Ken Preston's Blog, page 6

Saving Planet Earth with Edible Water Balls

I’m going off topic today because I’m angry about something.

Before we get into that I want you to watch this short video.

Done that? Great.

Those things I was holding? They are water balls. You can eat them. Or drink them. Whatever.

But yes, you can pick one up and roll it around in your hand like you saw me do there and then you can pop it in your mouth and bite it and you’ll get a nice drink of water.

My twelve-year-old son made these. He found a YouTube tutorial. He went and sourced the ingredients he needed on the internet, persuaded me to part with some cold, hard cash in return for said ingredients and then he made some water balls.

And I think that’s pretty incredible. He’s been researching edible plastic. He’s twelve. He knows all about plastic pollution. He knows we need to find a solution.

And then he goes and makes these edible water balls.

In the kitchen.

He’s not a scientist. He doesn’t have a Tony Stark style lab at his disposal.

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And now I’m thinking to myself: Wait a minute! What the hell is going on here?

You know, we’re living in some very strange times at the moment. If you read the newspapers or watch the news on TV, or follow social media, you’re probably thinking to yourself that planet earth is doomed. We’re going to Hell in a handbasket baby, and there ain’t no stopping it, no sirree, that momentum’s got too much power behind it to slow up now.

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We’ve got climate change, we’ve got plastic filling our oceans, we’ve got endangered species, forests disappearing, a raging diabetes epidemic, and there’s going to be far too many people to fit on our planet in the very near future.

It’s scary being alive right now.

Except . . .

My twelve-year-old son made edible water balls in our kitchen using ingredients he bought off the internet out of his pocket money.

Doesn’t that suggest something to you?

Doesn’t that maybe make you think that possibly, just possibly, we already have the answers to many of the problems we are currently facing?

Well, actually, we do.

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For example, Choose Water have developed a plastic free water bottle. No matter where these bottles end up, the ocean, landfill, they biodegrade within a few months and don’t leave behind toxic micro-particles or heavy metals. And they donate 100% of their profits to Water for Africa.

I think that’s incredible.

But what about climate change? This one’s a kick in the unmentionables for sure, isn’t it? There’s no way we’re dodging this particular bullet.

Well, yes and no.

Certainly I believe that the adverse effects of man made climate change are already starting to happen, and have been seen for some time. And it’s only going to get worse.

For the time being at least.

But work is being done, and the technology is becoming available, to save the planet and ourselves in the process.

A very quick search on the internet found lab grown meat, nuclear-fusion-energy power plants and a carbon capture power plant that can remove far more CO2 per acre of land footprint than trees and plants and then turn it into energy.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We have the means to save our planet and to make it a wonderful place to live for everyone.

So why isn’t it happening?

Or rather, why isn’t it happening at a faster rate?

Well, as much as I hate pointing the finger at other people because, well, it’s usually a bit more complicated than that, I’m going to do it anyway.

When our government could have spent its valuable time working to make the lives of its citizens better, especially those at the lower end of the income scale and those without homes, and when they could have been examining how we as a nation could work more cooperatively with other nations to tackle those big problems we are facing, what have they been doing instead?

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Well, I’ll tell you. They’ve spent almost three years fucking about with this stupid pile of shit called Brexit. And Lord knows how much money they have spent on it.

Bloody hell, don’t they realise they are supposed to be governing us?

That we elected them to keep order and to provide jobs and security?

Talk about climate change! How many times has Theresa May been flown to meetings in the EU to debate the fucking Irish Backstop!? (I don’t even know what that is! Do they? Does anybody? Because that’s all anyone seems to talk about these days.) Think of all the carbon that has been chucked into the atmosphere.

And am I the only one who feels like this country is currently being run by a bunch of incompetent, self-interested bigots?

Of course we’re not. It’s more complicated than that. A lot more complicated.

But that’s how it feels right now.

That’s how it feels.

And don’t get me started on Donald Trump.

Please . . .

On the positive side, all this stupid shit that is going on right now within the organisations of our respective governments has brought me to the realisation that actually, left to our own devices, most of us just get on with our lives. It’s almost like we don’t need governments.

And I think, at the end of the day, there’s a pearl of wisdom in that statement.

Let me tell you about Choose Water again. The company head, James Longcroft, set up Choose Water with the intention of selling bottled water at music festivals and other big events and then donating 100% of the profits to Water for Africa. This is amazing by itself, but James soon realised that, even with these good intentions, he was contributing to the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans and that didn’t fit with his ethical mission.

He stopped ordering plastic bottles and began researching a biodegradable alternative. They lost a lot of revenue, and James survived by designing websites for clients in the evenings and at weekends, while he spent his days developing a responsibility-free waterproof bottle. He spent a year and a half doing this, in the kitchen in his Edinburgh home and, in his words “…it was a right faff.” He had two small fires, an explosion, and he “… bled more than I thought humanly possible.”

But he did it.

And can we back up a moment there?

He did it in his kitchen.

I love and respect people like this, the awesome ones who live their lives ethically and kindly and generously.

And this is something we can all do.

We can take responsibility for our own lives, and always seek to look after, and be kind to, each other.

Because when you’ve got individuals like the ones innovating and giving at Choose Water, and the many thousands of others, maybe even millions, just like them around the world, then I think we’ve still got more than a fighting chance to save the planet and ourselves in the process.

