F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 11

Doctor Who Reviews: The Tsuranga Conundrum

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My one paragraph, instant reaction to this week’s DOCTOR WHO. 

One can easily imagine the teenage Chris Chibnall watching the brightly lit white spaceship corridors of 1980s DOCTOR WHO, and thinking how great it would be if one of Joe Dante’s Gremlins were thrown into the mix. And all these years later we have that episode! Bringing together a hospital spaceship, a decorated general, a pregnant man and an android – all great cut and paste sci-fi elements – into a romp of a DOCTOR WHO story. Well, perhaps ‘romp’ is the wrong word as we have the death of two characters and the episode ends on a eulogy, so there’s a level of seriousness beyond a romp – but still it was an hour of fairly undemanding running down corridors and I thoroughly enjoyed it. To be honest, even though I thought I’d write two hundred words on each episode, I don’t have much more to say. I can’t imagine anyone will list this one as their favourite of the series, but nor can I imagine anyone hating it. It has the feel of the ‘bog-standard episode in the middle’. But if a bog-standard episode can give one this much pleasure, then it seems like we’re in good hands.

 

If you’re interested in my own writings, SOMETHING WENT WRONG AND OTHER STRANGE TALES – my frankly must read collection of scary and quirky short stories is available for free now!

The Witch of Halloween House by Jeff DeGordick

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I’m really glad I read this in the way up to Halloween. For whatever reason, it suited my current mood perfectly. Nothing too gory and blood-splattered, no scares that were going to keep me up at night ruminating over. Instead it’s more a spooky tale of PG scares where you know that no matter what happens, everyone will end up fine.

In small-town America, a young boy disappears. Eventually he shows up safe, but that hasn’t stopped the town’s people throwing their suspicion and venting all their anger on the old lady who lives in the crooked house – the town witch. Unfortunately, before the boy is found, someone has set that old lady’s house aflame and she dies in front of the shocked town’s folk. Dissolving straight into ash as she does.

Now it’s three years later and children have started to disappear again – for real this time – and it seems that the witch is back.

THE WITCH OF HALLOWEEN HOUSE is a fun ride of the book. My own horror isn’t anything like this. It goes to work on adult themes and isn’t remotely kid friendly. My thirteen year old niece still isn’t allowed to read any of my horror. And that makes me so glad that there are books like this out there that anybody in the family can read and get safe Halloween thrills from.

 

If you’re reading this on Halloween itself, then two of my books, DEATH AT THE SEASIDE and CONFINED SPACES are free today! DEATH AT THE SEASIDE is the first of my ‘Ghostly Shadows’ novella series which will be taking up my time in 2019; while CONFINED SPACES is my collection of claustrophobic short stories. You can get them both free today (or 99c/99p on other days). Happy reading!

Doctor Who Reviews – Arachnids in the UK

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My one paragraph, instant reaction to this week’s DOCTOR WHO. 

What about the spiders in the safe room? That annoyingly was the question left bouncing around my mind at the end of this otherwise nail-biting episode. Is being shot dead by a Donald Trump stand-in actually a worse fate for mutated spiders than being lured into a metal room where they’ll be starved to death? Really? That’s the moral line this episode is going with. So alarmed were we by this turn of events, Mrs Jameson and I actually rewound the episode to see if there was a line of dialogue we missed which made things clearer. But no, they’re just leaving the spiders to die in isolation, which is the humane way apparently. I’m going to put my neck out and guess there was another scene, after the hotel, which was cut – where the spider scientist said what measures they were taking to look after the spiders and how they were keeping as many as possible alive to study them. Perhaps that was once in the script, but we don’t have that in the finished episode and so I’m left somewhat irritated. An annoyance accentuated by the fact that this was an excellent example of how you make horror TV for all the family. Gripping, tense and with just enough on-screen scares to make one’s imagination go wild. I just wish they’d tidied up that loose thread. Though, I suppose, the fact that I’ve spent most of this review banging on about it, just shows how invested in this episode – and this new series – I really am.

 

If you’re interested in my own writings, SOMETHING WENT WRONG AND OTHER STRANGE TALES – my frankly must read collection of scary and quirky short stories is available for free now!

 

Apostle (2018)

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Here – appearing on Netflix in the last couple of weeks – is a bonkers brilliant piece of British horror! A film which blew me away with its energy, even though I’m not sure I followed it one hundred percent and certainly wasn’t convinced by every one of its choices. The vividness with which it carved out its dark little world – and the skill with which it started as one horror film, before becoming another – just held me enrapt.

