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Celebrating Nigel Kneale
As mentioned recently I’ve an essay in the forthcoming anthology, We Are The Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale, which is edited by Neil Snowdon and published by Spectral Press. Tied into the launch of the book there will be a rehearsed reading of Kneale’s lost drama The Road at the Horse Hospital, London from 7pm – 10pm on 10 December, organised by Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. It will feature the voice talents of Jonathan Rigby, Mark Gatiss, Jason Morrell (son of Quatermass actor Andre), Claire Louise Amias, Clarence Smith, Annabel Bates, James Swanton, Michael Shaw, and David Morely Hale. After a short break there will be a discussion…
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the road
I’d been hearing a lot about Cormac McCarthy‘s novel, The Road, before it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for best novel. I purchased it recently, and during a long train journey read the book in one sitting. I would describe this novel as literary horror, with an emphasis on horror. The post-apocalyptic world that McCarthy describes, in which a man and his son scrabble to live in a burned, used-up world, is bleak, desolate, hopeless. It is a story about the fact that humans endure despite the odds, even though there is no good reason why they should strive to do so. The biological mechanism, even in the worst of…