I was at work and it was raining too much to get out of the van so I recorded an off-the-cuff video about the best three horror films I’ve seen this year.
I ended up naming seven films and they are all great. If you want to watch a genuinely good horror movie this month (the spookiest of all months) you won’t go wrong with any of these.
Transcript-
I am embarking on a writing project (a screenplay) that is going to require a lot of research. Luckily for me that research mostly involves watching a whole bunch of old movies. And I’m talking b-movie schlock horror. Mad scientists, monsters, screaming girls, crumbling castles, fog, lightning, all that good stuff. As I’m watching them I figured I might as well share some of the great old movies with you, starting with The Black Sleep from 1956.
It was released in America as a double feature alongside The Creeping Unknown which, if you live in the UK, you might not have heard of. Over here it was called The Quatermass Xperiment.
The Black Sleep was so scary to audiences back in 1956 that the parents of Stewart Cohen tried to sue United Artists and the Lake Theatre for negligence after their nine year-old son died of fright. He was so afraid that he ruptured an artery.
Written by John C. Higgins, (who also wrote a film called Robinson Crusoe on Mars starring Adam West, which I’ve only discovered in writing this introduction and is going straight to the top of my to-watch list), The Black Sleep is about a mad scientist who is trying to cure his wife’s brain tumour by experimenting with people’s brains.
It stars Basil Rathbone as Dr Joel Cadman, the mad scientist of the movie. The quality of the movie is heightened by two supporting cast members, legends of Universal Monster movies; Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.
Dr Gordon Ramsey, played by Herbert Rudley, is in prison the night before he is due to be hung for murder when he gets a visit from his old mentor, Dr Cadman. Cadman tells Ramsey that he believes he is innocent but is unable to help. He offers Ramsey a sedative to make the hanging easier. This is a lie. The powder he pours into Ramsey’s drink is an East Indian drug known as The Black Sleep which induces a deathlike state of anaesthesia.
Ramsey is pronounced dead in his cell and so avoids the noose. The body is turned over to Cadman. When safely inside Cadman’s abbey home, Ramsey is revived. Cadman explains that he needs Ramsey’s talents to help him revive his wife, who is in a coma due to a deep-seated brain tumour.
They get to work on examining the brain of a corpse. Ramsey learns that the “corpse” they had experimented on was alive and was now being kept in a basement dungeon where more living victims of Dr Cadman’s experiments were being kept, including Curry; the very man Ramsey had been accused of murdering.
Curry is played by Tor Johnson who you might recognise as the big guy from the infamous Ed Wood movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Lon Chaney Jr. plays Mungo, who walks with a dragging leg and torments Laurie Monroe (played by Patricia Blair). It turns out that Mungo is her father, Dr Monroe. He was a lecturer at the medical college who suffered a brain disease that Cadman said he could cure. Instead, his experiments turn him into a mindless leg-dragging monster.
The Black sleep was Bela Lugosi’s last movie (unless you count Plan 9 from Outer Space, which he was in but died before the film went into production. They used test footage of Lugosi in the finished film).
Lugosi plays Casimir, a mute servant. I loved him in this film. He has so much presence in every film he’s in and I’m always pleased when he pops up.
During production Lugosi was unhappy that his character didn’t have any lines so, to pacify him, the director, Reginald Le Borg, filmed some dialogue scenes with the actor and then just didn’t put them in the movie.
The film is great. They really put the effort in to make it creepy and atmospheric. They even got a real neurosurgeon in for the close-ups of the brain surgery to make it more believable.
I’m working on a screenplay that will be a homage to the old b-movies of the 40s and 50s. I love these old films and I think more people should go out there and rediscover them. The Black Sleep is available to watch on Amazon Prime and so are many other classics (including The Quatermass Xperiment, which is also great).
If you are looking for tips to improve your writing you will find them here. But you will also discover that doing whatever the hell you want can work just as well too.
Gertrude Stein, the famous American novelist, poet, and playwright said –
Punctuation is necessary only for the feeble minded.
Before we venture into the spiralling madness of authors who go against the rules, I just discovered that the word “playwright” is written P L A Y W R I G H T . I assumed it would be spelled P L A Y W R I T E . Like someone who writes plays. Playwrite. This might be because I am a fool. It might also be because the English language is endlessly surprising. Etymologically speaking Playwright is similar to wheelwright. A wheelwright was someone who wrought wheels out of wood and iron. And so a playwright is someone who has wrought words into a dramatic form. Like the words have been hammered and bent into submission.
