F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 37

The Girl on the Train (2016)

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One can’t help thinking that if the novel of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN hadn’t managed to strike a chord with the reading public at the exact right moment and become the thriller du jour, that it would have got the Ruth Rendell treatment with an adaptation on ITV on a Sunday night at nine.

Do you remember all those Ruth Rendell (or I think perhaps more accurately her pseudonym, Barbara Vine) adaptations from the 90s?

Stand-alone thrillers with damaged characters and dark twists, all set in a domestic milieu. Perhaps it’s because I’d read the book and so had already pre-envisaged North London environs, or maybe I was just conscious that half the cast was British (with Emily Blunt using her own accent) and so most of them would easily have fitted into the cast of an ITV adaptation, Or maybe it was just that the film didn’t feel particularly cinematic, that made me think that this was a little TV thriller which had been needlessly inflated.

(As a side note, watching this as someone whose read the book, with Mrs Jameson as someone who hadn’t, made for an interesting experience. I was watching it with an eye on the plot mechanics, knowing which red herrings would be thrown in and what misdirection would take place. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure they’d done that brilliant a job on it. But viewing this film when you already know the plot is clearly a hindrance, as Mrs Jameson observed at the end that they’d done an excellent job of keeping the whodunnit a mystery. So what do I know?)

I guess the best film to compare this to was GONE GIRL, another female-centric thriller du jour given the a Hollywood treatment. But whereas that felt cinematic and like it was adding to the material, this felt just like an ITV adaptation of it. The performances were fine, the script was fine, the direction was fine, but nothing screaming that it really needed to be on the big screen.

Even the locale, which is the more obvious result of the Hollywood-investment, didn’t quite work. The houses were set back too far from the track for you to really imagine that the girl/woman on the train would have seen so much.

Poky North London is the geography the book gave itself, and that setting would have worked so much better in the TV adaptation this film could so happily have been.

The Long Walk by Richard Bachman

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I’ve read most of the pseudonymous Bachman novels (RAGE, THE RUNNING MAN, THINNER, even THE REGULATORS – though the less said about that last one the better), but I’ve never found them particularly essential. They were perfectly fine, but weren’t compulsive, must read King. (I am perfectly aware though that there are plenty of Stephen King books with his own name on the cover which are also not compulsive or must read). However I drop down on my knees in praise to THE LONG WALK. This is a wonderfully brutal dystopian vision of the future, which J.G. Ballard would have been proud of. This is first order and essential King.

In an alternate version of reality (King merely alludes to where and how our reality and this reality divorced), a hundred young men are brought together and forced to walk. Starting in Maine, they have to cover four miles an hour every hour, without slowing up or ever resting. Those who do stop, or lose the pace, or faint, or collapse to the ground with cramps, or try to escape are shot dead by the ever present military. The narrative follows Garrity, one of the walkers (and the local Maine boy the crowds cheer on) and charts how his feet are worn away, his strength fades, his fellow walkers collapse and die while he keeps plodding away.

THE LONG WALK is a superb example of a book taking a simple idea and forcing it to its logical conclusion. This is an uncompromising page turner of a book, which is never short of inventive. He may have hidden his light under the Bachman bushel, but this is bravura King.

(Being British, I also love the fact that genial game-show host Nicholas Parsons is mentioned).

[image error]Actually mentioned in this Stephen King novel

Frank Darabont, who has made a career out of adapting Stephen King for the screen – having given us THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (superb), THE MIST (good) and THE GREEN MILE (long) – apparently has the rights to it. Though any film adaptation would fill me with something like trepidation. I can’t see how a big budget film would ever get across the wonderful bleakness of what we have here. If nudged, I could see it as a stark black and white animation, but that would push it decidedly push it towards a niche audience – and still would no doubt require too much cash for such a self-consciously cult film to be feasible.

Maybe I’d learn to love any movie adaptation, but I’m quite happy that this is the rare Stephen King which hasn’t made the leap to the big screen, and for now exists in the glorious place between the printed words and our imagination.

 

Doctor Who Reviews – The Pyramid at the End of the World

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

That was a most enjoyably tense forty-five minutes of TV viewing.

