Supernatural Tales

This is a very silly film, but don't let that fool you. It is also a very bad film. The cast list made me wonder - would Lance Henriksen and Adrienne Barbeau lend their talents to a sub-standard product?  Yes. Yes, they would.  This is an attempt to do a Scary Movie/Airplane hybrid, and it doesn't work. The basic plot is simple. A priest exorcises a demon, which first arose in some half-arsed fashion when he served in Vietnam as an army chaplain and tried to stop an atrocity. My Lai being employed for laughs, there. The demon gets on the plane and starts possessing the passengers. The latter are a gallery of two-dimensional 'gonzo' types, ranging from a dwarf who gets breastfed by his mother to the most stereotypical rabbi in history. There's also a bodybuilder, a Muslim terrorist, and Ms. Barbeau's character, a woman who brings her dead, stuffed pet dog on board as a support animal.  The crew is just as comical if you don't know what good comedy is. Bai Lin...

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 Conan the Barbarian now seems a little camp and outdated, but even if you don't rate those stories, they represent a small percentage of Howard's prodigious output.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...

The redoubtable New York editor Ellen Datlow has published her (very) long list of stories under consideration for her next anthology. The stories are from 2021. I'm pleased to say that ST is well represented, with no less than 14 tales in the semi-finals, so to speak. They are: Barron, Jon “Barefoot Banjo Girl" Cashmore, Stephen “From Ghosts” Chislett, Michael “The Entity Extractor” Dawson, Sam “The Minds Within” Day, Victoria “Mr. Winter’s Tale Or, Mr Nobody” Haynes, Katherine “Aunt Hilda’s Villa” Hubbard, Kathy “Familiar” Jakeman, Jane “A Ploughed Field" Jakeman, Jane “Toads" Jeffreys, Tim “Here Comes Mr. Herribone" Kenny, Peter “The Grieving" Nicholls, Mark “Settlement” Smith, Clint “Pregnant Women and People With Heart Conditions" Tyrell, Carole “Cocoon"

The final story in The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Follies and Grottoes brings us full circle, in a way. The narrator recalls arriving at a certain country house in 1937, and mentions the oppressive heat. The overall feel of the story is very traditional, and the characters might be the creations of E.F. Benson, L. P. Hartley, or Walter de la Mare.  Two former schoolmates have been reunited by chance, or so it seems. The protagonist Richard Murray never considered himself a friend of the somewhat effete Julian Sleat but accepts an invitation to visit his newly-acquired estate. The two men are interested in an obscure eighteenth-century composer, and Sleat has acquired some rare lost works by this Casimir Hoffner.  It transpires that another guest of Sleat, Simon Larch, a gifted but troubled young English composer, is seeking to recreate Hoffner's works in a folly within the grounds. There are some excellent passages in which Hoffner's obsession with the music of the spheres...