But this isn’t about playwrights. This is about rules god damn it, so let’s get to it.
There are hundreds of books about the rules of writing correctly. As authors we walk a tightrope of good grammar. At any moment we could fall into a pit of dangling participles, passive sentences, repetition, the much feared adverb that reveals the writers inability to show instead of tell, repetition, a misplaced comma, and god forbid; a rogue semi colon. And worst of all, repetition.
But how important are these rules and how much are they going to actually hinder your success?
Only ever use he said or she said, and never follow it up with an adverb.
You don’t even need to use he asked, or she replied. He said is a tag to notify the reader who has spoken. They become invisible to the reader. We scan over them as we read.
Of course you can say, said Graham, or Susan said, but be warned; only do that if you have characters named Graham or Susan. If not, I would recommend using the names of your own characters. The key here is economy of words, and clarity. The reader wants to know who is speaking but nothing more. All the dramatic work should be done in the dialogue or the surrounding prose.
You might have a character at the breakfast table. His wife has prepared breakfast for him. And we get the following piece of dialogue. “I wanted my eggs runny, not raw,” said Graham, angrily.
Instead of using the word angrily, you would write something like, “I wanted my eggs runny, not raw,” said Graham, picking up his plate and throwing it at Susan.
You see, we have a vivid image, instead of “angrily”. There is no doubt that replacing the adverb is better.
Unless of course, you are one of the bestselling authors of all time.
Stephen King said about J. K. Rowling –
Ms Rowling seems to have never met an adverb she didn’t like.
It’s true. Her prose is littered with them.
I’m a sucker for this rule and I try to never use adverbs. But maybe I shouldn’t be afraid of throwing a few in every now and then. It hasn’t exactly hindered the success of Harry Potter.
Avoid them. If you have more than three exclamation marks in your entire novel you have too many. It is lazy. It doing work that should be self-evident in the words being spoken, or the events that are unfolding. If you need to add a nudge at the end of sentence to let the reader know that THIS BIT IS REALLY SURPRISING then something is wrong.
Your words should speak for themselves without the fanfare to highlight how loud someone is shouting or that an explosion is really big. And just on an aesthetic level it makes the page look cluttered and messy.
Having said that, in Joe Hill’s hugely successful book, NOS4A2, there is an exclamation mark every time Charlie Manx, the bad guy in the story, speaks.
You will also find an excessive use of exclamation marks in the books of Tom Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austin, and of course the biggest offender of all, James Joyce.
Some people think of those authors as being amongst the best literary writers in history. So maybe using more than three in a book won’t be so bad.
Here’s a curious one; when writing dialogue should you use the double quotation mark or the single one? That has a straightforward answer.
The publishing standard in the UK is to use a single quotation mark. And in the US, they use the double quotation mark.
Unless of course you’re the bestselling author Roddy Doyle, who uses neither. He just starts each piece of dialogue with a dash.
Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, and The Road, didn’t believe in speech marks either, saying –
I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.
On the subject of basic punctuation, in the last twenty-four thousand words of James Joyce’s Ulysses there are only two full stops and one comma.
So what’s the point of all this? Well, simply, there is no right or wrong way to write well. You can do whatever the hell you like. The books that break through and become huge bestsellers are littered with broken rules. Nobody in the publishing industry can predict what makes a book become a bestseller. Writers have tried to hone their craft with best practices but, ultimately it’s for nothing.
My advice is that you should learn and understand all these things and then use them at your discretion. Be free to write the way you want to write.
Maybe you don’t need to polish your prose into a smooth perfectly formed generic thriller. Let it be a bit rugged around the edges. Let a bit of your voice come through.
Writing is like music. You can release a highly produced pop song that does well in the charts, and you will do well. For me, those songs are polished so smooth I bounce right off.
Or you can be like Bob Dylan. Sometimes he would screw up a word while singing and just say the word again. He didn’t even go back and rerecord it. It’s right there in the song. He might screw up twenty seconds in and just start eh song again, and it’s right there in the album. It’s those cracks in the perfection that let us in. It’s true for all art, and it’s especially true for writing.
