Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 336

Hallowe’en: Finding The Heart Of The Ghost Story

I’m doing Hallowe’en events all next week, and I’ll be reading several new ghost stories, but I still struggle to find a way of reaching the heart of the ghost story. Some questions need to be asked.

In modern times, how can we believe in them? Are ghost stories horror stories? What are they for? Why [...]

Hope For Paperbacks After All?

Yesterday I attended London’s annual paperback book fair in Victoria. On previous years it had been poorly attended. Two years ago I walked in and found myself the only person in the room apart from the dealers. This year, though, the place was completely packed – what had happened?

Recently we’ve been told that hardback books [...]

Re:View – ‘Red Lights’

Not to be confused with the excellent French thriller ‘Feux Rouges’, this film by Rodrigo Cortes, director of the nailbiter ‘Buried’, was unfairly dismissed at the box office. It’s a shame because, although flawed, it tackles something rarely seen onscreen, the flipside of shows like ‘Fringe’ and ‘The X Files’, wherein the paranormal is shown [...]

The Looming Hollywood Crisis

Cinema box offices sales have hit a twenty-year low, but such troughs have been weathered easily before. This time around, though, it’s a bit different. The problem is 3D, which has artificially raised cinema’s profits, and the fact that the so-called revolution turned out, once again, to be a fad that the public doesn’t really [...]

The Secret Geography of London

When I’m writing a new Bryant & May book, I try to look at London afresh each time, finding some intriguing aspect of the city that I’ve not covered before. Some of these areas are familiar to city residents, some not. Probably the quirkiest I’ve used so far was in ‘On The Loose’, with its [...]

Putting The Houses In Order

I’d like to apologise to readers in America for the long wait for the most recent Bryant & May novel ‘The Invisible Code’, but this is beyond my control. After the date was put back it became clear something was afoot, and now it has emerged that Penguin and Random House are currently in merger [...]

The Curse Of Hallowe’en

It’s hard not to notice that there are no great horror films or books around this Hallowe’en, and a quick look into the crystal ball that is ImdbPro sinks the heart, for here is the roster of upcoming Hollywood horror movies to delight us in the near future.
Frankenstein
Dracula
Poltergeist
Evil Dead
Carrie
Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Day of the [...]

The Silver Age of British TV

As DVD companies like Network delve deeper into their back catalogues to find some of the more obscure British TV series for release, I’ve heard about a couple I’m keen to see.

‘The Man in Room 17′ was set in Room 17 of the Department of Social Research, where a former wartime agent-turned-criminologist Edwin Oldenshaw [...]

Golden Girl

You’ve got to love Shirley Eaton for turning up to last night’s world premiere of the new Bond film ‘Skyfall’ in an outfit that gracefully echoes her legendary turn as Goldfinger’s gold-painted card cheat. Eaton was recently immortalised as the Goldfinger girl in the Barbican exhibition, where her golden facsimile greeted punters arriving in the [...]

Now Haunting London

Well, this year sees an explosion in spooky London events as we abandon our great love of Guido Fawkes and instead buy black-and-orange plastic supermarket tat before heading off to zombiethons, Zombie Horror Camp in the Old Vic tunnels, horror shows (the Leicester Square Theatre horror anthology ‘The Hallowe’en Sessions’ written by Kim Newman and [...]