Necronomania

Shadows of Darkness (1975)

2011-11-28T13:48:00.001-08:00

I wonder if there was ever a No. 2?

"Highgate vampire" hysteria was obviously still raging, five years on (or somebody hoped it was). And people were expected to pick up on references to "The Communist Party Manifesto" in a trashy comic...

"The Review Show" - Complaint to the BBC

2011-11-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

I would like to complain about the comments about Texan writer Robert E. Howard made by Stewart Lee at the end of "The Review Show" (4/11). Lee describes Howard as "a mad bloke" and then goes on to allege "Because he was insane, he maintained that he didn't write it but these characters stood over his shoulder, and dictated to him."

Both these statements are inaccurate. I assume that the notion that Howard was "mad" or "insane" stems from the biographical fact that he committed suicide at the age of 30. Although he was never diagnosed in his lifetime, it seems likely that this tragic action came about due to untreated clinical depression, probably induced by the stress of maintaining a living as a full-time writer during the Great Depression whilst acting as main carer for his terminally ill mother.

Having read Howard's published correspondence with friends and colleagues, I can confirm that he was intensely concerned with the creation of his stories, which were carefully crafted to suit distinct "pulp" markets. The notion that he believed they were dictated to him by discarnate entities is risible. Presumably it comes from a passage from one of the letters in which he describes figuratively the process behind his creation of "Conan". I find it near incredible that the BBC's premier arts programme should be inviting us to interpret this literally.

Not only is it inaccurate to describe Howard as "a mad bloke" because of his presumed depression, but it is insulting to people suffering from the same condition today. People with mental health problems suffer from discrimination from all directions, and hearing the words "mad bloke" and "insane" coming unexpectedly and inappropriately from a television comedian is likely to fall as another cruel blow to their self-esteem.

I am convinced that underlying this attack on one of the 20th Century's greatest fantasy and horror writers is the BBC's continuing bias against writing that falls outside of the narrow band of "literary fiction". A petition signed by 85 top authors was delivered to the Director General only this April, protesting against the network's "sneering coverage" of genre works. From the evidence of "The Review Show", it would appear that this has been ignored.

Kirsty Wark's sneering introduction to the piece backs up this impression: "Here's comedian Stewart Lee with a selection of his favourite books, most of which appear to be out of print - should that tell us something?" Presumably, to the mainstream mind of Ms. Wark, it should tell us that the books are worthless.

And yet; out of the three works chosen by Lee - two of them "genre" - only one (Machen's "The Green Round") is actually "out of print". "Conan", in particular, is readily available in a bewildering variety of editions, from e-books through cheap movie tie-ins to chunky hardbacks. To imply otherwise, not only demonstrates an appalling lack of research, but does the publishing industry a considerable disservice in these difficult times.

From Pan's People to Pony Play:"Ringstones"

2011-09-18T11:18:00.001-07:00

Sarban's Nightmares - Part One

(Warning - spoilers ahead)

John William Wall (1910-1989), who wrote under the name of "Sarban", has had something of a renaissance of late. This is largely due to the stalwart efforts of the Tartarus Press in publishing high-quality hardback and e-book editions of his long-out-of-print and unpublished works, plus a biography by Mark Valentine. Unfortunately, however, I have had to rely on a typo-riddled P.O.D. edition of The Sarban Omnibus. Two of the the three novels contained therein (Ringstones, The Sound of his Horn and The Doll Maker) are also available in free online editions.

Ringstones (1951) is centred on the first-person narrative of Daphne Hazel, a trainee gym teacher who accepts a holiday job at Ringstones Hall from an eccentric academic named Dr Ravelin. At this isolated moorland residence she is tasked with tutoring three mysterious "foreign" children of undisclosed nationality. In response to her questioning, Dr Ravelin is decidedly unforthcoming about the origin of his mysterious charges.

Idyllic to start with, the tale gradually becomes sinister as Miss Hazel discovers more about her mysterious charges and their surroundings. It becomes apparent that she is entrapped by the power of Nuaman, the fifteen year old boy (or is he?) who also dominates his younger female peers, Marvan and Ianthe, and Katia the Polish maid. Eventually, she is vouchsafed a disturbing revelation of where this domination is leading.

These events are punctuated by conversations with the reclusive Dr. Ravelin, who stays cloistered in his study for most of the daytime. An amateur archaeologist, he speculates that the ancient house occupies the site of a Roman arena set out for chariot races and other games. The moorland stone circle from which the Hall takes its name feeds wilder ruminations on history and mythology. Reflecting on the reuse of sacred sites by successive religions, Ravelin concludes "Perhaps these ancient stones hold down something far more ancient, something far stranger than the men who placed them understood. Some queer feet have danced here, I feel."

Ringstones is suffused by the spirit of Pan and "his representatives on (the) moors", who may or may not be the indigenous inhabitants of the land, driven out to desolate places but still recalled by folklore and superstition. The myth is of "the gift of the fairies" which, as Dr Ravelin observes "always has some disastrous condition attached to it. Their gold, in the morning, is a stone, or their invitation to a night's revels holds the unfortunate mortal in a century's slavery."

It will be clear from the above that we are in Arthur Machen territory. As with many of the Welsh master's accounts of the" Little People" Sarban's tale exudes an air of unwholesome sensuality. It starts off with in "Health and Efficiency" style with the well-toned Miss Hazel donning her "skimpy gym trunks" for a day's "romping and tumbling" with her shirtless young charge, whilst wondering at "the perfection of his physical development". Likewise, the clothing of the two little girls is of a type unlikely to be approved by the Mother's Union; "Like Nuaman's, their dress seemed more than is usual with English children to set off their figures rather than to cover them".

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, no explicitly carnal sentiments are expressed in the novel; things remain chaste even when Nuaman "caressingly" strokes Miss Hazel's arm in a "soothing, persuasive way". Sarban's eroticism runs underground and is focussed on male control and dominance. The measures that Nuaman (jokingly nicknamed "the Slave Driver" by his tutor) takes to impose his will on females very slowly become apparent, until the point at which Miss Hazel realises she has misheard the Polish maid Katia's broken English as "he weep" and that what she really meant was "he whips".

Miss Hazel also starts to realise that it is physically impossible for her to leave Ringstones. An attempt to reach a nearby village by crossing the moors results in her becoming lost and going around in circles until she returns to the Hall ("I want to keep you here for ever" observes Nuaman in a later conversation). She also receives a creepy indication that the two girls may be representatives of a larger group on the moors, as she spots some of them playing with Nuaman by the stream. Meanwhile, the Polish maid expresses her fear of lies-schi, which Dr Ravelin explains to the means "demons of the forest".

The conclusion of Miss Hazel's retelling of her adventures finds her arising on a moonlit night and finding herself mysteriously cast back in time to the Roman era, when the Games are being held on the site of Ringstones Hall. Preparations for track events are taking place in the arena and she encounters the Armenian servant Sarkissian with a special chariot. She had previously dreamt of him constructing this device with Nuaman in the stables.

It appears that Miss Hazel is about to be forced into an unconsenting act of what is termed "pony play" by modern devotees of the Aristotelian Perversion. Already leashed, she is to be stripped and manacled to the pole of this vehicle alongside the already-harnessed Katia in order to take part in a race. Then she sees the charioteer; "Nuaman gazed at me, and before I dropped my eyes I saw his expression begin to change… I dared not look at his face, but I saw the lash…" On this climactic note, her memoir comes to an end.

Daphne Hazel's story is framed by the sceptical account of an unnamed male narrator accompanying his friend Piers, who has received her manuscript and is keen to discover more about the extraordinary events described in it. When they arrive at Ringstones Hall, they discover it to be an uninhabited ruin. Tracking down Miss Hazel (placed as a tutor to two Egyptian girls in more normal accommodation), she explains her story to them as "a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams" which came to her after she injured herself at the ruin and was left there alone for several hours whilst medical assistance was sought for her.

One is reminded of the gift of the fairies, but the young woman seems, superficially at least, undamaged by her experiences, imagined or otherwise. Just before the narrator and his friend part company with her, they observe her making a movement which shows this is not the case;

"She held out both her hands … with a curious gesture of surrender as if offering the hands and wrists to someone. I saw a newly-healed long cut on the inside of her left wrist plain against the sun-browned skin. She seemed to offer her wrists a moment and then, yielding to an unknown compulsion, reluctantly turned down her palms, curling her fingers round something invisible to us."

Our narrator concludes "I was shocked to see how far behind Piers I had been in understanding the depth of her distress … I think we were all looking with a slowly rising fear at those two drooping hands, so helplessly waiting there." They respond in a reassuring way, but it seems clear that both believe that Pan's representatives have found a victim.

It could be argued that the extent to which Sarban's fantasy edges over into pornography is a measure of how it fails as literature. It could be that Sarban got away with so much kinkiness because he was writing in a more innocent time. Reaching the end of Ringstones, modern readers may feel that they have stumbled into one of John Norman's notorious Gor novels.

What saves Ringstones from being mere BDSM fare are its mysticism and atmosphere. Whilst it falls short of the bar set by Machen, there is a strangeness about the tale that captures the imagination in a similar way to The Hill of Dreams. It is very slow-moving and replete with detailed descriptions of the countryside and meditations on arcane subjects. The prurient person that James Branch Cabell dubbed "the pornoscopic reader" will have a laborious time finding the juicy bits.