That’s all from me!
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Last night was a bit mental. I had made a public declaration on here and on the Bestseller Experiment podcast group on Facebook, that I would complete a novella by midnight on the 31st Jan. On the 1st Jan I only had one chapter. Yesterday morning I still had six chapters to write.
I decided to document my race to the end with short videos on TikTok and shared them on Twitter and Instagram. I needed to give myself the added pressure of other people’s expectations.
Midnight came and I still had three chapters to go. I finally finished at 1:44 this morning, feeling frazzled and slightly nuts.
It’s done!!
Much polishing to do now. A cover is in the works which I will reveal soon.
The story is called Gnome. It’s a homage to creature feature movies from the 80s. Critters, Gremlins, The Gate, and Ghoulies. And the basic idea behind the story was inspired by a Brothers Grimm story of the same name.
This was only the first part of my public declaration. The second part is to complete a story called The Projectionist and The Wall People by 30th April. And then to finish a movie screenplay called Price of Life by the last day in June.
It’s going to be a busy year. I can’t wait!
Here’s the last video I posted at 1:44 this morning-
TikTok is a social media app that mostly involves lip syncing teenagers and dance routines. It is not a place for literature… Seems like the perfect place to chisel out a niche.
If you are unfamiliar with the format, here are the basics:
There are three ways to post content; a 15 second video, a 60 second video, or a photo montage.
You can easily add special effects and filters. You are limited to 100 characters in your description, which must include your hashtags.
You film your short video, post it, and with any luck you start to amass likes and followers.
I am new to TikTok but I thought it might be interesting to share any insights and tips that I glean along the way.
Here is the first TikTok I made with my manifesto –
I’m writing a dark fairy tale horror based on the Brothers Grimm story, Gnome. I will be documenting my progress and process regularly.
I will also be posting writing tips (sometimes serious, and sometimes not so serious, as in the TikTok below).
It is important as authors that we experiment with different ways of reaching and interacting with readers. This TikTok thing might crash and burn, but it might not. Either way I’ll be doing weekly updates with stats right here on my blog. So please follow me if you are curious about how this goes. Maybe you’ll decide to take to TikTok too, in which case you must let me know; we’ll do a duet.
I’ll get into TikTok duets in another post but, should I gain momentum, a duet is a way of giving new TikTokers an introduction to like minded followers. We’ll grow together.
The link below will take you straight to my TikTok profile. Feel free to cringe at my early attempts at content. Eesh. It’s a learning process, right? And don’t forget to press that follow button!
So, I’ve been on TikTok for three days so far. At the bottom of each TikTok update on this site I’ll publish my stats so you can see my growth and decide if it would be a worthwhile venture for yourself.
I’ll share my failed posts, my successful ones, everything; the good and the bad. Things are going to get experimental and weird. Until next time.
Andy
Book One – Fire and Rain.
This is one of the very (VERY) rare books that I would read again.
Fire and Rain is book one of a tetralogy. (Yep, that’s the word for four books in a series. Who else thought it was quadrilogy? Just me? Okay.)
I have been raving about this book. Taff understands story. He knows how to create characters that you love, and is equally good at making characters that you hate. The pace is great. The set pieces of fear are imaginative and vividly realised.
It starts with a troubled guy named Adam. He is afraid of everything. On the day that we meet Adam something unusual happens. People who come into contact with him are killed by their own fears. It starts small, but escalates quickly. By the time Book One is over, North America is on the brink of a fear induced apocalypse.
I was going to start this review by saying it contains spoilers, but I’ve decided I don’t want to ruin the fun. All I will say is that I was enjoying the book right up until it got to a scene involving a group of people on a bus and a fear that involved The Wizard of Oz… That was when I started loving the book.
The story centres around three different groups of people and we shift between each group as the events escalate. Adam and Jelnik, the people on the bus, and three teens.
There was a moment when the third group was introduced; a jock (Kyle), a popular girl (Carli), and a nerdy girl (Sarah), and I thought, “Oh, god, here we go. Bring on the cliché.” But Taff deftly steers it away from what you’re expecting and you are brought into the dynamic of the group as they struggle with all the things Taff throws at them.
