Unfathomable Athenaeum: Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.

It's that time of year again, The snow has started to fall, small cherub-faced children grin under bobble hats, time to curl up by your electric heater (loathe to turn the central heating on yet) and scare yourself shitless this winter night. The British Winter Tradition of the novella subtitled 'A Ghost Story' is an ancient ritual of, oh, about a year and a half. Wrestled successfully from long-dead Edwardian males like M.R. James, and Henry James' Turn Of The Screw (a masterpiece of the form), the traditional ghost story is now firmly in the hands of talented bestselling female authors, and frankly that's no bad thing.

2010 seems to be the year for it. We've had the applauded and Booker-prize nominated (not to mention fellow Pembrokeshirian*) Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, Audrey 'Time Traveller's Wife' Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry and the arch-duchess, woman in black of the genre herself, Susan Hill release her fourth ghost-novella The Small Hand, which has rocketed into the charts this November.

My read this winter was Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, originally a writer of worthy but formulaic family sagas, she eventually made her name with the children's series The Chronicles Of Ancient Darkness, anthropological fantasies in the tradition of Golding's The Inheritors or the books of Jean M. Auel. This year she released Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, a chilling yarn set on the arctic ice in the mid 30s, with the obligatory subtitle and tons of atmosphere.

It takes the form of the diary of destitute Londoner Jack Miller, poor, bitter and boiling over with middle-class anxieties and an unconscious death-wish that practically reaches out of the pages and smacks you in the face. An aspiring physicist, Jack is hired as a radio operator for a group of priviliged boy's own types for a lengthy scientific trek to Spitsbergen, a group of islands in the Arctic circle. Once a profitable no-mans land, Spitsbergen has now been annexed by Norway - leaving a scattering of disused miner's camps and trapper's huts throughout the snowy wastes. Once the party arrive at their camp and settle in for the six-month sunless night, it becomes apparent, to Jack at least, that they are far from alone.

There is a yarn element to all these ghost stories, the inevitable feeling that you are being spun a tale. The trick is to go with it and enjoy the ride. Paver's characters are believable, humanly flawed and sympathetic. The setting is individually Gothic - the brooding castle ruins replaced by the remains of 20th century industrial endeavour, and the excuse for her character(s) to exist within a perfectly Earthly eternal night is too good of a chance to miss. Also, for a female writer, she has an embarrassingly solid grasp on what makes these boy's adventures so indulgently fun. Building huts, surviving from rations, using a mix of scientific and practical knowledge to keep yourself alive and comfortable in an inhospitable environment. These are the hidden joys of the majority of male fiction, from Tintin to Mad Max and boy does Paver nail it.

But this is a ghost story, and chilling it is. All bases are touched here, visceral histories, isolation, attempted tragic rationality at all levels, the feeling of being powerless in a chaotic and unexplained universe. Most of all though, the very palatable and real irrational terror of staring straight into the face of a person who is not meant to be there, and being frozen to the spot. This is a frightening book, a clever ghost tale - proper nightmare fodder. Give some texture to those bad dreams this winter.

*not a real word

Unfathomable Athenaeum: The Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig'

The Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig' By William Hope Hodgson

The first novel from Edwardian self-defence teacher Hodgson, whose horror stories inspired many writers of supernatural fiction throughout the century and beyond. Like Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written almost 70 years previously, Glen Carrig is a maritime horror tale where the almost non-existent plot is merely a device in which to throw the protagonists from one unwholesome situation to another, emphasis being on the small, almost self contained set-pieces that appear throughout the narrative. 

Unlike Pym, which is very dry and in places dull because Poe mimicked factual books of the day in order to give his sea-quest a hint of realism, Glen Carrig is very dry and in places dull because Hodgson draws on his own lengthy experiences in the merchant navy to give his sea-quest a hint of realism. Only a minor criticism, as when he stops being a nerdy, boat-obsessed boy scout, Hodgson has managed in this book to write some of the most nightmarish visions and tension-ridden passages in horror fiction.

His ability to leave the worst of the horrors to the reader's imagination was copied far more clunky a fashion by the Horror Pope Lovecraft, but in these chapters the things that go bump in the night are rarely seen at all, leaving the atmosphere to really build by itself as the hapless crew try to survive every night, and when, unlike in the Lovecraft canon, the creatures are finally glimpsed they are not left as 'indescribable' or 'unnamable' but are described in as much detail that the narrator can allow.