Seen as a trilogy, the component novels of The Sarban Omnibus share the theme of male dominance. Ringstones introduces it as an archetypal principle arising from the mythic depths of the collective unconscious to ensnare a modern, independent young woman. The message is that, despite her superficial recovery, Daphne Hazel will remain permanently marked, physically and mentally, by her mysterious experiences. "Everything has end. Except a circle" she pleads to "Sir No Man" at one point. "Ringstones is a circle", he responds "You can never come to the end of Ringstones"…

(Next: The Sound Of His Horn)

"Coterie" by Elkie Riches

2011-07-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

Coterie draws us into a rural scene we think we are familiar with, but then expands its horizons to something quite extraordinary. From a fox’s eye view of the hunt, we are drawn into a surreal multiverse where the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is harnessed to a traditional aristocratic pursuit.

Along the way, we are led to consider some interesting questions. What is suitable employment for a cerebrally augmented fox? And, most importantly; if ever-branching realities can be bridged, then how do ethics and justice apply to the way we relate to our other selves?

In the multiverse, of course, there are infinite answers to these questions, and the colourful characters of Coterie make the mistake of assuming that Tradition is a constant in which the rules never vary.

Elkie Riches’ short story is a finely crafted comedy of manners and paradox. The “New Wave” of science fiction is an obvious reference point in a tale that blends Chaucer and Hugh Everett III. Coterie would not be at all out of place in a copy of Michael Moorcock’s classic journal New Worlds, and will be very much appreciated by anyone with a taste for this genre.

Coterie is available for Kindle

The Primordial Mother City - "Writer's Block" by Vitasta Raina

2011-07-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

“What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down”
– Jim Morrison

Cities are the future. Already, more than half the world’s population is urban-based and it is predicted that this figure will rise to almost 5 billion by 2030. Mumbai-base architect Vitasta Raina is well-placed to comment on the phenomenon. Writer’s Block casts a satirical eye on the fictional mega-city Chalet via a series of Joycean epiphanies centred on the alienated inhabitants of its eponymous literary ghetto.

The tale’s dystopianism evokes antecedents such as J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and M. John Harrison’s In Viriconium. The city is a physical reproduction of the society which creates it; class structures reified and set in stone. Civic planning has become the new totalitarianism as its Orwellian acronyms (helpfully listed at the start from “C-PUE” to “RUMP”) indicate.

Writer’s Block portrays a caste system based on material wealth; “Elegants”,”Indigents” and “Parasites” occupy distinct zones of the city, with the rich literally rising to the sky. Misguided attempts at encouraging social mobility have been frustrated by the mechanics of the property market as homes become multi-owned investments and status symbols.

As “Refined Indigents”, the “educated but not moneyed” inhabitants of the eponymous Writer’s Block play an interstitial role in the hierarchy. This affords them the dubious cachet of outsider status and an intellectually privileged but fundamentally powerless view of the city and her looming apocalypse; “We see the impending nightmare ready to explode. We see fat Chalet ready to erupt.”

Yet the human eruptions, when they arise, are minimal. Forced relocation of the Parasites to a floating ghetto leads to a night of rioting, but resistance is quickly crushed and life returns to normal. Fatalism is restored and polite indifference to injustice maintains the civilised facade. Quiescence is the human condition; as one character remarks of the Parasites “We know we’ll say “go” and ninety nine percent of them will”.

Yet Nemesis cannot be forestalled forever. It eventually takes the unexpected form of mechanical dysfunction, induced by the anthropomorphised entity of Chalet herself. Appalled by the concrete ravishment wrought on her by unrestrained development, the city takes revenge on the upper echelons of her human tormenters. It takes very little to disrupt and invert their fragile spatial hierarchy.

Writer’s Block is, at its heart, a tale of the Fall. A section near the centre gives voice to the megalopolis as she recounts her origins as a cluster of fishing villages, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the simple inhabitants; “I belonged to them as they did to me”. Imperialism imposed its grandeur and yet harmony was still maintained. Final loss of innocence came with post-war industrialisation; “They built and destroyed and built again and destroyed again, again and again and again till I was made of nothing except cold reinforced concrete.”

By offering a fantastic solution to the problems of the City, Raina seems to be implying that one in real life is not imminent. Her protagonists occupy a sub-section of society where imaginative withdrawal is an option. Rebellion takes the form of a self-parodying artistic movement; “My Avant-Garde Angst”. Disjointed in time and space, their idols are Western counter-cultural heroes of the 1960s; Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Robert E Heinlein and Philip K Dick. These are the children of globalisation, indicating perhaps that a simple return to the past is not a viable solution.

At the same time, however, one of the characters questions whether the past is actually over; “Even in the thickest of urban slums you see glimpses of rural villages… look around you and you will see how slowly the city is being taken over by ruralisation.” Could it be that the city is just a passing phase in the history of humanity?

The novella concludes with a magical-realist radio interview in which Chalet herself plays the role of chat-show host. After apocalyptic events, a bizarre form of normality returns. We become conscious of our status as passive consumers of reality. Through the media, the whole life becomes a staged event in which we all can step back and discuss our roles. And what is fiction but a medium?

With the globalised metropolis being the destination of the human race, it is the role of speculative fiction to explore the ramifications of this so we can create a liveable world. Writer’s Block provides no simplistic answers but invites us to explore a future (or could it be the present?) in which creativity is ghettoized and the mechanistic hierarchies of capitalism are reproduced in the physical environment. Showing that such deviations from the organic union of humankind and nature are unsustainable, it suggests that hope lies not in dreams of mass rebellion and resistance, but in the small details of everyday life and in the fabric of reality itself.

Writer’s Block is a short work about a vast subject. I left it feeling that there must be many more stories to be told about Chalet and her inhabitants, and hoping that one day Vitasta Raina might apply her pen to these. As it stands, it is a notable work by a first-time writer and very much recommended.

Ghosts of Christmas – Past and Present.

2011-01-16T05:58:00.000-08:00

The BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series originally extended from 1971 to 1978. Highly esteemed by supernatural fiction enthusiasts, it is mainly remembered for its adaptations of classic tales by M.R. James, although 1976’s atmospheric version of Dickens’ The Signalman is often considered to be the finest. In recent years, attempts have been made to revive the series, with new productions of James’s A View from a Hill and Number 13 appearing in 2005 and 2006. Whilst these are enjoyable exercises in television nostalgia, there is an air of pastiche about them which means that they fall short of the original series’ level of excellence.

This year it was revealed that the Ghost Story for Christmas was to be a remake of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Although Jonathan Miller’s 1968 Omnibus production of this pre-dated the series proper, it has joined it in popular memory as the first and most impressive of the BBC’s M.R. James adaptations. It is an extraordinary work that succeeds on many levels, and is a hard act to follow. I was thus mystified as to why the BBC should have chosen Whistle and I’ll Come to You rather than one of the many other tales by M.R. James and his Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries that have not yet been filmed.

Memories of pointless remakes such as The Haunting and The Wicker Man started to rise unbidden, provoking fears that were hardly laid to rest by an announcement that the remake was to be “a contemporary update, influenced by Japanese horror films and The Shining”, penned by Neil Cross. Oh dear. One bit of good news was that the star was to be John Hurt, surely an actor with sufficient gravitas to pull the pull the project through.

The issue of faithfulness to the original story is a complex one. Television and the written word and two separate media, and what works on the page is not necessarily going to be what’s best for the small screen. Jonathan Miller certainly didn’t take the path of slavish adaptation. However, although he was not afraid to make changes to the original, particularly in the area of characterization, he certainly took no liberties. His re-imagining of the story’s protagonist, Professor Parkin, as a bumbling old absent-minded don, played to perfection by Michael Hordern, was a stroke of genius.

Horden’s portrayal is a pleasure to watch in every frame. Here is a man fully at home with his own company and absorbed in his own mental processes to the extent that he has become somewhat disengaged with the rest of the world. As we observe his break at a desolate East Coast seaside resort, we become fully acquainted with the man and his habits. An amusing exchange with another hotel resident in which he applies linguistic logic to dismiss the notion of ghosts shows up Professor Parkin’s one big flaw; he is pleased to the point of smugness with his own arguments and formulations. In particular, he is delighted by his inversion of a famous quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in Heaven or Earth”.

Parkin’s faith in his academic superiority is threatened by the unaccountable events that take place after he discovers and blows and old whistle he discovers in an ancient cliff-top graveyard. Miller remains true to the story’s suggestion that the “ghost”, when it eventually appears, would not have had the power to physically harm its victim. The fear is not of violence or gore, but something far more powerful; the ease with which a logically constructed world-view established over decades of study and argument can be brought crashing down by a single anomalous experience. Jonathan Miller (no believer in the supernatural himself) has turned James’ comic-horrific tale of a conceited young don into a full-blown parable on intellectual hubris.

