The Amazing Race

A mysterious, enlightened tribe of superhumanly-fast endurance runners, previously hidden from the world in deep Mexican canyons who emerged to smash ultramarathon records in the early 1990s? Oh, run along…

The Tarahumara know how to dress

I have a work friend called Bill who is one of the funniest men I have ever met.  Relentlessly self-deprecating and always quick to highlight the absurdity of any situation - when he told me that he had read a book about running which had changed his life I waited for the punchline. Instead he went on to tell me with evangelical zeal how much he was now loving running, brought the book in the next day to me and told me that he didn’t want it back, but did want me to pass it on when I’d finished.

There was no sarcasm or irony here, Bill really had been born again by the Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run.

I started to read it for two reasons  - I was intrigued by Bill’s uncharacteristic transformation and secondly, I realised that I wasn’t enjoying running as much as I used to. Somehow this year it feels as if I’d been dragging an atypically reluctant body around, instead of my usual contended loping.  A list of excuses is always close to hand, entering my fifth decade, congenitally flat feet, persistently hot weather.  But I wanted to persevere - being able to leave the house with no equipment, transport, booking, venue or team commitments and simply exercise by putting one foot in front of the other embodies physical and mental freedom to me. 

Picking up Born to Run has resulted in my desire to write about this book outstripping my meagre reading speed.  I’ve only completed the first section, which I am assured that isn’t the most important part, but this is already one of the most fascinating stories I’ve ever read.

There’s something of a modern fascination with ancient Sparta and its army, who achieved a legendary physical prowess through utter devotion to their training.  But who knew that in the copper Canyons of Chihuahua in Mexico, there is an elusive race equally dedicated, not to war, but the art of long distance running?

Look at those smiles - these people love to run

McDougall first heard about the Tarahumara people when he found what he described as ‘a photograph of Jesus running down a rockslide’, in a Spanish travel magazine.  The description was not only visually apt, but the robed and sandalled runner also came from a race dedicated to honesty and philanthropy.  When the superhuman athleticism of these people also became apparent to Westerners, the Spartan comparison was not far behind, but as McDougall is quick to point out  “Unlike the Spartans the Tarahumara are as benign as Bodhisattvas, they don’t use their superhuman strength to kick ass, but to live in peace”.

They withdrew into the canyons after disastrous contact with the Spanish Conquistadores, and for hundreds of years were able to exist almost entirely isolated from the outside world. With widely dispersed settlements, the Tarahumara people developed a tradition of long-distance running for inter-village communication and hunting, covering up to 320 km non-stop over a period of two days.

Not only have they established a culture and economy based on altruism and happiness and achieve one of the lowest disease rates in the world but the Tarahumara also created a wonder food to enhance their legendary athleticism. Iskiate is made of dissolved chia seeds, bursting with protein, minerals and antioxidants.  As McDougall says, iskiate is not only the only food you would need on a desert Island, but it could also enable you to swim home.

Inevitably exploited once again by western greed in the early 1990s, these shy superhumans briefly humiliated ultramarathon runners on the toughest courses available, before leaving their sponsored track shoes (which they never wore) and squabbling ‘promoters’ behind to return to their own lives again.

The author meets an eccentric hermit who left everything behind to follow the Tarahumara home, and in gaining his trust begins to learn the secret of these people.  This passage has got me pulling my own running shoes on again and aspiring to be more like a Tarahumara (though goodness knows their preschoolers would outrun me).

“Think easy, light, smooth and fast.  You start with easy, because if that’s all you get that’s not so bad. Then work on light, make it effortless, like you don’t care how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go.  When you’ve practised that so long you forget you’re practising, you work on making it smooth.  … you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”

I hadn’t been doing any of those things, and no wonder I haven’t been enjoying running recently.  But from now on I’m going to 'pitter-patter' with a straight back and a smile on my face like the Tarahumara do … and come back to review this book properly when I’ve finished it.

The rugged terrain which is the Tarahumara running track

Electric Dreams

How does an 18-year-old woman called Mary pass her time during a wet holiday in Geneva, in 1814?  She only goes and writes the world’s most famous horror story.

Frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

When I got my first summer holiday job it nearly killed me.  Helping set up posts and wires for now famous marlborough vines, as a gangly 15 year old I was labouring way above my weight. I lost all the skin off my hands to blisters, more skin to sunburn and slept at nights like never before.

Certainly not for the last time I found an evening escape from this punishing routine in fantasy media - most particularly, a two-night television event which I’ve never forgotten.

Audaciously, and mendaciously, called Frankenstein the True Story this was a TV movie shown in two parts with an incredible cast. It boasted James Mason, David McCallum, Jane Seymour and even a cameo from Tom Baker, and seemingly lavish production values (the closing scenes in the Arctic were especially cinematic).

Mason played a sinister character called Dr Polidori, and one of my strongest memories is David McCallum speaking through the monster’s lips and mocking the Doctor in his distinctive, acerbic tones by referring to him as “Polly-dolly”.