After all, if my twelve-year-old son can make edible water balls in the kitchen sink now, what’s he going to be capable of when he’s an adult?

What are we all capable of?

The post Saving Planet Earth with Edible Water Balls appeared first on Ken Preston.

Guilty Pleasures #3: Trancers

Tim Thomerson has to be one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood. Born in 1946, and with his first appearance on screen in an episode of TV series Mannix in 1975, Thomerson has racked up over two hundred TV and film credits since then and is still working.

You’ve probably never heard of him, and you may never have even seen him in a film, as his career seems to have been spent for the most part in B-movies.

His most famous role is Jack Deth (and yes, I spelt that correctly) in a 1985 low budget sci-fi mash-up of The Terminator and Blade Runner.

Yes, it’s the return of Guilty Pleasures, my irregular series on films I have watched and enjoyed, but maybe shouldn’t have.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Guilty Pleasures #3: Trancers.

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My biggest problem with telling you about this particular 1980s cheapo sci-fi knock-off is trying to decide where to start.

Well, let’s begin with a basic overview of the plot.

The story starts in Angel City (Los Angeles to you and me, and I think it is underwater by this point) in the year 2247, when enforcer Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) has just retired from the weekly grind after vanquishing villain Martin Whistler and his roving band of zombies, called ‘trancers.’

Jack Deth, as played by Thomerson, is a Sam Spade private eye type character, only with ray guns and a watch with a ‘long second’, (more on the long second later).

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But, (don’t ask me what happened I can’t remember) Whistler and his trancers have gone back to 1985, with the fiendish plan of exterminating Angel City’s ruling council by killing off all the council members’ ancestors.

So Deth agrees to go back in time to get Whistler and the trancers all over again.

Time travel here involves a person’s consciousness being sent ‘down the line’ into an ancestor’s body, in this case a journalist named Phil Dethton played by, you guessed it, Tim Thomerson.

Dethton happens to have a pretty girlfriend called Leena (played by a very young Helen Hunt) who works as a Santa’s elf at a shopping mall (yes, it’s a Christmas movie too) and wears a skimpy, tight-fitting elf suit for much of the film. Together they work to find Whistler and protect the council member’s ancestors.

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You following this so far? There might be a test later.

As you can imagine with body swap time travelling there are lots of fun shenanigans to be had

Deth’s gruff, hard talking boss also pops down the line to 1985, but he winds up in the body of a young girl.

In another scene Jack and Leena are in bed about to, well, you know, ‘get it on’, when Deth is zapped back to 2247 for an emergency meeting with the council. By the time Deth is back in 1985 the fun is over and Leena is cooing about how amazing he was.

As Leena turns over to go to sleep, Deth wearily switches on the TV and says to himself, ‘Well, fella, I hope you enjoyed yourself.’

Then there is Jack Deth’s watch. With a push of a button, Deth can take advantage of the watch’s ‘long second’. Once activated, this stretches out a second of time so that everybody apart from Jack is frozen in time, giving him a chance to run away.

Trancers is gloriously ridiculous, and at a running time of one hour fifteen minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

It also has one of the best tag
lines for a movie ever:

Jack Deth is back, and he’s never even been here before.

And where else are you going to watch a film with the line, ‘Dry hair’s for squids’?

Trancers spawned five more films, and Thomerson starred as Jack Deth in all but 2002’s Trancers 6.

Well, I don’t know about any of the sequels but I highly recommend you check out Trancers.

Or at the very least the trailer.

The post Guilty Pleasures #3: Trancers appeared first on Ken Preston.

Why I Decided to Not Write a Blog Post This Week

I could just say it’s been a busy week and leave it at that.

And I wouldn’t be lying either because it has been a very busy week. And an exciting one.

But if I was to say, ‘I haven’t had time to write a blog post this week because I have been busy,’ and then leave it at that, well, I don’t feel that’s fair on you. Because, it’s Sunday, and here you are expecting your Sunday afternoon blog post and I’ve turned up (or, more accurately, not turned up) and told you that there’s no blog post this Sunday because I’ve been too busy to write one. And then, for all you know, I’ve leaned back in my comfy chair with a drink in one hand, the remote control for the TV in the other and a slice of chocolate cake (chocolate cake being my favourite) in…oh, I don’t know, my toes or something, and continued binge watching Season Four of Gotham.

It wouldn’t be right, would it?

You deserve an explanation.

Because I have been busy. Last week was the launch for Joe Coffin Season Four, and that kept me busy enough all week. Plus, I still had my creative writing groups to plan and run AND I started work on my next novel. So yes, it’s been a busy week.

Now, normally when I have a week as busy as this I carve out some precious time at the weekend to write that blog post for publication on Sunday afternoon.

But I haven’t even had time to do that as this weekend I have been away and doing something rather special.

You may have heard me talk about Christian Marclay’s incredible film installation The Clock before. I first heard of it in 2010 and got to see some of it at The Hayward Gallery not too long after.

For those of you who don’t know, The Clock is a 24 hour film on a loop, edited together from thousands of films and TV shows from all over the world in which each sequence tells the time in some way for every minute of a 24-hour period. So, in one sequence you have Sean Connery as James Bond checking the time on his watch and in another Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection asks Roy Scheider what the time is.

