New Phantasmagorias.

Nice start to the New year with two issues of the wonderful Phantasmagoria magazine, the regular one and a special dedicated to the legendary R Chetwyn Hayes. I have a contribution in each, a comic strip, with fantastic, or should that be Phantastique, art by P J Holden and the other an appreciation of the great writer. Its a joy to see the breadth of content in this magazine so cleverly and passionately edited by Trevor Kennedy. And a real pleasure to read the articles by people who really care about the subjects that cause them to put pen to paper.
           ...to be found at any distributor of the outre..

Nocturnes.

What a great choice this John Connolly collection of short stories turned out to be, for my Christmas holiday read. Felt in the mood for some scares, some more fireside scares,the particular ones you only get before an actual crackling fire, which is to be found in the house I was staying in over the Christmas holidays. I have had this book sitting on a shelf filled with John Connolly books, mostly his Charlie Parker books,waiting for the moment to really get my teeth into it, so to speak, then the stars aligned and I got a chance to sample this feast of pleasing terrors. It really looked the part, how a collection of possibly antiquarian stories, would look, sitting on a post-Edwardian book shelf.a lovely understated little volume containing fourteen short stories and a really gripping Charlie parker novella. One that contained something of a seismic event in the troubled life of Charlie Parker. It is no play on words to describe this collection as a haunting anthology and John Connolly wears his influences lightly, sprinkling the various texts with the most lovely little nods and winks. He homages but never mimics, his own voice being such a strong one. it always feels modern but boy can he deliver when it comes to telling tales in the grand old school way of an MR James or an Edgar Allen Poe. He commits to the short form as intensely as he weaves dark epics in the long form, although this distinction blurs as the reader comes towards the end of this collection and the charlie Parker novella that patiently sits at the back of the bus, awaiting disembarkation; The Reflecting Eye.
           Charlie parker is surely America's smartest and wittiest private investigator, although the events which shaped his character are truly horrific. For me, Charlie parker embodies the spirit of a fictional Anrew Vachs, a real life champion of lost children. Another who sees every child born as another chance to get things right.
The tragic events that drive, and haunt, Charlie Parker are pretty harrowing and his creator does not shy from articulating in almost poetic prose those horrors. Not perhaps for the faint hearted but beautifully rewarding.

A Christmas Carol.

It is that time of year. it always is,really. When Ipick up Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol and reread it. I do believe that one of its most enduring qualities is the rightly appealing notion that no human being is beyond redemption. Over the years since the first appearance of the story, it has possessed the ability to soften even the hardest hearts, suggesting that we are all capable of change, no matter how committed to a certain path we may appear. Ebenezer Scrooge is not even the worst of men, not even the worst character Mr Dickens ever created. And for all his faults there is a wicked humour at play in the pre-redemptive old curmudgeon. For instance when he faux mourns the passing of the various Victorian institutions set up to punish the poor for being poor, thinking the world a lesser place without the presence of a character building treadmill.
             It is a familiar tale off course; Over the course of one night Scrooge is visited by four ghosts. The ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and Christmas yet to come. Scrooge gets to revisit the early points of his life where he chose to take a different path from the one that would have best enriched his heart and soul, the two unquantifiable repositories of of the better angels of our natures. He also gets a glimpse of the here and now, of the world that lies just one step away from the closed cold circle he inhabits. Most scary though is the view of his path to a lonely gaping grave the unspeaking ghost of what may be gives him. All in all, it proves sufficient to make a man change his ways and Scrooge achieves the near impossible for him; Happiness.

The Company I keep.

Radio Times.

Oh yes, its that time of year again. The nights have well drawn in and we are heading towards Christmas. One of the surest signs, one of the more reliable visual clues, for those smart enough to know a hawk from a handsaw, is the appearance of Doctor Who on the cover of Radio Times. No longer a feature on Christmas day off course but The Doctor being the most nonlinear being in creation is welcome any time of the year...