With this illustrious predecessor in mind, it was with some trepidation that I switched on the TV to view Neil Cross’s “contemporary retelling”. First impressions were not good; we are thrown head first into a scene not bearing the remotest resemblance to anything in the original story. The elderly Parkin (John Hurt) has been saddled by the screenwriter with a senile wife (Gemma Jones) and is shown depositing her into what can only be described as the care home from hell. Parkin (who we learn is a retired astronomer) appears to be a wealthy man, so why he has chosen to place his beloved spouse in this grim establishment, in which the inmates are sat in rows in high-backed chairs wearing identical white gowns, is not explained. To a critical viewer, however, the answer is obvious. This is not one of the quaintly observed social locales we might expect as a background to the chilling goings-on in a Ghost Story for Christmas; this is Generic Horror-Land. And thereby hangs the weakness of this production. James’ finely crafted tale has been hollowed out and used as the vehicle for another, different story entirely; a markedly inferior one. You wonder how this came about; presumably the piece needed the cachet of the original to reach production and attract a talent of John Hurt’s calibre. Surely, however, it can only suffer from comparison with the original?

John Hurt has, it must be said, a most impressive face. Deeply creased and furrowed, it ages him beyond his seventy years. He is made to star in a Samuel Beckett biopic and somebody should really get to work on this immediately. In Whistle and I’ll Come to You, however, the poor man is coasting. He has one direction, which is to look miserable, and he does this exceedingly well. Yet everything about this work is lifeless and depressing, with fifty-two minutes of it stretching out interminably.

Having left the catatonic wife at the Stephen King care home, in the hands of the patronising nurse who is on single-handed duty there, Parkin (in a rare piece of faithfulness-to-the-plot) makes his way to a seaside hotel. This establishment is equally short-staffed and, apart from one family, which packs up and leaves during his stay, Parkin is the sole resident. Jonathan Miller showed us exactly how Professor Parkin spends his solitary days by the seaside, conveying a fine sense of life of the hotel and the nature of his solitary rambling. By contrast, the 2010 version seems fractured and drawn out. The setting has been transferred for some reason from East Anglia to Thanet in Kent, so we are presented with chalk cliffs in place of flat sands and, most importantly, no groynes to act as hurdles in the ghostly pursuit along the beach. Continuity is poor, however, and we never get a clear idea of the landscape and how it stands in relation to the hotel. Cliffs appear first in one direction and then in another. We are never sure how far Parkin has walked or what time of day it is.

The two big scares are stolen from elsewhere. First of all, there is a fearsome, unexplained banging on the bedroom door while Parkin is trying to sleep. This scene is reminiscent of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, but that is rather a classy reference for this production. The pre-screening publicity suggests that this scene was intended to evoke memories of axe-wielding Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Unfortunately as Parkin cowers beneath the postcodes, the response is more likely to be “Why doesn’t he just open the bloody door?”

Scare no.2 (which sinks any pretence at subtlety the production may have had until now) is lifted direct from 1998 Japanese horror smash Ringu. Just like Sadako’s stylised ghost crawling from a TV screen, the wraith of Parkins’ senile wife crawls beneath the three-inch gap conveniently left for her beneath his bedroom door. Crawling up the bed, she screams manically “I’m here, I’m here!” into his startled face – a disruption which causes the poor old codger to expire on the spot. Given the idyllic loving relationship that we have been led to believe existed between the two, this occurrence is somewhat surprising. Is it supposed to be a manifestation of the mood changes medically associated with Alzheimer’s disease? Parkin has earlier expressed to the hotel manager his horror at witnessing his wife’s living body minus her personality. Presumably the idea is that, by appearing in the guise of a Japanese ghost, Mrs. Parkin is merely attempting to alert her husband to her continued existence. But wouldn’t a gentler, more loving reminder have sufficed? There is no law stating that ghost stories have to be about crude horror. This story could have concluded in a heartwarming manner, offering consolation to individuals and families afflicted by dementia.

The final scene contributes more confusion, leading many viewers on online forums to question what happened. The nurse at the rest home (yes, that nurse) glimpses Mrs. Parkin among the white-gowned upright-chair-sitters before glancing back to see she has disappeared, a fact she acknowledges with a wry grin. Obviously she has died and become a ghost, but why she appears in such a peaceful form to the nurse (who seems quite unfazed) after scaring her poor husband literally to death is a mystery, only explained by the reflection that this is just a clichéd conclusion to a generic plot.

The plot of M.R. James’s masterpiece has been mutilated to a ridiculous extent. Most bizarrely, some bright spark has decided not to have a whistle, rendering the title entirely meaningless. The only reference to one when Parkin sings the Burns song into his wife’s ear near the beginning, but the relevance of this is not explained and most viewers will probably have missed this anyway. Removing this key plot element has the sole effect of making the thing even more tedious and uneventful – the director clearly thinking that picture postcard views of the seaside are sufficient to retain our attention.

One of M.R. James’ strengths is the inexplicable nature of his apparitions. All that is known about the ghost (if that’s what it is) in Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you is that it is comes from far away and is connected to the Knights Templars, a mediaeval religious order associated with diabolism and forbidden practices. An air of antiquity and the arcane pervades his tales, infecting the cosy world of his protagonists with the miasma of ancient wrongs. By contrast, the 2010 BBC production adheres to modern Hollywood conventions. In a quote from 1999’s CGI-ridden version of The Haunting (the direst remake of all), “It’s all about family!” In other words, the Supernatural must play second fiddle to a tedious soap opera plot that attempts to put a “psychological” spin on everything that happens to make it “relevant to a modern audience”.

All in all, this was a tragically wasted opportunity. The ingredients for a top-quality production were there in terms of casting and cinematography, but it foundered on the rocks of a dumbed-down screenplay. Considering the rich tradition of British horror, it is difficult to see the relevance of referencing works such as Ringu. Presumably the intention was to be “with it” and fashionable, but the Japanese horror craze was ages ago now, probably when the people who produced this were still at university. This demonstrates the weakness of the whole thing; it was made by people with no sensitivity or feel for their source material, who clearly felt they could improve on the original. Given the story’s warning against hubris, this is ironic to the extreme.

A Portsmouth Ghost Story

2010-12-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

Runner-up in "The News" Christmas Ghost Story Competition, December 2010`

Portsmouth in December 1945 was a brave but war-ravaged city. Although Hitler’s bombs had destroyed buildings and blown apart bodies, he had never succeeded in breaking the proud naval port’s spirit. Now its people were getting on with rebuilding their lives.

These thoughts crossed my mind as I left Fratton station. I had not been back to Portsmouth since before the war, but I knew what to expect. Coming down from London, it wasn’t such a shock; we had all learned to live with bombsites. What made me nervous was learning of the human devastation. Portsmouth had suffered heavy casualties and there were bound to be friends I would never see again.

I had two hours to spare before my cousin Reg knocked off from his job at the dockyard. I was grateful to him for inviting me down to spend Christmas with him and his wife. With my parents moved away, he was my sole family connection with the city I had grown up in.

I decided to stop off in the Nell Gwynne for a beer. Halfway through a pint of Brickwood’s, I spotted a familiar face; Vic Voller, an old schoolmate.

Vic and his brother Vince had lived in Orchard Road. They were twins, but not identical and had very different personalities. Vic was down-to-earth, while Vince was a dreamer, full of strange ideas and interests.

One night after the pub he took a bunch of us ghost-hunting in Highland Road Cemetery. The only spirit we found was in the bottle of an old tramp propped up against a grave stone.

After twenty minutes football chat (Vic was never one to talk about himself), I was invited back for a cup of tea. Vic was still living in the same house, which had narrowly been missed early on in the Blitz.

I sat down in the tiny living room while Vic went to put the kettle on. There were no Christmas decorations and everything looked dusty. It seemed like the twins’ old mother had passed away during the war.

“I’ve remembered what I went out for; a bottle of milk!” Vic stuck his head around the door. “I’ll just nip round and get some – won’t be a minute.”

I reflected on how things had changed. Physically, Vic seemed much the same, but there was something different about him. Sadness. Perhaps it was the loss of his mother or something else he had experienced. The war left scars on everyone.

Lost in thought, I was startled to see a figure in the doorframe, standing in the passage. I hadn’t heard the front door open and it came as a jolt to see someone staring. Then I realised it wasn’t Vic, it was his brother Vince.

Vince must have been in the house all along, sleeping upstairs. This would explain why Vic hadn’t disturbed him when we came in. He didn’t look well, quite ashen in fact, but he smiled when he saw that I’d noticed him.

I had always got on well with Vince. He was easy to talk to, always keen to find out what I thought about his latest hare-brained theory.

“Hello Vince”, I said “It’s great to see you! How are things going?” Then, remembering our drunken antics together, I added “How’s the ghost-hunting?”

Despite his poorly appearance, Vince’s eyes lit up. “Oh you wouldn’t believe it, Geoff; I’ve found out incredible things! I was playing around before the war, but I know much more about the subject now.”

This wasn’t the response I had expected, but Vince was obviously keen to expand. “What have you been up to?” I asked.

“I’ve met people in touch with the Other Side”, he said, “Do you know about Helen Duncan?”

I suppressed a grin. Everyone had heard about Helen Duncan. A Spiritualist Medium from Scotland, she had been convicted in 1944 under Britain’s ancient Witchcraft Law.

Many argued that Mrs. Duncan had been unfairly persecuted. It was rumoured that the real reason she had been locked up was wartime security. At a séance in Portsmouth, she had been contacted by the spirit of a dead sailor from HMS Barham. The loss of this Portsmouth-based ship, with nearly 900 lives, had been an official secret at the time.