James Mason (right) as Polidori about to bring Jane Seymour to life
through the wonders of chemistry. Never got to do that in School Cert science...

John Polidori was actually the vain and long-suffering doctor who attended Lord Byron during that fateful stay at Villa Diodati where 18-year-old Mary Shelley first imagined the story which would become Frankenstein, but what I’ve learned recently is that Byron did actually refer to the hapless medic as ‘Polly-dolly”!

As someone who thought he knew a lot about the creation and countless adaptations of this story, I’ve discovered even more I didn’t know from a book, written, fittingly by a female academic Roseanne Montillo.

The Lady and her Monsters is a fascinating look not only at the remarkable life of Mary Shelley and the famous figures around her, but contemporary factors which would have contributed to her most famous story. Body-snatching and early experiments in the electrical stimulation of deceased tissue are examined in a historical and medical context, which in turn provides an often uncomfortable view of the society of the time.  More than just dead frogs were made to jump around on the end of leads from a galvanic battery.

It’s easy to decry early medical experimentation as barbaric, particularly as many human dissections were made accessible to the general public for entertainment, but discoveries made also helped ensure that we are all so fit and healthy now.

Shelley was the daughter of a writer regard as the 'first Feminist', Mary Wollstonecraft, and went on to lead a sensational but mainly unhappy life. The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, it would never have done for the public to know that a woman had written it. Even after she was finally credited, it was Shelley’s collection of her late husband's poetry which finally brought her something approaching financial security.  Percy Shelley died in a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia, Byron expired on a remote Greek Island of self-inflicted ill health, and a destitute Polidori poisoned himself.

The achievements of the two Poets are well-known, but even 'Polly-dolly' managed, through his own ghost story conceived at Villa Diodati, to give the world Lord Ruthven, establishing the image of the ‘modern’ aristocratic vampire before Stoker ever wrote Dracula.

The first edition of Polidori's The Vampyre
was erroneously credited to Lord Byron,
which pleased neither men.

And speaking of which, I’ll finish with a piece of trivia which Montillo uncovered which binds the two protean figures from the dawn of literary horror together:

" The real Frankenstein family had settled in a formidable castle overlooking the Darmstadt (Rhineland) region, where their deeds, famous and infamous began to be recorded in the annals of history...

 In the mid-1400s the castle was the site of much bloodshed when a member of the family was locked in mortal combat with an enemy of unusual fortitude and cunning, with a deep understanding of psychological warfare...

Known for his brutality, Vlad the Impaler and his doings provided, in part, inspiration for another gothic masterpiece: Bram Stoker's Dracula."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Arthurian Legends

A science fiction writer, inventor and undersea explorer investigated myths in his own television series, and unfortunately became the target of a particularly unpleasant one, himself, many years later.

Arthur C Clarke 1917 - 2008

In the '70s it was Leonard Nimoy who brought the world’s mysteries into our living room via his acclaimed In Search Of series.

His successor in the early ‘80s was a bald, bespectacled West-Countryman. He didn’t have Nimoy’s star power or charisma, but to my friends and I he was a star of a completely different magnitude - Arthur C Clarke wrote one of the greatest films ever made: 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I discovered his other novels he fast became one of my heroes.

The men behind 2001, writer Arthur C Clarke, and director Stanley Kubrick.

He pioneered groundbreaking work on the early warning radar system during World War II and later the concept of geostationary satellites; predicting their potential for global communication. He commentated live on the Apollo 11 moon landing, served as a patron for charities combating polio and preserving gorillas, was an avid diver who discovered a sunken temple off the Sri Lankan coast and wrote 80 novels.

The day before my birthday I decided to treat myself to a book and spotted the television ‘companion book’ to the series I’m alluding to: Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, in a second-hand bookshop. It’s one of those books I always meant to get, a lot of people I knew owned it, but somehow I never got around to it. Picking the book up from a pile not yet shelved, I’d just noted its perfect condition when the shop-owner asserted: “Five dollars”.

Happy birthday to me…

But before we return to his wonderful television series Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, lets address a little bit of ugliness first.
Already having been appointed a CBE, Clarke’s knighthood for services to literature was announced in the 1998 New Year’s honours list. However, when the Sunday Mirror accused him of paedophelia, he requested the investiture be delayed until his name was cleared.
After an investigation the accusation was found to be completely baseless (and possibly part of a Sri Lankan conspiracy to discredit Clarke and embarrass Britain on the occasion of a royal visit by Prince Charles).
Clarke received his Knighthood in 2000 and five years later, the highest civil honour Sri Lanka could bestow: the Sri Lankabhimanya.

Unfortunately, that kind of defamation can still cause irreparable damage, and I know I’m not the only person to have been more aware of the accusation than his exoneration.

Clarke scuba diving in Sri Lanka

Moving on…

The book I parted with a princely sum for was published in 1980 to correspond with the screening of the Mysterious World series, and is redolent with the graphic design of that time, heavy egyptian serifed headlines and neatly drawn key lines around the many photographs.