Revelation Of The Daleks.

Well, here it is, the last of the original series novelizations, written by Eric Seward himself. This lovely looking volume, the companion to Ressurrection Of The Daleks released earlier this year, was in my mind the perfect bookend to that much loved series of novelizations. But off course they are nothing like that.Both stories take place at much later stages in the later stages off the Doctor's original run on television. Relatively speaking...
           Which is what much of the discussions revolving about the life of the Doctor often require; a loose sense of relativity.
            This story is a very spirited reminder of that period of the good Doctor's history with all the characters and situations inhabiting the more extreme and generally eccentric zones of the Whoniverse. With more room to breathe and tell the tale there was also room to give many of the characters back stories, in the fashion that book story telling can get away with compared to its cousin television story telling. All done with a great sense of almost Douglas Adams like humour and goofy insight, without ever feeling like over padding or losing the sense of darkness that original script oozed.Like so many stories from the Colin Baker era there are some very dark things going on while The Doctor and Peri brush shoulders with some very shady characters indeed. There is humor too, again exhibiting a darker tone than usual. With the character of The Doctor being loud, proud and garrulous to know...
           Poor Peri, of all The Doctor's chums she was the one who more often than not got to experience some of the nastier aspects of time and space. In this story alone she finds herself clubbing a diseased man to death with a log in order to save The Doctor's life. Throughout her time with two incarnations of her friend she was witness too, and even experienced, some full on horrors. One wonders she ever felt inclined to travel the universe at all with it vast panopoly of terrors. I am remined of Donna's reaction to the grotesque and cruel treatment of The Ood, which almost made her reconsider her desire to explore the wider unknowns. So soon after tracking down the impossibly elusive Time-lord.Poor Peri seemed to run into such horrors every time The Tardis landed somewhere or sometime.
            And davros was back for this one. At first just as a demented and rotting Halloween turnip, sitting at the center of an elaborately spun web whose threads stretched across the stars. Mind you, the humans who stray onto this web are little different from the mad scientist from Skaro. Every human being The Doctor and Peri encounter in this story are every bit as corrupt and self serving as Davros. Where is the love? it is perhaps to be found only in The Doctor /companion relationship between the two Tardis travelers. Or in this story between Orsini, the space knights templar, and his squire, the smelly Bostock. Who come across as a very dangerous Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
             In space no one can hear you sigh.
             A great read. A treat for long time Doctor Who fans but a splash of funereal color for anyone who enjoys bizarre space yarns.

The Chimes At Midnight.

          I had never seen this film made by Orson Welles before. I do not think it has ever been shown on television and I have never seen it for sale in any store any where.Then I was leant a copy by the artist Mark Mc Keown who recommended I give it a view and Oh boy did it reward. I put it on late one night just to watch the beginning, to check out the tone, and just could not switch it off. I got so drawn into it, this hybrid of the words of Shakespeare and the ballsy interpretation by Orson Welles.
It looks and feels raw and dirty, as though the cast were living their parts. I had expected a slightly affected turn and was not prepared for the naturalism on display.

Orson Welles is magnificent in this. You can see why Falstaff's friend treat him with such a wide mixture of affection and weary scorn.He is a lazy scoundrel but charmingly bumbling with it, a complete rake who any father should be weary off his son spending time with. He is bad company but wonderfully full of life too. Mad, Bad and hilrarious to know. The King is heart broken his wayward son Hal is spending any time with this unruly mob and fears his kingdom will fall to disaray in the hands off such a man. And young prince Hal revels in his time, mixed in many a scrape that are most unroyal. But when the time comes and he puts away the toys of childhood, when the time comes for him to assume the crown he casts Falstaff aside, ready to assume his kingly mantle.
            You would need a heart of stone not to feel for the crestfallen Falstaff as he sees his dreams of unearned nobility fall away, pulled from him in that most heart felt of rejections.
             just fantastic stuff
             Falstaff is dead...
             "He is in Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom."