EasterCon Belfast

I do not have very much experience of attending conventions. I did once attend one in Glasgow to keep my daughter company; I can't even remember which con it was, although I do remember the guy in the very convincing Pyramid Head costume. (Apparently people put Pyramid Head on their hear-me-out cakes but I'm not going to be doing that any time soon. Brrrr.) Anyway, I decided I really ought to dip my toe in the water. I love so much of the stuff that is celebrated and I actually write horror and fantasy, for goodness' sake. So last weekend I went to EasterCon in Belfast.

The journey there was a bit of an Odyssey. I decided to travel in an eco friendly way, so I opted for the ferry from Cairnryan. This would have been fine, except I rang the ferry company to check there would be parking at the terminal, and they said they couldn't guarantee it. It was Easter weekend, after all. So my long suffering husband had to drive me down there. Then the ferry was late (and quite raucous). I arrived in Belfast feeling a bit the worse for wear, to find that the bus had left 90 minutes before and there wasn't another one for ages. Eventually I shelled out for a taxi. I suppose I could consider that entire journey a penance to Gaia or something. On the way home I had to fly; I just couldn't make the logistics work. 

I had two panels arranged for the weekend. When I looked at the programme I realised that other people had scheduled far more events, but being a newbie I didn't want to overdo it. One of the panels was "Lost Films, Old Tech: The Appeal of Analogue Horror" and the other one was "X Never, Ever Marks the Spot: Archaeology in Speculative Fiction". 

Anyway, here's the Old Tech panel. Left to right: friendly tech person, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Williamson, Lynda E. Rucker (moderator), me, Ben Unsworth.

                   

(Pic with thanks to Ben Unsworth)

Big thanks to Lynda for her excellent moderation! I enjoyed this panel so much, especially since I got to talk about some of my favourite obsessions, including M.R.James (yes! there is tech in his stories!) and recent film Broadcast Signal Intrusion. I've been interested in old technology in books and films for a long time (see previous blog post on novels about old movies), probably since hearing Aaron Worth (Associate Professor at Boston University) speaking about the "Haunted Cinematography of M.R.James" at a conference in 2015. 

One of the things Aaron Worth highlighted was the uniquely ominous character of outdated technology: the grainy images, the crackling soundtrack. I have to agree with this; I think, for example, that Nosferatu (1922) is still frightening in spite of being superseded by modern special effects, because it is palpably ancient. There is a dark griminess to it, as though it is something excavated from a bad place. Film technology is now old enough to take the place of handwritten documents and antique engravings in supernatural fiction, particularly given that we do not necessarily want to put apparitions and phenomena too far into the past: M.J.James himself commented "It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective." His phantoms are often of relatively recent date, and nowadays that would put them firmly in the era of the moving image. Arguably also film is the latest form of the "uncanny valley"; the moving image looks exactly like a person but isn't a living person.  

As mentioned, there is a surprising amount of tech in M.R.James's stories (cameras, trams etc). But undoubtedly the most unsettling piece of technology is the magic lantern show which Mr. Karswell puts on for the village children in "Casting the Runes". It prefigures the terrifying moment in The Ring  (2002) when Samara crawls out of the TV screen:

"He switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling sound which sent the children nearly mad."

"Casting the Runes" was published in 1911, by which time movies were well established. Magic lanterns were still in use but had been technically overtaken by more sophisticated media, so they were already old tech. 

Anyway, that was a massive digression! As you can see, the problem with this topic is not getting me to talk about it; it's getting me to shut up...

The Archaeology panel took place half an hour after the Old Tech one ended, and alas, I do not have a picture of it. It was moderated by Liz Bourke and featured David Hodson, Sharan Volin, Kari Sperring (Maund) and me. 

I have a lot of thoughts about archaeology in speculative fiction and films; far more thoughts, in fact, than I was able to squeeze into my panel contributions! So I might blog about those separately. The general consensus (unsurprisingly) was that archaeology in books and films isn't much like real life archaeology. My son is a field archaeologist working here in Scotland, and as I remarked during the panel, if anyone made a realistic film based on what he does, it would be about three weeks long and the protagonist would spend most of that time standing next to a trench in a hard hat and steel toe capped boots; in the last reel they would discover a few places where the earth was a different colour, indicating that wooden posts had once been there. Those Indiana Jones-type movies where archaeologists rush about grabbing precious artefacts, or have to decipher arcane scripts at high speed with everyone screaming at them, are not true to life. But you know what? The excitement is real. I can get very passionate about petrospheres and Viking burials, even if nobody zoomed in and snatched them from under the nose of a bunch of villains.