Actually, the two scientists in the lab bringing about the end of the world through carelessness and the common cold – but not through broken glasses – would have made a fine incredible suspenceful episode of a TV show all by itself.

Mixed together with everything else, this made for one of the most nerve-wracking episodes of DOCTOR WHO I can remember in an age. The rising panic as the clock counts down, the sense of impending doom in the lab, Nardole collapsing, The Doctor’s blindness putting everyone at risk and Bill forced to make an impossible choice.

This was an episode to make you grip your seat, devour your finger (and even your toe) nails, and force grey hairs to sprout spontaneously on your head even if you’re bald.

But even beyond those bits designed to twist your insides, there were numerous moments to cherish here: The Doctor’s languid walk to the pyramid, sunglasses on and jacket blowing in the breeze, that was so rock’n’roll it was like Keith Richards playing the part for the moment; elsewhere we had Nardole’s sexiness; and The Doctor’s instant – flirtatious, though respectful – rapport with Erica in the lab. The show could do with a Twenty-First Century Liz Shaw, and there’d be worst candidates.

Indeed, the only bit that irritated me was the U.N Secretary General crashing into the date. Having done it with The Pope last week, it was the law of diminishing returns this. Obviously Moffat thought he’d found gold and wanted to pass it off again, but with jokes you’re supposed to top what went before rather than give slightly less good versions.

Despite that though, I once again loved it and, once again, am hoping with every fibre of my geeky being that next week lives up to it. In short I hope next week is not ALIEN 3, although I would be perfectly happy if Paul McGann showed up.

End notes:

The Monks are a great villain.  Not just their design (although it is a bit derivative of The Silence) but the fact that they seem to be acting out of some weird sense of compassion. If it turns out that the rumour is correct and they are the proto-Mondasian Cybermen, I’m going to be a tad disappointed. We need a new great villain in the Pantheon.
I’m typing this in a hotel in Southsea, with Mrs Jameson on the bed beside me and Baby Jameson asleep in her travel cot four feet away. It’s our Bank Holiday trip away, but we’ve still built our Saturday night around DOCTOR WHO. That’s how rock’n’roll we are!

 

 

Me, (Re)Writing, in 2017

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I think it’s a good habit for me to keep a writing diary, so that’s why I’m now trying to get an entry out every week.

(Yes, I know if you look back through these entries you’ll see that there’s a couple of weeks’ gap, but this is a new resolution. Not a New Year Resolution, but definitely a mid-May one.)

All going to plan it should help me put into context what I’ve done that week – how many of the writerly tasks I set out to do I succeeded in, how many others slipped away.

On good weeks, I should feel a little bit of pride in myself. Always I’m going to overload myself with too many tasks so I’ll never get time for all of them, but I will hope to have seen some progress made.

Other weeks (and there will hopefully be fewer of these) I will give myself a damn good kicking.

But at least I’ll do it publicly.

This week I have dug another four stories out of my trunk. Four shorter tales this time, all of them about people trapped in rooms and all of them clearly born from my deep-seated claustrophobia. I intend to have them published in one volume this autumn.

My main task though has been working through the story I wrote about last week – my tale of the gothic. The story of a pompous, bullying aristocrat who receives his comeuppance.

This is a tale I will publish this summer.

What’s really amusing me about it as I work my way through the manuscript is inserting in as many old, syllable-laden words as I can. There are already a great number in there, but I’m getting high satisfaction from cramming in more, poring through the dictionary and thesaurus in my head (as well as actual dictionaries and thesauruses) to see what I can find.

If I’ve already used the word ‘bacchanalian’ – what else is there? ‘Revel’, ‘debauch’, ‘den of licentiousness’.  English is a great language with which to describe drunkenness and clearly that’s always been the case.

Stone of Fire by J.F. Penn

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I think I picked up STONE OF FIRE at exactly the right moment. After a week filled with dark and distressing headlines, it was a fantastic relief to immerse myself in a piece of sheer escapism.

That’s what it is at its core – unpretentious escapist fun. It’s just happy whisking you from exotic locale to exotic locale, asking you to cling on to its helter-skelter spirit of adventure and not look back. Whisked together in its story of powerful ephemera from Jesus’s time, are an Oxford academic with military skills, a secret organisation, another secret (but more evil) organisation, and a mad American billionaire with a diabolical scheme. The whole thing is preposterous, but undeniably gripping in its bonkers way.

