over L'Affaire Carroll yet. True Faith speaks for me:

"I’d foolishly allowed myself to imagine myself sitting in my SJP pew watching the Bensham Van Basten develop over the next ten years into a bona fide No.9 legend, smashing goals in, leading the line and providing the essential link between team and the terraces he also supported the club from... But the fact is Andy Carroll is not at Newcastle United but £35m of Liverpool’s money is... I didn’t imagine that the big answer to Carroll’s departure would be Demba Ba, on a free with a dodgy knee... and us having had the bum’s rush from No.1 and No.2 targets Gameiro and Gervinho."

The swing to Labour and the margin of error

It does shame me somewhat that I have so little to say on politics at present, which is why I've not said it. Recently I felt my sense of malaise and stagnation on burning issues of the day was expressed to some extent by this PoliticsHome/YouGov poll on the NHS that found 'while voters largely support reforms in principle, they don’t trust the Conservatives to deliver them in practice.' Which leaves us where exactly? Meanwhile, flinching and flip-flopping seems to have become the Cameron Way, and if he thinks that's the way by which he'll win an outright majority in 2015 then he's a braver man than I thought. The creeping lack of assurance, the tendency to panic would be more dangerous for Cameron in the short term, I'm sure, were it not for the peculiar character of the Leader of the Opposition.
Ed Miliband has quite clearly had a result or two at PMQs lately, and Labour's poll lead looks to me to be six points more often than not. This ought to have the look of a strong position: not least since there is no realistic chance of Ed being ousted from the post, no real money in the Labour current account that hasn't come by way of Ed's avowed admirers in the Movement, and no form in the Labour Party for ditching leaders other than those who have won three general elections. And yet... are Labour behind this leader? Are Labour voters actively keen on him? Are undecided voters persuaded by him? I only ask these questions at this time of night because there's no need to answer them.
The delightful photo above I have borrowed from this Jim Pickard piece in the FT.

Kate Bush: The thrill and the hurting

Bloomsday this year brought me a very pleasant surprise in Slate magazine’s splendid set of links for celebrating Ulysses online. It also reminded me that in spite of best intentions I’ve yet to get to a record shop and purchase Kate Bush’s The Director’s Cut, with its allegedly ‘warmer’ and ‘more organic’ re-workings of her material circa 1989-1993, including the new ‘Sensual World’ with approved extracts from Joyce. However the great video jukebox that is YouTube has given me a preview and... well, I don’t know. The musical-production fashions and stylings of the 1980s, which seemed old to me by round about 1990, have a fair bit to commend them now, I’d say. And I don’t think that too much of The Sensual World as an album is really improvable (The Red Shoes rather more so...) But, eh bien, I think one generous YouTube commenter puts it best: ‘None of these songs are better than the originals, i don’t think they were meant to be, it’s just good to add them to your collection and enjoy them for what they are...’ That is indeed the spirit.

The Faber Social: It Lives, and Shall Live Again...

A late word for the inaugural Faber Social which took place on Monday June 6: a really good night, auguring well for many more top-drawer monthly literary-musical evenings ahead. (The proceedings had a nice write-up from Max Liu here). The audience were savvy and engaged, both for myself and David Peace in our discussion of gothic themes, and for Simon Reynolds and Bob Stanley on pop's endless fixation upon recycling. The Social as a venue is both suitably intimate for dialogue and good and lively for the purpose of spinning a few tunes. (Highlight for me having retired to the bar was hearing Simon Reynolds drop John Martyn's 'Big Muff'). But the overall top moment was hearing David Peace's incantatory reading of the 'Battle of Orgreave' chapter from GB84. I must admit that when I headed down the steps into the Social basement for the start of the night's proceedings I was feeling roughly twice my age, yet seeing my face on the promotional posters alongside the DJs was a kind of anti-ageing serum for the soul...

Bloody England in the Summertime

I'll always remember June of 2006: a new home, our firstborn child just a few months’ old, the drama of Zidane's swansong World Cup on the telly, and – I’m certain of this – a kindling early summer heat that came off the very paving stones beneath one’s feet. Conversely the cold, dreich summer of 2007 I'll always associate with Gordon Brown. (And sometimes I feel like we're still living through it.) As for 2011 – we’ve now had the Solstice, a day I always think of as Great Gatsby Day ("I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it...") and still we’re peering up at drear skies, scouring for patches of blue... Good lord, is this how it will be from now on?