A propos, I have written several stories featuring archaeology in one way or another, and you can listen to one of them in this recording by David Longhorn: "Gold" - two others, "The Valley of Achor" and "The Edge of the World" (in which I offer an explanation for the mysterious purpose of petrospheres) can be found in my collection Atmospheric Disturbances from Swan River Press. 

Other highlights included attending a very interesting panel on the topic of "Irish Mythology and Horror" (had to be done, didn't it?) and bagging a signed Adrian Tchaikovsky book for my daughter.

I also spent quite a lot of time hanging out at the Swan River Press stand in the Dealers' Room, where the indefatigable Brian J. Showers (below) presented some truly gorgeous volumes and could also be persuaded to blether for hours and hours about books, publishing, and conventions. 

Anyway, that was my first proper Con - let's hope it's the first of many! 

Cover art beauty contest!

Last weekend I was at EasterCon in Belfast, a topic I may blog about later if I can squeeze the time in (April is a bit mad this year). I'm very new to the world of conventions, so I only did two panels and spent quite a lot of time hanging out in the Dealers' Room, and specifically at the Swan River Press stand. 

SWP produced my two short story collections, The Sea Change (2013) and Atmospheric Disturbances (2024). I was particularly thrilled with the AD cover, designed by John Coulthart and featuring little cameos from all the stories. Brian, who runs SWP, had rolled his eyes a little over my design input; I wanted something 'clean and crisp', he recalled, but, he said, "What does 'crisp' even mean?" Well, whatever it means, I think the design nailed it. 

Anyway, while I was at the Con I naturally had a lot of time to look at the books on display, and to talk about them with passers-by. The funny thing was, nobody could agree about which was the most beautiful one. The covers are all strikingly different and so were all the opinions. 

My personal favourite (apart from Atmospheric Disturbances) is the cover for Old Albert, created by Jason Zerrillo. Apparently the original photo couldn't be used - wrong dimensions or something - so Jason recreated it. I absolutely love the way the strong, almost toxic yellow of the birds stands out against the grey background. I kept picking the book up and admiring it, until someone very unreasonably bought it! 

Take a look at some of the Swan River covers (below) and see what you think! I'd love to know which cover appeals to you the most. 

Of course, these are not all the books that SWP has produced. You can see them all on https://swanriverpress.ie/titles/ - perhaps you'll like one of the other covers even better!

Left to right: Atmospheric Disturbances by Helen Grant, cover art by John Coulthart; 

The Dark Return of Time by R.B.Russell, cover art by Jason Zerrillo; 

Old Albert by Brian J. Showers, cover art by Jason Zerrillo. 

Left to right: Friends and Spectres, ed. Robert Lloyd Parry, cover art by John Coulthart; Longsword by Thomas Leland, cover art by Ellen McDermott; Uncertainties 6, ed. Brian J. Showers, cover art by David Tibet.

Left to right: The Ruins of Contracoeur by Joyce Carole Oates, cover art by Meggan Kehrli; Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis, cover art by øjeRum; Selected Stories by Mark Valentine, cover art by Jason Zerrillo. 

Left to right: A Flowering Wound by John Howard, cover art by Jason Zerrillo; Now It's Dark by Lynda E.Rucker, cover art by John Coulthart; Sparks From The Fire by Rosalie Parker, cover art by R.B.Russell. 

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden: fifteen year anniversary!

Fifteen years ago today - on 2nd April 2009 - my very first novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden was published in the UK. It seems incredible to say that - I can't believe so much time has passed! The book was inspired by the real life history, legends and topography of the little town of Bad Münstereifel in Germany, where I and my family had been living since 2001. The locations in the novel are all real ones, and in fact if you want to see them, I did a video walking tour of the town a couple of years after the book came out. You can see it here: YouTube tour

I absolutely loved living in Bad Münstereifel. We originally moved out there for 2 years for my husband's job, but ended up staying for 7, and even so, I cried bitterly when we left. It turned out that our new home in Flanders would inspire three more books, but that's another story...