The Clock is also synchronised to the local time, and it actually does perform a function as a clock.

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Of course you spend the first few minutes checking the time whenever you see the time displayed, or told, on screen. But then you quickly sink into it and the film becomes mesmerising.

The problem with The Clock being synchronised to the real time is that you only get to see the portion of the film available during gallery opening hours. It’s playing at the Tate Modern at the moment and if you go to see it on a Saturday then you will get to watch The Clock from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm.

But that still leaves half the film unwatched.

Probably more, unless you have the stamina to sit and watch a film for twelve hours.

The Tate Modern got around this problem by holding three twenty-four-hour screenings.

And yes, you guessed it, this weekend I went to one of them. The final one in fact.

I arrived at the Tate Modern at about 4:45 pm to discover a queue. This was my third visit to see The Clock at the Tate Modern and I had never had to queue before.

The line moved pretty fast though, and I was inside and watching The Clock at 17:15. (This is how we viewers of The Clock talk about time in relation to the film. Sad, I know.)

I stayed in that gallery space, sitting on a surprisingly comfy sofa, for the next eleven and three-quarter hours until, forced by tiredness and a need for the toilet, left the screening at 05:01.

And now I have seen the night-time segment of The Clock. Or most of it, anyway.

The nighttime section is a wholly different experience to daytime.

Especially after around 03:00 when it starts to become hallucinatory and dreamlike.

First of all we have the journey towards midnight which includes, obviously, Marty McFly and Doc attempting to power the DeLorean when lightning strikes the town clock tower at 10:04 pm (or 22:04 in The Clock parlance). Midnight arrives with a flurry of clock faces turning onto the hour, followed by various clips from movies of people trying to get to sleep, or make love, or even simply staying asleep, but always interrupted by something, usually the telephone ringing.

And then comes the clock faces, their hands spinning backwards along with the dream scenes from Hitchcock’s Spellbound, designed by Salvador Dali.

It all became a very surreal experience, particularly in the gallery space crammed full of people, when the Tate staff started wandering up and down between the settees and shining their torches on viewers they suspected were asleep. Anyone they found asleep they shook awake and told them to watch the film.

So yes, for the last thirty-two hours and counting I have been awake, and for twelve of those hours I have sat and had the time told me, every single minute.

It was a lot more fun than it sounds.

But anyway, that’s why I haven’t had time to write a blog post this week.

Sorry and all that.

The post Why I Decided to Not Write a Blog Post This Week appeared first on Ken Preston.

Vampires

Where do vampires come from?

These days, saturated as we are with films, TV and books, we know what vampires look like. They have fangs, drink human blood, and can’t see themselves in mirrors. Some can be warded off with garlic, and most if not all can be killed with a stake through the heart.

But it wasn’t always that simple. Today’s scholars suspect that the modern conception of these blood sucking monsters evolved from traditional beliefs held throughout Europe. Beliefs that were centred around the fear that the dead, once buried, could return to life and harm the living.

Without our modern day, scientific understanding of how bodies decompose, it would have been easy to think that a recently deceased loved one was rapidly turning into a reanimated monster.

As a corpse’s skin shrinks, its teeth and fingernails can appear to have grown longer. And as internal organs break down, a dark “purge fluid” can leak out of the nose and mouth.

Anyone unfamiliar with this process might have interpreted this to be blood and suspect that the corpse had been drinking it from the living.

Fear of vampires also rose during times of plague. Hunting down the dead, believing them to be risen again and drinking blood, may have been a way of taking control of the random nature of disease.

In 2006 archaeologists unearthed a skull in Venice, Italy, buried amongst plague victims. The skull had a brick jammed in between its jaws, perhaps in attempt to prevent the corpse from rising and feeding on the living.

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One of the last big vampires scares occurred in New England in the 1890s, two hundred years after the last of the Salem witch trials. In 1892, 19 year old Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis. Her mother and sister were already dead, and her brother Edwin was seriously ill.

Concerned neighbours were worried that one of the deceased Browns were harming Edwin and so they dug up Mercy and found blood leaking from her mouth. Convinced she was a vampire they burnt Mercy’s heart and mixed some of the ashes into a potion for Edwin to drink.

The potion was meant to cure him, but he died a few months later.

We’ve come a long way since then in our understanding of death, and yet still we are fascinated by vampires, and stories about them.

Much like in the past when a fascination with vampires was a way of dealing with the horror of illness and death, I think today we are still doing the same. We use stories to escape into a different world for a while.

But did you know vampires are real?

You are probably finding that statement hard to believe, right?

Vampires, real?

Well, maybe.

I got to thinking about this whole supernatural thing a few weeks back when I attended a seminar on Gothic fiction. One of the attendees explained how she sees dead people.

They come to give her messages, she said, and they are always friendly. Apparently she often wakes up in the morning to find a dead person sitting at the end of her bed, waiting to give her a message.

Now, I’m not really a believer in the supernatural, even though I write about it. But this woman, she seemed so genuine and told us the facts about what she experiences on a daily basis without any fanfare or amateur dramatics, without the need to be centre of attention.

And I know she was telling the truth. Even if I find her truth difficult to believe.