Much like his Edwardian counterpart H.G. Wells, Hodgson is very much a grotesquophile - a big fan of tentacled monster 'devil fish' and the like, as well as strange plants and fungi and the unbelievable 'Weed Men' - sort of bottom-feeding, beaked slime-covered crosses between Tove Jansson's Hattifatteners and William Burrough's Mugwumps.

A bizarre book, well worth the read, if maybe there are a few too many passages on mizzenmasts and the correct construction of a bow and arrow. There is, however, something in this book, as well as Hodgson's other sea-stories, that bridge the gap between the traditional boy's own sea fable and the later space operas of the 20th Century, where the mizzenmasts have been replaced by self-aware space ships, tachyon beams and the like. The technological geekiness has just progressed along with the technology, the ideas of adventure, survival and alienation as well as the horror of the unknown have survived and this is certainly one of the important stepping stones on the way.

Unfathomable Athenaeum: Kraken

 

Kraken By China Miéville

Fast-tracked to paperback in a mere five months, probably due to the Hugo Award presented to his previous novel, The City And The City, Miéville's Kraken is a dark, supernatural blend of W.H. Hodgson-like grotesquery, grubby cyberpunk fantasy and esoteric theologies.

'Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god. A god that someone is hoping will end the world.'

Miéville, the erstwhile wunderkind of the New Weird, manages to nail the urban fantasy genre in a dark, violent and often comic novel. While not a groundbreaking read, with its bizarre cults, new twists on worn characters and tongue-in cheek pop culture references (trust me, you'll never watch Star Trek in quite the same way ever again) it is nevertheless visceral and cathartic fun. A magnum opus for fans of Gaiman's Neverwhere or Mike Carey's 'Felix Castor' thrillers, Kraken is probably more of a fun aside for more uncompromising fantasy or horror fans.

You're a thing, a construct. They grew you in a f*cking lab.

*Computer Died In It's Sleep - Phone Post*

    'Ripley was dead to begin with. As dead as a tired franchise...' For many years now the much maligned Alien: Resurrection has been a whipping post for Alien fans since its release in 1998. Often seen as a needless, soulless, studio cash cow sequel to a flawed but inspired horror trilogy - a clumsy Ringo in the John-Paul-George sequence of the first three films (respectively).

    With the franchise now not only dead, but violated repeatedly in its grave (the dull and stupid AVP and AVP: Requiem.) I thought it would be fair, in blissful retrospect, to look back at a film that in all honesty I enjoyed without prejudice when I was 16, over cups of tea, the morning after a late-night Alien-a-thon.

    Like the other three films, each of which was directed by a fastidious auteur, Alien: Resurrection was helmed by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a director with, too, his very own strikingly original visual style. Many shots from Resurrection would not be out of place in his dark, retro-futuristic fairy tales the City of Lost Children or Delicatessen, but as a whole, Jeunet reigns in his idiosyncratic style, favoring a more mainstream approach - which honestly can only be a blessing. The times his Gallic quirkiness take over - as in the woefully miscalculated opening sequence, in which the title is practically spat at us through a straw - prove that what this franchise doesn't need is to be the next Amelie.

    Resurrection sports some pretty geektastic names. Sigourney Weaver agreed to come back as Ripley (or at least a bestial simulacra of the character) and you can tell immediately that she's having the time of her life. Probably one of the most important elements of the film is realising that Ripley is not Ripley - merely an approximate copy with some distinctly unwholesome additions. It gives Weaver a chance to camp it up in a performance literally hundreds of years away from the original tortured psyche of Ellen Ripley. Is it over the top? Yes. A bit of a slap in the face for fans? To a degree. But the series would have been nothing without the hard work Weaver had put into it over the decades.

    Other performances are patchy to say the least. Dan Hedaya as the ship's captain and a pre-hellboy Ron Pearlman as a hard-case space pirate are inconsistent at best and uninteresting at worst. The rest of the space pirates are tediously faceless and mercifully culled.