Dan Stevens travels to a remote island to try and find his missing sister. On the island is a strange, quasi-Christian cult, led by charismatic, mad and undoubtedly dangerous preacher, Michael Sheen. So far, so THE WICKER MAN (which, I should perhaps say, is one of my favourite films). If Gareth Evans didn’t have a large poster of Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward above him when he wrote this, I will be hugely surprised. Stevens does his best to fit in and play the part of a member of the cult (although if there is an obvious flaw, it’s that Stevens seemingly tries to fit in by looking as suspicious as possible at every turn). Eventually he finds his sister, but he also finds that things on the island aren’t quite what they seem.

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I won’t give more away, and I know that this turn in the narrative will undoubtedly put some viewers off. But I went with it. I went with it every step of its increasingly mad and gory story. It’s an intense film, but one that thrilled me and gripped me and called to mind old English pastoral horror – and that really is a good thing.

In short, I loved it.

 

If you’re in the market for quirky scares, my short story collection, SOMETHING WENT WRONG & OTHER STRANGE TALES is available for free now!

Doctor Who Reviews – Rosa Parks

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My one paragraph, instant reaction to this week’s DOCTOR WHO. 

I had some concerns coming into this. The story of Rosa Parks is such an important tale, one which needs to be handled sensitively, so throwing all kinds of sci-fi shenanigans into it might not be the smartest idea. Now, I know that as a middle-aged white man in London, I’m not necessarily the best person to sit in judgement on it, but I think that not only did the production team get away with it, they created something really affecting. The whole episode built up to the looks on our time team’s faces when they had to let this woman be arrested. Horror mixed with shame as they realised they were just going to sit there and passively let her be taken away. It was a goosebumps moment, one of real power. What else? I liked that the villain was the kind of future-man who’d believe Donald J. Trump was America’s greatest President. His confrontations with The Doctor were absolutely sparkling. (Jodie was superb tonight.) Quibbles? There were a few moments when it was a bit on the nose (I’m looking at you, behind the dumpster conversation); and would Ryan really be able to figure out how to use that weapon, and then The Doctor really say nothing when she heard he’d used it? Oh well, given the rest, I can file those away as minor irritations for now. The BBC’s remit was once ‘to educate and entertain’, and I think tonight, DOCTOR WHO admirably succeeded in both.

 

If you’re interested in my own writings, SOMETHING WENT WRONG AND OTHER STRANGE TALES – my frankly must read collection of scary and quirky short stories is available for free now!

 

 

 

Revenge in 3 Parts by Valerie J Brooks

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What I really enjoyed about REVENGE IN THREE PARTS was that – without sacrificing any sense of character at all – the plot moves at such a dazzling speed. Part of that is this is three novellas running together, so there are three distinct plots. But read as a whole, it still flows brilliantly – despite our protagonist’s life being in such a different place a third of the way through the book to how it is at the beginning. Even with that, it still makes perfect sense.

A large part of that is in Angeline, we have an absolutely brilliant central character. Brooks has created a great heroine – smart, resourceful, ruthless, but also undeniably flawed. She is never passive. Even when things happen to her, she never just sits back and takes them. She always responds, and it’s the way she responds (and the mistakes she makes in responding) that keep her journey so incredibly readable.

Angeline’s beloved sister has killed herself and Angeline believes she knows who’s responsible for the despair which led to her sister’s destruction. But is everything as it seems? And thus begins a genuinely surprising zig-zag plot (most of these zigs caused by Angeline herself) in a fantastic thriller debut.

 

If you’re interested? You can read my own debut in the thriller field, DIANA CHRISTMAS, right here.

Doctor Who Reviews – The Ghost Monument

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My one paragraph, instant reaction to this week’s DOCTOR WHO. 