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest: News/Reviews/Events Round-Up

How've I been keeping? Busy, thank you very much. Here's the current report card on me and my Doctor Forrest:
- A couple of pleasing reviews, from Louise Welsh in the Financial Times ("Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the gothic horror genre") and Ben Felsenberg in Metro ("Richard T Kelly's new novel is a rattlingly good yarn that wears a bloody Gothic heart on its sleeve")
- Last weekend I had the pleasure of writing about The Brothers Karamazov for The Independent's 'Book of a Lifetime' and on Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for The Guardian's 'Re-Readings'.
- I am interviewed here by Professor Glennis Byron at the University of Stirling's excellent Gothic Imagination website.
- An extract from the opening of the novel is online here at Writers' Hub.
- And I am in conversation tonight with David Peace on matters of the gothic and occult and Northern, at the first 'Faber Social' event in central London. Come ye all, ye be welcome...

Trailer for The Possessions of Doctor Forrest!

(Connoisseurs of the North London Gothic may care to know that the scenic element of this clip in which I read from and discuss the themes of The Possessions of Dr Forrest was shot in the grounds of Abney Park Cemetary, Stoke Newington.)

Dr Forrest at Stoke Newington LitFest 05.06.2011

I’m delighted to say I will be appearing at an event as part of the 2nd annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Sunday June 5, details of which are now available at the festival website but which I reproduce below. I’ll have the special pleasure of being part of a panel of fine practitioners in fiction and non-fiction, with whom I daresay I have a good few things in common. Doctor Forrest obviously belongs more to the genre of Horror than to Crime but without doubt it partakes of crime/procedural elements that were the product of research on my part, just as Crusaders, ostensibly a social-realist or state-of-the-nation novel, also included criminal acts and their investigation in a drawn-from-life fashion. So I’m looking forward to chipping in to what I hope will be a lively conversation, with the added marquee value of the terrific recent TV adaptation of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The Serious Crime Squad
Sunday June 5 @ 6pm
Abney Public Hall, 73a Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0AS
Tickets £6. Click here to book online.
Of all genre writing, crime – both true crime and fiction – hold an enduring fascination for millions of readers, male and female, young and old. So much so that crime writing has grown much bigger than ‘genre’ can contain, making considerable inroads into ‘serious’ literature and historical research. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (recently dramatised on ITV), Kate Colquhon’s Mr Briggs’ Hat: The Sensational Account of the First Railway Murder (set in Hackney), Chris Paling’s Nimrod’s Shadow and Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, are all stunning examples. Together, this is an astonishing panel of some of crime’s most exciting writers. The Guardian’s Alex Clark chairs.

Doctor Forrest - The Film

This post is merely to acknowledge that Doctor Forrest is now in development as a motion picture with the excellent Festival Films and their chief producer Ray Marshall. Your humble correspondent is fully ‘attached’ as the project’s screenwriter, and is currently on work on the highly intriguing task of re-tooling his own novel into a viable film script. The Festival site makes a very handsome home for the Forrest jacket, methinks, and I would hope the tag-line on the dedicated page is just the sort of thing to have people racing to book tickets and babysitters once the finished product rolls out at Odeons Everywhere…

When an eminent cosmetic surgeon vanishes mysteriously, his two oldest friends investigate his disappearance – only to discover that Doctor Forrest has unleashed a diabolical evil that could destroy them all…

Yes, as the showmen used to say, we’ll sell you a seat but you’ll only need the edge of it.

Bookhugger column: "Is There Such a Thing as a Male Book?"

I'm glad to be back onstream in columnist capacity over at Bookhugger, and this month the chaps were kind enough to put in my lap a stimulating brief, namely a response to a fascinating piece on a useful topic written by Molly Flatt (pictured right) over at the affiliated Bookdiva. Said topic is the influence of one's gender upon one's writing and reading choices/preferences. And I daresay we all have a share in that subject. Pictured left, of course, is the late Norman Mailer and his late wife, the last of the six women he married, Norris Church Mailer. And you can imagine that I brought Norman into this discussion, without, I hope, doing anyone a disservice...