Anyway, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a tribute to one of the places I love best in all the world, and to a large extent it is also a portrait of the place at the time we lived there. Much has changed since. After we had departed for Belgium, the town became a "City Outlet", which no doubt brought in many commercial benefits but also meant that some of the shops and cafés in the book no longer exist. Then in 2021 there was appalling flooding which caused widespread damage in the town. I believe restoration work is still going on. Also, of course, a period of fifteen years brings other changes - it's hard to imagine the young heroine Pia and her sidekick Stefan not having mobile phones if the book were set now. And the dangerous turret in the ruined castle on the hill above the town now has a huge metal cage over it to stop people falling in. 

The folk character "Unshockable Hans" who appears in the novel and inspires Pia's investigation is a genuine one. Back when I was writing the book, I came across him in several books written about local Eifel legends, and so I went to the Eifel Club library in Düren and read up about him from very old issues of the Eifel Club newsletter. I recall that in addition to being written in rather old-fashioned German, they were also published in an eye-watering Gothic type which made my progress through them very slow! 

The book was - and is - categorised as YA, at least in the UK (in other countries it was sold as an adult title), but I didn't write it with a specifically young adult audience in mind and I know that it has had at least as many adult readers over the years. It went on to be shortlisted for the Cilip Carnegie medal and the Booktrust Teenage prize, and won an ALA Alex award in the USA (Alex awards are given to books written for adults with a special appeal to young adults). 

Since the book came out, I have had a further nine novels published, plus one short story collection, with more works in the pipeline. My most recent novels have all been firmly aimed at an adult audience, and set in Scotland, where I have lived for well over a decade. But The Vanishing of Katharina Linden will always have a special place in my heart, and I'll be raising a glass to it this evening. 

Below: the US cover

 

5 novels about lost movies

I'm an absolute sucker for lost movie stories, especially when they're old ones. Vintage technology has an eldritch quality all of its own, a topic touched on some years ago by Aaron Worth of Boston University in his talk about M.R.James's Uncanny Cinematography, at an M.R.James Conference in Leeds. Film technology is now long established, and grainy footage or crackling audio can be just as creepy to modern audiences as dusty books and ancient manuscripts were to Victorian ones.

Anyway, I couldn't resist adding my own contribution to the trope with my latest novel Jump Cut. Obviously it’s not the first book on these theme, nor will it be the last, so I thought I'd put together a short list of lost movie novels. This is not an exhaustive list! Goodreads has one with 31 books on it, though it's lost films and cursed movies, which is a wider definition. But these are the ones which sprang to my mind. 

Of these five books:

- I have read two

- I have written one 

- There are two I have not read (yet!) but which look intriguing 

Here are the books in publication date order!

Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell (first published 1989, now available in a new edition from Flame Tree Press)

I read Ancient Images when it first came out, but over 3 decades later I mainly remembered scenes of the heroine driving through endless fields of wheat, accompanied by a lowering feeling of dread. So I ordered a new copy and read it again. 

Here's the blurb: "Tower of Fear is a lost horror film starring Karloff and Lugosi. A film historian who locates a copy dies while fleeing something that terrified him. His friend Sandy Allan vows to prove he found the film. She learns how haunted the production was and the survivors of it still are. It contains a secret about Redfield, a titled family that owns a favourite British food, Staff o’ Life. The Redfield land has uncanny guardians, and one follows Sandy home. To maintain its fertility Redfield demands a sacrifice, and a band of new age travellers is about to set up camp there…"

It's an interesting contribution to the lost movie trope because – at least to me – the lost film isn't the most frightening thing about this book. The unnerving element comes from Sandy's frequent sightings of vaguely ominous creatures seen out of the corner of the eye: a tramp, a dog, a workman on all fours, a scarecrow – or are they? These manifestations don't always pierce Sandy's upper consciousness, being half-noticed and then dismissed, but they recur so frequently that they amount to a subtle and horrible pursuit. 

When Sandy finally watches the lost movie, the viewing takes place in a semi-derelict cinema in the midst of renovation, and the projectionist goes off site for the second reel, leaving her alone with the film, the smell of brick dust, and the shifting shadows. Very creepy. 

The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox (2016)

This novel is, I suspect, the most literary of my list of five, though I'm taking a bit of a flier since I haven't read two of them yet! It has a vivid, to me almost poetic style. It's a fever dream of a book. 