The aesthetic of a tent in the desert (1988’s ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’); a fantastic race across the universe (1983’s ‘Enlightenment’); and the self-interested, ruthless, almost mercenary character of Epzo (who with a little tweaking could have been an actual mercenary in any Sixth Doctor story you can think of). It feels here as if Chris Chibnall is shooting a glance at 1980s DOCTOR WHO and showing how it could have been done. Chibnall did, after all, first make an impression on fandom by appearing on TV as a geeky teen and debating with then writers about the quality of the show. This then is his fifty minute lecture on what he would do with 1980s tropes. The script was tense, while full of lovely character moments that managed to be both gripping and affecting. The four leads seem to have been born to play these roles. And let’s be honest, it also looked absolutely bloody marvellous! Possibly the most cinematic DOCTOR WHO has ever looked. So, we’re saying a win for the script, a win for the direction and design (the Tardis was both quirkily brilliant and utterly other-worldly). Two episodes in, Jodie Whittaker is clearly a fantastic Doctor and I am so excited about her run. Now I’m off to ponder just what or who the timeless child is…

 

 

If you’re reading this Sunday night after broadcast, then the first of my ‘Screen Siren Noir’ novels is FREE this weekend on Amazon Kindle! Diana Christmas was a beautiful English film actress until a secret derailed her life. Find out her story here.

Your chance to dip your toe into ‘Screen Siren Noir’!

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If you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the ‘Screen Siren Noir’ world, then this could be your lucky weekend. The first of the series, DIANA CHRISTMAS is free on Amazon Kindle today. Just click here, and it can be yours.

It’s a must-read for all fans of Megan Abbott and James Ellroy. A nail-biting British noir that’s perfect for all fans of hard-boiled crime fiction.

Twenty years ago, Diana Christmas was a beautiful actress at the top of the game, until a terrible secret derailed her life and sent her into seclusion. Now a young film journalist is about to find out the true story of what drove her away, and that the past isn’t yet over. Crammed full of twists, danger and memorably scary characters, DIANA CHRISTMAS is a brand new and gripping thriller set in the British film industry.

Intrigued? Then grab hold of your copy now!

I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Alice Rackham is out today!

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ALICE RACKHAM is published today!

It’s funny the turns life takes sometimes.

A year ago I was writing DIANA CHRISTMAS and thinking that it was just going to be a stand-alone short story. Then suddenly – seemingly of its own free will – it turned into a novel.

Excited by this brand-new novel (after years of not managing to finish any writing projects), my mind flooded with stories of other actresses. More tales I could tell in this ‘Screen Siren Noir’ world. All of them self-contained, but with enough links that those who read the whole series can chuckle to themselves at the connections.

Today I put the third of these novels out there. The story of the beautiful Alice Rackham, a stage actress of power who was too often wasted in film, and her romance with a young, struggling actor. A romance which, because of the kind of life that Alice led, was fraught with innumerable complications – and shattering danger.

It takes us to the lovely and picturesque, but quite foreboding, Carreras Hall. An old stately manor in the English countryside, with its strange, faithful retainer, Daniel. A place that is opulent enough to be a favourite amongst the monied classes, but also so sinister that once its chill enters your bones, you can never quite relax.

(And it’s a locale I will undoubtedly return to – both when wearing my straight thriller hat, and my supernatural thriller cap.)

This is a book which reverberates with passion and lust, to the point where both move past being pleasurable, and instead become utterly deadly.

As you might guess from my enthusiastic burbling above, ALICE RACKHAM is a book I am tremendously proud of and I’m so happy today to finally send it out into the world. If you do get chance to pick it up and read it, please do. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

 

You can pick up your copy of ALICE RACKHAM right here!

Doctor Who Reviews – The Woman Who Fell to Earth

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My one paragraph, instant reaction to this week’s DOCTOR WHO. 

Above everything else, this was about the introduction of Jodie Whittaker. Given what I’d seen of her in advance of this, I knew I was going to like her. There was a charm and wit to her that was effervescent in the various promotional clips, which suggested that with her, us DOCTOR WHO fans were going to be in safe hands. So it proved. But then – at the top of the crane – when she combined that charm with the big determined Doctor speech, any tiny residual doubts were swept away. We have here the makings of a great Doctor and I cannot wait for the rest of this year’s adventures. What else is there to say? Well, it looked marvellous and the music was fantastic, while the various companions – if still a little flimsy – were likeable too. And if the story itself was somewhat workmanlike? Well, so be it. You don’t want to have a settling-in episode that’s overly complex in a way which requires several viewings. You want viewers grabbed instantly. Workmanlike and moving from A to B to C is fine. What’s important is that tonight we have a brand new Doctor, and she is absolutely wonderful!

 

The third of my ‘Screen Siren Noir’ series, ALICE RACKHAM is out Wednesday. If ‘Screen Siren Noir’ is a new concept to you, then check out the opening chapters of the first book, DIANA CHRISTMAS, here!

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