Anyway, I started thinking about vampires. Like, what if vampires were real? How utterly terrifying that would be. Like a zombie apocalypse, only worse.

Why worse?

Because vampires can move fast, but zombies can only shuffle.

And vampires are clever, they can think for themselves, while zombies are after nothing more than another meal of fresh brains.

So I did a little research.

Looking back in time it seems that Countess Elizabeth Bathory may have been the first documented vampire. Born in 1560, Elizabeth also holds a Guinness World Record: The world’s most prolific female serial killer, with a possible 650 victims to her name.

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Born into royalty in Hungary, Elizabeth Bathory was married at 15, and her wedding was attended by 4500 guests. She was an educated woman who could read and write in four languages. During The Long War Elizabeth defended her husband’s estates, and there were several instances where she intervened on behalf of destitute women, including a woman whose husband was captured by the Turks and a woman whose daughter was raped and impregnated.

Sounds like an admirable person, doesn’t she?

Despite this, she had a darker side.

Báthory’s initial victims were serving girls aged 10 to 14 years, the daughters of local peasants, many of whom were lured by offers of well paid work as maids and servants in the castle. Once she got a taste for murder and torture she started abducting young women. Torture and bloody orgies were carried out to accompany family celebrations, including her daughter’s wedding, and holidays.

The atrocities described most consistently included severe beatings, burning or mutilation of hands, biting the flesh off faces, arms and other body parts, and freezing or starving to death. Other forms of depravity included girls being burned with hot tongs and then placed in freezing cold water, being covered in honey and live ants, and cannibalism.

It was also said that she bathed in the blood of young virgin girls to retain her youth.

When her crimes were finally unearthed, over 300 witnesses and survivors testified against her, and the discovery of many horribly mutilated, dead, dying and imprisoned girls didn’t help her case either.

But was she actually a vampire?

Probably not. The legends of vampirism surrounding Countess Bathory only began to emerge years after her death. Aside from bathing in blood and biting her victims what really helped further the rumour of vampirism was the fact that both her grandfather and uncle had been high ranking officials in Transylvania.

And we all know who lived in Transylvania, don’t we?

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So, a Guinness World Record holder yes, but vampire?

No.

Just like those ancestors of ours who jammed bricks in corpses’ mouths to prevent them from feeding on the living once they had risen from the dead, labelling Countess Bathory as a vampire was simply another way of dealing with the horror of reality. And so they turned to a fiction, vampires, to help deal with that.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy writing the Joe Coffin books so much. Some pretty bad things happen in those novels, but they never follow me back into the real world, thank goodness.

And the reason I am talking about vampires so much today is that Joe Coffin Season Four is due to be published on Tuesday 27th November 2018. Yes, that’s right, this Tuesday coming.

And I’m rather excited.

Quite giddy in fact.

A few lucky readers have already had a first read and here are some of their thoughts:

‘What can I say…Joe Coffin season 4 was worth the wait! Vampires, bats, gangsters and, of course, Joe Coffin. This story flat sucked me in. I read it straight through, completely unable to put it down.’ – Jamie
‘New readers may be lost (but they have the joy to come of reading the first three seasons) but for those who have already encountered Joe Coffin this is a welcome return!’ – Julian
‘This is the best book so far!’ – Philip Daniel Angel

If you want to keep up with news about Joe Coffin and my other books, then you need to sign up to my email newsletter. And if you sign up this coming week, you will find out how to get hold of some free bonus books to go with Joe Coffin Season Four.

The post Vampires appeared first on Ken Preston.

Cut Up Joe

It’s not long now before Joe Coffin Season Four will be on your ereader screens. And I’ve been getting some feedback from some early readers who are saying things like, ‘This is the best book so far!’ and, ‘This book is great!’

My favourite though is this one, ‘I read it straight through, completely unable to put it down!’

Anyway, I got so excited about Joe Coffin Season Four’s imminent release that I thought, why not share a little of it with you?

The thing is though, yesterday I was leading a creative writing workshop with a group of teenagers and we were looking at cut up poetry.

We watched this short video from William Burroughs:

And then we watched this video about David Bowie:

Well, these two videos and the workshop had such an effect on me that I couldn’t resist taking some key scenes from Joe Coffin Season Four and cutting them up and rearranging them into a Burroughs/Bowie type poem.

Anyway, here you go.

Cut Up Joe

Coffin picked up the empty whisky glass at Stilts. It smacked him on the forehead, knocking his aim off.

Coffin hurled the whisky glass at Stilts. It smacked him on the floor.

Coffin stood up, lifting the table with him until it was on its side and Gosling said, ‘I can get you another drink, Joe?’

Gosling said. ‘I can get you another drink, Joe?’

Gosling said. ‘I can get you another drink, Joe?’

Gosling said. ‘I can get you another drink.’

Coffin hurled the whisky glass again.

‘You want another drink.’

Coffin hurled the whisky glass again.

‘You want another drink, Joe?’

Coffin picked up the empty whisky glass again.

‘You want another drink.’

Coffin hurled the whisky glass again.

‘You want another drink, Joe?’

 

Through the pain and your ears off his face with swear.

Through the back of his face.

‘Now you, I’m going to take you, you are going across her concentration and your tongue right where you, I’ll bite you are,’ he said, panting.

‘Now,’ he had wiped the back of his face.