It’s also delightful, more or less following the format of series with separate chapters on everything from lake monsters to UFOs to the Tunguska explosion. The book is actually written by Simon Welfare and John Fairley, but each chapter is closed with a comment from Clarke, where he gives his personal interpretation of the particular mystery.

Each time the impression that Clarke believes mysteries are important because they are so far unquantifiable, is apparent. Do any of us really want to see Nessie or a sasquatch caught, scientifically labelled and corralled? Surely this would only diminish our sense of wonder about the world (to say nothing of the harm it would do to these new species)?

It is also fascinating to read about the the science of the day being applied to less glamorous phenomena like ball lightning and the moving rocks in Death Valley, and to see how little we’ve advanced in thirty five years to come any closer to a definitive explanation.

A scene from last year's television adaptation of Clarke's novel Childhood's End.

Clarke ends his remarks in a playful fashion:
“Mysteries are fun. Even if they are only nature’s practical jokes, they add to our enjoyment of the marvellous universe around us…
If we can find the answers to as many as ten percent, I should be very pleased - and surprised.
And even if we got the answers to one hundred per cent, there are plenty more where they came from…”

When Arthur C Clarke’s death was announced in March 2008, I just happened to be listening to the radio at the time. The National programme played this excerpt from 2001 as a tribute...

The two least emotional characters in cinema history,
Dave Bowman and HAL 9000, break your heart

What a wonderful world

What do Spider-Man, the Loch Ness Monster and German Opera have in common?

I have a large collection of hardback books which, when we finally have our much-discussed living room shelf unit built, will never be allowed to abide there.  And this isn't an issue of age-restricted material (unless you count the barely fettered decolletages of the Hammer ladies) but more one of minor embarrassment to my wonderful wife.  Yes, she'll watch any old tosh with me if I pick my moment, but to have shelves full of books devoted to horror, science fiction  and fantasy films and television in full view of visitors who might have otherwise thought we're normal, seems to be a bridge too far.

So solid, respectable tomes about gardening, travel, history, handicrafts and, if I'm lucky, astronomy will make the living room bookshelves creak instead, while my extensive but slightly worrying collection will remain fittingly hidden away from sunlight.

Like the creatures within their pages, these books might be sometimes shunned and misunderstood, but my Mum actually started this collection, buying me my first 'coffee table book' about monsters when I was still having single digit birthdays.
 

And what a book it was, becoming a treasured possession all through my life. Despite being a clumsy and often absent minded person I somehow manage to take incredibly good care of my books, and my copy of this particular volume: The Horrific World of Monsters, still looks as if it could have been bought yesterday.

I've been to Bran Castle, alleged by this book to be the birthplace of
Vlad Tepes, and it really is as pretty as it looks in this inset.

I've amassed many books on the same subject since but this one remains a curiosity, in the best possible way.  First of all, the creatures within are arranged alphabetically, an unusual move which you think might spell disaster when you reach less fertile letters.  But not this book. Not only did it cover the expected Universal and Hammer monsters but also creatures born of every old world mythology - from the British Isles, through Scandinavia, Europe and the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt and the Middle East, Asia and then into Russia. As an introduction to classical and medieval myth and legend alone (illustrated with art from the likes of Goya, Tibaldi and Bosch), this book was worth its weight in golden Fleece.

But this was just the beginning, true believers.  In my last post I 'came out' as someone who prefers to 'make mine Marvel', and that might stretch all the way back to this book.  Because also within its pages were Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and numerous Stan Lee spawned super-villains. It seems insane, but page 86 for example gives us this bewildering spectrum of subjects: Redcap and the Roc from British and Islamic folklore respectively, The Reptile from Hammer, Spider-Man's minor nemesis the Rhino and Tolkien's Ringwraiths. How wonderfully bonkers is that?

The 'Horrific' Four (coming to a cinema near you soon), sharing a page with the Fly,
Frankenstein, a Wagnerian Opera and an Irish feathered cyclops.

Still want more? Well, dinosaurs obviously, all photographs of 'life-like' models, as many of the books from the mid-seventies liked to use. But possibly the best was still to come: Television wasn't to be neglected, with Quatermass and Star Trek touched upon, but Doctor Who's big three: the Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors were  each given lavish picture spreads. This officially made The Horrific World of Monsters The Best Book Ever.

Good luck spotting this scene from the  Doctor Who story the caption says it's from. 
I think it might actually be a publicity shot from a BBC exhibition - but it's still brilliant.

From it's atmospheric cover painting, with 'likenesses' of Lee, Karloff and Chaney just the right side of copyright infringement and a devil tail on the bright yellow title lettering, to the distinctly '70s typography throughout, this book was patient zero of my life-long disorder regarding books, monsters and books about monsters.

I'll be disinterring many other volumes never to be seen in our Living Room in posts to come.

Tome Reader

When the going gets a little tough, you can always make your own 'carrot on a stick' to keep moving forward...

