In praise of a pervasive sense of evil - Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (A BFI Compendium)

I have before me the newly published Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (A BFI Compendium). It’s a remarkably handsome volume and, I’d have thought, a must-have for enthusiasts and students in this ever more ardently studied field. But then 'we are for the dark', as Shakespeare had the serving maid say to Cleopatra.

I contributed a chapter to the book (on Satanism and witchcraft, naturally) but it’s really not for that reason that I consider the work overall to be essential. I’m just a one-time gothic novelist, not truly a specialist in the discipline; however, inter alia, fellow contributors such as Guillermo del Toro, Marina Warner, Christopher Frayling, Kim Newman, Anne Billson, Mark Gatiss and Ramsey Campbell most eminently are. The richness and variety of this collection, expertly assembled by the BFI’s James Bell and superbly illustrated to boot, are to be savoured, in more than one sitting.

The book marks a BFI season that begins shortly and will run into 2014. A fine taster of what lies in store was offered at the end of August with a 'Monster Weekend' of special screenings in the forecourt of the British Museum: I went along to the first of these, the movie being Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, and thought it a really delighting occasion.

I notice that I’m using a lot of ‘pleasure-words’ in relation to the gothic here, which, funnily enough, is the spirit in which I wrote my chapter for the book. For a long time I more or less believed that the whole origin of the horror genre was quite aptly encapsulated by the ‘celebrated’ line from the Catholic Office of the Dead, ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ (‘The fear of death disturbs me.’) Our mortality, and that of those whom we love, is after all the best if not the only thing in this world to be afraid of.

However, horror consumed as a cultural experience clearly has to offer pleasure of sorts too, even if a somewhat masochistic one. Horror might be said to indulge a certain phantasy about the existence of wickedness and depravity in the world: how it might indeed triumph over good, or how, at least, certain souls (deserving or not) could succumb to it. In the process, wickedness and depravity may be dressed up with certain superficially alluring aspects – and when it comes to such costuming, cinema is supreme among the arts. But at such a puppet show it’s easier to spot the strings.

There are many aspects of the gothic that have great powers to haunt and disturb and unnerve us, and gothic works that invoke devils and demons and necromancers (what I thumbnail in my essay for convenience as ‘the gothic occult’) are by no means excluded from that. Their particular powers, though, feel to me a tad reduced. The gothic occult is predicated on the existence of evil as a metaphysical force in the world: a thirsty evil, one that wants to keep its infection spreading. A really bleak gothic occult will propose a black pessimistic view of Man's Fate – that the material world belongs to Satan and goodness is unattainable, on this plane at least, etc. That all sounds scary enough on paper, and can be so on screen.

And yet this particular version (or explanation) of a metaphysical evil seems to me to require – how can I put it? – a more than usual bound into the suspension of disbelief. By contrast, the idea of a ‘ghost’ – where a ghost might come from, what it might look like, what its motives might be – seems to me endlessly recyclable and potentially mysterious, fit (if the mood is right) to inveigle itself even into our wide-awake rational thoughts. Ghosts appear to me as the absolute lifeblood of the gothic. But then to speak of devils, of Satan... of a personification of evil, an antagonist to some almighty king of the heavens, a figure at the head of a large hierarchical structure committed to humanity’s ultimate catastrophe – well, this is to confront the reader or viewer with a heftier (and consequently less nimble and persuasive) proposition. Having written a novel in the Faust mode I appreciate the size of the ask, and accept that one’s first duty under these conditions is to entertain.

The best, most persuasive work of fiction that I know of to imagine Satan’s immanence in our world is Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (which is also perhaps the most decidedly gothic title anyone could ever append to a novel.) If I can’t immediately tempt you to read it, please try this superb interview with Mailer about the novel, written up by Philip Weiss for the New York Observer. And do keep your eye on #bfigothic.