This week Roger Moore also died, the kind of news which, when it broke in context of Tuesday, made me feel how lucky and incredible it is that some people get to live to eighty-nine and have full and rich lives. But STONE OF FIRE, as well as stealing me away from the horrible headlines, also seemed like a strange tribute to him.

To describe this book succinctly, it’s basically a Roger Moore James Bond film with a thick topping of religious Macguffins.

The Wannabes by F.R. Jameson

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Looking back at THE WANNABES, ten years or so after I wrote it, I find – with a baffled smile – that I’m not quite sure where it came from.

Whereas for my other novel, HELL’S SECRETS, I can remember the exact moment when I started to type down the story, for THE WANNABES it’s a strange blank.

I can certainly recognise some of the inspirations that wind through the pages. Undoubtedly, there’s a bit of Patrick Hamilton’s HANGOVER SQUARE, which is a book I loved at the time; there’s a great dollop of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, although – if I’m honest – probably more of the Roger Corman film than the Edgar Allen Poe story. I saw that movie on BBC2 when I was about fourteen and the images have never left me. The character’s lead name comes straight from William Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST. Although, since Stephen King made the same steal for THE GREEN MILE, maybe it came from there too. I had read both, after all.

There’s a lot of that’s autobiographical within the pages. People I knew who made their way into the book, stories from my own life, things that were happening to me which barged their way in.

Then there are the pubs.

Both THE WANNABES and HELL’S SECRETS feature a hell of a lot of pubs, and back then – I will confess – I was something of a frequenter. Today, as a new dad, I imagine my fiction will contain noticeably fewer public houses.

Write what you know, they say. So if you are someone who frequently has a pint in their hands, write about someone who frequently has a pint in their hand.

What I don’t remember though is where the story came from. I don’t recall any moment of inspiration. I just remember writing it and it suddenly being there.

However, what I do remember is the moment before. That flash of realisation when I decided to become a genre author.

Until then I’d been scribbling away with a mindset that was self-consciously literary. With a mind full of Philip Roth and Richard Ford, I was trying to write books that said something.

This period went on for a while, as when you’re young you have a tendency to self-importance and can easily convince yourself that you do have something meaningful to say. But when I wrote in that way I could never create anything I truly liked. The stories I wrote were okay, but they were not brilliant and what I really wanted to do – with my self-important literary poseur head on – was write something brilliant.

Something brilliant and something important and something meaningful and something poetic and all so many somethings.

But one day I took a step back and looking at my bookshelves and saw the Raymond Chandlers, the Stephen Kings, the James Herberts, the Agatha Christies and wondered what the hell I was doing. Yes, I liked reading literary fiction, but what I really enjoyed – what really gave me pleasure – was horror, mysteries, crime, thrillers.

This was not only the stuff I liked, but in odd idle moments I would write little sketches of stories designed to be as scary, creepy and gruesome as hell.

What I needed to do was so obvious that I was annoyed at myself for weeks for not thinking of it earlier. I needed to be writing horror, to be writing mysteries, books with a crime at their centre, which wanted to do nothing more important than thrill.

That’s what was going to make me happiest.

And THE WANNABES is the first full-length ripe fruit of that realisation – a book where I tried to cram in so much of the stuff I liked, that it can’t help but amuse me as I read through and see a check-list of all the things I was into and how I reinterpreted them.

It’s a supernatural thriller, certainly, but it’s also a genre compendium – one shot through a psyche just excited to be bringing all these things together.

 

THE WANNABES is available on Kindle and should you feel tempted to read it yourself, you can buy it for a reasonable price through the links below:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon Australia

 

The Fireman by Joe Hill

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Quite frankly, I’ve struggled to write this review of THE FIREMAN.

There was so much I liked about it at the outset, so much that was clever and entertaining and humane – but the whole tailed off so badly, that my over-riding emotion at the end was disappointment.

However, I didn’t want to write a negative review, one that pulls apart its flaws for all to see, as for most of its long length I actually enjoyed it. There’s a lot of really good stuff here. But it’s also the case that if I was asked to recommend it, that recommendation would come with so many caveats it would surely end up standing as a non-recommendation.