The authorities, it was claimed, were worried that a German spy might attend one of Mrs. Duncan’s séances and obtain classified information from the Spirit World.

From what I had heard, however, the true story was not so exciting.

“Oh yes”, I answered, “I know about Helen Duncan. One of my journalist friends covered her trial at the Old Bailey. But, you know, he was not impressed. He says she was arrested simply because the police were fed up with her taking money from the bereaved.

“You know, she had already been convicted of fraud in Scotland and exposed as a fake.”

I regretted those words instantly; I could see from his face that Vince was angry. “Well”, he hissed, “You can tell your friend he is wrong. Nell Duncan is a good woman. I was at the séance in Copnor and, trust me, I know she is genuine. Nell Duncan is no witch and she is certainly not a fraud!”

With this he turned around and left the doorway. I felt rotten for upsetting him. It seemed his belief in the after-life was something he was hanging on to. This is what suffering and loss did to people. How could I be so insensitive?

Just then the front door opened and Vic appeared, clutching a bottle of milk. I followed him through to the kitchen.

“I’m really sorry Vic”, I said, “I think I’ve upset your brother.”

A dark look entered Vic’s eyes, and his gaze went down to the kettle.

“Look, Geoff. I haven’t told you about Vince.”

“He’s not well, is he?” I asked gently.

Vic turned and lifted his eyes to meet mine.

“He’s dead, Geoff. He went down on the Barham in 1941”.

A New Robert E. Howard Manifesto

2010-10-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Mark Finn

I am a fan of Robert E. Howard, the Texas author who created a multitude of unique characters, wrote original and inventive fiction, defined the genre of epic fantasy as we understand it, and inspired me to become a professional writer. There are tens of thousands of other fans just like myself. As fans of Robert E. Howard and his works, we are interested in reading more about our favorite author. We are interested in sharing and exchanging new ideas about his life and work, and we actively seek out these new ideas online, in print, and elsewhere.

What we do not want to see are semi-uninformed retreads of the same discussions that were in vogue circa 1984. The field of Howard Studies is alive and well, with new discoveries and voices appearing all the time. Interest in the author is high and remains so. If you have a thought or an opinion, even a controversial or untested one, and want to share it with the world at large, we encourage that you do so.

We expect responsibility and accountability on your part. We are not interested in your grand pronouncement on a subject which has yet to be settled by people who have spent decades studying the issue at hand. We expect you to do your homework. There are a number of websites and literally stacks of new books that likely cover or answer most of your questions regarding Robert E. Howard. To not utilize those sources when doing your research smacks of willful ignorance and will not be tolerated by the fans of Robert E. Howard.

If you want to write a review about how much you didn't like Kull: Exile of Atlantis, have at it. Take it apart for any and all textual reasons you choose to invoke. We may not agree because Howard's work isn't for everyone, and we understand that. But the minute you start bringing Robert E. Howard's life story into your Kull review, it will garner a much more careful reading, and if you don't have your facts straight, or your opinions backed up by same, then we will call you on it.

The online Robert E. Howard fanbase calls itself the "Shield Wall." Some writers who have been on the business end of the Shield Wall's attacks have accused us of being bullies and overly-obsessed for the protective stance we take.

While it is not our intention to bully anyone, and while we may get a little carried away on occasion, let me be very clear here as to why this is so: Robert E. Howard has not had a voice for 75 years now. For four decades after his death, he had very few advocates who would defend him against the libel and slander of those who stood to profit from his work. He has been misunderstood and misrepresented for years. The Shield Wall's goal has been to stop in its entirety the kind of character assassination employed by L. Sprague de Camp and others who would adopt his methodology.

Consider this a challenge to survey the amount of work that has been done in Howard Studies in the last ten years alone and then try to come up with your own take on a topic or angle of discussion that has not been beaten to death. Do not make the mistake that so many others have made; just because Robert E. Howard isn't considered a "classic" author by the literary establishment that you can beat his literary reputation (or his personal life) like a rented mule and you will not get kicked for your efforts.

We expect you to accord Robert E. Howard the same respect as any other 20^th century American author with continued and perennial popularity. No more back handed compliments. No more snide insinuations. No more rampant and irresponsible speculation with no basis of fact or evidence to bolster it. And for God's Sake, no more "oedipal complex" crap, either. Those theories are thirty years out of date, and we are sick and tired of seeing it. Give us something new, or keep your parochial and backwards thinking to yourself.

Mark Finn
Author of Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard
And Commander of the Texas Shield Wall

“Film Noir” (2007)

2010-06-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

I came across this dvd in the bargain bin at Morrisons. From the title and the description on the box, I was expecting a full-on animated tribute to the whole film noir genre. However, this isn't really what the movie's trying to do, although it does contain enough noir elements to get away with the title. Purists will find plenty to carp about, as the modern setting alone will be enough to alienate those who believe that a true film noir must be set in the 1940s and 1950s. Others will consider that the filmmakers have succeeded in their aim of creating a solid low budget 'B' movie which draws inspiration from the past. From its black and white format to its plot and characterisation, “Film Noir” lives up to its name, although it also has roots in the action movie genre. Although the two genres are not necessarily incompatible, the action movie aspect takes over at times and ruins the noir atmosphere that is really the movie’s greatest strength.

Animation-wise, “Film Noir” was never going to give “Sin City” a run for its money, but the work of its Belgrade-based crew is sufficient to carry the plot and convey a distinctive image. 2D style figures are superimposed on more realistic backgrounds, many of which were filmed on site in L.A., a semi-ironic nod to the back-projections often used in 1940s and 1950s movies during car scenes. As may be expected, rain pours down windscreens as cars speed down the long lonely freeways and it is generally night-time with neon signs flashing. Considering that they are drawings, the shady and troubled women who throw themselves at the hero / anti-hero at every opportunity are surprisingly hot and there are several sleazy sex scenes. Overall, however, you never stop being conscious of watching an animation, and the low-budget effects often give a game-like impression, especially when there are crashing vehicles and explosions.

The unlikely plot is equally cartoon-like and, in fact, probably wouldn’t work in a live-action movie. The theme is self-discovery, as an amnesiac man who finds himself regaining consciousness next to a murdered policeman beneath the famous Hollywood sign tries to piece together his past. The more he finds out, the less he likes himself, although twists abound in a manner I won’t disclose here. Identity appears to be a big issue for the movie’s L.A. based Serbian director, who uses the one-off pseudonym of “D. Jud Jones” for the project and claims to reject the concept of a career. In true noir style, most of the characters suffer from self-hatred and can be corrupted by money from a sinister “Mr. Big” who represents the cruel and perverted heart of the system.

Throughout the movie, the protagonist is threatened by a deadly gang of assassins who turn up unexpectedly in a machine-gun blazing helicopter. In most cases, no explanation is given as to how they know his whereabouts or which vehicle he is travelling in. I found myself wishing that more imagination had been applied to these attacks – perhaps a more traditionally noir mode of transport such as a train or a boat journey could have been incorporated into the story? It is at these points that the film seems to lose its bearings.

Just as many of the original directors who crafted the classic films noir of the 1940s and 1950s had arrived as refugees from Nazi Germany to present an outsider’s view of the States, the creative team behind “Film Noir” comes from part of Europe with a difficult recent history; the former Yugoslavia, with production taking place via the Internet between L.A. and Belgrade. The key difference is, of course, that the original film noir was a genre invented in retrospect by French critics and intellectuals who detected stylistic and thematic similarities in many of the Hollywood products of the time and came up with the theory to explain this. Modern noir (“neo-noir”), by way of contrast, is a self-conscious attempt to replicate these elements in a contemporary setting. The impetus behind “Film Noir” is a playful one, with the director attempting to employ available resources, including a spare team of animators and some pre-existing plot ideas, to an entertaining effect. (In the interview included as an extra on the dvd, he explains that he had never even thought about making an animation until he learnt about the team of former animators employed by one of his friends in a web-design business left high and dry by the Internet bubble).

One of the best things about movie is its score, composed by the multi-talented Mark Keller, who also voices the main character. Jazz-based, it also features a couple of excellent song compositions that are soul / blues pastiches and show Mr. Keller to have a voice comparable to Tom Waits’. (It is interesting to note, by the way, how few of the original films noir actually had jazz soundtracks, whereas the sound of a sleazy sax has become de rigueur in neo-noir.)

So overall, “Film Noir” is definitely worth a peak, as indeed are the bargain bins at Morrisons (my finest-ever haul from which was Stuart Gordon’s sublime Lovecraft adaptation "Dagon").

Portsmouth’s Carbuncle: The Tricorn Tragedy

2010-05-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

(Originally published in Prototype X 2, 2006)

The Tricorn is no more. Finally levelled, its absence worries like a pulled tooth. In place of its concrete tiers and towers, the flatness of a temporary carpark yawns between the red brick Gothic of haunted St Agatha's (cut free at last from the Dockyard and with God reinstalled, but still marooned from its age and its surroundings) and the ripped backside of Cascades, Portsmouth's very own air-conditioned nightmare. Driving past this desolation, we see the manifestation of urban folly and bureaucratic indecision. Like the Saturday afternoon achievements of Pompey (a deep-seated love of football is compulsory in Portsmouth), this is supposed to make us proud. "Tricorn Down - Portsmouth Up!" was the official slogan displayed Maoist-style by the Tricorn as it awaited its own execution.

