What I've Been Reading: It's a strange world.

High concept is tough to make good literature. There's a readership out there who devour anything with big ideas and only big ideas, who love to see titles like 'Cowboys and Aliens' 'Cowboy Ninja Viking' or 'Superman and Batman VS Aliens and Predator'. But then the story can fall apart under the lack of story. Concept isn't story, concept is bigger than that, and if that's all you have, then you don't have a story. Just ask Michael Bay.

But then, sometimes, you come across the high concept that works, the one that fuels great characters and that makes you think of impossible things.

Here's a few of them.

Planetary

Planetary is the work of Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, and tells the story of the Planetary organisation; a group of archeologists of the impossible who travel around the world uncovering the secret history of the planet and universe.

The villains of the series are The Four, an analogue for the Fantastic Four, they are made up of four astronauts transformed by a trip into the multiverse who now spend their time stealing artifacts and learning the secrets of the world, only to store them away. The Planetary organisation's goal is for this knowledge to be shared across the world, their motto being, 'It's a strange world, let's keep it that way.'

Ellis uses Planetary to discuss big ideas about the formation of the universe, creation myths, and comic book theory. In the seventh issue of the series, 'To be in England, in the summertime' the team head to England to attend the funeral of Jack, a John Constantine analogue. John Constantine for those who don't know, is a Scouse magician and the star of Hellblazer, once upon a time Vertigo's flagship series. Using the funeral as a set-up, Ellis crafts a tale that takes a look at eighties and their effect on comics.

When a former goodey-two-shoes superhero shows up to murder the already dead magician, he begins monologuing about how he used to have an origin based on good old fashioned family values, he had a wife and kids and then suddenly found his origin was actually grim and gritty and horrible.
(Click to enlarge)

Essentially what Ellis is doing is a critique of Alan Moore's handling of superhero's in the eighties, the way in which dark, more realistic stories took over from these golden age tales of derring do. It's an incredibly sad story, with strong work that takes it above and beyond the basic concept of 'what if Marvelman killed Alan Moore for what he did to the character'?


The Infinite Vacation

Nick Spencer made it into my top ten of the year last year for all his brilliant writing on various projects. The Infinite Vacation is his first new series this year (he's also taking the reigns of Supergirl, and War Machine later this month). It tells the story of Mark, or rather the multiple stories of Mark. He's part of a future world in which you can swap lives with any number of parallel versions of yourself for a price. See a girl in a cafe who leaves before you make a move? Just buy yourself into the universe where you did. Ever wonder what would have happened if you'd dropped out of college and set up a surf shop? It's just a click away. Mark's problem is, he keeps ending up dead.

Really this is the highest of high concepts, similar in nature to Grek Pak's 'Vision Machine' which involves an iPhone app that can let you edit and play with reality. The Infinite Vacation doesn't just allow the concept to carry the story along, rather it uses it to explore what kind of a person would use that kind of a system to live.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu writes and stars in this novel about himself. Set in a science fictional universe in which the physics is only around 90% complete (meaning some areas don't really have anything like gravity) and where aliens, ray guns and the Death Star all bump together in a hefty bundle of cliches and mad ideas, the story concerns Charles Yu, a time travel machine repairman. Time machines can be confusing bits of technology, most people assume that obtaining one means you can go back in time and change things, make your life better, but that's not the case. In fact, changing things just throws you into a parallel world or gets you stuck in a loop. Charle Yu makes the mistake of shooting his future self, who steps out of a time machine trying to hand him a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe'.

What sets this apart, and makes it work is how Yu writes each scene with such a hefty dose of science fiction and bonkers maths, but skews them with an emotional punch that keeps it grounded. When you read the flashbacks of him and his father inventing time travel, it's dealt with in the same way you would expect to read about a father and son tinkering with a go-kart in the garage. When he goes back in time to view these scenes, and realises he can't change anything, it's a smart way of showing flashbacks and keeping a human level to the story.

Whilst the ending isn't as good as the preceeding pages, the novel is well worth a look.

All the above titles can be found in most brilliant bookstores!