Book One ends in a big way. From this point on the world will never be the same. The more afraid the characters get, the more danger they are in.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the narrator. Linda Jones is a superb reader. You don’t even realise she’s there (which is a compliment, even though it might not sound like it). I listen to an awful lot of audiobooks and Linda is a real talent.
Book Two – Water and Wind
Book Two sees the introduction of a new character; Reverend Mark. And with him comes one of the creepiest scenes in the story so far, involving a young boy named Dom. I won’t say anything about what happens but it proves the author can do small, fear-inducing, character-driven horror as well as the big imaginative set pieces that launched the narrative in book one.
The mystery of what’s happened to the world starts to become clearer. Adam is a vessel for all the world’s fears and the vessel is full. It has spilled out into the world.
Mark meets a girl. Monday. She’s going to be important.
If you’re reading this review I’m assuming you’ve read book one and are wondering if you should continue. Continue fellow reader, continue. Even if it’s just to get angry at Carli, the traitorous little bi-…
Great narration from Linda again.
Book Three – Air and Dust
It starts with a pile of burning dogs.
Mark and the small group he has met along the way arrive at an army base. On the first night the base is attacked.
There is a moment where Rev Mark, and the rest of the camp, are being attacked by swarming- well, I won’t say what, that would spoil the fun- and he does something that should come across as absurd schlock, but is actually exciting and just what the book needed at that moment. 
There are rumours of an encroaching darkness. A wall of sheer black spreading across the globe.
At the end of the book a man arrives with a convoy of people he has “saved” from other places. He tries to take over leadership of the army base and succeeds, but in doing so becomes the new villain of the story (god it’s hard to explain a story without spoiling anything). I’ll say this. By the time book three closes you’ll hate him in your bones. You’ll feel it in your gut. His name is Tim Jacoby and you’ll wish you were there so you could grab a weapon and reap vengeance yourself.
As with my previous reviews, hats off to the narrator, Linda Jones.
Book Four – Earth and Ember
The darkness is closing in. The psychotic new leader, Tim Jacoby, has had a message from God; Thou shalt go to Memphis.
So there he leads the last people alive on Earth. Graceland becomes their temporary home. The last stop before the final confrontation with Adam.
We find out what is up with Jelnik; Adam’s personal slave. We go back to Jelnik’s childhood. The events described are awful, harrowing and terrifying. After the flashback, Adam assures Jelnik that things could have been so much worse, if he only he knew. Jelnik doesn’t believe it. Adam shows him.
At this point I thought, “There’s no way Taff can make that scene worse unless he goes over-the-top-corny with it.” Scary stuff can fall into absurdity very easily and lose its impact. It’s a fine balancing act.
So the memory restarts. Adam has turned up the fear. And… it… is… glorious. There are no limits to Taff’s disturbed mind. And god it’s fun to watch.
The last survivors leave Graceland to make their way to the last city on Earth to face down Adam.
Monday’s role in the apocalypse is revealed.
Rev Mark and Adam face off.
The ending is neither rushed nor prolonged.
Linda Jones’s narration was, as always, perfect.
A note on the serialization
I really have nothing bad to say about the story, the author, the narrator, the characters, the writing itself, it’s all great. But I do have something to say about the release of the book. It won’t affect the star rating, but I think it needs to be said, if only because I want to recommend the book to as many people as possible but find that I can’t because I’d be asking them to invest too much money in my recommendation. The price is far far too high. (If the Kindle and paperback editions are priced to reflect the shortness of each instalment, then that’s fine. All good and well. Serialization makes sense in those mediums. This is purely to do with the Audible release.)
I understand the reason for releasing it in a serialised form (in the tradition of Stephen King’s Green Mile, and the works of Dickens, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle etc.) But the reasons, in this instant, are driven by greed. A reason that rarely succeeds. The cost is too high. Each book is only about 3 hours long (apart from the fourth instalment which is just over 5) and most people only get one credit per month on Audible so he’s asking his readers to spend four months of credits on one story. That’s not much listening for a full third of a year. Especially when you can get seventy two hours of Sherlock Holmes for the same credit, and indeed The Green Mile in its entirety – 14 hours. I suspect it will ultimately have the opposite effect on sales and people will be put off by the combined high price. It won’t matter how much I, or other reviewers who have been lucky enough to get a review copy for free, rave about how great it is (and it is indeed great), the money grab leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
This is a book that should be loved by many more people than will be willing to part with the high ticket price. It would be sad to see the best horror I’ve read this year die because of an ill-considered route to market.