Real life (TM) has been a little trying recently.  I work in an ever-changing industry which seems to be reaching the point where a week's worth of stability is now more of a change than anything else coming our way.
A born fretter, fifteen years of exposure to this has environment actually made me more of a 'Once was Worrier', giving up the illusion of security in the arms of a caring employer has left me a happier and less troubled soul. Like Doris Day, I now draw comfort in life's one sureness of 'whatever will be, will be'.

But a current, particularly prolonged period of upheaval with no end in sight is going to eventually take it's toll, no matter how thick my shiny, philosophical glaze has become.  It's times like this you often look back and draw comfort from elements of your life that have always brought you succour when you've needed it.  For me, its Horror.

Yes, not only is that paradoxical but also weird and a bit creepy. But I'm generally regarded as a cheerful, positive sort of chap,  I believe partly because immersing myself in Horror cinema is deeply cathartic and lets me work out my fears and negativity on what is happening on screen.  Not to say I don't enjoy what I watch, I deeply love the genre of chills, although my particular preference is more for anything before and including the mid-seventies.  More latter-day slash and splatter leaves me cold - I'll take venerable atmosphere over teenage viscera any day.

I have shamefully neglected attributing another of the main influences for me beginning this blog for too long. The Hypnogoria podcast http://www.hypnogoria.com/html/podcast.html is an enthusiastic and meticulously researched homage to 'fantastic fiction' of every variety, including film, and host Jim Moon's melifluous Northern tones have accompanied us on many a long car journey.

  http://hypnobobs.geekplanetonline.com/?podcast=microgoria-13-horror-movies-by-alan-frank

His most recent 'cast was about a book which he regards as his 'bible', one of the very first 'coffee table books' about Horror Films, Alan Frank's A Movie Treasury of Horror Movies (1974).  This is something I was always convinced I actually owned, until Moon began to describe it in detail and I realised that I actually have the follow-up book: The Movie Treasury of Monsters and Vampires, published two years later and for many years the most lavish book I had in my embryonic but growing collection.  Although some of the choices of images in this book are distinctly 'sensation-seeking' (the back cover features the creature from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell with bloody tissue hanging from where his eyes should be) Alan Frank is no slouch as either a writer or researcher. His analysis and reviews proved invaluable for me in deciding which Sunday Horrors really were worth staying up for.

If you think the front cover is startling, you should see the back!

When Jim Moon began reminiscing about how he gained his love of Horror film and enthusiasm for writing about and reviewing them at 'Alan Frank's knee' as he grew up; returning to The Movie Treasury's pages again and again, it struck a chord with my own experience. And I suddenly, desperately wanted the book he was talking about - the one I didn't have.
Flicking speculatively to Trade Me I was astonished to find that very book up for grabs and placed my first on-line bid ever. I can't honestly say an intense biding war ensued, mainly because you need at least one other participant for a battle, but I now have A Movie Treasury of Horror Movies winging it's way to me.

When coffee table books ruled the Earth, even the grim Reaper was a Cover Boy

It's a tiny event, I know, but sometimes it's the little treats we look forward to which help us hang on through life's bumpier passages. And if the book's original owner feels a little regret that he's surrendered this tome for the price of a cup of coffee, I hope he'll take solace in the fact the Movie Treasury will be treasured for at least my lifetime.

Now I know I had this one somewhere - time for a rummage in the attic.

I am Joe's Eye-stalk

We're going beyond the beyond of beyond,
 and getting under the enemy's skin...

Doctor Who is back after it's longest break since Paul McGann left San Francisco in 1996, and so far it's been rather good. Inevitably I'd like to write about the new series here, but I don't want to slavishly post a review of the latest episode every week, either.  A plethora of up-to-date, well-written reviews are a few key-strokes away on Google, so I'm going to try something a little bit different.
What I'm planning to do is occasionally dip into the new series with a more peripheral look at a particular episode. For example, I covered the first story by banging on about Peter Capaldi for paragraph after over-long paragraph (well, he's great, OK?).
This week's episode has been almost unanimously, and deservedly, declared an instant classic. It delivered exactly what its title: Into the Dalek promised: a miniaturised 'fantastic voyage' through the inner workings of the Doctor's greatest enemy.  So I'm going to look at the first time many fans took the same journey - within the pages of a very special book.

“BEYOND the BEYOND of BEYOND”, we intoned solemnly into the cassette recorder, bellowing every time we came across a word spelt unnecessarily in BOLD CAPITALS, “at the DARK endless edge of ETERNAL SPACE!”.  We were eleven years old, and my friend Adam and I broke off helpless with mirth at our own prepubescent wit.  We were reading from possibly the first ever Doctor Who coffee table book, the legendary 1976 tome Doctor Who and the Daleks Omnibus, and specifically the stunningly illustrated but erratically ‘bold/Caps locked/strip: ‘Invasion – the Enemy Within’.

