Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 23

The Scared Brain: Favourite Cerebral Scares

Considering I’ve written some 300 short stories in the genre of the fantastic, I feel that stories in which one’s inner doubts and fears are made irrefutably solid is the bravest choice to make aesthetically. Psychological stories achieve a unique level of catharsis but shocking images must be yoked within the service of powerful ideas. The […]

Uncultured 2: What’s On My Cult Radar

  ‘The Passenger’ by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz There’s a big world of stories out there, and I’m drawn to expansive world imprints like Pushkin Press. I discovered the collected novels of Stefan Zweig at Pushkin, along with unfamiliar story collections from Gogol and Chekhov. Bringing together my twin obsessions, they also publish ‘Walter Presents’ novels […]

Press Clippings From Hell No.1

An odd article in the New York Times grabs my attention today. A man who runs an online spectacles company has been threatening to rape and murder customers who complain about the poor quality of his sunglasses. The 6′ 5″ Ukranian admits he may have a bad attitude. An older clipping is sent by a […]

The Cons Of Prose

Things like this can make you paranoid.  Let’s be clear; books are published to make money. I’m lucky to have Transworld behind me, a company with integrity and admirable loyalty to their authors. Not everyone is quite so traditional in their outlook. I was shocked when the ‘sock puppet’ scandal broke (authors leaving nasty reviews […]

Uncultured 1: What’s On My Cult Radar

  HHhH by Laurent Binet ‘HHhH’ is enlightening and occasionally infuriating, but retelling an oft-told story is never easy. Binet’s Prix Goncourt winner concerns the legend of the London-trained parachutists who attempted the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, 1942, the events leading to the confrontation, the ambush itself, which played out like an action […]

Uncultured 1: What’s On My Cult Radar This Month

  HHhH by Laurent Binet ‘HHhH’ is enlightening and occasionally infuriating, but retelling an oft-told story is never easy. Binet’s Prix Goncourt winner concerns the legend of the London-trained parachutists who attempted the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, 1942, the events leading to the confrontation, the ambush itself, which played out like an action […]

Bryant & May Awake

How woke should a fictional crime series be? The recent term for the old awareness formerly known as ‘PC’, and before that ‘cool’ and before that ‘hip’, has been so absorbed into the mainstream that many entertainment products now feel as if they exist on one side of the line or the other. Thumbing through […]

A Letter From London

You see it everywhere; the sign that reads ‘Welcome Back’. The pubs, shops and restaurants are open for outdoor dining only, the vaccination scheme is working and the West End has gone through an unimaginable transformation. In just eighteen months central London has changed out of all recognition. It has become a semi-derelict inner city […]

Tomorrow Is Another Story

I’m tempted to write a literary book about stasis Today I stumbled across a great file of film pitches for ‘Roofworld’, ‘Spanky’, ‘Calabash’ and many others. I have files full of such presentations, most of which you can date at a glance. Few of them ever got beyond the script stage. One or two are […]

Not The Ideal Holmes

Recently there’s been much talk in the creative community about IPs. The intellectual property rights of characters are being sought out as never before because in uncertain times they come with built-in buyers. The most well-known characters are the most valuable, and they’re usually the simplest and easiest to grasp. That’s what keeps Sherlock Holmes […]