The seasons long for each other, to be cured of their excesses

ITEM
“Oblivion is freedom” – The End of Everything (M. John Harrison, 2026)

My sister’s husband died in March. Last night my mum told me he’d applied for a new job and was shocked to find himself being interviewed by AI. Ghosts of water judging ghosts of the earth – to be honest it makes about as much sense as anything this year. 

I mention this because I’ve sometimes wondered if my dedication to M. John Harrison’s work is a hangover from a time when Fear Satan and Blue Jam were my baseline. Sex suddenly possible if not entirely comfortable. Punches to the back of the head still likely to come in the dark, with or without a bluffed pretext. You’d like to feel you’ve a grip on the world now, but then there’s your common thread, no more familiar now than it was at seventeen.  

Like Harrison’s previous novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again this one takes place in the damp wreck of an England that might yet have been. Phillip pulls an iGhetti artifact out of the sea and goes looking for a change of fortune where there’s only change. His aunt Marnie has her art practice and a gun, her vulnerability and affection coterminous with most of the novel’s scattered acts of flat, horrifying violence. Motive lives across the horizon: “I’m not complete, it says, and they laugh.” 

When it was pointed out that my sister’s dead husband had been seen around he was briefly his cousin, who might actually be the guy cuckolding him. What remains of the network scrambled that illusion without providing clarity on the nature of the catastrophe. “[REDACTED] is just a–” PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! 

My sister’s dead husband is currently selling Oasis tickets for £1K a pop, a triumph of zombie economics. I’d pay more than that to understand the hurt here, let alone to heal it, but you can’t purchase connection. No more than you can simply ignore the weird gravity of its absence. 

ITEM
Child of the Flea!

ITEM
Imprinting

It’s one of those libraries where you can never quite see the pages of the books, never quite read the words. And inside one of the books there’s a witch. Practically a cartoon. Margret Hamilton in the Wizard of Oz. But there is something fundamentally wrong about her. 

She grabs my forearm. The Witch’s touch burns. Not like fire. Her hands are clammy. Wet. And that wetness conducts a heat that I can feel deep inside me. A burning wrongness. She is from a different place, we cannot coexist. Her face is up against mine and it begins to distort and change. I don’t know what she is becoming but I do know that I’m dreaming and I’ve learnt how to wake myself up. There’s this thing I can do in the back of my head, like a twisting, and I begin to surface, rising up through the layers till I open my eyes and I’m awake. 

My room is normal. This is the house in Wallasey. Superman wallpaper. Ineffective Nick O’ Teen poster. Plastic grotto with a wind up Virgin Mary. A stone lion. A boiled egg with a face drawn on it from a school project that I won’t throw away. A pile of teddies that 42 years ago wasn’t a pile but individuals with names and distinct personalities.   

My bottom draw begins to open of its own accord. The witch crawls out, heaving herself brittle into the world. I’m not awake. This isn’t my room. 

She’s carrying an axe and she’s had enough of me.

It’s quick. As she decapitates me my view mercifully shifts to observer. She grabs my head and sticks it on a pole. Underneath my dead head is a sign that reads ‘Sesame Street is a production of the Children’s Television Workshop’. 

I dreamt this twice when I was 8 years old. The second time when part of me kept remembering what was about to happen was worse. 

ITEM
Suggested For Mature Readers
5: John, I’m Only Screaming

The bullying caws of crows on a powerline, silhouetted by the dwindling winter sun.

The doomy thrum of unknown machinery beneath a hillside.

Freight trains carrying mysterious cargo past back gardens in the depths of the night.

Dogshit and graffiti sigils in tower block lifts.

Rain on a car windscreen in an eternal motorway traffic jam.

The British landscape is full of everyday horrors, so it’s no surprise our fiction is too.

John Constantine is an integral facet of the British fictional topography of the 1980s. Informed by the political and cultural climate of Thatcher’s Britain, he reflects the strange changes, flinty edges and apocalyptic rumblings of the decade.

He’s the shadow face of a country in permanent turmoil, where the sins of the past constantly bubble up into the present. History written in scars on the landscape.

Jamie Delano’s original run on Hellblazer is a core weird 80s text, as representational as Troy Kennedy Martin’s masterful conspiracy-laced mystical noir ‘Edge of Darkness’, or Dennis Potter’s mercurial ‘The Singing Detective’.

With its fusion of lurid, bloody horror in downbeat contemporary settings, it surfs the same literary wave as Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, or the grisly home-counties schlock of James Herbert.

Haunted housing estates, demonic yuppies, Satanic cults founded by curdled Aquarians. Awful experiments conducted in shadowy facilities in the middle of nowhere; Keep Out signs rattling on chain-link fences. It all felt like horror on your doorstep. The world you knew, viewed through an awful new angle.

At the heart of it, Constantine. As English as the rain. Cynical, funny, scary. The kind of dangerous guy whose house you somehow end up going back to after the pub. Seances and cans, a brimming ashtray. Piss and magic. Seeing things you won’t forget. Can’t unsee.

Horrors every day. The British way.

ITEM
Planks Constant

ITEM
Who ya gonna call

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

ITEM
Nobody Escapes Us

If I recall correctly, Channel 4 showed Hellraiser on Christmas Day. My memory is hazy though, because I remember seeing Event Horizon a few weeks after and Hellraiser was too fresh in my head for me to find the newer movie interesting. The internet informs me that Event Horizon was released in August 1997, so I must be conflating my first viewing with the later Xmas showings. Time moves differently in the face of such sights.

