In the mid 90s - the exact date is relevant, as we'll soon see - one of my friends gave me a mixtape. He, my cousin and I swapped records all the time: we were into the blossoming forms of electronica that the early 90s gave birth to, and every other week it seemed a … Continue reading Ambient search – help needed
How does Star Wars begin again? Ah yes: “Another galaxy, another time.” That’s right. Wait – what? Star Wars geeks among you already know that the above is true – from a certain point of view. That’s because the sentence comes from Alan Dean Foster’s 1976 novelisation, published under George Lucas’s name. It came out … Continue reading The joy of film novelisations
The book's subtitle puts it better: Ghost Movies. But even that's deceptive. In this 260-page anthology, editor Peter Haining (whose many other spooky collections were familiar to me as a teenager) traces the history of the ghost story onscreen through the works of fiction that inspired such classic films as Night of the Demon, Don't … Continue reading Horror Rewind #11 – “Classics of the Supernatural” (ed. Peter Haining) (1995)
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of retrospective looks at 80s & early 90s horror. There are, I know, loads of excellent websites covering this area. Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction is the Daddy, and of course Grady Hendrix's essential Paperbacks from Hell is your print companion. Elsewhere in the Gyre I've … Continue reading Horror Rewind #1 – Mark Morris’s “Toady” (1989)
Let me start this extremely digressive review with a long digression. My 18th birthday was in May 1992. Eighteen is a rite-of-passage birthday, though of course different teenagers arrive at it with differing levels of maturity. I've previously written about the way we have different "selves" - co-existing within us are personas that can differ … Continue reading Review – “Amorphous Albion” by Ben Graham (2018)
Into the Gyre 