Firemen put out fires, so if you have a novel whose heat and intensity suddenly extinguishes, a fireman seems an apt figure to be standing over it.

Although pretty much set in the now, THE FIREMAN is post-apocalyptic novel about a terrible disease named Dragonscale, which carves bright tattoos into a person’s skin to make them instantly recognisable and causes it’s victims to spontaneously combust. A huge chunk of humanity succumbs to it, while the rest are forced to protect themselves anyway they can.

The narrative centres on Harper Willows, a young infected nurse and the new life she has to create herself once the Dragonscale forces her into hiding.

This is where the book is at its best, creating a story that is undoubtedly epic and yet keeping it at the same time utterly personal. The world Harper moves to is vividly captured, the characters she meets so beautifully drawn and the way the story develops feels like watching a chess-master move all the pieces together.

There is a logical place for the book to finish about three quarters of the way through, but Hill doesn’t take it. I don’t mind that, as I appreciate books which confound expectations in their structure.  But unfortunately that last quarter just loses the passion and spark of what went before and the book becomes a trek to the finish. A trudge for both the readers and characters, that even late twists or outrageous coincidences can’t save.

It’s a shame – as there’s so much that’s great in these pages, I felt almost hurt I didn’t walk away from the book feeling more delighted with the experience than I did.

Joe Hill is, of course, Stephen King’s son.

A fact I wouldn’t feel the need to mention if THE FIREMAN didn’t have resounding echoes of his father right the way through it. I noticed the phrase “forgotten the face of his father” from THE DARK TOWER series, as well as a reference to the beverage Nozz-a-La from the same books. It’s twenty odd years since I read THE STAND, so I’m not overly familiar with it, but it does seem from a little routing around on the inter-web as if there are numerous parallels between the two books.

It’s both curious and a shame as clearly Hill is really talented in his own right, but heading down this route it seems he could just end up a footnote to his father’s work. Not really a Dirk Cussler, but certainly not a Martin Amis. And that would be disappointing, as I really think he is good enough to carve out a place all of his own.

Doctor Who Reviews- Extremis

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

Next year, when presumably he’ll no longer be contributing scripts, we’re really going to miss Steven Moffat.

Even those who stand as detractors (and I know there are many) would – even if they don’t like his tricksy style – surely concede that his scripts have ambition to them, they have intelligence. At their best his scripts have more unfettered ambition and pulsing intelligence than most shows on TV manage, let alone most DOCTOR WHO episodes.

Take, for example, ‘Extremis’.

Looking at the ‘Next Time’ trailer, I thought it was going to be DOCTOR WHO meets Dan Brown, and that’s great. As if THE DA VINCI CODE had been a big hit in 1974, surely Robert Holmes would have leapt on it and we’d have had a version starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen.

The Doctor meets X current popular thing is a long and noble tradition in the programme.

But we’re wrong-footed at the start as it clearly isn’t just DOCTOR WHO meets THE DA VINCI CODE, indeed the imagery couldn’t be any more GAME OF THRONES if they had George R.R. Martin playing the chief executioner. And before we know it THE MATRIX is thrown in there as well. All this in forty-five minutes, with an alien invasion, existential terror and the comedy ending of a date somehow crammed in as well.

Okay, it’s a particularly dark episode and I can see why some people will resist because of that. It’s taking the themes of THE MATRIX and really squeezing them. In the Kenau Reeves movie, when characters realised they were in a computer simulation they tried to liberate themselves. Here it’s suicide, or mass-suicide. It really is dark.

But I loved it.

I thought the script (as you might have surmised by now) was fantastic.

The direction was magnificently atmospheric.

P-Cap was superb.

P-Mac doubly so.

Even M-Lu, whose acting I haven’t had cause to praise thus far, was excellent.

I’m fully aware that a duff episode next week may tarnish the gleam of this one, but for now I’m a very contended Whovian.

 

Random other thoughts:

I didn’t notice any First Doctor references this week, but maybe I was too caught up in the story.
Although, apparently there’ve been lots of David Bowie references this series as well, and I’ve missed them too.
I’m starting to suspect I’m not very good at spotting references.

Me, Writing, in 2017

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One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given in writing is to not to throw anything away.

