Supernatural Tales

The Raven is a quite staggeringly fictionalised account of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe and is currently available on Netflix. Written by Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston, it was directed by James McTeigue and stars John Cusack as the doomed author. So much for facts. The rest, as they say, is bollocks. But it's entertaining bollocks, so don't despair.  Spoiler alert - the raven doesn't do much, really

Another year lumbers toward its end, and I have not one but two poetry pamphlets from Cardinal Cox, former Poet Laureate of Peterborough. I'm saving one for the New Year, but today I'm typing some vague thoughts on Codex Nemedia, a homage to and mediation on the works of Robert E. Howard.  Is Howard ripe for reassessment? I only ask because he was a pretty good writer for action/adventure stories with a fantasy/supernatural basis. Conan the Barbarian now seems a little camp and outdated, but even if you don't rate those stories, they represent a small percentage of Howard's prodigious output. I recently encountered some stories about the rather odd Puritan freebooter Solomon Kane, and was impressed by their verve and concision. The same can be said for Howard's Lovecraftian fiction. Anyway, in this pamphlet, the Cardinal examines the psychic reveries of James Allison. One of those mental adventurers in time and space, Allison explored many fascinating worlds, presum...