What I've Been Reading 2010: Part 3

3. The work of Nick Spencer.

Nick Spencer is a relative newcomer in comics, his previous works such as Existence 2.0 may have passed me by, but when a new series from Image, Morning Glories, began picking up acclaim and hype, I picked up the first issue. Morning Glories is simply the finest new ongoing series that came out of 2010, coming across like the evil bastard child of Harry Potter, Runaways and Lost. The mysteries are nicely mysterious (hopefully with the added payoff that Lost so deperately lacked) with the origins of the school and its various methods of teaching, beign kept under wraps for the moment. However, what makes Morning Glories shine is the characterisation. It would be easy for Spencer to write cookie cutter characters with little to no personalities and try and let the mysteries carry the series, but he doesn't rely on anything like that. Each of the characters is rounded and interesting. This isn't to say the mysteries aren't worth the price of admission, from the first page onwards you'll be hooked. Spencer has also re-launched DC's T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents, a title about a team of superheroes who work for the UN under the knowledge that their superpowers will eventually kill them, if you want to see what Spencer's writing is like, have a read of these captions from the final few pages of issue one of this series:

"Then let's say, just when you were at your lowest point, someone came to you and offered you a choice. A chance to change everything. A way to redeem yourself, to rewrite your own history...to make the world-to make yourself-forget your past. But even more than that, a chance to do great things, things most people can only dream of. A chance to be a hero. To save the world. And this is what we did. We gave them that choice. And once we accepted our offer-we equipped them....we trained them...we sent them in to rescue Raven and destroy Spider...and then we killed them. All of them."

Perfect.

2. Lean on Pete by Will Vlautin

Willy Vlautin writes the American working class better than almost any other writer alive today. As the singer/songwriter behind the excellent band Richmond Fontaine, he can say more about the lives of people in three minutes than some writers fail to in 600 pages, so it only seemed apt that he became a writer. His first two novels, 'The Motel Life' and 'Northline' were both brilliant pieces of work, and his third, 'Lean on Pete' came out earlier this year. Telling the story of fifteen year old Charley, who moves to Portland with his father and starts working in what only a sadist would describe as a stables. The writing is excellent, and the story is capitvating, bordering on a socio-realism that books like Kes are famous for achieving.

1. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Skippy Dies is a work of art. Pure and simple. It's a nearly seven hundred page behemoth, the kind of length usually reserved for a Harry Potter novel, and yet it's more akin to The Wasp Factory or The Rehearsal. It begins with the titular death of Daniel 'Skippy' Juster, a geeky boarding school Irish boy who chokes on a donut and dies in front of his best friend, but not before leaving an ominous message in strawberry jam on the floor. From there the story jumps back to months before the incident and covers a whole host of characters, the highlight of which is Ruprecht, Skippy's roommate, a homeschooled wannabe Stephen Hawking, who spends most of the book trying to break across into the eleventh dimension in order to discover a universe made of beer. The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize and it's a wonder it didn't fare better, it's one of the finest novel's of the decade, one of the funniest and most heartwarming books, and also contains a scene where rap music induces mass vomiting at a high school prom. In my books, there doesn't get more praise than that.

What I've Been Reading 2010: Part 2

Hope everyone is enjoying this slightly different rundown on the best things from this year. I'm trying to make it as wide ranging a list as possible, to show an appreciation for all kinds of writing. So onwards with the top five. This list is in no particular order.

5. Andrew Kaulder in Monsters by Gareth Edwards

Sometimes good writing sneaks up on you. Not because you weren't expecting it, which certainly wasn't the case with Monsters, but because the parts of it that impress you aren't the parts you thought would. Take any sci-fi film, any at all. Chances are, whilst they might be well written, by and large the character's are not the highlight. No-one talks about the depth of the marines in Aliens, right? Even films like District 9, brilliant though it is, has a fairly simple linear arc for the lead role. This is where Monsters surprised me. Photojournalist Andrew Kaulder is not a straightforward character. When we first see him, he's approaching a hospital to check in on his boss' daughter who was injured in a building collapse, when he finds her, he simply asks if she's ok and when he gets an answer, he leaves immediately. No quips, no moral high ground, he just leaves. He does what he has to get by, and that's all. There's something to be said for a film about an alien invasion when you come out remembering more about the main character than the actual aliens. It says something that the two main characters are a real life couple, and Andrew's feelings towards Sam do inform a large portion of the narrative. This is not to say that this is as simple as, a tough no-nonsense journalist falls in love with a woman and goes with her on a life or death journey, because he's not a tough no-nonsense journalist and he doesn't really fall in love with her. In Monsters, there are much more complex things going on.