When you’re writing, you’re bound to start things you don’t finish, have ideas that fizzle out. You’ll no doubt have short stories you wrote and never went back to, or even completed novels (or really close to completed novels) which have been placed on the back-burner for so long now the bottom of the pan is scorched.

Maybe you got distracted by a different idea. Maybe your passion for the project dissipated for some reason. Maybe something happened in your life (“Events, dear boy, events.”) that meant with all the good will in the world, you couldn’t finish it then and have just never come back to it.

The Why doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you keep everything. That you don’t lose track of any work you’ve done.

Having finished the first draft of the new book last week, I’m now taking a short break from it. A chance to contemplate it, give myself some distance and gain a clearer point of view about what works and what doesn’t.

But still wanting to be productive, I’ve dug out a story from the old trunk and am working on that, with a view to making it the next thing I publish.

Actually, this story wasn’t one I had to wrestle out dog-eared from somewhere at the bottom of that trunk (you know, the kind of thing buried under yellowed receipts and the water-stained manual for a DVD player I no longer own), but one that’s been sitting pristine on top. It’s a tale of the gothic I wrote five years ago and have tinkered with on and off ever since, always with the thought I was going to finish it, but never quite getting there.

Until now.

But I know that further down in the trunk there are other stories, even one whole novel which I’m sure I can come back to. I’m confident that the ideas remain strong, that a lot of the themes and characters are already there, they just need to be rewritten.

The thought of that pleases me tremendously.

It means there are days ahead when I don’t have to start from scratch. The tyranny of the pure blank page can be ignored whilst I work on them.

Yes, the rewriting will require hard work, but since I last picked them up, I’ve done a lot of thought on narrative and writing – read a lot more – and I know I can do a better job on them now than I did back then.

Keep everything!

Don’t throw out your notepads. Don’t move files into the Recycle folder and forget about them when you change laptops.

You never know when you might have opportunity to make something really good out of it.

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

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The first half hour of BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB is absolutely fascinating.

After an ancient Egyptian opening which manages to be wordlessly creepy without ever leaving the studio, we then have the tale of a beautiful young woman seemingly exploited by all around her.

Her father has a weirdly solicitous relationship with her, like a seedy wooer rather than a dad; she seems to have her own stalker; while there’s a joke that the main reason her boyfriend goes out with her is her looks.

Elsewhere we have a secretary whose first appearance is being jokingly grabbed around the throat by her boyfriend, and it starts to look like a film about the dreadful things that men do to women.

BIG LITTLE LIES as 1970s creature feature. Hammer Horror as feminist text.

Amazingly in the first half hour it even passes the Bechdel Test.

Of course, in the context of a Hammer movie whose poster features a prominent cleavage, these tools for a feminist reading are surely there by accident rather than design, and the rest of the film is indeed a lot more plodding and prosaic.

If you’ve ever seen a MUMMY movie, you’ll have a good idea of what’s going down – a powerful Egyptian Queen dies long ago and in the present day her spirit tries to take over a beautiful young woman.

This one runs through those normal plot beats, but does throw in some creepy moments – jackels in the streets of London, a man thrown through the window by the power of thought. There’s some good scary stuff in here.

But there’s also a lot that just doesn’t work, that doesn’t seem to have been thought through.

The character of the dad changes quite quickly – from the weirdo at the start, to a normal father without particular comment. And as for the rushed conclusion – so we’re heading into big time SPOILER territory here – why if Margaret was basically Tera does she turn so swiftly against Tera at the end?

The biggest problem though is Valerie Leon. I’ve only ever seen her in CARRY ON films before, and she never stood out there and she certainly doesn’t here.

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It’s not that she’s bad as such, more characterless. Things seem to happen around her, while she stands about like a beautiful busty cypher. She has a line-less, almost plastic, face and a way of holding her head curiously to the side – particularly in those scenes where she’s terrifying some poor hapless man. Surely in the script it’s written that her face takes on a scary aspect, but Ms Leon completely fails at that challenge. Indeed, what that expression brought to mind was THUNDERBIRDS’ Lady Penelope, and once you have that thought in your head, most of the terror does dissipate.

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It’s a shame as there’s a lot that’s good here, and one can’t help think that with another draft of the script and a better lead actress, we’d be in the presence of a classic.