We might have been mocking, but we loved that book.  Like the Doctor's recent foray, the wonderful cutaway diagram 'The Anatomy of a Dalek' allowed us to see inside a Dalek. We learned that the gun was called a ‘multi-range variable power destructor’ (only here and nowhere else as far as I know), although the organic creature itself appeared to be a large collander of effervescent pea soup. We speculated whether being shot in the pinky finger by a multi-range destructor might kill you.

At the back, every Dalek serial was listed with a tantalising brief description, the closest thing to any kind of programme guide we'd ever seen at this point (even if few of the story names were actually correct).  This ended with the then-latest dalek adventure called Genesis of the Daleks.  The Omnibus was very focused on this serial which we had never seen and a good part of the book consisted of an apparently abridged reprint of Terrance Dick’s Target novelisation - a meticulous on-line Fan has since calculated that almost 5% of the original prose has been removed.  (This was months before I even knew what a Target novelisation was – but I digress, there will be much more about these wonderful little books in an upcoming post).  Pages of the actual Genesis script and images from the story were reproduced, along with a gorgeously lurid illustrated portrait of Davros.

 This all made Genesis of the Daleks seem like the greatest story ever, even though it was clearly inaccurate.  We all knew that the Daleks evolved as a result of a neutronic war with the Thals, not genetically engineered by some wizened, wheelchair-bound slap-head – how could the programme get that so wrong?
The third Doctor story Planet of the Daleks got similar treatment in the second half of the book, which I loved even more as I was, and remain, a steadfast adherent to the gospel according to Jon. And then some glorious colour stills including  a thrilling scene from Genesis where the Daleks apparently corner the Doctor in a BBC carpark (I had no concept of publicity stills at this age).

Like the modern programme-makers, the publishers of the Omnibus were clearly enarmoured with the stack-platformed, long-eared (that’s what the diagram said the Dalek ‘lights’ were) big-screen Dalek versions, as they featured in most of the illustrations.  Oh, the illustrations! Here we finally come to the reason why this book is utterly essential in any fan’s library.  No Doctor Who artist (and there have been many talented professionals over the years), ever came near the verve, spectacle, and sheer insanity of the magnificent work done by the General Illustration Company for this book.
Colour and texture which in isolation might border on unsightly are blended into stunning visions by a masterclass application of composition and technique.

 The illustrations for the Genesis of the Daleks prose are the most bold and surreal, broadly rendered and sparingly coloured, with beautiful use of negative space.
But personally, the artwork accompanying the Planet of the Daleks section is where the book really soars for me.  These are all beautiful pieces boasting a richer palette and more precise rendering, but still masterfully slick and never laboured. My own favourite is the contents page for Planet, featuring the Thals grimly removing the remains of two partially submerged Daleks while the Doctor looks on.  The composition puts the villains at the front, giving the two Daleks a sense of menace despite their predicament, while desperate determination is clear in the Thal's expressions. The Doctor is three-quarter length at the top centre, directing proceedings with a calm authority which is pure Pertwee.

I only wish we could properly credit the criminally anonymous geniuses of the general Illustration Company, the real stars of the Dalek Omnibus. From the startling cover to the literally stellar depictions of Skaro’s solar system and the mighty Dalek Deep Space Cruiser – this was artwork which convinced you of the might, the evil and other-worldliness of the Daleks in a way the programme itself never could.

(With special thanks to my Aunt May. Ten dollars was the most money anyone had ever given me in my ten-year-old life, but at least I spent your generous gift on a book which is still a prized possession and inspiration all these years later.)

Light reading

A good story doesn't have to be embedded in a weighty tome,
sometimes it can be quite Light. 

To my shame, I haven't taken the time to read a good book in far too long.  Commuting with a sexy new little Macbook Pro means that time which might once have been spent snuggled within the pages of an engrossing book is now spent pecking ineptly away at a shiny metallic keyboard (for either business, or pleasure).
So when the striking cover of a young adult novel caught my eye recently, I thought: why not?  It seemed to be a little bit about maths and physics, set in Wellington and most importantly, short enough for me to get through before being distracted by other obligations.
Speed of Light is the latest young adult novel by the prolific Joy Cowley, a multi-award winning author of New Zealand fiction.  A passionate advocate of improving child literacy, Cowley claims to have struggled with reading when she was a child and learned valuable lessons through her own experiences:
"I believe that learning to read must be a pleasurable and meaningful exercise. If it isn't, then we teach children to read and to hate reading at the same time."

Before getting to Speed of Light itself, I'll just note that phenomenon some call 'syncronicity'.  I was dimly aware of Joy Cowley, but once starting this book I just happened to lay out an article about her at work, then read an interview with film Producer Dave Gibson who famously filmed Cowley's novel The Quiet One in 1985, and finally learned that she actually lives just down the road from our own home in the Wairarapa.
Such happenstance is appropriate for Speed of Light, a story about encountering and ultimately putting faith in influences beyond mere numbers, logic and financial and material gain. It's a surprisingly gritty tale about a dysfunctional, materialistic family who've somehow fallen out of touch with the fundamentals of life, and the efforts of the youngest child, Jeff, to find solace in the dependable, undeceptive world of numbers.