The book is being sold as an epic. And yet all four books combined are only the length of a single novel. It’s money for old rope. It frustrates me because if I hadn’t had the opportunity to review it for free I would have never gambled the £45.83 it would cost me (based on the current prices on Audible) to read it. It would have never happened.
I could get the stand for half the price (or one credit which is even cheaper) and it’s 47 hours long.
These things must be considered when it comes to releasing things in audio.
All four parts should be gathered together and released as The Fearing. I believe it would be a cornerstone of modern horror and many more people will discover it. People that really want to read it but can’t afford the comparatively massive cost would give it a go.
I would be the first to go to social media and tell the world about it.
It is a great book. One of my favourite of the last few years. If it wasn’t for that it wouldn’t frustrate me so much. I want the world to read it.
The one good thing about getting all four paperback editions is that the covers combine to create one big picture, which is pretty cool.
I submitted the first page of my new book to The Bestseller Experiment podcast to be criticised in what they call a One Page Punch Up. There were many submissions but, to my joy (and sudden apprehension), I got selected!
And so best-selling author, Mark Stay (author of Back to Reality and the film Robot Overlords starring Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley) and Juliet Ewers (Publishing Associate at Orion Publishing who has previously worked with Ian Rankin and Michael Conolly) critiqued the opening page of Shelley Town RPG, my latest novel (it’s a Stephen King-esque horror).
The episode came out. Me and Rachel pressed play and listened. A grin started to spread across my face. By the time it was done we were speechless.
If you want yo hear what these two respected experts had to say about my writing you can listen on the link below! They reviewed five pages. Mine is first so you won’t have to scroll through the audio trying to find me.
Unbelievable Violence and Perversion.
This is a short and sick listen. If you are willing to suspend your disbelief to get beyond the few illogical plot flaws (a kid becoming so hungry he eats rotten chicken after being in solitary confinement for only a few hours) there is a lot to enjoy with this story. It is entertainingly written. The opening scene in the classroom is brilliant and the protagonist and his grandfather are well drawn characters.
The only thing I would change about the actual writing of the book is that characters are far too often “awed” by things. But that’s a small issue really (especially considering the graphic content of the book).
It is violent to the extreme and sexual in a way that is so far removed from erotica it is utterly repulsive. I’m going to leave two words here that may or may not have any relation to the “erotic” element of this sory: grandmother’s bottom.
There we are. Read at your peral.
A Horror so gruesome blood trickled from my earphones
The book opens with a glorious and bloody first chapter (it begins with a vicious scene involving a girl in a bath tub. I won’t say any more on that).
The story then meanders a bit as you get to know the central group of characters but pretty soon people start disappearing and werewolves start crunching on skulls with their big fanged mouths. At one point a man’s face is torn away like skin from a cooked chicken. So if you like that sort of thing, tuck in.
The narration by Matt Godfrey is excellent. His voice delivers the story to your ears with great efficiency and effectiveness.
Feral is a good start to what I’m sure will be a bloody and howling series.
My only criticism is the meandering second act but much is made up by the quality of the writing. Matt Serafini knows his craft well.
Click here to view the book on Amazon (or on the picture above to go directly to the Audible page).
This book surprised me. I was expecting some schlock. Some B-movie pulp horror. A first attempt at fiction by an author who would become one of England’s best selling horror novelists. But actually, it was brilliant.
It has a few intentional false starts so you’re not sure for a while if the person you’re following on that page is going to die in the next. Or if he, or she, will go on to be the main protagonist of the story. At first the book is a series of vignettes of rat killings. But you don’t just get a violent attack. You really get to know every character before they are ripped to shreds.
It starts with a story involving a gay salesman struggling with his love for another man. You think he’s going to be the main character and then he wakes up to find he’s being eaten alive by a swarm of rats the size of a small dogs.
The depth James Herbert gets from his characters is impressive for such a small book. He wants you to feel something for them before their eyes are graphically chewed out.
There are lots of things about this book I want to spoil for you, but I won’t. The ending was absurd and brilliant. I absolutely recommend it.
Andrew Chapman / Author and Screenwriter 