The Tricorn, of course, was never intended to provoke indifference. Designed by Rodney Gordon of the modish Owen Luder Partnership, it was a product of the school of architecture which had acquired the name 'Brutalism' from the French term for the material employed; béton brut or rough concrete. Strong reactions were aroused right from its opening in 1966, when the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth reportedly admitted "It looks horrible from the outside..." The following year, the Tricorn won the Civic Trust Award in recognition of its "exciting visual composition". In 1968, it was voted “the fourth ugliest building in Britain”…

Sections of the ‘quality’ press, however, were ecstatic in their enthusiasm. The Sunday Times applauded "an exotic essay in reinforced concrete, using towers, pyramids and minarets to give an eastern feel - the character of the Casbah", whilst Ian Nairn in The Observer gushed "At last there is something to shout about in Portsmouth. Britain's primary naval port has a dreary record of post-war buildings; in fact, nothing grand has gone up there since the 1890s. The new Tricorn development designed by Owen Luder will change all that. It is in Charlotte Street, part of the main shopping centre, and it provided the full developer's repertoire: shops, supermarket, rooftop carparking, a tower carpark as well, flats, two pubs and a wholesale market. This is in fact a complete town ... every student's dream made visible; spiral staircases, heroically modelled facades, writhing compositions of cross-overs and pass-unders. Everything is going on at once on about six different levels."

Picking up the 'Casbah' theme (oddly appropriate, given the “star and crescent” of the Portsmouth city arms, said to have been brought back from Palestine by the crusading King Richard the Lionheart), architectural historian David Lloyd had this to say about it in 1972; "In form it is a romantic piece of 'concrete sculpture' on a huge scale ... The shape of the Tricorn as seen from the road to the north-west suggests allusions both to an Arabic city and to an oil refinery, expressed in the medium of concrete. The effects of the horizontal 'trays' of car parking space separated by dark space are dramatically exploited as are the concrete driveways up the round towers at the angles. The main building is massively chunky in form, and the irregular skyline is punctuated by round-topped turrets." Some years later he remarked "If only the building were painted in white ... its wonderful sculptural form would be even more emphasised."

This brings us to the Tricorn's greatest shortcoming; concrete decay. Its Space Age aspirations were fatally undermined by the encroaching ugliness of its physical fabric. It gave ammunition to the building’s enemies and caused resentment to a general public ignorant of the advanced science of concrete restoration. Only poetic souls, attuned to the interplay between Man and Nature, could gain lugubrious sustenance from the stained grey walls and stalactites. For most people, the tabloid tag "ugliest building in Britain" quickly gained resonance.

There were other problems as well. For a start, the structure was not completed. The “hanging gardens” of greenery envisaged for the upper storeys were never planted, lighting and street furniture were not installed, and the social housing built into the complex experienced problems with leaking. The overall design presented a challenge; self-contained and inward-looking, despite its high-profile visibility from the road, the Casbah-like Tricorn insulated itself from the rest of the city centre. A wise move, some might say, but this did nothing to endear it to Portsmouth’s town planners, who wanted a more integrated shopping area. Most worryingly, the complex failed to attract a “big-name” store such as Marks and Spencers. The concrete sculpture, however audacious, appeared to be incapable of shifting sufficient units. Murmurings about the Tricorn’s future began at an early stage, but it was widely believed that it would be too difficult and expensive to knock down; the pre-stressed concrete would explode catastrophically when struck by a demolition ball. Under-investment and neglect followed. Portsmouth was stuck with Luder’s decaying citadel; a grim relic of the ‘brutalist’ past.

Built in a socially optimistic era, the Tricorn’s warren of entrances soon became a lurking ground for muggers and vandals and a haven for late night pissers. The smell of urine blended with that of rotten vegetables from the market to create an aesthetic experience that was quintessentially Portsmouth. Stalls and barrows from the Charlotte Street market crept under the concrete to create a scene that crossed Charles Dickens with J G Ballard. To the shopper seeking respite from corporate cloning, this was the joy of the Tricorn; its maligned structure sheltered a community of independent traders. From the clothes stalls downstairs in ‘Charlotte’s Superstore’ to the top floor, which hosted at one stage a secondhand paperback shop, a comic shop, a secondhand record shop, a witchcraft shop, a retro-clothing store and a classic ‘greasy spoon’. There was not a ‘High Street’ name in sight (although the Tricorn had once been the home of Richard Branson’s very first Virgin record store). All these businesses have now been ethnically cleansed, having no place in the portion-controlled paradise envisaged by Portsmouth City Council. Gone too is Basin’s Night Club, which once reverberated to the likes of the Pink Fairies and Robert Calvert.

Ultimately, the Tricorn didn’t stand a chance. Its future had become the city’s past. In 1984, Charles Windsor made his notorious “carbuncle” speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, speaking up for “‘ordinary’ people (who) need not be made to feel guilty or ignorant if their natural preference is for the more ‘traditional’ designs”. He soon turned his royal sights on Portsmouth’s ‘carbuncle’, describing it as “a mildewed lump of elephant droppings”. Modernist eyesores should be swept away from his forelock-tugging Utopia. Thatcher’s Britain looked back to the future, dreaming of a Merchant Ivory world of country houses and rose-tangled gardens. All evil, from teenage sex to striking binmen, was blamed on the left-wing ‘60s. Bundled into this demonology, radical architects were exposed as contemptuous technocrats engaged in social engineering; crypto-Stalinist manipulators of public space.

Yet still the Tricorn remained, implacably concrete and Portsmouth to the core (one admirer hymned the “poignant relevance” of “its tough macho quality”). Although older residents had grounds for viewing it as an alien interloper, for those born in its own decade it was as much a fact of life as the seagulls overhead and the diesel fumes belched by buses. In its decay, it captured the zeitgeist of a city past its prime. In the eyes of the superstitious, it was held responsible for all the city’s ills and worthy of a witch hunt. Portsmouth South MP Mike Hancock led the campaign for its destruction, hissing that “it has dragged the economy down for years”. Insanity formed a sub-plot. The manager of the Tricorn’s pet shop went on a rampage in Sainsbury’s, hurling bottles of single malt whisky at terrified shoppers until the police arrived to section him. Just another life, caught up in the march of progress.

Even boarded up and in a semi-derelict condition (and it was kept in this condition for ten years), the Tricorn retained its defenders. The serious-minded patricians of the Portsmouth Society conducted a campaign to have it listed, something which should, of course, have occurred without question. Ambitious plans were commissioned to rejuvenate and remodel the building, seeking to resolve some of its problems and provide Portsmouth with much needed housing and siting a new “winter garden” in place of the failed department store. Optimistically, the Society explained “We have all noticed that public perception of what is beautiful or ugly works on the pendulum principle and reaches its nadir just before a fresh and positive evaluation.” In the Tricorn’s case, however, the pendulum had reached the point of no return.

The end was long and protracted. Like an inmate on Death Row, the Tricorn clung to existence, in the vain hope that its uniqueness would overcome commercial considerations and be recognised by the Heritage Minister. In its sunken state, it became a magnet for art students and an endless source of controversy. ‘Middle England’ jumped in for the kill and Luder’s once-lauded masterpiece was voted “ugliest building in the UK” in a poll of Radio 4’s Today Programme listeners, apparently blind to the numberless out-of-town retail hulks scarring Britain’s landscape. The principle of the Tricorn’s architect Rodney Gordon was working in reverse; “If people don’t notice it, it’s not architecture”. Imagination scorned, everyday ghastliness and mediocity could be accepted without question. Safely superior, the presenters guffawed. As always, they were right. How could anyone think differently to their enlightened followers?

A group of would-be Lettristes calling themselves ‘Proles for Modernism’ attempted to engineer a situation by insinuating themselves into plans to hold a ‘Tricorn Festival’ to mark the building’s demise. Issuing homemade psychogeographic tracts about a dubious “Tricorn Ley Line”, they declared the failed shopping centre to be “a demotic symbol of resistance - it contradicts the role to which it’s assigned”. Foaming with mock rage, they vowed to “spit on ‘Prince’ Charles, and on the scum who execute his wishes.” All of this alarmed Taylor Woodrow, the Tricorn’s original builders, now playing the role of demolition contractors, who pulled the plugs and withdrew permission for the festival. The official reason was that they suspected a graffiti spree. In view of the greater vandalism to come, the irony was deadly.

The death sentence was finally announced in March 2004. Mike Hancock lost no time to engage in some populist gloating: “With new developments like Gunwharf Quays, the Kings Theatre saved and now the Tricorn coming down, “Pompey’s on the up.”” Owen Luder defended his creation to the end: "My problem now is that there is a lynch mob - the 'tear it down' lot - who have not given any thought to what the Tricorn was or what it could be. As it is, all they are going to do is knock it down and have a surface level car park, which is where I started in 1961. Portsmouth will regret having demolished the Tricorn in the long term."

At 11.00am on 24.03.04, Mr. Stuart Hamilton, Portsmouth resident and lucky winner of a Council competition, ceremonially commenced demolition to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a sarcastic reference to Ian Nairn’s 1960s Observer article in which the award-winning edifice was described as "an orchestration in reinforced concrete that is the equivalent of the 1812 overture". Defeated and solemn, members of the Portsmouth Society and other Tricorn supporters lined up in the crowd to witness the crass spectacle.

