Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 5

Just How Tricky Can You Be?

Lately TV drama has been playing tricks on us. The peak so far probably came with ‘Landscapers’, a true crime story disturbingly redesigned around the protagonists’ fantasy lives. It’s something novelists did with some frequency until publishers decided to play it safe and revert to Victorian narrative – solid, straightforward, nothing too tricksy or clever. […]

The Last Royal

How can you feel such a strong connection with a stranger?   (On Queen Elizabeth’s death, 8th September 2022) It’s traditional for us to gather around Buckingham Palace in times of difficulty and uncertainty as well as celebration. And so it was yesterday, with thousands standing silently waiting for news, then remaining into the night, […]

Balancing Acts

New evidence shows that human beings were already standing on their own two feet seven million years ago. So it would seem I’m going in the reverse direction, for I’m now barely able to stand up some days. The neurological damage to my lower limbs, my weight-loss and general unwellness suggest that I will have […]

Heading Home

Our Easyjet flight to Barcelona should have been fully masked, but most Britons simply forgot. After all, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had failed to mention the pandemic for months. Consequently the Husband caught a bad cold on the flight, then I got it, and our travel plans fell apart. To make up for it, old friends […]

Kingdoms

Fantasy Schmantasy I know it’s my problem. I’ve tried so many times with fantasy novels, but there’s only a very fine strand of them I can really appreciate. Those are the ones carrying the weight of reality with them, the ones that put humans ahead of invented creatures. I always loved the film ‘Dragonslayer’, partly […]

‘Dark’ VS ‘Cosy’

Publishing is a bipolar industry. Its subjects are cute or bleak, its publicity blitzes star-driven and hyped-to-death or lost and invisible. I try not to judge books by their covers but you can often discern entire plots from the jacket. I know there are sections of the market not aimed at me, like the book […]

The Last Stake In ‘Dracula’ (Part 2)

Transylvania’s Castle Bran is only the fictional home of Count Dracula, but when Bram Stoker used it as a direct model for his novel, it was granted an awkward place in Romania’s history. The government would rather not be remembered for a British pulp author, but the image stuck in the public consciousness, and therefore […]

The Last Stake In ‘Dracula’ (Part 1)

I’ve written on this subject often because it lies at the junction of several of my interests, but decided this could be the last word on the subject. Every time I see that Disney are spinning off another peripheral character into a film franchise my heart sinks. Walt Disney himself was far more imaginative. He […]

The Films I Keep Coming Back To: ‘Drowning By Numbers’ (1988)

I’ve revised this list all through my life, and now that I’m at a somewhat later stage than I’d intended I thought I’d try to make a definitive list of films that have influenced me, some of them far more than they should have. I shall not again mention Ken Russell’s ‘The Boy Friend’, which […]

Film Round-Up: Here Be No Dragons

One of the problems besetting film collectors who have ended up owning redundant DVDs is the increasing unplayability of the discs. Finally settling down to watch the four-hour version of ‘Mysteries of Lisbon’, Raul Ruiz’s remarkable last film, I discovered the discs were so covered in scratches that they wouldn’t play. I mostly use portable […]