4. This speech from The Pandorica Opens by Stephen Moffat

Really, if anything this years series of Doctor Who just proved how much we've been missing good writing talent at the head of the writing team. Stephen Moffat crafted an excellent storyline in which every race faces a tough choice. The highlight of the series was the two part finale in which the theme of self-preservation extends all the villains the Doctor has faced in his lifetime. When they show up to claim the 'ultimate evil' contained underneath Stonehenge, and thousands of starships litter the sky, the Doctor stands atop the monument and delivers this speech:

"No plans, no backup, no weapons worth a damn. Oh, and something else I don't have: anything to lose. So, if you're sitting up there with your silly little spaceships and your silly little guns and you've any plans on taking the Pandorica tonight; just remember who's standing in your way. Remember every black day I ever stopped you and then, and then, do the smart thing. Let somebody else try first."

The final three will be along soon!

What I've Been Reading: 2010 Part 1

It's nearly the end of the year! Break out the champagne and/or mulled wine, put on a hat and party like it's 1999. Usually, Blogs such as this one would spend their time listing the top of ten of whatever subject matter they choose, but I thought I'd do something a little more specific. I'm still going to do a top ten for the year, but it's going to be a top ten individual moments of writing that I loved this year, they might be comic books, novels, songs, short stories, scenes in films, but one things for sure, there's going to be ten of them.

Numbers 10 -6:

10. Uncanny X-Men 529 by Matt Fraction.

I'll be honest, X-Men for the past year or so has underwhelmed me, I'm a big fan of the God Loves, Man Kills days of the X-Men being a metaphor for diversity and discrimination. I don't so much agree with where the story has gone now, with time travelling siblings, different realities and so much continuity it's nigh on impossible to penetrate. Sure, Grant Morrison had a great handle on the property at the start of the decade but there's been nothing to make me want to come back. Matt Fraction, as brilliant a writer as he is, has had a pretty generic run on the title so far, until this final issue of his storyline 'The Five Lights'. The piece of writing that struck me came at the end of the issue, after Emma Frost (quick recap: used to be evil, now married to Cyclops.) kidnaps her ex-lover and takes him away in a spaceship made from the conciousness of a French thief. So none of this should work, but Fraction throws out a monologue at the end of the issue that is so well written, so perfectly done, that it more than made up for the lacklustre arc that came before it.

"I've started to go grey this year. You know? It's true. I have. The other night Scott reached over and found two grey hairs on top of my head. It was supposed to be sweet. He was trying to say--look at these things we're eduring together. Look at us surviving. But that's not what I thought at all. I knew a girl once--Jaye. We spent some time in New York togehter. She had come out here, but I didn't know until--I saw her obituary in the paper after we bear Bastion. Died in the attack. And then I thought of pool old Kurt. No matter how sad he seemed to get, I always saw a smiling swashbuckler. Kurt, who was always my favourite, who I could never shock. Kurt, who I miss more than anyone would ever believe. Scott was trying to be sweet and all I felt was cold and along because so many wonderful lights have gone out and I'm so tired from fighting against all this darkness. And I thought, "I'll name them Jaye and Kurt." I name my grey hairs after dead friends. Dead friends and X-Men."

9. The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin

I've blogged about this film once before, back when I first saw it. It stands as one of the best films I've seen this year and despite the fact that it's an incredibly well acted, well filmed story, the thing that makes it a true classic is the script. More specifically what works so well is the opening scene. Two students in a bar. Every single element, every theme, every nuance of character you will see is captured in a microcosm in those opening five minutes. It's an example of perfect writing, and here's how it opens.

MARK (V.O.)
Did you know there are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

ERICA (V.O.)
That can’t be true.

MARK (V.O.)
It is true.