Tragic circumstances lead to his home life becoming steadily more unbearable; parents financially ruined and violently estranged, and his beloved big sister abandoning him for a doomed relationship with a married man. Eventually, Jeff's final comfort in the rational  and scientific is challenged by the dramatic manifestation of an elderly woman who might be delusional, or might very well be the supernatural agent of his deliverance she claims to be.

Cowley introduces each chapter with a short passage describing a particular scientific principle or definiton, whose relevance to the following section of the story becomes gradually clear.  For example, chapter ten is a turning point; when Jeff's plummeting situation has reached the point where it cannot get any worse, and is cannily prefaced by this description:
A falling object reaches terminal velocity when the sum of the drag force and buoyancy equals the downward force of gravity acting on the object.  Since the net force on the object is then zero, the object has zero accelleration.  Drag depends on the projected area and that is why objects with a large area relative to mass, such as parachutes, have a lower terminal velocity than objects with a small area relative to mass, such as bullets.

Brief observations on the properties of light, the nature of tides, prime numbers and many others are used to begin other chapters with equal deftness and acuity.
As we are often told, it is always darkest before the dawn, and Jeff's mystery 'guardian' opens his eyes to the importance of adhering to life as it should be, before age, cares and woes gradually dull its shining and simple truths.  Or is she simply a senile woman who has rediscovered, or even invented, a childish philosophy in her final, backward-looking days?

Despite being written for 'young adults' Speed of Light isn't an easy read in any sense of the word. It makes you work, and even despair at times, but I hope I'm not giving anything away to reveal that Jeff and his family's eventual re-emergence into the light makes all their beautifully-written tribulations worthwhile.

Dansing King

Yet another Stephen King book about a writer/teacher from Maine? But this time it’s non-fiction.

A one-line review on the release of Danse Macabre, King’s analysis of horror,  back in 1981 sniffed: “Stephen King with his critic’s hat on”.

But, like the homogenous writing and/or teaching heroes of most of his early novels, King is actually well-placed to examine and critique other works, particularly in the horror genre. Obviously there’s a strong leaning towards American films , TV and fiction, but that goes hand in hand with the often interesting autobiographical tone of this book.

I first read this book almost 25 years ago, and at that time still enjoyed King’s novels.  I had just finished The Talisman, his brilliant and inexplicably still-unfilmed novel co-written with Peter Straub, and was willing to accept everything he said as gospel. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre was my unerring compass pointing to recommended destinations, and away from dead-ends, pitfalls and washouts.  His swooning adoration of Straub’s Ghost Story, a book which I read while staying in a Highland Castle and rattled me like no other novel ever has, further convinced me of King’s worth as a guide through the genre.

Since then of course, I’ve been let down to the point of no-return by both King and Straub, and done enough reading and viewing to form my own opinions about much of the material covered in Danse Macabre.

Although returning to this book in a slightly belligerent frame of mind and far less inclined to be lectured to, I still found it difficult to disagree outright with most of King’s views. When this hopefully-ashamed author of the interminable and unfocused Tommyknockers accuses Ray Bradbury of over-writing I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or choke, but King also nails what is so magical about Bradbury’s work:

“…he lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated.  Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury, he broke the mold”.

“Amen to that!”: to borrow King’s sometimes annoying habit of falling into overly-chummy “gonna, gotta, aintcha” slang when he feels confident he’s made a point which we’re all going to hoot and murmur “right on!” to.

That quote was from the final and densest part of the book, where King is obviously most comfortable – analyzing American horror literature.  As well as Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes and other writers, he looks at The Bodynatchers, Rosemary’s Baby, The Haunting of Hill House, The Shrinking Man and, to his credit, a couple of British authors.  What unites this list is that they have all been filmed, mostly well, and so if I hadn’t read the novels discussed I have at least ‘seen’ them  King appears to have corresponded with the authors, and so the views presented aren’t just his but are also straight from the horse’s mouths, which is insightful and fascinating.  Jack Finney, for example, had no thoughts at all of a ‘reds under the bed’ subtext when he wrote the Bodysnatchers – so there!

The Film and TV sections are where the book shows it’s age the most, with discussions of long-forgotten features as ‘current cinema’ (mutant grizzly bear epic Prophecy, anyone?) and an unsurprisingly American-centric and ultimately dismissive view of horror on television.  There was much more happening on the box than Kolchak and Twilight Zone re-runs across the pond, Mr King…

Elsewhere, his insistence on distilling characters and themes into Apollonian and Diosynian (good and bad to you and me) are useful categories when King is in full lecturing mode, but feel a little like being constantly tugged on a lead back to his own totemic dog park rather than really being allowed to explore.  (Not sure why I fell into a dog metaphor there, maybe it’s the ghost of Cujo…)

On the plus (apollonian?) side, King’s love for the material shines through and his own skills come to life when recounting one of his own viewing or reading touchstones. He quite rightly prophesises the then-recent Alien to be a modern horror classic and recalls 50s and 60s B movies with real affection. Here he recounts an image from such a film which was obviously hugely influential:

“But the feeling that stuck longest was that swooning sensation when good old Richard Carlson and good old Julia Adams were surely going down for the third time, and the image that remains forever after is the creature slowly and patiently walling it’s victims into the Black Lagoon; even now I can see it peering over the growing wall of mud and sticks. 
Its eyes.  Its ancient eyes.”