A footnote: when I was readying my Gothic compendium chapter for the presses with BFI editor James Bell I was not surprised and quite amused to hear from him that I ought to try to trim back on a rather prolix attempt I’d made to define exactly what constitutes the gothic in cinema. Apparently, more than one of my fellow contributors had fallen down the same dark well... and the effort is probably doomed, one has to say. There’s nothing exactly Gothic in cinema, but it’s generally agreed that we seem to know it when we see it, or feel it. Gothic is a visual style and a mood, an atmosphere, enhanced above all by production design – one of gloom, intrigue, dread, a pervasive sense of evil, which may well (but need not) materialize in outright horrors. In the case of the gothic occult, this production design tends to dark secret places where cabals gather and rituals occur, the solemn black mass and the orgiastic walpurgisnacht. And there you may also see the goat’s head and the horned man, the grimoire, the beckoning finger of Mephistopheles – all that...

Dickens 2012, Seoul/Incheon: "Behind every building, every facade, I can see there's a story..."

The British Council Korea made this lovely video compilation of their 'Dickens 2012' commemorations last March. It's mainly in Korean, of course, but there are a few snippets of me in preaching/teaching mode as the grateful Visiting Novelist amid this cherishable project of cultural exchange... I only wish they'd managed to capture the bit where I tried to explain to some young Korean writers why Incheon is so much like Newcastle...

Financial Crisis Redux: We are all Japanese now

Very interesting this week to see the sudden, riled, edgy urging of a Plan B For Growth/Contra Recession by a good many financial journalists – this urging upon a Chancellor who clearly has wished to be seen as a Man of Iron, and whose confidence is probably rice-paper-thin right now, as the economic forecasts start to turn over the ballast in everybody’s guts. In these circumstances it’s no wonder that Ed Balls, with his mildly psychotic and probably permanent air of assurance, is unusually happy to be asked to give a lot of sound-bites on the general theme that, since everyone in the world has now stopped spending money, then it’s time for the UK to resume the practice.
I can see that George Osborne hates the thought of humiliation, maybe even more than the rest of us. I hadn’t thought he could bear the idea of calling a slippage on his deficit-reduction programme. But I’m truly curious to see what else he can do now. No amount of small-beer red-tape-cutting or enforced ‘flexibility’ upon the labour market, no greenbelt home-building or income tax tinkering can turn around the grim figures. Some big infrastructure projects – ‘public works!’ – would be the smallest start, and very welcome to my mind – but themselves inconceivable as of a few months ago, and thus a lot for Osborne to swallow. Let’s see if he can face the idea of ‘finding’ money to stuff into the public maw.
My problem with Ed Balls – sorry, one of my problems – is that I don’t believe he’s bothered by the notion of rebalancing the economy, only with slackening the pace of deficit reduction, and what that could mean for him in the eyes of Labour’s usual voters. And I don’t think that’s an adequate showing from an Opposition in these circumstances. Obviously no Opposition would put up costed plans this early in a parliament but, given the State of the Nation and the slough of public disregard that Labour's fallen into, I think they could do themselves a favour by seeming to be chomping at the bit with smart cost-efficient fiscal ideas.
I’ve been intrigued to see the amount of press play given (as here in the New York Times) to Adam S. Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, ‘a leading expert on what is often called Japan’s lost decade’ who sees the US and Europe as repeating ‘the same monetary policy mistakes that left Japan’s once-robust economy stagnant...’ Posen is nakedly advocating ‘more monetary stimulus’, and I admit I don’t see why that’s going to work now rather than before. But I’m more interested in his conviction that ‘the Bank of England and the British Treasury form a government-backed bank to make small-business loans.’
I've just written a long paper about the prospects for the North East England economy, to be discussed at the Durham Book Festival next month. It was largely concerned with urging entrepreneurialism and growth in SMEs. However I fought shy of too many policy prescriptions, just because the paper assumes tight-fisted Tories in power until 2015 at the very least. But then maybe Osborne really is about to un-constrict the spending sphincter, in which case all bets are off. If I were urging positions upon Labour now... well, business-targeted job-creating infrastructure projects, the full gamut of tax breaks for start-up businesses (research, employees, profits), establishment of sector-specific state investment banks, vocational training (also adult re-training) in hi-tech, digital and green energy skilling... yeah, I'd probably be focusing on things like that, in respect of what the state can do as an engine for growth, and not just a dispenser of hardship funds.