ERICA (V.O.)
What would account for that?

MARK (V.O.)
Well first of all, a lot of people live in China. But here’s my question:

MARK
How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SAT’s?

ERICA
I didn’t know they take SAT’s in China.

MARK
I wasn’t talking about China anymore, I was talking about me.

ERICA
You got 1600?

I'm not merely saying this snippet of dialogue itself is worth of inclusion in the list, but the scene as a whole is such a good example of how to write, it should be shown to writing students as a perfect example of that age old rule, show don't tell.

8. Hurricane J by Craig Finn

The Hold Steady are one of my favourite bands, combined great music with a literary eye for lyrics and their latest album 'Heaven in Whenever' was no exception. Whilst previous albums have had a novelistic approach, telling a wider story with a tight cast of characters, Heaven picked up on themes and told a fairly straightforward coming of age tale. 'Hurricane J' is the highlight of this album. Telling the story of Jessie, a girl named after a hurricane who appears to have taken on these characteristics. It's telling that Craig Finn, brought up a Catholic, sees the characteristics of namesakes in people and it's smart that the narrator of the story steadfastly refuses to accept that her behaviour could be anything else. The lyrics in their entireity can be found below.

Jessie, I’m not jokin’ around
I see the crowd you’re hangin with
and those kids don’t seem positive
Don’t all those cigs make you tired?
You know I never ask you to change, I only ask you to try
I know you’re gonna do what I know you’re gonna do
but 22 and bangin’ around in restaurants ain’t that much prettier
than bangin’ around in bars
and why do you keep going to his car?

I don’t want this to stop
I want you to know
I don’t want you to settle
I want you to go
Forget all the boys that you met at the harbor
You’re too hard already, you’ll only get harder

Jessie, let’s go for a ride
I know a place that we could stop and kiss for a while
I know a place that makes you smile
I know you’re gonna say what I know you’re gonna say
I know you’ll look at the ground, I know you’ll probably cry
You’re a beautiful girl and you’re a pretty good waitress
but Jessie, I don’t think I’m the guy

I don’t want this to stop
I want you to know
I don’t want you to settle
I want you to go
Forget everything that I showed you this summer
You’re too hard already, you’ll only get harder

but they didn’t name her for a saint
they named her for a storm
so how is she supposed to think about
how it’s gonna move in the morning
she said if heaven's hypothetical
and if the cigs keep you warm
then how is she supposed to think about
how it’s gonna move in the morning
‘bout how it’s gonna move in the morning

Hurricane Jess, she’s gonna crash into the harbor this summer
She don’t wanna wait till she gets older
Hurricane Jess, she’s gonna crash into the harbor this summer
She don’t wanna wait, she said it only gets harder

7. Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Yes the film adaptation was brilliant, kinetic and a fine blockbuster, but really nothing can come close to capturing what made the books so good. The final volume of the six part series hit the stores this year, and completely lived up to the hype. What made the series work so well was the seague from the start of volume one, with it's general hipster comedy/drama turning quite dramatically into this bizarre mashup of computer games, manga and comedy that stuck with the series for so long. What made the finale work so well is that it brought all of that back to the beginning, with the fights taking a backseat to the everyday comedy/drama. The best scene from the final volume, and pretty much the whole series, came midway through, when Scott goes to visit his friend and ex-girlfriend Kim Pine.





6. Various Characters by Fred Van Lente

Fred Van Lente for those not in the know is a comic book writer for Marvel. He's responsible for co-writing the fantastic Incredible Herc series (seriously, if you haven't read it, go forth and purchase) which is currently winding down in the Chaos War mini-series. Van Lente's place in this list isn't for Incredible Herc, but for the myriad of characters that he's created this year. From his co-creation of Amandeus Cho's nemesis Vali Halfling in the Prince of Power mini-series, to the new version of Power Man in Shadowland he's been adept at creating iconic characters seemingly without even trying. Take a look at his new villains created for the Taskmaster series:
Black Choppers, Trenchcoat Mafia, Militiamen, The Org, Inquisition, The Don of the Dead, The Town that Was Hitler, Redshirt: The Uber Henchman, and the Minions' International Liberation Front (MILF). There's a skill involved here that doesn't just stop with creating names. The characters he creates are incredible involving, detailed characters, even moving beyond some of the pun's they first seem to be. Just look at The Town that was Hitler from Taskmaster issue 3, where Hitler's DNA has encroached on a small German town's water supply, turning each household into a miniature Third Reich, every single family fighting each other for power over the village, launching Blitzkrieg attacks against their neighbours. It's the same with his new Power Man, a character who has more in common with the kids from The Wire than he does superheroes.