A confession from my lips: I only watched Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 for the first time during lockdown. Apart from that, Hellraiser: Bloodline was never off the Sci-Fi Channel when my mate, who’s computer I’d abuse, got cable telly. It’s the first one that drifts into my thoughts when Autumn rolls over.

Why it’s a favourite relates to the tickling of some primal fears. It’s just a puzzle box. Oh, no, it is a means to summon us. Rules were broken. Rules you didn’t even know existed, or understand. Now your life is forfeit. A fear that applies to every aspect of your life. You went somewhere you shouldn’t, ate something bad, said the wrong thing. You transgressed in error and now you have to pay. Your life, your health, your relationships torn apart. Like a microcosmic horror.

Hellbound almost makes it seem to operate on a more reasonable contract. It is not hands that call us, it is desire. So, either the flawed ending of Hellraiser means the Cenobites know something in Kirsty’s heart, or they’re just bastards. Oh, Kirsty. So eager to play, so reluctant to admit it. That’s the other fear of Hellraiser, the secret desire. The secret, kinky desires. Really it’s the same as accidentally solving the puzzle box. The fear a part of you breaks some rule and self destruction lies within.

ITEM
Happy Halloween 

ITEM
I'LL SHOW YOU FEAR IN A DENFUL OF HUTCH

I don't actually much care for horror films - that's an oversimplification but I don’t like edgy strings, gore and jump-scares which I associate most strongly with it. Weapons is a horror I guess, I watched and greatly enjoyed that last week and I did dig J-horror a lot, especially The Audition, 20-25 years ago where do they go these forgotten futures and one day you find you are haunting yourself… time unfolds and this film is 25, I desperately wanted to see it after the website had so thoroughly intrigued ne and I had discussed with fellow Invisibles & Lynch & etc fans on the hip message-board, Barbelith. However I was also in postgraduate penury and could never afford anything ever (a pattern that would continue until er *muffled, indistinct sounds*) so my friend Robbie paid me in. He was a fantastic drummer, many theorised because of his tap training at high school, his band should have been bigger but there was a contretemps with Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite - a tiny man - and they weren't. Robbie died ten maybe twelve years ago of an aggressive and unique bowel cancer - I probably wouldn't have seen Donnie Darko, an extremely key of me film were it not for the lovely tall bahá'í bastard and I really appreciate it.

(You can watch it free on YouTube now). I never really do this although it was the only way I could see Peter Mullan's Pearl.

If I were at all social, festive-minded and liked dressing up (no), I would have dressed as Frank the Rabbit tonight. I am looking forward to the book and read The Destructors (cited hence) quite recently which I highly highly recommend you also do if you haven't, Greene is probably right it was his best work. 

The film was kind of an aftermath cult success largely because of how well it did in the UK (also I feel minded to say the only film I am aware of offhand to feature the word “chode”, a penis which is wider than it is long, in dialog) and I really do think the deployment of two Tears for Fears songs is what won it. Mad World sort of attained “You’re Gorgeous” style banality status partly by dint of being too good but also of simple sentiment but it's the school bus scene with Head Over Heels (TW: a small man harasses library assistant here - probably not even a top 5 biggest TFF song?] really always sticks with me - really good baroque, prog-pop band who like Talk Talk have yet to be reprocessed (nice try here tho) into the spectacle (The Weeknd of all people seemed to work out A-Ha! his last album)

AHH, DUKAKIS… SON OF A BITCH

P.S. theory: Lost was Donnie Darko fanfic to explain the jet engine… “if it fell from the plane, what happened to the plane?!” - S. Darko

ITEM
The Thing from Another World (Howard Hawks, 1951)

Around ‘50, the cold war flares pretty hot here and there, Ho Chi Min and Formosa, thermite flurries burrowing into ice. They get the OK on the H-bomb and Ivy Mike is on the way. The Thing, like any sufficiently dense meta-object, obtains to its surroundings in unpredictable ways. Hawks’ production briskly reflects its moment, an engine moving through the gears with a textured practicality, logistics and mission planning, the poetry of aircraft landing on pack ice. But with every act of military efficiency the dream factory lays the bounds of a space where anomaly and horror beg to emerge, sled dogs bled onto the snow as a war offering.

For the immolation ritual, master cascadeur Tom Steele (born Thomas Skeoch, Lanarkshire, 1909) was wrapped in heavy asbestos with a small but highly-explosive breathing tank strapped to his ass. In the day Republic would hire serial actors because they looked like Steele, reverse casting a hundred westerns and cop shows to fit the stuntman. He lived on screen but kept his cool, silent and anonymous, thrown through windows daily, sometimes chasing himself upstairs when no-one else was around. Brought football padding and crash mats on set, turning the crew’s breaks into bruises. Glowered silently as the mysterious Masked Marvel, 12 episodes a title star without a word spoken, four other actors playing his potential identity, men who couldn’t even take a sugar glass bottle to the face.

Today he’s standing in as an alien vegetable vampire, with thorns for hands and a head like a Soviet statue. Euphoric from the oxygen too high in the mix, he abandons himself onto the kerosene buckets feeding him like an idol, tended by scurrying monks with blistered hands. Subtle body enveloped in plasma, Steele is turned into an empty void by the contrast in the flames, cut off from reality, cut out and set adrift. The hole he leaves behind in the firmament is right there on the screen. You can see it, the hole where The Thing gets in.