The campaign to eradicate the architectural heritage of the 1960s continues apace. Next on the death list is Luder’s second Brutalist classic, the Gateshead multi-storey car park which acquired iconic status due to its appearance in the classic British gangster film ‘Get Carter’. Meanwhile, Portsmouth has a new Middle-Eastern inspired architectural emblem in the shape of the ‘Spinnaker Tower’, a half-sized replica of Dubai’s Burj-al-Arab hotel overlooking the harbour. Originally meant to be the centerpiece of Portsmouth’s Millennium celebrations, the scandal-ridden project was finally completed in October 2005 at a cost of £35.6m. £11.1m. of this, contrary to promises given at the outset, was funded by taxpayers through Portsmouth City Council. The building is constructed from concrete.

HUNT: Beyond the Frozen Fire

2010-05-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

Gabriel Hunt is a new cycle of pulp paperbacks created by Charles Ardai, editor of the Hard Case Crime series. It is aimed at reviving the “two-fisted” genre of men’s adventure tales.

The gimmick of the series is that the hero's name appears on the cover of each book as though he were the chronicler of his own extravagant exploits. It is only on the title page that the name of the true author appears; "as told to ...". As the stories are narrated in the third person, this "ghost-writer" concept isn't exactly followed through, but it does give the books a very distinct brand identity, aided and abetted by the classic pulp artwork of Glen Orbik. It is clearly hoped that Hunt himself will become a strong enough draw to sell succeeding volumes.

It didn't really work that way for me however, as I purchased this novel primarily because it was penned by Hard Case's first female writer, Christa Faust, who shot to fame with the noir thriller Money Shot, in which she grippingly explored the nastier reaches of the porn industry. Beyond the Frozen Fire is a far lighter piece of work which shows another dimension of her talents.

Something of a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond, Gabriel Hunt is the sort of fantasy figure most men would secretly love to be, and most heterosexual women would like to get more closely acquainted with. Backed by the multi-million dollar resources of the Hunt Foundation, administered by his younger brother Michael, he has the onerous job of roving the world in search of missing ancient artefacts, an activity which necessarily seems to involve sexual entanglements with a wide variety of alluring and dangerous women.

I haven't read any of its predecessors, but my guess is that Beyond the Frozen Fire raises the bar in terms of exotic locales and outré happenings. To set the scene, it kicks off with a short adventure set in Eastern Europe, in which Hunt seeks to retrieve a priceless Cossack knife from a beautiful but treacherous female archaeologist. This short story within a novel is all that is needed to introduce the protagonist to newbies like myself and gets things off to a rollicking start.

The story proper is set off by the arrival on the scene of "a tall, auburn-haired beauty" who introduces herself as one Velda Silver. She is the daughter of a distinguished scientist who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances from a research station at the South Pole. Hunt quickly agrees to help her find her missing father and sets about assembling an expedition.

One of Ms. Faust's talents is the creation of interesting supporting characters and this is given full reign here. Sexual tension is introduced by the inclusion of one of Hunt's old flames, a tomboyish Brazilian mechanic named Rue Aparecido. It doesn't take long, however, for a liaison with the passionate Velda to take place; "her fierce, urgent heat threatening to melt through the polar ice beneath them."

It would be unfair to divulge too much of the ensuing plot, which is pure pulp hokum of the very best kind. Suffice to say it revolves around a “hollow earth” encounter with a lost tribe of Aryan Amazons. Close shaves and finger’s breadth escapes abound, including one memorable incident in which Hunt finds himself tied up by the Queen of the Amazons in a manner that is perhaps not surprising from a writer who lists “rope bondage” among her personal interests!

All this well-paced action is spiced with lashings of innuendo and lively banter between the characters. There is absolutely no pretence at profundity and the novel aspires to be nothing more than a light-hearted piece of entertainment. As such, it is ideal escapist reading for these troubled times, and one can only hope that Charles Ardai’s hope of sparking a pulp revival comes to fruition.

The only criticism I could make concerns the cover, which illustrates the East European prequel. I am a great admirer of Glen Orbik’s work, but this is a bit disappointing. The foreground figure seems too dark and takes up too much space for my liking, and the perspective is very confusing. Above all, it would have been nice to have a depiction of the blonde woman warriors who figure so large in the story (“dressed, if you can call it that, in scraps of black-and-tan-striped fur …”). However, it seems that Ardai’s modus operandi was to have Orbik produce the pictures first, and then distribute them to the authors for inspiration.

I shall certainly be seeking out more episodes of Gabriel Hunt's adventures. What seems most promising is that the individual writers are allowed to keep their own voice; Beyond the Frozen Fire is unmistakably a Christa Faust novel, no matter what name is written on the front.

A further Faustian treat is due early next year with Choke Hold, in which Angel Dare, the superbly characterised ex-porn star heroine of Money Shot, returns for another stab at society’s dark underbelly. Sporting a gorgeous Orbik cover, this is bound to sell in stacks. With a movie of Money Shot also in preparation, things seem to be on the up and up for the writer dubbed by Richard Prather “the ‘First Lady’ of Hard Case Crime”.

Attack of the Killer Earthworms

2010-05-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

“God, when I think I used to pick them up as bait for fishing when I was a kid. Never again!”

In the pulp world of the mid ‘70s to early ‘80s, Nature was revolting. All manner of creatures had developed homicidal, if not genocidal, tendencies and were turning against their human overlords.

The first stirrings of this uprising had actually taken place way back in 1917 with the publication of Arthur Machen’s novella The Terror. As a committed Christian and former member of the Golden Dawn, Machen offered an esoteric explanation for the “great revolt of the beasts”, interpreting it as a response to Man’s spiritual abdication during the horrors of the Great War;

“He has declared, again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign… If he were not king he was a sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.”

The story ends with a warning; “They have risen once – they may rise again.” How true that was to prove!

Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds, set in a bleak Cornish location, offered no explanation for the behaviour of its feathered antagonists, although its year of publication (1952) led some to read it as a Cold War allegory. Two years later, the science fiction movie Them exploited a related anxiety; the effects on nature of the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons. Low tech special effects were skillfully employed to depict a colony of giant ants, genetically mutated by radiation from the New Mexico tests and breeding in the storm drains beneath L.A. Much suspense is generated from the police investigation into mysterious deaths caused by the ants, which do not themselves appear in the movie for quite some time.

Hitchcock’s movie of The Birds (1963) transferred the action to a Californian location and added a screwball romantic plot. It was inspired by an actual incident which jogged the director’s memory of the option he had purchased on du Maurier’s story. A Santa Cruz newspaper had reported a bird attack in which, possibly as the result of seafood poisoning, a flock of seagulls had shattered windows and flown into streetlights, leaving dead birds littering the streets. The adaptation, with its screenplay by Evan Hunter (more widely known for his crime writing as Ed McBain!), did not find favour with du Maurier herself, but was a great critical success.

The “revolt of the beasts” really entered the world of the pulp British paperback in 1974, with the publication of James Herbert’s notorious debut “The Rats”. The novel recounts with gusto attacks by giant rats in a London still pockmarked by bombsites, its unbridled gore and grimly realistic setting making it an instant bestseller and a landmark in the horror genre. The floodgates were open. No creature was too small and innocuous, too cute or too fluffy for a starring role in a pulp horror novel as publishers rushed to cash in on Herbert’s success.

Most notably, Guy N. Smith's Crabs series maintained just the right blend of sex, gore and excitement. Smith conveyed the authentic feeling of a small community under threat in his evocation of the Welsh seaside resort of Barmouth, but his main talent lay in keeping his tone just the right side of tongue-in-cheek in describing the villainous over-sized crustaceans, which became more ludicrously indestructible with each sequel. Who, after reading Night of the Crabs, could read those ghastly syllables “clickety-click” without a shudder (or at least a chuckle)? The Crabs series extended to six volumes and maintains a cult following to this day. (A private amusement of mine is to enquire politely “Do you have Crabs on the Rampage?” when visiting particularly staid secondhand bookshops.)

The Morgow Rises (1982) was penned by Peter Tremayne, the pseudonym of respected academic historian and biographer Peter Berresford Ellis. Engaging in some literary legerdemain, Tremayne swaps genres half way through the book, leading us to believe at first that we are reading one of his trademark Celtic supernatural tales. In fact, it even seems possible that he may have adapted an existing text to the cookie-cutter “Nature runs wild” formula demanded by the publisher.

In the finely realised setting of a Cornish fishing village, we are faced with a mad old witch, a family curse and an intriguing slice of Celtic legendry as the attractive heroine, Claire Penvose, arrives to visit her retired mining engineer uncle, Henry “Happy” Penvose, on his birthday, only to find him missing in the corridors of a disused tin mine called Wheal Tom he is hoping to reopen. His disappearance appears to be connected to an ancient prophecy concerning the return of a monstrous creature;

"Beware when the Morgow rises,
Lament for the living,
Lament for the Unborn.
All things end!"

Meanwhile, local fishing craft are being destroyed and threatened by a mysterious whirlpool at sea and sightings are made of “a black, rubbery thing, something like a gigantic slug”. Reporters and other outsiders converge on the village as news of these happenings spreads.