He wiped hair, damp with sweat, swinging across her tongue right where your mouth if you are,

he had wiped the pain and spat in Gilligan. I will bite your ears off and your nose and grinned.

Emma, right out off and said, panting, ‘Now you, I swear.’

Through the nausea, Emma and you, the pain and the nausea, Emma shook her head, her head, her concentration and the pain and you,

I will kick your tongue right where he said, panting, ‘Now your tongue right out of your mouth if your nose and spat.’

I will kick, you won’t.

I will kick you, are going to take.

 

‘Bloody hell, Gerry, here on stage so the other the mic stage, a pint in one had moved around there’s jokes,’ Gilligan said, his club erupted, people laughing.

You?

Shaw muttered.

Shaw muttered.

Gosling said.

Shaw glanced around. He hand, walked away from there like he was standing the two men.

Very hard at each other. He had moved away, they weren’t. Silence had fallen over, they weren’t.

Silence hand, walked around the stage so the microphone in hand, walked across the stand, like the two men.

‘Jokes,’ Gilligan said.

Except now the standing very hard man of Birmingham is in the microphone,

had fallen over to the closer to that heard man of Birmingham is in one,

in the closer to the two gentlemen?

‘You think they’d just heard there’s something else happening and clapping, looking you?’

 

‘Should have stayed on the hell the bonnet of the A93, just like I told you,’

The back Range Rover. He’d refused to get off the back Range Rover. He’d refused.

‘You know where the pages of the bonnet, out where went wrong yet?’ Coffin said.

‘You know where the pages of the Range Rover.’

A cold wind while they were.

‘You know where went wrong yet?’ the back Range Rover. He’d refused to get out, said flat on they were.

‘We should have stayed on the Stig, tried the hell, the Stig said he didn’t want to get off the cold wind, while the road atlas laid flat on the Range Rover.’

He’d refused to stay on the Range Rover. He’d refused, the Stig tried the back of the Stig struggling up.

Shaw was sat in the bonnet of the back Range Rover. He’d refused to stayed on the Stig, said he didn’t want to work out, he said.

‘We should stand around, in they were. You kn

The post Cut Up Joe appeared first on Ken Preston.

Spoiled for Choice – But is that a good thing?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You kids, you just don’t know how lucky you are when it comes to entertainment these days. Especially when it comes to movies and television. You’ve got cable channels, you’ve got Netflix, you’ve got Amazon Video on demand, you’ve got DVD and Blu-Ray and you’ve got YouTube.

You kids are just spoiled for choice.

I’m glad to be alive in this easily accessible information overload we live in. I love how I can access almost any movie or television show I want to, quite often within minutes of realising that, yes, I really do need to see the intro to Then Came Bronson once more.

But all this accessibility to stuff has a downside too. Because it’s so easily available it becomes less special in a way.

I waited 15 years to see Sorcerer and when it finally became available I had to travel down to London to watch it at the BFI.

Now, of course, I own it on Blu-Ray and I can watch it any damn time I please.

We don’t often encounter something that is that hard to find anymore. Although it does happen occasionally.

Christian Marclay’s 24 hour film installation The Clock is currently playing at the Tate Modern in London. Now that really is difficult to see. The last time it played in Britain was eight years ago. The film is made up of clips from films and TV around the world, and in every clip there is a reference to the time. The film is also synced to the actual local time, which makes it even harder to see in its fullness as most people only get to watch the sequences available during gallery opening times.

I’ve seen about four or five hours worth, between around 11:30 am and 4:30 pm. I would love to see some of the sequences at night, especially around midnight and the early hours, but it’s not easy. There is a 24 hour screening in December which I might go to, and then in January it leaves the Tate Modern and may not be back for another eight years.

So the fact that I can’t own that film, that I can’t even see all of it without tremendous effort, makes it special.

I have to actually put in some work to view it.

Back when I was a youngster, in ye olden days when we all lived in houses made of mud, and bartered chickens for clothes, most films were out of reach for a good long time, some of them forever. If you missed seeing a new film at the local cinema it was a five year wait at least until it turned up on TV. And then you had to check the TV guide and make sure you were free at the show time and hoped that there wasn’t going to be a power cut.

But there was an upside to all this.

These days I watch TV very specifically. I search for something I want to watch and then watch it.

Sounds obvious, right?

But back in the old days we had three channels, and that was it. If you fancied watching something, you were stuck with whatever was being shown at the time on one of those channels. And if there wasn’t anything on that was decent enough to enjoy, well…tough.

But the flipside of having your choices made for you like that were, if you stayed up late enough into the night then you sometimes got lucky with a random TV horror movie you’d never seen before.

Here are a few I remember stumbling across.

Killdozer.

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Starring Clint Walker this film starts with a small meteorite crashing to earth on an island where building construction is about to take place. Of course the meteor has some kind of powerful supernatural force within it which is released when a bulldozer’s blade hits it. The bulldozer then takes on a life of its own and starts killing off all the construction workers, leaving only dependable Clint Walker to triumph over the evil living within the machine.

Yes, it’s as ridiculous and as bad as it sounds.