Here's the blurb: "During the oppressive heat wave of 1976 a young journalist, Ed Peters, finds an Edwardian photograph in a junk shop in the seaside town of Brightland. It shows an alluring, dark-haired girl, an actress whose name was Leda Grey.

Enchanted by the image, Ed learns Leda Grey is still living – now a recluse in a decaying cliff-top house she once shared with a man named Charles Beauvois, a director of early silent film. As Beauvois’s muse and lover, Leda often starred in scenes where stage magic and trick photography were used to astonishing effect.

But, while playing a cursed Egyptian queen, the fantasies captured on celluloid were echoed in reality, leaving Leda abandoned and alone for more than half a century – until the secrets of her past result in a shocking climax, more haunting than any to be in found in the silent films of Charles Beauvois."

I absolutely loved the fact that one of the long-unseen movies was based on H.Rider Haggard's She, which was a great favourite of mine when I was a youngster. The other memorable aspect of this book was the blurring of real and unreal, and whether we can believe the evidence of our eyes. 

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (July 2023)

Alas, this is one of the books I haven't read yet. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has written ten novels, although the award winning Mexican Gothic, which is on my bookshelf, is the one a lot of people have heard of. 

Here's the blurb: "Montserrat has always been overlooked. She's a talented sound editor, but she's left out of the boys' club running the film industry in '90s Mexico City. And she's all but invisible to her best friend Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, even though she's been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbour is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he has a way to change their lives - even if his tales of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán might just find out that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies…"

Ah, that volatile nitrate film. The BFI website says: "Simply put, once alight, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish until it has burnt itself out and no film (fuel) remains. One burning poundweight of cellulose nitrate can reach temperatures of around 4,444°C, and is 15 times more combustible than a similar weight in wood. This heat, combined with the production of toxic gases from the combustion process, can present an immediate threat to life." This is a characteristic of vintage film which did not escape either myself or Essie Fox…

Jump Cut by me, Helen Grant (September 2023)

Like my previous novels Ghost and Too Near The Dead, Jump Cut is set in rural Scotland, and the isolation in which my heroine finds herself is the backdrop to a grim game of cat and mouse. Film researcher Theda wants to know all about lost movie The Simulacrum, but she can only obtain the information by paying for it with the details of her own tragic past. Pitted against her is 104-year-old former film star Mary Arden, one of the characters I have most enjoyed writing, ever. She's a joyously malicious, brazen old besom. 

Here's the blurb: "The Simulacrum is the most famous lost movie in film history – would you tell someone your darkest secrets, just to lay hands on a copy? 104-year-old Mary Arden is the last surviving cast member of a notorious lost film. Holed up in Garthside, an Art Deco mansion reputed to be haunted, she has always refused interviews. Now Mary has agreed to talk to film enthusiast Theda Garrick. In return she demands all the salacious details of Theda’s tragic past. Only the hint of a truly stupendous discovery stops Theda walking out. But Mary’s prying questions are not the only thing Theda has to fear. The spirit of The Simulacrum walks Garthside by night, and it will turn an old tragedy into a new nightmare..."

And finally… 

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay (due out 2024)

Obviously I haven't read this one (yet), but it has all the gripping ingredients: a notorious film never properly released, real life tragedy, and a single surviving cast member. I await it eagerly! 

Here's the blurb: "In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?" 

So those are my five lost movie novels, and if you can think of others (I'm sure there are lots) do let me know in the comments. 

I'm also interested in movies about lost movies (John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns springs to mind, with its madness-inducing film La Fin Absolue du Monde) so would love to hear of any recommendations in that line. There is also, in a reversal of the books-about-lost-movies theme, room for a list of movies-about-lost-books, but that is one for another day. 

"The great terror of Abercrombie Smith" - Lot No. 249: some thoughts

(Spoiler alert! Best read after watching.) 

"Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck, and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams..."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lot No. 249 has long been a favourite of mine, so when I heard that Mark Gatiss was making an adaptation of it as this year's Ghost Story for Christmas I was absolutely thrilled. I very much enjoyed his previous adaptations of M.R.James, especially Count Magnus, which I thought was really wonderful, maintaining as it did some of the key parts of the story such as the innkeeper's tale, but also adding some new layers to it. My feeling is that Mark Gatiss is a safe pair of hands but not too safe; none of the adaptations feel stale or too slavish to the original texts (which are texts after all, devised to be read rather than watched). Lot No. 249 is no exception.