 Perhaps more fond recollections and less lecture note would have gone down better with me, even if I can’t dispute his conclusions.  But given all that has happened in the horror genre since 1981, I wouldn’t say no to a follow-up, either.

Unbreakable

Think you’ve had a hard day?  This book might just give you a new sense of perspective…

Unbroken is that rare species of book which, if it had been a work of fiction rather than a biography, would quickly be dismissed as utterly unbelievable.

Louis Zamperini, an American WWII airman and Berlin Olympic athlete, is simultaneously one of the most, and least, fortunate men in human history. Somehow surviving the lethal indifference of nature as a castaway, and then the repugnant excesses of human sadism as a captive, Zamperini found a superhuman ability to endure even while his torture and disease wracked body continued to deteriorate under unimaginable hardship. This is the story of an extraordinary man finding himself circumstances which tragically were all too ordinary for thousands of prisoners of Japan, and does not make for easy reading.

Zamperini (left) finishes his record-breaking final lap at the Berlin Olympics.

Growing up in California, Zamperini discovered a gift for running which not only pulled him back from a life of delinquency (which taught him how to make a quick getaway) but eventually saw him represent his country at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, meeting Adolf Hitler after finishing the final lap of his 5000m event in an unprecedented 56 seconds.  Many believed Zamperini had the ability to become the first sub-four minute mile runner in history until, like so many others, his aspirations were sidetracked by the outbreak of war.

 Zamperini served as a bombardier based at Oahu, Hawaii and saw plenty of action until a tragic series of miscalculations onboard an unreliable B24 bomber resulted in a fatal crash into the Pacific.  Despite being entangled in wreckage, he became one of only three men to survive, living on rain water and anything they were able to catch, while the sun and sharks constantly assailed them, a Japanese Zero strafed their raft and they drifted ever deeper into enemy territory.

Covering two thousand miles in a hellish 47 days, this account of the survivor’s ingenuity and determination would make an astonishing book on its own.  Unfortunately for Zamperini, this unparalleled feat of endurance was to be a mere prelude to what awaited him after his immediate Japanese capture.

Zamperini inspects one of the 594 holes left in his plane after a bombing raid.

 To attempt to summarise his experiences here would reduce them to a mere list of brutalities, leaving no room for the moments of quiet and ingenious defiance, unexpected humanity on both sides and strength of spirit beyond all imagination. It can’t be trivialised or barely even described – Hillenbrand’s sensitive but unflinching account deserves and demands to be read in full – but be prepared for a harrowing time.

Zamperini was to suffer 27 months of abuse and deprivation before the two most deadly mushrooms in history finally brought the war to an end.

‘Hospital-hopping’ his way back to America, his former athletes body gradually recovers, but like so many returned servicemen Zamperini finds that the most lasting damage is psychological. His brief happiness and recent ‘story-book’ marriage begin to disintegrate as he realises that his ordeal is far from over - the final, hardest part of his struggle must be against himself.

Like all great stories, Unbroken is a triumph against unimaginable odds and you may even find yourself re-evaluating your own life and assumptions, after having briefly walked in Louis Zamperini’s shoes through this thoroughly engrossing, and ultimately uplifting book.

 

Not so bad in the end?  Zamperini's story is currently being filmed by Angelina Jolie,
for release at the end of this year.

Beating the Count

The novella Whitstable is a beautifully researched, but unexpectedly harrowing tribute to my favourite actor.

"My heroes have always been cowboys...", sang Willie Nelson in 1980.

Mine have always been old men.  Well, older men: professors, ‘mentors’, scientists and perhaps most especially, doctors.  The young ‘square-jawed’ heroes just bored me.  A commander who shot and punched his way out of a problem was nowhere near as interesting to me as an otherworldly scientist who could call upon vast reserves of knowledge and experience to logically think his way to a resolution.  Even if the mature, learned figure surrounded by uniformed ‘heroes’ wasn’t entirely good, like Doctor Morbius in Forbidden Planet, or even something of a buffoon – Doctor Smith in Lost in Space – a ‘qualification’ always trumped a rank or title in terms of my interest and sympathies.