Much better than that was-

Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

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Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak, played by the marvellous Darren McGavin, keeps coming across vampires, zombies, witches and all sorts of other creatures of the night, but of course nobody believes him. This was actually a short lived TV series on the back of two TV movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, both written by Richard Matheson. Kolchak is deliriously good fun, with a different monster every week and I highly recommend you check it out.

Salem’s Lot

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I’ve already written about the book Salem’s Lot here, but the TV series starring David Soul and James Mason also had a significant impact on my formative years. And how could I not watch it? Based on a novel by Stephen King, with David Soul fresh off Starsky and Hutch, my favourite TV cop duo (now replaced by Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock of course) and James Mason, a classic actor from many a Hollywood movie.

And it was great, too! Spooky mists in woodland, gothic architecture, a vampire child floating outside a window, it was everything I wanted out of a horror film. And it was directed by Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another film I despaired of ever getting the opportunity to see.

I’m missing many others out here, some of which I have seen and many others I haven’t, but I have to finish today’s post with one of my all time favourite, made for TV, films-

La Cabina.

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Written and directed by Antonio Mercero, this 1972, 35 minute long Spanish TV film was shown on BBC1 late one night without a single subtitle. And I was gripped throughout its running time right through to the ending. The premise is simple. A man gets trapped in a telephone box and several passersby try to set him free.

And that’s it.

I’d love to say more, I really would. I’ve just watched it again, for the first time since the late 70s, and it is brilliant.

Pure cinematic brilliance.

But to say more about it would spoil it for you.

You can watch it here on YouTube.

Watch it right now, with the lights down and nobody else in the house to disturb you. La Cabina demands your complete attention.

And then come back and tell me what you thought of it.

The post Spoiled for Choice – But is that a good thing? appeared first on Ken Preston.

A Dog Called Lion

A visit to Highgate Cemetery was always on the bucket list for me after reading Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry. The cemetery is split into two halves, East and West. Visitors can wander around the East side unaccompanied, and find the graves of Douglas Adams, Karl Marx and Malcolm McLaren amongst others.

But the West side is only accessible by a guided tour and it was here that Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife, worked as a tour guide for a year whilst writing Her Fearful Symmetry.

The cemetery was built as a response to London’s rapidly increasing population and, with it, its increasing death rate and need for burial. Opened in 1839 its location on a hillside afforded it magnificent views across London.

By the early 1900s with ostentatious burials and memorials becoming less popular and cremation increasing in popularity Highgate Cemetery began to fall into disrepair. With the groundsmen called away to war, nature took over and began reclaiming the land for itself once more. Now those magnificent views of London are obscured by trees, and many of the gravestones are crumbling and overgrown.

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It looks wonderfully eerie and Gothic.

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Our guide gave us a fascinating talk as he took us around the various monuments to the dead, not only about the history of the cemetery but some of those interred there.

Take, for example, Thomas Sayers, a Victorian bare-knuckle boxer.

Before the introduction of the Queensberry Rules, and with it boxing gloves and weight division, boxing was a highly dangerous, and somewhat illegal sport. Despite standing only 5’ 8” tall, Sayers fought and beat men much heavier, and was a popular figure around London. He was so popular that after fighting American John C Heenan in the first international world title fight in 1860, a fight which ended in a draw after two and half hours, a public subscription was put together of £3,000 to pay for Sayers’ retirement.

Sayers was often seen accompanied by his dog, Lion, a huge black mastiff. So close was Sayers to his pet that Lion was his chief mourner at the retired fighter’s funeral only a few years later.

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Elsewhere in Highgate Cemetery is the tomb of George Wombwell, the founder of a famous menagerie, Wombwell’s Travelling Circus. Menageries were a popular Victorian pastime, and Wombwell’s was one of the largest, containing thirty lions, five elephants, two rhinoceroses and whole herds of tigers, bears, and more. Wombwell died in 1850 and a docile lion sleeps atop his tomb.

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I went to Highgate Cemetery to experience its atmosphere and for the photo opportunities, but I received far more than that. Not only did I enjoy the tour guide’s talk on the history of the cemetery, its architecture and some of its residents but I also found two more characters to add to a novel I have been mulling over for a year or two now.

I don’t particularly want to say any more, as I am a firm believer in keeping my works in progress under wraps until they are ready to be seen. But I think it’s obvious from what I have said that I will be returning to Victorian history at some point in the near future, and it will be for a novel unlike anything I have attempted so far.

If you would like to keep updated with my work, and get a couple of free books, you can sign up to my newsletter and I will be delighted to welcome you on board.

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It’s been a funny sort of week

It’s been a funny sort of week.

As a self-employed, full time author who spends most of his day sitting in his cellar staring at a computer screen, it’s important that I plan my week out. Left to my own devices I would probably just spend my day browsing Facebook and chasing internet memes down virtual rabbit holes.

Ugh!

That’s why, every Sunday night I look at what I have achieved in the previous week and at what still needs to be done and then map out my week.

Here is this last week’s schedule-

[image error]And beneath that a list of things that need doing that I cross off as I go-

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Now, I think you will notice that nowhere on that list or in that timetable does it say anything about emptying the dishwasher, putting on a load of washing and taking it out to hang up to dry. It doesn’t say anything about going to the bank to deposit cheques, or to the shops to buy reams of paper or coffee. Oh yes, now that I think about it, there’s nowhere on that list that mentions anything about making hundreds of mugs of coffee and tea every day.