Harry Potter and the Secondary World

I went to watch the latest Harry Potter the other night, and it was alright. I'm not a massive fan of either the books or films, both of which I regard as readable and watchable, but nothing much more. Whilst JK Rowling (and the filmmakers) have a grasp of big events and the occasional clever moment, there's something missing that I couldn't put my finger on until now.

I think Harry Potter is one of the first examples (there have been others since) of 21st Century literature. It's a perfect example of this new generation of fiction that makes low demands on an audience and readership and favours events and rigid exposition over warmth and heart.

Don't get me wrong, I think Harry Potter is a fairly big achievement, seven books, soon to be eight huge films and all manner of merchandise to boot, there has to be something there. But I don't think what's there is quite the same as Rowling wants to achieve.

Fantasy is about building a world. A completely true statement to an extent. However, the problem most fantasy writers, and sci-fi writers as well, seem to come across is far too much focus on this world-building aspect. Writing maps, biographies, histories, drawing pictures of places is not writing a fictional book. It's creating a game world. A world in which people can speculate, imagine and play. Tolkien describes the concept of world building below:

"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside."

This idea can become a little obsessive for fantasy writers, but a lot of them, Rowling included, miss the point.

Take for instance, one of the minor villains of Tolkien, Gollum, or as he's originally called 'Smeagol'. Tolkien, an English language professor has deep set origins for his characters names, for instance Sméagol" bears strong resemblance to Old English smēaġan, a verb meaning "to ponder". For people who are not scholars, this isn't something that strikes you too much. If you are an expert (like Tolkien) in the use of Old English then you may notice this similarity, but it would not detract from the overall enjoyment of the story.

This is where Harry Potter comes in. Take one of the minor villains of the story, Dolores Umbridge. Recognise that surname? It's identical, in pronunciation (if not spelling) to umbrage, a word that means:

1.offense; annoyance; displeasure: to feel umbrage at a social snub; to give umbrage to someone; to take umbrage at someone's rudeness.
2.the slightest indication or vaguest feeling of suspicion, doubt, hostility, or the like.

And that's essentially her character in one fell swoop.

And that's not the only character who Rowling does this too, what about Harry's Godfather, Sirius Black? Who turns into a Black dog. Sirius was Icarius' faithful dog, who was changed into a star. Pretty much predicates exactly what happens to the character in the books. Other characters have closely written names, Hagrid is haggard, Snape snaps at the children, Cornelious Fudge fudges things.

Now look back at that Tolkien quote, where he talks about bringing our minds into this Secondary World. The one thing that detracts from a story is anything reminding us of the existence of this Primary World, it brings people out of the story and reminds them that they are reading fiction. Rowling's problem in the books is that so many things have reference to things in our world, that don't require it. I'm not arguing that a pen has to be something completely different in the Harry Potter world (because it does, after all take place in a vague side universe alongside our own, and events bleed together). But do we really need the main villain to be named after the French, "vol-de-mort" meaning "flight from death" (meaning literally escaping death). Literally naming your characters exactly what they are like is not world building, it's lazy writing.

Structure is also something that modern fantasy seems to be confused about. Lord of the Rings is deceptively simple. There's an evil ring, and it needs to be thrown into a big volcano. Simple. Harry Potter? There's an evil wizard, and he's split his soul into seven pieces and hidden them all in different places, so we've got to find these seven pieces of his soul and destroy them. That, to me, doesn't sound like literature. It doesn't sound like a story. You know what it sounds most like to me?

A video game.