    A shout-out though to my two favorite non-insectile villains: the good mad scientist/bad mad scientist team Gediman and Wren, played respectively by b-movie legend Brad Dourif (Dune, Deadwood, Child's Play, Exorcist 3) and the ever-threatening JE Freeman best known (to me at least) as the misogynistic tower of psychotic violence The Dane, from the labyrinthine gangster epic Miller's Crossing. Both Gediman and Wren, albeit really only side-characters, are entertaining, intense, occasionally weirdly funny and both have colourful melodramatic demises. ("Always put one in the brain!")

    The screenplay was written by scruffy nerf herder Joss Wheadon, who would later hone his skills on the witty, grubby space opera with the much lamented - but probably beneficially finite - Firefly/Serenity tv show and film. Whether you're a fan or not, it's clear that he was not on top form for this script. You can take in account that he had no creative control and the commercial demands of a high profile project, but this is just not a well written story. Interesting characters are sidelined (the potentially fascinating character of Purviss, knowing he will eventually die in the worst way imaginable) and unaccountably awful characters are given full reign (Winona Ryder’s tedious Annalee) Gags are plentiful and dull and the relentless action becomes a monotonous whizz-bang-whatever in comparison to the slow build-up to the other films, even James Cameron’s blockbusting Aliens.

    From a horror perspective, this film falls down flat. The idea that the titular alien species would have some sort of reverence for even a partially-alien Ripley is hard to swallow - even given that it’s exact biological life-cycle is vague to say the least - (an egg laid by a Queen alien that spawns a facehugger that impregnates a host with another egg etc. etc.) and it kills the central horror of the beast. This insectile thing - this rape-made-flesh - uses us as an incubator before tearing us apart like the pointless bag of flesh we are. That is where horror lies - not in the idea that these creatures, although undeniably intelligent, could communicate in an overtly human way, form a consciousness of a kind, destroys any last vestige of horror. It turns a primal, cosmic fear into just ugly, penis-headed versions of ourselves - nature’s unfortunate consciousness-cursed mutants. Epic fail.

    I suppose the largest fault with the film is that while other successful horror and science fiction films are given dreadful sequels, the Alien franchise is still held in high regard by critics and fans alike. The traditionally low-budget but increasingly high-financed sequels are almost expected, and either ignored outright by critics or have their in-built idiocy ironically enjoyed by shlock fans. So spoilt are we by the previous offerings that this outing could be nothing but disappointing, but in any other series, maybe we could have forgiven its faults and enjoy a daft, gory action film. However, as an Alien film, we deserve more.

Tumultuous Sycophancy and other stories

In Points Of View tradition: Good work, the BBC! (Christ.)

Yeah, being my first blog I thought I'd put my heart into this, but I'm very tired, so, y'know.

Mark Gatiss, of League Of Gentlemen fame, has done a good documentary on horror filums which is still on iPlayer (small i, capital P). Watch it. Despite his constant mugging when interviewing any relative of a b-movie star, he's a good host who is eloquent about the films he enjoys. Great news is, though, is that iPlayer have included Witchfinder General and The Quatermass Xperiment on their playlist this week (God knows if they actually broadcast them - who even has a television these days?)

Witchfinder is a good watch. A mildly camp plague of anarchy and christian mythology in which the horrors are wholly human. Reminds me of this post:

So yeah, I like it when the words 'You took him from me' are shouted over and over again while a woman screams uncontrollably in the foreground before everything goes black...

Quatermass is good, but i prefer the more ponderous (if as low-budgeted), slow-burning Hammer re-makes. This first one is good, and the alien/nuclear analogy is played to the terrifying full, but I don't like Quatermass as a speed-talking, spiv-moustached wiseguy. Having said that, Andrew Keir's later, full-bearded protohippy from the Hammer films is quite irritating as well. The bonus of this is that the writing is so good that it's quite within reason to assume that Bernard Quatermass was an actual historical figure, his exploits revered and made into populist films starring great actors of the day. The historical bite of cinema is palatable between the first Xperiment (1955) and the final hammer ...And The Pit (1967) It's a good'un. I'm quite fond of the idea of a real-life science fiction character being often inelegantly portrayed by rubbish actors, it certainly attributes the themes of the feature as smack bang in the era they were filmed. Makes Dr Who's 'regeneration' look like a pathetic plot device... Oh, hang on...

It does however cement Nigel Kneale's Quatermass as a popular figure, maybe not as well know as the shitspy thug James Bond, but certainly as iconic, if not a Guardian-reader's preference. (Yep Lee, that's you)

Going to bed now. bye.