Supernatural Tales

Peter Bell's story 'The Tunnel' is one of the most popular ever published. It's in ST17, if you haven't already bought a copy. Here's one fulsome reaction from a reader: Not only does ST 17 look great-it is great,opening with a wonderful ghost story in the grand tradition.The Tunnel has a lot going for it-multiple layers of narrative,an expert in esoterica( in this case trains) and some sly humor( Thelma Kemp's crack about Roman Catholics).But to really make it tasty, Peter Bell has added a generous dollop of the class struggle.The animus between urban evacuees and their country hosts during the Blitz becomes the focal point of this story.Lady Wyke's treatment of the Wood children would be called child abuse today.All in all, a rich , wonderful story.

It's always nice when you read in your local paper that some enthusiasts are making a genuine horror movie in your neck of the woods. So I was intrigued when I read last year - or was it the year before? - that something was going on County Durham. Now comes the review in SFX . It begins thusly: 'Al-Qaeda should use this horror comedy as a recruiting tool - watching it, the notion that Western society deserves annihilation briefly seems reasonable. You slide through disbelief, boredom and anger into a despair so crushing it's akin to grief.' If you'd like to know which movie prompted this somewhat negative reaction, the official website is here . If you want to see some of that local media coverage, a report from Cannes (no less) is here .

Earlier on I expressed my approval of the Hong Kong movie The Eye . I just rented the DVD of the Hollywood remake and thought I'd share my 'thoughts' about it. Firstly, why take a movie made in Chinese and redo it as a fairly standard Hollywood shocker? Because millions of people out there can't handle subtitles, I suppose. In this regard I'm lucky. When I was a wee lad BBC 2 used to show lots of foreign films and I got used to reading the often enlightening phrases appearing along the bottom of the screen. I saw - as a child/teenager - some of the classics of European cinema. The Royal Hunt of the Sun , Jules et Jim , Alphaville - all grist to my mill. If you grow up with something it's a bit less threatening. Anyway, they remade The Eye with Jessica Alba in the title role of Sydney Wells. Good choice. Alba is pretty, petite and does the worried frown, bafflement and fear expressions well. To be honest, she's not required to a lot else, because this is...

So, there are now two little PayPal button thingies over on the right. This means you can click your way to poverty amid the global recession much more efficiently, and subscribe to ST. I'm sure it's a great leap forward. And it's all thanks to a nice chap called Brian J. Showers, who knows how to do techie things that I can't. In return for such a favour, all I can do is urge the reader to pop over to Brian's site, The Swan River Press , and buy everything at least once.

What links the brazen, mechanical head of Roger Bacon, a war waged throughout time, bustles, and the Mummy? The answer - and it's so obvious I'm really surprised you didn't get this - is that they are all to be found in Cognition , a new pamphlet from Cardinal Cox. The Peterborough poet has produced some poems for The  Asylum , which is apparently a 'Lincoln convivial'. The theme is steampunk, which is more sci-fi than supernatural, but it's all satisfyingly strange. Cognition drew its inspiration from a Steampunk Art exhibition held at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford earlier this year. 'It also borrows from such authors as Brian Aldiss, Max Beerbohm, Lewis Carroll, William Morris and Philip Pullman.' And quite right too. Look, I'm holding it up! The first poem, 'Elias Ashmole's Casket', reveals that 'in a dark, dark cellar' someone finds a remarkable collection of wondrous things. Along with Wilmot's last p...

For me, the old wireless is a good medium for weird stories because it leaves more to the imagination. TV and film spookery can fall flat because you really don't agree with the way a story has been  visualised. So I'm always searching for audio stuff, particularly old time radio stories of terror and the supernatural. If you agree, or indeed if you don't, pop over to Strange Tales on Old Time Radio. There are some familiar stories there, notably 'All Hallows' by de la Mare and Kipling's 'The Phantom Rickshaw'. There are also a lot of other stories, some of them supernatural. They've been selected by enthusiasts from a huge range of old American radio shows. Wish I'd had that sort of thing to listen to when I was a lad.

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