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New Work, and Some Old Places
I’m thinking of going to the Gene Autry Western museum in Griffith Park this weekend. See if there’s anything that helps my ideas for the new book. (That’s the new new book; the new book, a big historical in the same vein as The Kingdom of Bones and from the same Random House imprint, is…
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Carnival of Souls
If there’s any movie that comes a close second to Jason and the Argonauts in terms of the money that I’ve shelled out to own copies of it, this low-budget hand-made horror from the ‘sixties must surely be the one. I saw Carnival of Souls as the lower half of a Sunday horror double-bill at…
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Frequently Answered Questions
On Getting StartedI was lucky enough to start as a reader when horror was a subtle art, and just as lucky to start my career at the point where it turned into big business. So my early reading was people like HG Wells, Conan Doyle, Joseph Payne Brennan, and all those marvellous Pan Books of…
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Eyes Without a Face
On that trip to Paris a couple of weeks back I gave myself an excuse to browse the stock of the Bouquinistes, those riverside bookstalls along the Seine, for a copy of the source novel of one of my favourite films. All I knew of Les Yeux Sans Visage was that it was written by…
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Valley of Lights
Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post… Stan, people are gonna start talking. The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I’d most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I’ll go into another time, but for now here’s an extract from my afterword to the…
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Book into Film
Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I’ve dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers’ Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just…
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Wendigo, Night Tide
A week or two back, Stephen Volk asked me if I’d seen “the peculiar, eerie Wendigo“. And the answer was, yes, I have. Stephen Laws had discovered it and was determined that he was going to get me to see it. On the face of it, Larry Fessenden’s modestly-budgeted indie horror reads like a standard…
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Six Tales
Stephen Laws writes: “Completely by accident, I was looking at the TV schedules last night – and the title Spectre caught my eye (like I have exclusive rights on the word, or something). “Turns out that it’s the first of a six part Spanish series called 6 Tales to Keep You Awake – very much…
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Life Line
Did you see this? I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was no. It seems to have become one of the best-kept secrets of my career. It was a two-parter for BBC1, two hours long, and starred Ray Stevenson (Titus Pullo in Rome), Joanne Whalley (Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective, Scandal, and many a…