As you can imagine, my days quickly shift shape and become something else.

There are some items on that list that have to get done, such as preparing sessions for my creative writing after school clubs. And, of course, I have to deliver the sessions.

But then there are other distractions, too. This week, for example, I was feeling so good about finally finishing writing Joe Coffin Season Four that I decided to forget all about that list of projects that needed tackling, and design the Season Four book cover instead.

Here, take a look:

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Now come on, you didn’t seriously think I was going to show you the cover, did you?

Anyway, having a design which I liked, I realised that I could redesign the covers for the first three seasons to tie them all together thematically whilst hinting at the contents of the individual book.

That still left the accounts to work on, the short stories to write, the lecture on self-publishing to put together, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

Having taken all that into consideration I tore myself away from redesigning the Joe Coffin Season One cover and . . . well, I wrote some poetry.

I normally don’t write poetry but I had been looking at quite a bit recently in preparation for one of my creative writing after school clubs, and I’ve become fascinated with prose poetry.

Here is my attempt at a prose poem:

Buttons, y’know, I just don’t like them. There’s something repulsive about buttons, something disturbing and freaky. I know one thing for sure, and I don’t know much, but I know this, that I would not like to eat a button. I would not like to swallow one and feel it’s angular roundedness sticking in my throat. I’ve seen them dipped in gravy, school gravy, and maybe that is where it all started, at school, in the gravy. I don’t like custard much, either, but I’ve never seen buttons dipped in custard. Would that help their angular roundedness slide down my throat? I doubt it, and I would cough and choke and spurt yellow snot out of my nose and ears and eyes and mouth as I choked on a custard covered button with its angular roundedness stuck in my throat. I don’t like touching buttons, I don’t like poking them through button holes and on the occasions when I have to do it they fight me, those buttons, and I do believe that even if they were coated in custard or even custard snot they would still refuse to go through the button holes. Because buttons don’t like me and they watch me, and sometimes they are eyes and buttons that are eyes are buttons coated in custard and stuck in my throat.

And I have to swallow.

Doesn’t much look like a poem, does it? And who knows, maybe I got the whole idea wrong and it isn’t a poem at all. But I had so much fun writing it I decided to write another one:

There is a computer in front of me and it is blank.

As you might have guessed, inspiration had deserted me and that is all I came up with.

So, finally, I turned back to my to-do list.

So much to do.

It’s been a funny sort of week.

Oh yes, one more thing.

Joe Coffin Season Four.

Out soon.

I promise.

The post It’s been a funny sort of week appeared first on Ken Preston.

My Life as Gothic Fiction

Last Friday I attended the Birmingham Literature Festival, specifically their session on Gothic Fiction. Andrew Michael Hurley, author of Gothic novel and Costa award winner The Loney, lead the session.

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Well, if you’ve been following this blog for a while or if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, then you will know that my reading tastes are all over the place. Gothic fiction though? Hell yes, that obviously holds a special place in my black, shrivelled, literary heart.

I think the first Gothic novel I ever read was Dracula, back when I was about twelve years old. The early scenes with Jonathan Harker staying at Count Dracula’s castle are always my favourite, and the most Gothic scenes in the book for me.

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Whitby Abbey, home of Dracula.

Thinking about it now, I remember reading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson at quite an early age, well before Dracula. Stevenson’s most famous Gothic novel is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but I think Kidnapped counts as well with its high quotient of dark, gloomy passages and stormy nights.

Anyway, as you can imagine, Gothic fiction with its creepiness and suspense and atmospheric settings, with its reliance on the supernatural and its flawed heroes and attractive villains, turned me on to horror in a big way. After Dracula in particular I was off and running and it wasn’t long before I was reading Salem’s Lot, Interview with a Vampire, The Fog, Night of the Crabs and much more.

After that session in Birmingham last Friday though, I’ve come to realise that perhaps my interest in Gothic fiction is actually part of my DNA. That no matter what books and films I had been exposed to at an early age, it would have always been there like a dormant virus waiting to be activated by the right conditions.

It turns out that Andrew Michael Hurley is from Lancashire like myself. His book, The Loney, is set in and around Morecambe Bay.

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No, The Loney has nothing to do with this particular Morecambe. That would have been a very different book.

Chatting to him before the session started and then through group discussions later, I realised how much of a Gothic landscape I had been born into and grown up in. The rolling hills and constant grey skies, wind and rain. The abandoned buildings falling into disrepair. The impenetrable accents of some of the older locals and the history of witchcraft and ghosts.

Why had I never seen it before?

I suppose it’s familiarity, the fact that for the first twenty years of my life this was the normal, blinded me to it.

You could also say I was born into a family straight out of a Gothic novel, with its secrets (especially the secrets) and history of mental illness (oh yeah, that too), the scandal of illegitimacy, the suicides and the drug abuse.

For most of my life I have regarded my family’s history and my upbringing as a millstone around my neck. Looking at it in this way, through the lens of Gothic fiction, it’s starting to appear more as a gift.

I can feel a fictionalised memoir coming on.

During the discussion about all things Gothic I told a story from my childhood about a gruesome and very Gothic discovery I made one day.

