Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 304

In Praise of Women In Horror

I’ve been interested to read the comments about women in horror. Many of my favourite creepy stories were written by women, from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ to ‘Three Miles Up’, but as Gareth says in the last set of comments, I’m staring at the same shelves I had as a kid.

Where are the great new names [...]

An Argument For Banning Girls From Horror Novels

Girls, eh? Cuh! First they ruined vampires, then they wrecked werewolves and zombies. Stephanie Meyer and Kristen Stewart dragged the whole horror thing into some weepy-drippy chintz-filled world of longing dewy-eyed kitty-looks and wet ‘caring’ blokes and tasteful pastels and deep heartfelt sighs, just so that a whole generation of middle-American teens could wear Goth [...]

How Authors Are Expected To Look

It’s not enough to write and live quietly behind the covers of your books anymore. In an ideal world you also need to have been a stripper. I remember seeing the cover shot of Sebastian Junger, author of ‘The Perfect Storm’, and thinking ‘I can’t do this anymore, he looks like a movie star!’ He [...]

Good & Bad Walls

There’s a right and a wrong way to approach graffiti – does it add pleasure to the way in which we view our environment, or does it subtract from the surroundings? Too often, desperate art teachers have fallen on graffiti art as a panacea for youthful troubles, allowing bad art to flourish. Now that everyone [...]

Assessing the Legacy of Iain Banks

After his tragic death at the age of 59 from gall bladder cancer, tributes have poured in for Iain Banks. This is what happens when a British writer dies (I know he was Scots Nationalist, but until the state decides otherwise he was technically British). It’s amazing how few innovative writers are appreciated in their [...]

What The Hell Are They Selling?

Continuing my obsession with peculiar shops and displays (I’ll spare you my collection of anthropomorphic fruit-people photographed at hotel buffets) I spotted these on my road trip – a slap in the face of chain-store conformity and a bit of a two-fingered salute to logical interpretation too…

1. and 2. A shirt shop of the traditional [...]

Not Everything Works: Winning and Losing Novels

Here’s an honest round-up of my recent hits and misses – a snapshot of where I am at the moment, writing-wise.

‘Bryant & May and the Invisible Code’ won the eDunnit Award, which I was thrilled about. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing lately.

The sad news is that ‘The Casebook of Bryant & May’ won’t [...]

Ten Great Road Trip Movies

As my own road trip winds down in Arragossa, the last stop before the 300km drive to Barcelona, I mentally drew up a list of memorable road movies…

1. Dead End

Christmas Eve, a family trying to get home, a vanishing woman, a mysterious stretch of road that seems to repeat itself forever – the staples of [...]

Today’s The Day…

…that ‘Bryant & May and the Invisible Code’ comes out in paperback in the UK.

Friends in the US will have to wait longer for their edition, as it’s still not posted on Amazon and I can’t find the publication date anywhere. I’m hoping that we can close up the lag for the next book, but [...]

The No-Tourists Road Trip Part 4

We’re now in the top part of Spain, Basque territory, between La Guardia and Logrono, missing out Bilbao and San Sebastian as I’ve been there before (Catherine Zeta-Jones’s party, if you must know – she was very nice).

Instead I’m visiting the other Frank Gehry building, a winery he built that is now an unaffordable hotel. [...]