There's 21st century literature for you. A new post-millenium fantasy/sci-fi structure. No need for simple plots. Why not just write your role-playing game down on a piece of paper and have at it with levels, and bosses. Harry Potter has severely structured stories. Every single book is almost identical. Harry starts a new school year (even the story set outside of the school takes place within one school year, more or less) with Harry starting off simple and happy, learning new spells and tricks and new characters. Along the way he has minor battles and takes part in mini-games of Quidditch whilst mystery upon mystery piles up until, ta-da the final boss rears it's head and Harry uses all these new skills he's learnt in this book to defeat it. Then there's the mandatory cut-scene in which Dumbledore explains everything (even after he dies, this still happens).

This isn't classic fantasy structure. This is a Playstation game.

And maybe this isn't a bad thing. Maybe this is just what the audience of today demands, the kind of level based structure where your characters grow stronger, learn new skills and gain new items like they've just gained a hell of a lot of XP. Is this what we, the audience demand? Are these stories not Rowling's fault at all, but an audience reared on serialised gaming, where they can log in to a whole fantasy world and live out their own story one chapter at a time. Did they bring this on?

It's hard to say. I can certainly understand how an audience raised on these stories would fall in love with the Harry Potter series, even if they shy away from other copycats but maybe publishers should, instead of trying in vain to please people, show us something new. Do something dramatic. Don't let an elderly man with a penchant for being quirky, explain everything. That's called telling. And that's writer's rule number one.

Let's be honest here, Rowling's series isn't the only one to subscribe to videogame rules of engagement. There's plenty of soft targets out there, Dan Brown & Laurel K Hamilton, stand up and take a bow. But when you go back and look at Lord of the Rings, or even The Hobbit, you get a feeling that sometimes genre fiction can be so much more than an angsty, partially sighted, orphaned, bullied, scarred, uneducated boy who lives in a cupboard under a staircase completing a video game.

A Magic Word: Origin.

Or, 'How I learned to despise interpretations of superhero continuity'.

I didn't like Superman: Earth One. In short, that's what this entire post will be about. It's a pretty fickle thing to say, and I'll go into some detail about it, whilst talking about the ways in which writers can claim to interpret origin stories and classic tales.

Superman: Earth One is written by J Michael Strazyinski, and tells the tale of a young Superman in our version of Earth, becoming the superhero for the first time. The main point is to have a whole new continuity and interpretation of the character, but let's just look at the main points in the story.

A young Clark Kent arrives in Metropolis, is shown to be fairly intelligent and decides to become a journalist. He works with Lois Lane, Perry White and Jimmy Olsen, and defeats a superpowered enemy after donning a red and blue costume.

What makes this so different from any other Superman story before? Nothing. There isn't a single moment in this strung out fight scene that couldn't take place in the current Superman universe. Add to this the fact that, let's face it, there is no Metropolis on our Earth. It's lazy writing.

But what about reinventing the myth? Isn't all this just necessary for readers who expect such things from Superman comics? What are the base elements of Superman? I think Grant Morrison, writer of 'All Star Superman' manages to sum up these elements in one page, and eight words:

"Doomed Planet
Desperate Scientists
Last Hope
Kindly Couple"

That'll do quite nicely. Because beyond these eight words, what else really should define Superman? A costume, that's just the logo, the brand, not the character. These other charactrs like Olsen and Lois Lane, they're just dressing - a result of years of continuity and story arcs - they don't define Superman, they're just a part of a particular story.

Pretend for a moment that you, as a writer are told to write a character named 'Superman', What if you were given just those eight words as an origin? Would you still send him to a fictional city, get him a job as a reporter and have him dress up in Red and blue?

Writers Spotlight - Halloween Special

There's a soft spot within me for horror. I don't consider myself a genre buff, even though I can devour sci-fi, fantasy and especially comics with the best of them. But there's always something about horror that grabs me. I'm not one for this new breed of True Twilight Anita Blake Vampire Diaries that appears to be more of a trend than Tony Blair Porn. But having said that, I don't know what it is that grabs me about horror.

So, I'm going to delve into the screenplays, novels, short stories and graphic novels that really got into me, and try and work out why they were so successful (in my mind at least).

