Pet Sematary (Novel)
Older and Wiser: Going Back to the… Pet Sematary It’s funny, isn’t it, how something you read so many years ago can have a completely different feel when you return to it. This has been true of most of those early Stephen King novels that I’ve been revisiting of late…but none more so than with his 1988 Pet Sematary. I was in my twenties when I first stumbled across that clearing in the Maine woods. That odd patch of ground where...
Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon
Hollywood Hokum & Snail Masturbation; Welcome to… Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon Dear oh dear, what a sordid and depressing 2001 novel this one is. From the pen of horror writer Clive Barker, it should be pressing all the right buttons for me. In particular, I’m a sucker for tales of Old Hollywood — and Coldheart Canyon is even advertised as a ‘Hollywood ghost story’. Yet so much of it is wrong, wrong, wrong; not...
The Sign of the Four
Cocaine and Criminal Capers: The Sign of the Four By Arthur Conan Doyle Despite the moans of some, I think that A Study in Scarlet, the debut teaming of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson is just a little gem of perfect structure. I really enjoyed it a great deal. A little less than three years later, Arthur Conan Doyle brought the duo back with a very different outing, in the 1890 short novel The Sign of the Four. At least...
Revisiting Stephen King’s Different Seasons
Revisiting Stephen King’s Different Seasons Reading this collection of four excellent pieces in 2017 is a very different experience to having read it back in 1983, shortly after its initial publication. It’s not that my opinion of Stephen King has changed much; if anything, I appreciate him even more now than I did then. Rather, in what is surely a unique case, three of the collection’s four stories were turned into films that are...
Stephen King’s Cujo
The Monster Never Dies: Stephen King’s Cujo “Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine… “He was not a werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes; he was only a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems. A good man named John Smith uncovered his name by a kind of magic, but before he could be captured – perhaps it was...
A. C. Doyle : A Study in Scarlet (1887)
Where It All Began: Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet I would consider three of the 20th century’s great pulp icons (or literary, if it please thee) to be Tarzan, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. Certainly, Dracula is there also; but he is a child of only one book by his creator and that in 1897. It was down to the cinema to create our enduring group image of the vampire king. And of course that’s true of Tarzan and Bond...
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