If you know a story very, very well, you inevitably have a mental film of it, but I try to set that aside when watching an adaptation. In my mind's eye, for example, "Old College" is based on New College, Oxford, but Rothamstead Manor, where Lot No. 249 was shot, does very well, especially the interiors; I liked the detail of the "true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile" hanging from the ceiling in Bellingham's sitting-room.

One thing I was slightly sucking my teeth about before I actually saw the adaptation was the casting of Freddie Fox as Bellingham, since Fox is young and good-looking, and the Bellingham of the original story is "strange and most repellent" looking, as well as very wrinkled, which implies mature age. I'm generally not very fond of film versions prettying characters up for the sake of it (one of the reasons I love some older horror films like The Fog (1980) is that the people look like real, ordinary people). However, it is also the case that the original story equates unattractive looks (and fatness) with a villainous personality, and that is something I would like to think we are moving on from. Having now seen the adaptation, I feel it does a tremendous job of portraying Bellingham instead as a person of moral ugliness - someone prepared to murder on very slight grounds. His tempting good looks and charisma are simply a lure.

And now to the nitty-gritty: the mummy* itself. This worked superbly for me - as in the original story, the first glimpses of what is going on are oblique and indistinct: the mummy case which is empty one moment and filled with a grisly occupant the next; the mysterious tread on the staircase. I watched Lot No. 249 with my adult children and we all agreed that the chase scene, which is the high point of the story for me, was really frightening. "He was a famous runner, but never had he run as he ran that night" wrote Conan Doyle, and believe me, you would, if that thing were after you. The moments when Smith sees a distant silhouette were also deeply sinister and yet ambiguous; his friend's explanation  that "Some gaunt, half-famished tramp steals after you, and seeing you run, is emboldened to pursue you" might be right - except that we, like Smith, have seen every detail of the approaching horror.  

This brings me to the friend in question - "Peterson" in the original, and in the adaptation, very clearly Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation. I have seen some online objections to this, on the grounds that Conan Doyle came to resent the way Holmes's popularity overshadowed his other work and would not therefore have appreciated his trespassing upon it. This is certainly true, however his appearance does presuppose a Doylian universe in which all his creations co-exist, which I rather like. 

I was also delighted to see that the confrontation between Abercrombie Smith and Edward Bellingham towards the end of the story was perfectly recreated. It is rather jaw-dropping to think that an undergraduate could, at that period, go to a gunsmith and buy a heavy revolver and ammunition, and that is not to mention the amputating knife he adds to his armoury! Would Smith actually have shot Bellingham if he refused to destroy the mummy and papyrus? In spite of his asking his friend to sign and date an account of recent events "in case I am arrested" (for murder), I can't help thinking that his main object was to convince himself that he would do it, so that he could threaten it with utter conviction; in fact he was banking on Bellingham complying. Either way, it is a marvellously tense scene, as Smith marks the passing minutes with his watch, until Bellingham finally cracks at the last moment. 

This brings us to the final scene (and I re-iterate for the unwary, spoilers are incoming so look away now if you haven't watched). In the original story, a brief paragraph tells us that Bellingham leaves the university immediately after the events described, and is "last heard of in the Soudan", presumably looking in vain for a new copy of the burnt papyrus. This has always struck me as a perfectly adequate ending, especially since the existence of other copies of the papyrus would undermine its aura of sinister power. However, there may be other expectations from filmed horror - the final twist in which the evil forces suddenly retaliate is an established trope. I assume this is behind the new ending, with a new mummy and a new papyrus. I regret to say that we did rather chuckle over it - "Lot 250: this time it's personal" suggested my daughter. However, overall we thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation and look forward to watching it again. 

Finally, I am very sorry to read about the difficulties in obtaining funding for Ghost Stories for Christmas, and would like to add my voice to those pleading for them to continue. There are a great many BBC programmes throughout the year in which I have no interest, but the Ghost Story for Christmas is one single half hour for which I drop everything. Is that too much to ask?

Above and below: my copy of The Conan Doyle Stories, this edition published in 1949. 

* Some museums are now moving away from the term "mummy", preferring terms like "mummified remains" to avoid depersonalising the dead person. An article on the Museums Association website dated January 2023 and quoting a CNN report adds: "Institutions are also keen to distance their collections from popular culture depictions of mummies as supernatural monsters..."