As I said, we lived out in the countryside. One main road snaking its way through a valley. Take a left or a right off that road and if you didn’t wind up parked on somebody’s drive then you were most likely going to finish up sitting outside a farmhouse. Next to our house (which also used to be a farmhouse) there was a lane leading up to farmland and footpaths. I used to take our dog for a walk along those footpaths, one of which ran beside a bubbling stream, and up onto the fields.

On one particular route there was a ruin of a farmhouse which I sometimes explored.

Part of it had collapsed which obviously made it a health and safety nightmare. But this was the seventies, health and safety hadn’t even been thought of back then, and kids just did what they wanted anyway.

You could get into a couple of rooms on the ground floor. The part of the building that had collapsed was where the stairs had been, but you could still get up there by climbing up the collapsed section.

One day I climbed up the mound of rubble to the first floor. Upstairs I found a room, bare of any furniture like the rest of the house, except for a simple wooden table.

Neatly placed on the table was a sheep’s carcass. The sheep had been gutted, all of its insides removed so that it lay flat on the table, only its head left alone.

It’s strange but, although this discovery was very much an unusual and startling find, it wasn’t that unusual or startling.

Where I lived, that kind of experience wasn’t totally out of the ordinary.

It’s only now, looking back from a viewpoint many years in the future, that I can see what a very 1970s style Gothic fiction life I lived.

Which, I suppose, explains why I write what I write.

Gothic fiction is in my DNA.

 

Oh yes, one last thing . . .

The Results Are In

You voted on my next project after my current WIP.

Here is how you voted:

Caxton Tempest in the Village of Insects 34.6%
Joe Coffin Season Five: 65.4%

That’s a pretty clear answer.

So, here is how my publishing schedule is going to look for the rest of 2018 and into 2019:

Joe Coffin Season Four

Planet of the Dinosaurs Book Two: The Journey North

Joe Coffin Season Five

Caxton Tempest in the Village of Insects

The post My Life as Gothic Fiction appeared first on Ken Preston.

Decisions, Decisions

I keep coming across this quote from Douglas Adams:

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

You’ve probably come across it before, it seems to do the rounds on the World Wide Web quite often.

And I expect you can identify with it too. I know I can. I’ve set myself so many deadlines over the years, and seen (and heard) them fly by that I’m amazed I still bother.

But bother I do.

I’ve been looking at my schedule of novels planned for the next couple of years and, yes indeed, I have stuck deadlines on all of them.

But, bearing in mind Douglas Adams’ warning for inveterate deadline setters such as myself, I decided against making those deadlines public.

After all, why should I share the horror of my missed deadlines with you when I am sure you have plenty of your own?

On the other hand I thought you might like to see what I have planned next, without deadlines but in chronological order of intended production.

Here goes then (whether you’re interested or not):

Priority Number One

At the top of this list, of course, is Joe Coffin Season Four. I am ashamed and embarrassed at how long it has taken me to write this fourth instalment in the Joe Coffin Series. Honestly, I published Season Three in February 2017, and that one was behind schedule. I had intended to bring out a new Joe Coffin novel once a year, which meant number three should have been out on October 31st 2016 and number four October 31st 2017.

Well, here we are in October 2018 and I’m afraid Joe Coffin Season Four is going to miss another deadline: the 31st of this month.

I know, I know. I’m sorry.

What can I say?

Life took over, as it sometimes does.

But hey, the good news is, Season Four will be out later this year. All being well. Hopefully.

Okay, moving on . . .

Priority Number Two

Number two on my list of novels to write and publish is Planet of the Dinosaurs Book Two: The Journey North.

This is one I’ve been looking forward to getting back to and finishing for a while now as it is already half completed. I’ve also got a pretty good idea where the rest of the book is headed, so hopefully once I get stuck back into it (which is happening in the next week or two) I should make some speedy progress.

Priority Number Three

Ah now, this is where my plan starts getting a little vague.

I have three options.

One is to go straight back into the world of gangsters and vampires that is the Joe Coffin series and start work on Season Five. I’d love to get that one out fast, maybe the end of May 2019. As an apology of sorts for keeping everyone waiting so long for number four.

Or, I could write a new romance novel. I haven’t written one of those for a while either.

Or, I could finally, FINALLY, get around to writing the second book in the Caxton Tempest series. It’s only been eleven years since I published Caxton Tempest at the End of the World.

Time to hang my head in shame again.

Don’t look at me like that.

Shit happens, okay?

Okay?

After that, well, I have a sackful of stories I intend telling you. Oh yes.

More Seasons in the world of Joe Coffin.

More Planet of the Dinosaurs and a spin-off series looking at what happened to the people left behind.

More short stories.

A web-based serial, either free to read or protected by a subscription based paywall but with lots of other goodies included in membership.

A novel I have been incubating for a while in the back of my subconscious and is now stirring and demanding attention. I don’t want to say too much at all about this one. But I can tell you this: It’s going to be my riff on the movie Jaws, a love letter to it if you like, but so much more than that too. It will also be based on a true story.

All right, so I need your help. If you’ve been paying attention so far, you will have realised that the publication of Joe Coffin Season Four is (at long last) drawing close.

After that, it will be the second in my Planet of the Dinosaur young adult series.

But what about the next project?

Well, why don’t I let you decide?

Cast your votes below and I shall do as you bid.

 

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