So far, so good, until we learn the real secret of Wheal Tom. The mine should not have been sold by the Government to “Happy” Penvose (who has by now, met a grisly end in its tunnels) at all, and had only been doe so as a result of “bureaucratic error”. It should really be “a strictly prohibited zone” due to its use as a store for radioactive waste (page 100). Readers familiar with Them and its countless imitators will of course have guessed the rest of the plot by now, but have to wait a further 55 pages for an identification of the Morgow from a Government scientist;

“Lambert cast a nervous glance towards the group of angry press reporters.
‘Strictly between ourselves … I believe that the radiation attacked the most primitive cell forms – chaetopoda – earthworms or marine worms, causing a disruption in their growth.’
Neville stared at the man’s calm scientific assessment.”

Scientific indeed. Note the way in which “marine worms” are needed to explain why attacks are taking place at sea as well as on land, although no concessions are made to the biology or habits in the working out of this tale. (In fact, in a couple of places the creatures are referred to as “eels”, leading to a suspicion that Tremayne may have changed his mind at some point).

After munching their way through various characters including the local witch (who goes out to entreat with the Morgow); a “male chauvinist” reporter; an adulterous ecologist and his “well proportioned” secretary (“but she felt her bottom was perhaps too broad and her breasts too full” – it is her demise that is so pleasingly illustrated on the cover) and most of the crew of a coastal shipping vessel, the worms are eventually, and somewhat perfunctorily, dispatched by the RAF, armed with high explosives and napalm bombs;

“Being worms they have no central nervous system, so no bullets harm them. You all know what happens if you slice through a worm with a garden spade. The two halves can wriggle away!”

Following an obligatory homily about the dangers of messing with nature, the novel ends with the suggestion that one of the creatures has escaped, making room for a sequel, although none was ever written. Nor is it likely to be,

Tremayne is mining a vein of literary gold nowadays as the creator of Sister Fidelma, a 7^th Century Irish nun whose “whodunnit” style adventures have attracted a huge following, organised into the International Sister Fidelma Society. He shouldn’t be judged too harshly on “The Morgow Rises”, after all it’s an entertaining and amusing read that, despite its ridiculous premise and clichéd conclusion, does manage some moments of tension and terror.

“The Wicker Man” Rises From the Ashes

2010-05-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Featuring the ritual burning of a Wicker Man, the Beltaine Festival at Butser Ancient Farm is an annual fundraising event “for entertainment purposes only”. Nevertheless, it has attracted much patronage from local neo-Pagans; a point tacitly welcomed by the organisers, who are now attempting to sell “souvenir” bags of ash from last year’s conflagration at an inflated price, following an approach by someone who wished to use some in a ritual (although a Wiccan friend assures me that only the current year’s ash would be efficacious for this purpose).

As a fan of British horror, the event has always been inseparably linked in my mind to the classic 1973 movie The Wicker Man, starring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. As the archaeologist Richard Sermon has noted,* the Festival’s “association of modern folk traditions with ancient Paganism, May Day with Beltane, and of course the Wicker Man itself” blends together many of the elements that formed such a potent mix on screen.

Whilst in previous years this link with the film has been unconscious, perhaps even coincidental (when I once gave a friend of mine who volunteers at the Farm a copy of the dvd, she told me that neither she, nor the man who constructs the Wicker Man, had ever seen it before), this year it was conscious and explicit as a tribute to Edward Woodward, who sadly died on November 16^th last year. A further bonus this year was that the Saturday on which the Festival took place actually fell on May Day itself.

The centrepiece of the Festival is, of course, the Wicker Man itself, which this year was constructed as a smaller, somewhat wonky version of the one in the film. This made it a distinct improvement on last year’s, which was controversially immolated clutching an oversized effigy of Shaun the Sheep, much to the distress of the Pagans and (one must assume) any small children present.

For an additional fee, festival-goers over the age of 16(!) were able to climb into the wicker man’s central cavity for a Sergeant Howie’s eye view of the proceedings; fortunately free from the sensation of being crapped on by goats and chickens which had helped make Edward Woodward’s experience during filming so unnervingly authentic.

The Festival’s peripheral events (the gates opened at 4.30pm) were an array of British eccentricity. On the main stage, shamanic-themed belly dancers (including a cross-dresser!) wriggled away to ethnic sounds rendered Industrial by the appalling sound system, alternating with an Irish folk band. At the same time, a troupe of determined Morris dancers and some motley-clad, black-faced mummers cavorted among the mud and thatch roundhouses. There were falconry displays, drumming workshops, forest craft demonstrations, Iron Age food-tasting and consultations with an herbalist. The beer tent was drained dry of real ale and local cider long before its closing time.

Around 9pm, a procession was formed to march down to the Wicker Man. Among the crowd, high priestesses could be spotted assembling their covens. When everyone reached the field, an incongruous church fete note was added to the proceedings in the form of a raffle to determine who among the ticket-holders should be privileged to light the flames.

The Wicker Man was, of course, by this stage empty of bodies and, sadly, the crowd appeared to be ignorant of the words to the ancient song “Sumer Is Icumen In” used with such effect in Paul Giovanni’s movie soundtrack. Instead, many spectators chose to carry out the 21^st Century ritual of holding aloft camera phones to record the primeval event.

Despite the Festival’s claim to be an historical reenactment, whether a Wicker Man was ever in actual fact burnt before the film was made in 1972 is open to question. Evidence that the Druids sacrificed condemned criminals and other victims by burning them alive in an anthropomorphically shaped wicker construction comes solely from the pen of Julius Caesar, so may just be Roman propaganda.

Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s screenplay has been criticised for its over-reliance on discredited works on folklore and anthropology such as, most notably, Sir J.G. Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”.** But this is missing the point; as Lord Summerisle explains to Sergeant Howie, the island’s Pagan society is a recreation introduced by his great-grandfather, not a genuine folk-survival. So it is with the folk traditions and neo-Paganism showcased at Butser. The Ancient Farm itself is a sober-minded archaeological experiment which lets its hair down once a year and indulges in some money-spinning flights of fantasy.

It is impossible not to wonder, however, exactly how some of the more serious Pagans queuing up at the vege-burger stall reconcile their participation in the reconstruction of such a bloody and murderous ritual with the words of the modern-day Wiccan Rede: “An it harm none do what ye will”.

For lovers of weirdness, the event is highly recommended. Watching the giant human effigy being consumed by flames does actually provoke some deep feelings that could easily be interpreted as spiritual. It is the same emotional charge that powers the film, turning Shaffer’s anti-religious and somewhat cerebral script into an addictive experience for many of its viewers.

* "The Wicker Man, May Day and the Reinvention of Beltane" Richard Sermon

** "The Folklore Fallacy: A folkloritic / filmic perspective on The Wicker Man" Mikel J. Koven

- both in "The Quest for the Wicker Man".

"The Witch of Prague and Other Stories"

2010-04-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to “The Witch of Prague and other Stories” (a volume in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series) David Stuart Davies presents us with a mystery:

“During his lifetime Francis Marion Crawford (1854 - 1909) … [was] one of the most popular and commercially successful authors of his day. Yet strangely, quite soon after his death … [he] became a forgotten writer and there seems to be no logical reason for the evaporation of interest in this skilled author.”

Well, after working my way through the 300 page novel that forms the centrepiece of this collection, I feel I am on my way to solving this mystery.

Despite the originality of its conception, some interesting characterisation and an atmospheric, if sketchily realised, setting, the “classic of occult fiction” (as Dennis Wheatley, who presented a previous paperback edition in 1974, dubbed it) has several fatal flaws. Tedious purple passages full of rambling conjecture slow the action to the pace of a charnel worm and Crawford’s over-reliance on conventional plot contrivances such as unlikely coincidences and “love at first sight” undermine “the suspension of disbelief”, bogging the novel down in clichés. Overall, the modern reader is likely to feel crushed by the dead weight of Victorian Romanticism.

This is a pity, because at root, “The Witch of Prague” is an intriguing attempt at speculative fiction, largely inspired by the new science of hypnotism. In his exploration of this topic, Crawford rejects the “animal magnetism” theories of Mesmer and adopts an explanation based on “moral” influence. His central character, the beautiful but capricious Unorna, possesses hypnotic powers that she (and others) can’t help attributing to “superstitious” causes, hence her reputation as “the witch”.

Materialistic and reductionist science is caricatured in the bizarre figure of Keyork Arabian, an aged dwarf whose obsession with extending his own life leads to grotesque experiments with both living and dead subjects. The description of his Frankenstein-like chamber of horrors, full of dismembered remains and semi-revivified specimens, provides one of the most straightforwardly Gothic and enjoyable sections of the novel:

“Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal – as cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan lady, decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly still…”

Arabian’s self-centred quest for physical immortality throws him into an alliance of convenience with Unorna, whose skills are essential for his most sinister project; maintaining a centenarian in a state of hypnotic suspended animation pending rejuvenation via non-consensual blood transfusions from her young Jewish suitor, Israel Kafka (also kept hypnotised throughout the week-long procedure).

