Happy Halloween Chums.

Doctor Faustus.

My favourite Richard Burton performance. Think he nailed the world weary yet voracious appetite for knowledge that led the great Doctor to strike the most famous of Faustian bargains and be dragged to hell. I know some people equate the desire for power as being the same thing as thje desire for knowledge but I do not believe them to be the same. Above all is, even sex, Doctor Faustus prized his cunning above everything. Perhaps he believed that knowing more than anyone else would cause all other equations to fall in place. Human beings are rarely as lucky as that. The smartest man in the world must still obey the laws of gravity, undestanding how it works will make him no lighter. In Faustus we follow the tale of a noble soul who has led a chastened cerebal existance, trading that soul for twenty four years of hedonism (Iggy Pop got far more for far less.) Christopher's tragic tale is a timeless yet always timely reminder that in our lives we already possess the most valuable of gifts and should be wary of deals too good to be true. Its all there in that centuries old text, words that have resounded across the years, the better part of half a millenia. "Look to Heaven, remember God's mercies are infinite" a wise friend tries to warn the learned Faustus, alas too late.For shortly after such sage advise he is dragged into hell. I recently recommended it to a friend, this fil version, and he said it all felt very stagey, like a play. Which off course it is. And in this instance the play is very much the thing.

Doctor Who Annual 1976.

The previous Christmas I had recieved the Doctor Who Annual 1975 and thought no book could be better than this. At my early age I could never has believed that the new iteration of my beloved Doctor would prove to be an even more treasured incarnation. From the brilliant time and space traveling Dandy to a truly alien and amiable scarf wearing bohemian genius. And it never got old.

Genuine Life Size Moon Monster.

An ad in an old DC comic, from the days when one could actually purchase Moon Monsters through the mail. Sigh.

Scuttler's Cove.

"Whats this,then?" I asked Ali in the bookshop "Its a bit like The Wicker Man" they answered "With crabs", they added, smiling. Which made me immediately want to read it, so I did, and I am glad I did."The sea never forgets, the sea never forgives" this book seems to whisper as it plunges to some dark depths. Set in a coastal sea-side town named Scuttler's Cove, it is the tale of a young woman's return to her coastal Idyll,a town where the locals can no longer afford to buy homes in the area where they have grown, as those homes are being sold for enormous prices to out of towners, second homers.Sadly, a not uncommon situation, a sickening curse of modernity which spells doom for small communities who used to exist in a state of self-sufficency. Some of those new comers are are made to feel unwelcome as a series of property attacks gather pace and also serve to mask an altogether more ancient horror. It takes some folk-horror staples and tropessuch as the new being vanquished by the old, and vice versa, depending on one's bank balance. David Barnett does an impressive job of teasing out folkloric horrors hiding in plain sight. The line between the natural world and the unatural one blurring in an entertaining and insightful novel that draws on towards a sopping wet climax of ancient beliefs and customs that serve to remind us of the illusion of modernity. Its a slow burning folk festival that conceals the best for last and which comes across as dreadfully plausible in a Cornwallish stylee. An absolute treat of a folk horror tale which deserves to be more widely read.

A Tale Of An Empty House.

Most famous for his Mapp and Lucia books, Edward Frederic Benson also wrote a number of Shost Stories. I was drawn to this book in order to read the original story The Room In The Tower. A story adapted for the BBC Christmas Ghost Story series spear headed by Doctor Who and League Of Gentlemen alumni Mark Gatis, who seems to be single-handedly keeping the genre alive in the streaming age.That story wasabout a man haunted by a recurring dream that eventually bleeds into reality. A bit of a theme perhaps for E F Benson as one of his most well known tales; The Hearse Driver is also about visions from the subconcious, bad dreams that prove to future echoes from beyond the mortal realm. It was served well by a cinematic adaption in the British classic Dead Of Night; "just room for one inside,sir." Theres a beautifully English quality to these stories and yarns, bearing witness to the iron clad grasp of even gentle class based civility and custom. I do not mention this as a pergorative, the maelstorm of affected classlessness which surrounds us today is mostly felt as a painfull affectation in modernity. We should feel freer but mostly we just feel rootless and oppressed by the tyranny of social media that has no room for forgiveness in its kindly authorative fashion.The beauty mostly to be found in thec wit used to buffer the brutality of class based expectation. It serves to make the creeping terror of certain yarns all the more unsettling as we traverse a world of seemingly empty houses in the company of E F Benson. I certainly felt it.

Portrait Of Evil.

Look at this amazing study of Vincent Price as Prince Prospero from Roger Corman's adaption of The Masque Of The Red Death. Many of it consider it to be the jewel in the crown of his Poe Cycle. With a multi-layered performance by Mr Price at the very height of his powers. To me its another great turn by the great man but even in that context he does an amazing job of making an unqestionably evil man strangely sympathetic. Most of it is not in the original work by Edgar Allen Poe, its down to Roger Corman, Vincent Price, Nicholas Roeg and the cracking team of creatives assembled to produce a film thats still something special.