The Most Recent Riots of 2011

Of all the persuasive things I read in July perhaps the one that took up most solid residence among my mental furnishings was a 'tweet' by the excellent PatrickOsgood, Assistant Editor at Oil & Gas Middle East magazine: “We're screwed, right? By ‘we’ I mean flabby westerners in advanced economies...”
To wit: earlier this month I spent a week’s family holiday abroad, a proportion of which was spent watching BBCNews24, aghast, and debating the usefulness of plastic bullets in situations of violent mass public disorder... A friend with whose family we were sharing the holiday watched these bulletins alongside me with a special set of concerns – he being a producer for the BBC 10 O’Clock News, thus a keen-eyed judge of how well ‘the firm’ was doing in its coverage.
For me there was the special unease of goggling from afar at conflagration and mayhem in parts of North London (N17 and N22) where I used to live – contentedly in the main, among good people, if always feeling fairly rueful about the patches of public deprivation/squalor, and very often nervy/annoyed about the unnecessary levels of edginess on the street courtesy of young males whose chief ambition in life seemed to be making themselves look quite nasty. Still, as an impotent riot-watcher I had the consolation that my current manor (N8) was being spared too much shattering of shop windows. Instead it was Tottenham and Wood Green where the workless class of England smashed and grabbed armfuls of branded sportswear made in China and Vietnam.
I must admit, one of my most insistent feelings in watching the reportage and mulling over it was: fings ain’t what they used to be. To be precise, what I was seeing didn’t strike me as having the full-force ramifications of the Thatcher-era riots of 1981 that I remember, in Brixton, Southall, Toxteth, Moss Side et cetera. In 2011 I simply couldn’t see the point of summoning a Lord Scarman to pick over this wreckage: it just wasn’t an impressive sort of uprising. And by the time one heard the first reports of a millionaire’s daughter in court for nicking – it felt like a 'disenfranchised class'-type analysis wasn’t going to stay on its feet for long.
Arriving home again on Wednesday August 10 I found the heat had abated: the cab driver at Stansted presented me with the Sun, its front cover a mosaic of CCTV-busted rioters, the inner pages given over to a chorus of popular revulsion. Sixteen thousand additional police officers appeared to have worked the trick and laid down the law. (I understand David Cameron, unlike his Home Secretary, had been all for wheeling in the army. Good job cooler heads prevailed - I admit I was one who briefly got into a tizzy of what sort of force might be needed to dampen the rioters' ardour.)
That Wednesday night I watched the father of Haroon Jahan on the news, and burst into tears, as I suspect did others. His remarkable dignity and eloquence seemed to sum up a noticeably prevalent message: for shame. Meanwhile online I found (via Norman Geras) that Kenan Malik had said quite quickly most of what I’d been thinking. (I also endorse pretty much all of what’s written here by Will Davies at his Potlatch blog.)
In a mood of dubious nostalgia I did allow myself a glance back the other day at Alexander Cockburn’s long essay ‘The Underclass’, published by the Village Voice in January 1982, subsequently collected in Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire (Verso), and dominated by an interview with Darcus Howe, who was then billed as ‘editor of Race Today.’ Interestingly Howe spoke witheringly of a Britain ‘saturated with the concept of welfare’, a placebo that black Britain had come to see as ‘no cure for the cancer’ – the cancer being the threat of ‘permanent unemployment.’ Cockburn ended pointedly with this interpretation of events in the Manchester vicinity by Howe: ‘Whites from Withenshawe (sic), blacks from Moss Side, no prearranged plan. They gather. There is a shout, “On to Moss Side police station.’ That gives you some indication. You must have a convergence of interests in order for that to happen...’ The question, of course, is what those interests can be defined as, and what they amount to. But in any case on the occasion of the Riots of August 2011 I’ve yet to hear or read a resolute class analysis akin to Howe’s of 1981 (or rather, yet to hear or read one that wasn’t outstandingly foolish.)
Finally, what to make of Tony Blair’s contribution to the post-mortem (‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’)? Very well made, I’d say, and firmly on the side of ‘decent law-abiding’ people who don’t want their homes and livelihoods wrecked by reprehensible gang-bangers. But this reflective passage is, for me, ‘the money’:
“I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up. I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west...”
Ah yes, the fading of the West, which is where (with Patrick Osgood) we came in.
Oh, and finally (2): Blair is quite right to express irritation at sections of the media given to “a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally.” In particular one of the most irritating things about the (generally Blair-hating) tenor of left-liberal England is where it joins hands with the most reactionary right in heeding the sermons of Peter Oborne, the churchy Sherborne Tory who is very good at sounding morally vexed by everybody living outside his parish. Oborne lacks even that one highly redeeming feature of Toryism: namely its departure from the Spartan Left in seeing Man not as some perfectable socio-political unit in a grand Utopian project but, rather, as a fallen creature of whom we must simply try to make the best that we can. Still, Socialist Worker and Daily Mail meet over drinks in their shared capacity to get disgusted by the slightest traits of their fellow men and women, and that is one party from which I’ll always run a mile.