The main story is driven by Unorna’s abuse of her powers in advancing her unrequited passion for the mysterious, unnamed “Wanderer”. He in turn is single-mindedly engaged in tracking down his own long-lost love, Beatrice, in pursuit of whom he has travelled the globe before sighting her in a Prague church. Unorna’s egocentric ways (exacerbated by Arabian’s amoral tuition) eventually lead her to a state of moral crisis which precipitates the novel’s melodramatic conclusion.

A subplot concerns the fate of Israel Kafka, whose one-sided adoration of Unorna ironically mirrors her own predicament. Unfortunately, the novel’s portrayal of Prague’s Jewish community falls back on anti-Semitic stereotypes that still find favour among Far-Right and “Anti-Zionist” conspiracy theorists;

“…Israel sits, as a great spider in the midst of a dark web, dominating the whole capital with his eagle’s glance and weaving the destiny of the Bohemian people to suit his intricate speculations. For throughout the length and breadth of Slavonic and German Austria the Jew rules and rules alone.”

At one remarkably queasy point, Unorna, out of sadistic pique, places Kafka in a hypnotic trance and forces him to relive the life and death of Simon Abeles, a young Jewish apostate who (according to the Jesuit John Eder’s miracle-ridden account) was martyred by his father and an evil rabbi for converting to Christianity.

Crawford’s Prague is a spectrally foggy and frozen place of Gothic churches and deserted graveyards, a far cry from the stag party capital of today. This archetypal Mitteleuropean city seems to be more of a state of mind than a geographical location, and its icy gloom contrasts with the warmth of the tropical conservatory in which Unorna receives her visitors. The fact that the unnamed protagonist is referred to simply as “The Wanderer” adds to the feeling that we are reading some kind of psychological allegory.

David Stuart Davies reports that Crawford was in poor health when he drafted the novel, and its long, rambling passages certainly reveal some dark meditations that have scant relevance to the plot. These digressions try the reader’s patience and ultimately stifle any enjoyment or interest in the story. In contrast to Dennis Wheatley’s praise of the novel’s “fascinating reading” and the author’s “penetrating analysis of the powers of the human mind”, an Amazon reviewer wickedly hits the spot:

“If ruthlessly edited, it might have made a passable short story itself, but the melodramatic gothic tale goes on and on and on, padded out by relentless swathes of descriptive prose, philosophical treatises on life, love, romance, and a million other concepts, and bosom-heaving twaddle.”

If Crawford is remembered today, it is for a much-anthologised pair of short stories that have become classics. “For the Blood is the Life”, described by Basil Copper in his study of The Vampire: In Legend, Fact and Art as “one of the most original and unusual essays in the genre” is the tragic tale of Cristina, a murdered girl who returns to vampirise her lover, “he knew that her lips were red … and that she was dead”. Full of pathos and eroticism, the story is particularly memorable for its sun-drenched Italian setting.

“The Upper Berth”, lauded by H. P. Lovecraft as “one of the most tremendous horror stories in all literature” is the account of a haunted cabin aboard an Atlantic crossing. Its realistic setting, first-person immediacy and the narrator’s initial scepticism make its unexplained supernatural terrors all the more ghastly.

“The Screaming Skull” is inspired by a “real” 17th Century legend concerning a skull reserved at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset. It is an effectively scary tale, narrated in the cantankerous persona of a retired sea captain. It was filmed in 1958 and the movie was promoted with the gimmick of a free funeral for anyone scared to death during a screening. There is no record of any takers! It also seems likely that the story was an influence on Robert Bloch’s 1945 Weird Tales contribution “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”. This was far more effectively filmed by Amicus in 1965 as “The Skull”, featuring the immortal combination of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

From the rest of the stories, “The Dead Smile” is the purest Gothic, full of dark family secrets and mouldering crypts; “The Doll’s Ghost is a Dickens-like exercise in sentimentalism; “Man Overboard!” is a seafaring ghost story featuring identical twin, marred by an excess of nautical terminology; “By the Waters of Paradise” is a Gothic romance and “The King’s Messenger” is a tale of premonition.

The Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series is a bargain-priced set of volumes from the publisher which launched the “£1 Classic” back in 1992. Retailing at under £3, the series contains some obscure works that would otherwise only be available in expensive small-press editions, alongside better-known works by Dennis Wheatley, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (including the “The Right Hand of Doom”, the only British edition of Howard’s original Solomon Kane stories).

"Solomon Kane" - The Movie

2010-04-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

The advent of Michael J. Bassett's Solomon Kane was awaited with great anticipation by the Robert E. Howard fan community. The production's links to the abortive Wandering Star publishing venture, set up to release luxurious (and expensive) illustrated editions of Howard's works, which eventually morphed into the highly regarded Del Rey trade paperback series, raised expectations that the movie would be respectful of its source material.

For many, these hopes were dashed when it became obvious that Bassett's Kane would not be a faithful reproduction of the original. Specifically, the revelation that Howard's "man with no name" type Puritan would be saddled with an expository back-story was sufficient to arouse understandably furious indignation from "purist" Howard fans.

For those of us prepared to overlook this enormity and offer the movie a chance of acceptance on its own terms, the project still held promise. From my own perspective, Bassett's citing of Michael Reeves' legendary Witchfinder General as a key influence was enough to set the cinematic salivary glands a-drooling.

So, has Solomon Kane delivered on the big screen? Whilst no classic, Bassett's movie has successfully captured the feel of British horror's '60s / '70s heyday. For a start, it is unrelentingly grim and gritty. Snow and rain fall ceaselessly on bleak winter landscapes as ragged figures trudge through the mud. Eternally grey skies loom over scenes of violence and desolation, apocalyptically foreboding.

The acting is accomplished with a strong lead from James Purefoy, ably supported by character actors of Peter Postlethwaite and Max von Sydow's calibre. (It would be unfair, of course, to draw any comparison with the once-in-a-lifetime performance teased out out of Vincent Price by the crazed young genius of Michael Reeves.)

Plotwise, Bassett has opted for an "evil sorcerer enslaves the land" scenario which will raise few eyebrows among Sword and Sorcery die-hards. The plot twist tying it into Kane's much lamented back-story ticks around like clockwork and concludes with a somewhat disappointing climax featuring a generic Balrog-like CGI monster. (As a low-budget production, the movie is fortunately up to that point free from excessive CGI).

The evil sorcerer, Malachi, is a mini-Sauron, and the sight of his zombified minions transporting terrified peasants in cages raises the ghastly spectre of 20th Century Nazism, and there are some genuinely scary and even gory moments in the film. At one point there is even a crucifixion scene, which pays simultaneous homage to both Witchfinder General and (less auspiciously!) Conan the Barbarian as Kane is hoisted aloft and then escapes by dragging the nails through his palms.

Whether or not one sees oneself as an "REH purist", Kane's back-story (insisted upon, we are led to believe, by the movie's money men) creates some serious problems with his character. Robert E. Howard's original 17th Century Puritan is a splendid creation, much of whom's power derives from the mysteries of his origin and what drives his motivations. Single-minded to the point of fanaticism in his persecution of wrong-doers, this enigmatic "man of God" appears at times to be driven by an almost demonic will. Even his Puritanism is tinged by pagan elements; he has no scruples, for example, in forging a supernatural alliance with an African witch-doctor when it serves his ends. Lacking introspection, he wholeheartedly accepts his role as the tool of his own righteous anger.

Bassett's Kane, on the other hand, is a much more conflicted character. A damned soul seeking redemption from sins committed in far lands whilst buccaneering in the service of Queen Elizabeth, he is guilt-ridden and self-obsessed. As the dispossessed younger son of a West Country nobleman, he is further burdened by psychological "baggage" in the shape of family trauma. In the face of these obstacles, his religion seems weak and, at the start of the film, he is ejected from a monastery's guestroom because his presence is deemed in some unexplained way to be disruptive.

Most worryingly, Kane's Puritanism is reduced to the adoption of his characteristic (and historically inaccurate!) black garb, which is presented to him as a gift by the family of Peter Postlethwaite's aspiring Pilgrim Father, who take him under their wing after he is beaten up by wayside robbers. His commitment to this stern belief system therefore stems more from feelings of personal gratitude than from ideological fervour or divine inspiration. All in all, this is "Solomon Kane Lite", a watered-down, more sympathetic anti-hero, driven by psychological impulses that drive the plot along in a way which it is hoped will be familiar and comprehensible to modern film-goers.

Right at the end, however (following the Balrog), there is a promising hint that, with all this psychological kerfuffle brought to some kind of "closure", Kane may well be able to shed his past and set out across the globe smiting bad guys in the single-minded manner expected of him by admirers of Robert E. Howard. So really the movie we've all been waiting for is in fact the sequel to Solomon Kane.

The sad irony of all this is that it now seems likely that the promised sequel will never be made. It is a testament to the deep conservatism and risk-averse nature of the modern film industry that Solomon Kane failed to find a theatrical distributor in the States and will not be screened in Howard's own country. As Al Harron has pointed out over at The Cimmerian, the only hope now is that dvd sales will be spectacular enough to warrant further investment.

One is, of course, left wondering what would have happened if the producers had shown faith in Howard from the outset and created a movie faithful to his character or, better still, based on one of his original stories. Would the general public have been able to cope with such an enigmatically vengeful and mysterious character? We may never know, but one thing is certain; Sergio Leone's masterful "Man with no name" trilogy could never have been made in today's impoverished cultural climate.