Charles Burns' terrific graphic novel Black Hole is best placed to start this off. In this coming of age body horror tale, a school in the American mid-west is consumed by a sexually transmitted disease that causes all manner of mutations on its victims. These stretch from tails, to blisters and perhaps the most horrible one, an extra mouth growing in your throat. The teens who are infected retreat to a nearby forest to form an odd commune. As Time magazine said at the time, "Fear of adulthood, fear of sex and fear of ostracization have never been more disturbingly explored in a serio-comic flashback to bellbottoms, big doobies and skinny-dipping in the woods." It's this common fear that all teenagers have, as well as the fairly horrific detail (someone's extra mouth talking to you whilst they sleep) that make this a truly frightening experience.

Is there a better, more effective short story than The Mist? The short answer, no. This simple tale of a group of survivors holed up in a supermarket during what can only be described as the apocalypse and the relgious segregation and ultimately puritan finale which result from this, is a brilliant story. Stephen King is sometimes (quite rightly) described as too wordy, and too concerned with writers in Maine being involved in car crashes, but with The Mist he succeeds in delivering a classic story, in just under 100 pages. What makes this work, is not so much the monsters (however briefly seen they are) but the people. In particular Mrs Carmody, who begins the story as a cranky religious nut, but by the end has risen to a much more papal position, ordering sacrifices to a vengeful God, as she puts it, "It's expiation gonna clear away this fog! Expiation gonna clear off these monsters and abominations! Expiation gonna drop the scales of mist from our eyes and let us see!" Almost more scary than this is the completely ambiguous ending, which won't be spoilt here. The film adaptation is likewise a true classic of the genre, with an arguably better ending.

I was a little disappointed with the original novel of Let the right one in, mostly because the film adaptation is so good, there was little to no chance that any other version would be unsuccessful. The film is an incredible piece of work, about the relationship between Oskar, a young Swedish boy and a vampire named Eli. Like Black Hole it examines the idea of coming of age. Unlike Black Hole and especially unlike The Mist, Let the right one in is an incredibly subtle piece of work. The vampiric element only constitutes about ten, or fifteen minutes of screentime, and if removed, you would still have a hell of a good film. Two moments really stand out for me, one of which is incredibly good writing, one of which is incredibly good filmmaking. The final scene in which Oskar and Eli are on a train, Eli hidden in a wooden box to protect her from the sun, Oskar tapping on it in morse code is a wonderfully written scene, bringing together the idea of this monster needing someone to protect her, and almost in a way, being the kind of monster that someone likes the idea of protecting. Earlier in the film, we see an older man who murders people and drains their blood to feed her, and by the end of the film we've no doubt in our minds that this is where Oskar is heading, with Eli forever young, Oskar will no doubt age and start killing people for her, until he outlives his usefullness. The other scene is also towards the end of the film, with the killing of three bullies by Eli. The whole scene is shot underwater, whilst Oskar is being drowned by one of the bullies. We see nothing but occasional splashes and the odd limb floating dream-like in front of Oskar and sinking to the bottom of the pool. You can watch this scene here

As an ongoing comic series, The Sandman was one of the best. When it finished it encompassed an incredible story, one long narrative with a very definate beginning, middle and end. However, there were times when it deviated into short stories, just on the fringes of the ongoing story. "24 Hours" is just such an issue. The main character of The Sandman is Dream, the embodiment of dreams and the dreaming (his reality). At this point in the story he has lost various items due to a period of time he spent imprisoned. One of these items is a ruby, stolen by a serial killer named John Dee (an old Justice League villain). He heads to a diner, and over the titular timeframe, wreaks havok with the customers. This is a fairly screwed up issue, filled with depravity and violence, all at the behest of a man with too much power in his hands. One of the Gaiman's captions puts it best when it says, "All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows when to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

So what is it in horror that I like? To me, that metaphor that comes with most of those stories above, that the monsters, vampires and creatures aren't what you should be scared of, that humans, in their toughest challenges, are the most dangerous people to be faced with, I think that's scarier. When you look at other horror films that I love, Dawn of the Dead, Onibaba, or books that I like, The Wasp Factory, Lunar Park. There's an element of that human indecency in those.

I think I'll leave this with a quote from Laurens Van Der Post, who said “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” I think he may have something there.