The Japanese Macbeth

Did I tell you I used to live in Japan... Extract from a new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog Kurosawa had originally planned to follow Rashomon with Macbeth, but put the project on hold in deference to Orson Welles’ film version of 1948. He revived it almost a decade later. Throne of Blood was to…

Filming A Christmas Carol

Extract from a new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog Scrooge (released as A Christmas Carol in the US) is a powerful adaptation in the tradition of David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), with a similarly bleak Victorian mise-en-scène, gothic sensibility, and stunning black and white cinematography.  The film was directed by Brian…

The Fall of the House of Usher

In the summer of 1960, American International Pictures released a little gothic number called The Fall of the House of Usher based on the strange and phantasmagoric short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839. AIP was a low-budget, independent outfit that banged out cheap…

A Parent’s Guide to Halloween Films for Children

I've been meaning to write this for years... As Halloween descends once more upon us, our 12-year-old son is horse-trading over what horror movies we’re going to let him see this year. This is as much a family tradition as Halloween itself. When we met, my future wife Rachael was a goth and a total…

Conan Doyle and Professor Challenger (Podcast)

This episode, Paul and I are delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr Stephen Carver, author, biographer and recipient of one of the ACD Society’s Inaugural Doylean Honours for his excellent Wordsworth Editions blog on the Professor Challenger stories. We talk with Stephen about the appeal of Professor Challenger to readers and to Conan Doyle, The Land of…

And the winner is…

Like headlines and phone calls, rarely in my experience are emails good things. It’s usually work, spam, or a bank statement, none of which I’m particularly keen on. One of the exceptions to this rule are those from my friend Derek Wright, Director at Wordsworth Editions, who has been kind enough to allow me to…

The Watch House: A Ghost Story for Christmas

It was Angie – or ‘Angelique’ as she now styled herself – who first figured out that the old watch house on the Spit would make a great venue for a Christmas party. An early adapter to acid house, she loved beach parties in the summer and warehouse parties in the winter. This year, she…

The 2021 Olga Sinclair Prize for Short Fiction – Judge’s Comments

It was with great pleasure, not to say humility, that I was asked to judge the 2021 Olga Sinclair Prize for Short Fiction, the results of which were announced this evening. The theme of this year’s competition was ‘Lost’, to be interpreted in any way by the submitting authors, the only limit being the number…

A little place just outside Diss

A ghost story for Halloween... ‘If there is an afterlife,’ I remember my mother saying one day, ‘then how come people always look so sad when they die?’ Back then, I wasn’t in a position to answer. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was already regretting raising the issue with her at…

In Conversation with Novelist Audrey Chin

Extract of an interview on the 'Essence of the Gothic' with Singaporean novelist Audrey Chin What is Gothic literature? Is there a difference between the modern and Victorian variety? Or the Asian and European ones? And why is it considered part of the literature of subversion? I’m a neophyte to the genre. Indeed, I would…