Norman Geras on the fading of blogs

Where was I...? Oh yes, Norman Geras. Proprietor of as thoughtful a weblog as you're liable to find, he made these comments last month (on the eighth anniversary of his celebrated site) in respect of some recent "difficulties in blogging":

"Some of the reasons for them are obvious: this particular debate has been had, and one doesn't feel as if there's anything to add; even if there may be, I don't feel like writing about the same thing yet again; just temporarily the 'topics of the day' don't appeal to me; even if I've got something to say, other people are already saying it, saying it a billion times - in the press, on the blogs, on Twitter; and so on. Whatever the case, until very recently I never had trouble finding what to post about; now sometimes I do. Yesterday I came across [a] post by Andrew Sullivan, in which he says that if it isn't updated at least twice daily it ain't a blog; and ideally it should be updated four or five times a day... Anyone who's blogged for any length of time will know why the rate of posting on so many blogs begins to fade, and why those who pack in blogging altogether, which is many many people, do so. And how many former bloggers now prefer Twitter, as being much less demanding of their time..."

Norm has decided to carry on, though. And so, confound it, shall I. We shall see quite what I'm made of in short order, shall we not...? In the meantime you can of course find me on Twitter...

Normblog: Tolstoy, The False Note, and the problem of Evil

Norman Geras, Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, has since 2003 been fashioning a notable second career for himself as a blogger and tweeter on issues of the day and assorted enthusiasms. A regular feature of the blog is 'Writer's Choice', wherein (as Geras described it for the Guardian) "novelists, poets and other writers have contributed their thoughts on books that have been important to them in one way or another, or books they have simply enjoyed." I am very pleased to say that I am the latest invitee to contribute a screed of this sort to Normblog: my choice was Tolstoy's novella The False Note, also known as The Forged Coupon, and you will find the full essay here. Meantime, a taster:

"I find The False Note an endlessly involving piece, and I feel it ought to be more widely known and celebrated. It is a kind of parable about money (we might better say 'currency') and the problem of evil: how a simple exchange of tainted money introduces a current of malevolence into social relations. Yet it resists a straightforwardly materialist analysis. As the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia read it, Tolstoy exhibits 'a strange conviction that every society creates evil according to some kind of natural secretion, as certain molluscs produce pearls'."

I might have said in the piece - but it was long enough already - that Robert Bresson's masterly 1983 film L'Argent is derived from the first of the two parts of The False Note, the setting transposed to contemporary France. Below, the last movement from L'Argent and the great Bresson in discussion of his work.

Esquire (August 2011) now on stands: I'm Back...

Well now, there's a familiar form of headline for this blog, albeit one that's been out of action for roughly 18 months... Nonetheless, it's a fact that I have written something in Esquire this month, and I'm very glad about it since a) I've remained a Contributing Editor in the time since my last contribution, even without troubling the scorers, as it were; and b) the magazine has a new editor in the excellent Alex Bilmes, who has a raft of fine ideas and has been putting them vigorously into practice since his appointment earlier this year. (To wit, the Esquire website has had a refurbishment recently and is worth your perusal.)
My essay for the August ish straddles the categories of 'Personal/Humour/Lifestyle', I suppose. It's called 'Fitness First?' and it's the up-and-down story of the 20 or so years that I've spent intermittently belonging to gyms and working out: a pastime that has brought me joy and pain, you may be sure - and for which I now feel the need to make an accounting in my life. Why am I harping on this, you ask? Well, because I'm one of many 40-year-old men who received a new gym membership on said birthday from their better half. And, possibly against the run of the mill, I was very glad to have it - because a small but significant part of my adult life has been spent hefting heavy lumps on metal around padded or reinforced floors. But, but... you do get to an age where the gravity of time sits heavy on your shoulders. As I say in the piece:

"... at this new Health Club of mine the fight I am picking is with Nature. My genes having been tidily downloaded to my kids, I am now expendable: Nature has written me off, reckons it has no further business with me. And Nature might be right. Every ten years a man loses four-to-six pounds of muscle. After 40 his testosterone levels ebb, his body hair shrivels, his spine weakens until he’s nearly as titchy as Tom Cruise.
I don’t presume to reverse that process, merely to ward it off just for a bit. I want to feel my heart racing, but under my control; to feel some vigour again in my limbs; to recapture that natural high of physical exertion – the high that brings no self-hating hangover, leaves one indeed feeling better in the morning. My body remembers all this, however vaguely. Because I have a long, complex relationship with gyms..."

To read on, as I'm sure you're dying to on the basis of that, give yourself a present of the August Esquire, it's £4.25 and there's loads of lovely stuff in it. Wrapped round the exterior and draped across a few pages therein is Abigail Clancy (pictured), who I believe has just enjoyed the loveliest of wedding days and is thus newly married to a professional footballer and accomplished body-popper.

Freud & Jung: The Movie!

On the subject of psychoanalysis - well, I've never been there, you understand, but I'm an admirer both of Freud and of Jung, and I'm quite sure that I’ve learned many profound things from the writings of both that, taken together, are not exactly complementary. As such I have waited keenly for a film of The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton’s play about the great Austrian, the great Swiss, and Ms Sabina Spielrein. Now that film is nigh, under the title A Dangerous Method, which references a book by John Kerr that was (as far as I know – I’ve not read it) the first to take seriously the importance of Spielrein to the history of psychoanalysis on the grounds that she was first a patient of Jung’s and subsequently a disciple of Freud’s. As I understand it, what Kerr didn’t know when he wrote A Very Dangerous Method was that Spielrein and Jung had been lovers during his treatment of her.
Hence the special drama of this story, for which Hampton was the ideal dramatist – Freud and Jung as mentor-and-protégé pioneers in the fathoming of the unconscious; Jung becoming the errant son who succumbed to sex with a patient, then proceeded to an occult-spiritual philosophy that alienated him yet further from rational, disapproving ‘father’ Freud; and Spielrein as the woman who first occasioned this intellectual dispute, then went on to make a discerning contribution to it.
The richness of all this is obvious. Is it ‘a movie’ though? I’ll be intrigued to see whether Cronenberg follows Hampton’s play in jumping forward and revealing to the audience at the halfway stage what was Spielrein’s eventual fate. It’s also worth noting that Paul Schrader, an equally fine piece of ‘casting’ for this project, tried to write it as a play for the National Theatre in 1982 at the prompting of Peter Hall, but could never quite finish his script. (‘It’s such a great story’, Schrader told Kevin Jackson for the excellent book Schrader on Schrader, ‘that it took me a long time to realize that it just wasn’t working.’)
For Cronenberg Sabina Spielrein is played by Keira Knightley who also gets top billing over Viggo Mortensen (Freud) and Michael Fassbender (Jung). For me as for many viewers, this is a small matter of concern, but presumably for many other viewers it will be why they turn out for this movie. So, we shall see… Here at any rate is the trailer.

"The Good of the Novel"

During my adolescence I regularly day-dreamed of growing up to be the sort of fellow who'd be asked to pontificate in print on the current condition of The Contemporary Novel... or I should say that I day-dreamed about this as regularly as I did about winning Wimbledon or taking Susannah Hoffs to the pictures. Still, as of now I have my wish in respect of the first of these, and here you can read my contribution to an online symposium occasioned by the Faber essay collection The Good of the Novel.

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...