NUFC: Limping to the line

Gettin’ beat 3-0 off Liverpool is a wearyingly familiar experience, as indeed is getting beat 2-0 off Liverpool. Nine years ago one such 3-0 finally robbed the wheels off what had been our very real push to the top-division title under Bobby Robson - wistful to think back on it now, but in that season of 2001-02, with 11 games to play, the title was mathematically in our hands. Seems like dreamland tonight...
Today’s special discomforts: for one it was our owld manager King Kenny in the Liverpool dugout, looking like he’s really enjoying his football, as he never once appeared during his tenure at NUFC (at least not after the day of his coronation and mandatory mobbing by adoring Geordies.) And for two, owld King Kenny reckoned it would be canny just to bring on Andy Carroll for a 20-minute run-out even with the match won. You could have spared us that one, Ken, let it ride for another day... It’s only amazing that Carroll didn’t score, since NUFC alumni nearly always score crucial goals against us, as do the non-Toon-related glamour signings of other clubs, especially when they’ve otherwise been having a lean spell (so back Fernando Torres for a brace at least when we face Chelsea on May 15.)
The corollary to this gloom is that Newcastle rarely ever get to enjoy a reciprocal pleasure in ‘putting one over.’ I remember the hype and the chatter back in 2005 as Michael Owen prepared to face Liverpool for the first time in a black-and-white shirt. What happened that day? That’s right, we’s got beat 2-0, and Owen had the sort of disconsolate just-in-it-for-the-money-pal day that was his stock-in-trade at Newcastle.
The excellent True Faith seemed to me to get it right with this Carroll comment piece before the game. The sad - indeed pathetic - thing is that I dreamed I met Carroll last night – honest – in a crowd amid some kind of post-training canteen chat situation; and he seemed a very nice lad, and told me casually that he reckoned he’d probably be re-signing for Newcastle eventually, after the whole Liverpool thing had gone off the boil... So, alas, I clearly can’t say I’m over this thing yet. Worse, a Liverpool fan of my acquaintance, a good lad generally speaking, seems to have no conception of the pain he causes when he tells me cheerily how much he’s looking forward to having Jose Enrique on the left of defence next season.
In other Toon news the mighty nufc.com kindly transcribes some comments from Kevin Keegan uttered in his capacity as ESPN pundit – another warning that Carroll’s transfer fee will not be spent on new players, and this about our erstwhile #9:

"He (Carroll) was on the fringe when I was there. He was raw. This kid is the best header of the ball I’ve ever seen. That’s his biggest plus point for me... His minus points have always been there. Can he get his head down? Can someone make him realise that all he has to do is train hard, work hard and be a good pro for 10 years and he’ll be a very rich boy? He needs to get rid of the other stuff...”

Ah yes, the other stuff. ‘Very nice lad’? In your dreams, as they say...

'This Must Be The Place': Cannes 2011

Thankful news emanates from Cannes HQ that Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place has been afforded a competition berth at this year’s edition of the great festival. Sean Penn, as so often, will be competing against himself, as Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life also graces the line-up. I await both movies keenly, and look forward to discussing them with their leading man, for the benefit of the revised Sean Penn: His Life and Times which is due later this year or else early 2012.

'Oh let the sun beat down upon my face...'

Since I now have multiple blogs going on, and since there is nothing happening in politics at present that I’m feeling especially strident about (other than a plan to resist AV on May 5) – well, in that light there is a certain temptation to convert this blog wholesale into a Led Zeppelin worship site. I won’t, you understand, but there’s a temptation...
It was only six months ago in Dublin that I learned (through a conversation with someone who worked on it) of the existence of the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, a recorded symposium and jam-session between Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, three generations of ‘guitar hero’ if you like. I thought then that I ought to see it immediately: in fact I still haven’t, but the existence of this clip – in which Page instructs the other two in the genesis of the riff for Kashmir – reminds me that I’ve got something to look forward to.

'Doctor Forrest' has risen from the presses...

Osborne's narrow choices, and ours

I look at David Cameron and see someone who strikes me as passable. This is mainly – and, I concede, a tad worryingly – on account of his dignified, principled bearing on occasions when he has handled matters related to HM Armed Forces: most strikingly, the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and, last week, the issue of deployment of British forces over Libya to enforce UN 1973.
The Libya question, it’s been widely noted, proposes more strongly than ever that Cameron is the ‘heir to Blair’. – a perilous mantle to hold, but you would count on Cameron not to be fazed by it. Even now one hears familiar critiques of his character – that he is a glib and shallow PR man, an aloof and pampered toff, merely Thatcher’s bastard offspring, i.e. one of the ‘same old Tories’, to use the lumbering terms of Labour’s current and hopeless leader. At times it seems to me that observers might as well resort to the analytical method of Harry and Paul’s old club buffers in this celebrated sketch.