And if this intellectual, less obviously heroic character could do the physical stuff as well, then I was really behind him.  This might be the application of an obscure or alien martial art, or simply the courage to take sudden and desperate action:

“And he was coming towards you and your eyes went like this – “ He shot a glance to his left.  “And you saw the red curtains and you jumped up and ran cross the long, long table and tore them down and the sunlight poured in…”

In this passage from Stephen Volk’s 2013 novella Whitstable; a young boy excitedly recounts the climax of Hammer’s 1959 Dracula, to Peter Cushing.  But he isn’t just after an autograph: he wants ‘Doctor Van Helsing’ to save him from a real vampire.

The central concept to this short story, written last year to commemorate the centennial of the late Cushing’s birth, sounds charming and probably the prelude to a gentle and loving, possibly even sycophantic, tribute to a much-loved actor.

Actually, in just 132 pages, Whitstable will put you and Cushing through the emotional wringer in ways that Van Helsing’s worst nightmares couldn’t match.  Consider that the story is set just after the death of his beloved wife Helen, when even opening his eyes in the morning seems like a pointless exercise, then ponder what the real-life equivalent of a corrupting, predatory vampire might be and you’ll glimpse how dark the road which Volk leads the reader down really is.

Cushing’s legendary impeccable manners, religious faith and scrupulous regard for the old world values of respect and compassion are tested to their breaking point in the seemingly uncaring and often profane world of the early 1970s.  Many times his films are paralleled (including a horrifying home invasion which can’t quite breach his threshold, uninvited) as this gentle man out of time seems so utterly helpless against the brutal forces of darkness.

Putting real people into fictional situations is not new, but strikes me here more than ever that using a public figure (in this case someone only ten years gone), and all that we knew of his loves, hopes , fears and vulnerabilities in a concocted tale might be treading the very fine line of good taste.

Many have said that they hoped Cushing might have approved of Whitstable, and having finished it in a single afternoon (almost unheard of for me) I can only add my own wish to that sentiment.  It might be harrowing and challenging, but Whitstable is certainly still a loving tribute to Cushing and as with his countless films, good does finally triumph over the most appalling evil.

Highly recommended, but don’t expect a gentle ride.

Of Cushing himself, as with many of my heroes, my Mother made the introduction.  It’s difficult to remember exactly where – it might even have been an episode of Space 1999!  I had read about his films for years, possibly completely missing his cameo in the campily-disturbing Scream and Scream Again, so I suspect it was Star Wars where I first really saw him – fittingly, on the big screen.  Once again the young heroes didn’t get a look in for me.  Tarkin’s cold destruction of Leia’s entire planet, quelling of the squabbling lesser dignitaries, and that last, fleeting glimpse of his icily calm profile before the Death Star detonates all stuck in my mind.  He even convincingly threatens Vader with a single, flint-hard line.

And as usual, Cushing’s fellow cast could only rhapsodise about working with the ‘Gentle Man of horror’, Carrie Fisher often remarking about how impossible it was to hate the man who blew up her planet.

Be kind, I doodled this in the back of a school exercise book when I was 14.

And it seemed to continue to be his atypical performances where I would catch Cushing.  His running-gag appearances on Morcambe and Wise, playing my hero in Doctor Who and the Daleks and Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Peter Cushing in the lead role of Doctor Who and the Daleks (1964)

In the early 1980s TV2’s ‘Sunday Horrors’ opened a treasure trove of Hammer and I finally saw Cushing’s Van Helsing and Victor Frankenstein.  Naturally, he was as sublime, steely and dynamic as I’d always hoped. But even if I had somehow impossibly been disappointed by his two most well-known roles, it wouldn’t have mattered at all  -Peter Cushing had somehow already become my favourite actor.

Far more accomplished than the parts usually afforded him deserved, and hugely prolific - I’m thrilled by the fact that , even now, there is still a huge amount of his work I am yet to see.

To finish, I am yet again going to defer to another’s far more skilful writing.  In the audio reading of Cushing’s autobiography, Past Forgetting, he reads this ‘fan letter’.  In Cushing’s distinctively perfect diction, scrupulously observing every consonant and finding hitherto unsuspected syllables in every-day words, this letter is possibly the best of its kind ever written, and encapsulates perfectly why this gaunt, gallant gentleman continues to mean so much to those of us who’ve seen his films:

In the endless of fables of good and evil, which we tell, and want told to us, you are the teller, and the tale.

The kind conjurer, the vulnerable miracle worker, with sleight of mind you can steel your face and eyes to become the glacial fire that would wreck a world. You can leash, and unleash the very devils of hell.  You are the raised rapier behind which no fiend could reach.  Grey, grained oak from a remembered childhood, that held the earth and sky in place.

But most of all, you are the long-awaited story-teller.  No-one gives life to a legend as you do, the beloved enchanter, enfolding us in the simple power of a gesture, turning each moment like a spinning apple on a stem, until it falls into our upturned hands.  And the only price we pay is loss of ignorance.

Mary-Anne Rosberg, a Fan, 1978 

  

Living in Britain in 1994, I found out about Cushing’s death when I discovered
I had recorded this unscheduled, short tribute shown the night before.