Of course, Cameron is patently not a politician who could have been slotted (even by time machine) into one of Thatcher’s 1980s cabinets; and while he is undoubtedly several leagues more posh than me he looks (from my myopia-ridden remove) to be one who mixes well and without condescension (other than in his ripostes to the aforementioned Hopeless Labour Leader, who doesn’t even ‘speak human’ on what I’ve heard, for all that his fan club boasted otherwise those 7 long months ago.)
What does Cameron believe in? To quote from Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, I think ‘he believes in himself.’ That, too, can be dangerous, a vulnerably Blair-esque distinction. But it certainly suggests someone who will not run into any of the nervous-wreck hazards of leadership, i.e. unlike the excruciating personal style of the now-invisible man whom Cameron replaced.
Approving Cameron to that degree, I find it easier to speak of all the things that are disagreeable about George Osborne, whom I doubt mixes well at all and, worse (as Martin Kettle argues here) seems to be trapped in some hellish mirror-image homage to the wiles of Gordon Brown. John Rentoul did no messing in describing Osborne's Budget speech of yesterday as “the most appallingly crafted, third-rate peroration of any parliamentary set piece I have had the misfortune to witness.”
You can probably trust the view of a Tory who trashes the first routinely scheduled Budget of a Conservative chancellor in 14 years: thus Fraser Nelson, today poring over the Office for Budget Responsibility's report, seeing no authentic pro-growth measures, only creeping inflation, steadily ahead of wages, until possibly mid-2013. (“Result: real wage falls, real drop in living standards and real misery.”) Nelson is avowedly a hardcore tax-cutter and deficit-slasher, believing too that the former aids the latter, and he criticises Osborne for insufficient zeal on the controversial issue of The Cuts (“In 2011-12, the estimated bill for debt interest will be £48.6 billion — a staggering £4.7 billion more than the estimate in the November forecast.”) This may be in part why John Rentoul, however scornful of Osborne's presentation, concludes that “overall, the Cameron-Osborne judgement on public finances seems more right than the Miliband-Balls one, so far as that can be defined.” Or as Martin Wolf puts it in the FT, "The UK is caught between a chancellor who insists his policies are perfect now and a shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who insists that policy was perfect under Labour" - or, at least, Labour under the glorious leadership of Balls' padrone, Brown.
This week Rentoul quoted with permission a plaintive letter he'd had from one Darren Canning, a Labour member and campaigner:
“I keep hearing how a new generation is in charge of Labour now and keep wondering if there is any place left in it for me... All we have had to say is ‘Vote for us, we’re not Tories.’ It isn’t enough to get excited about... I am pulling out of active campaigning and am seriously thinking of leaving the party altogether. At least then I will be free to defend the last 13 years without constantly being accused of being ‘disloyal’. I am writing to you asking for counsel, is there a place for those who still value the New Labour project in this new Labour party or is it time to take a break?”
On one level you have to say, tough-mindedly, that there is no point whining about where Labour's internal convulsions have taken it, because it's hardly unprecedented, and there's hardly anywhere else to go. But to sound a tad less brusque - I do approve the Canning analysis.

Forrest/Finds: Comparative blogging...

This rather feels like some weird form of autogenesis, but I'd like to point readers to some recent posts on My Other Two Blogs... Over at Faber Finds I've been especially enthused in relation to William Sansom and James Baldwin, and at the Doctor Forrest platform I've had a few things to say about Egon Schiele, William Hjortsberg, Bela Bartok, Alice Krige (pictured) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (What a dinner party that would be, no...?)

Stylist endorses Doctor Forrest...

In case it ever be mooted that I invented the show of support given me by Stylist, of which I blogged a little while ago - well, here is the proof. 'The Chilling Read of the Year', mate. Black and white. I'm pleased to say there have been some other subsequent votes of confidence in the book, and I look forward to taking the wraps off these shortly...

True Faith: Inside Mike Ashley's Mind...

I simply have to quote the following from the latest editorial at the staunch and pawky True Faith site:
"I’ve often wondered what Ashley gets from owning Newcastle United. Quite apart from why he bought the bloody thing in the first place. I don’t believe he makes money from United, he has hardly gilded his business reputation and if it’s a 50,000 new mates he was after when he walked into SJP in May 2007, then he has been sorely disappointed. Ashley has at rough estimate £900m+ available to him. If he never struck another bat in his life he would never want for anything and neither would his grandchildren or their grandchildren. I think I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing with my weekends than sitting in the best seat in a football stadium at the other end of the country on match day watching a team I aspire to be average go through the motions, surrounded by thousands of people who would love to see me fall down the steps and burst my face open..."

Mary Shelley@NT: Claire Tomalin, Daisy Hay (and me)

It's happening this Tuesday March 15 2011, at 6:00 pm, and forms part of the National Theatre's 'Beyond Frankenstein' series of platforms in support of the current Nick Dear/Danny Boyle production. The session title is Frankenstein's Creator: Mary Shelley and it's billed as "a glimpse into the life of Mary Shelley with Claire Tomalin, biographer of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics, celebrating the idealistic circle who were there when Shelley first told the tale of a monster." It will be chaired by me, is due to last 45 minutes, and will be followed by a booksigning with these two fine literary historians. Tickets £3.50 (£2.50 concessions). See you there then...?
Oh, and - girls? - the quite fabulous image to my left is actually available to wear on a babydoll tee-shirt courtesy of ThinkGeek here...