Recent content by Lucia Lanigan

Thanks, but what were all the references to Lacan and continental philosophy? I don't remember there being any in the book. That lot are like stalkers who think their prey are sending them secret messages, so I've become pretty arm's length about that stuff (saves time). There's a lot about...

Loved Lispector's 'The Passion According to G.H.', and also - obviously different, but not a million miles away in spirit - Helena Parente Cunha's 'Woman Between Mirrors'.

Thanks for the kind words all. It's nice being able to write about tales you can link directly to for free, actually, cause books time tends to be quite slow normally. Idlerich - hah, you've hit on a thing about Machen there. People who write/talk about him soon drift away from the subject to...

I wrote a thing about Arthur Machen ages ago, which went up today, if anyone's interested: http://thequietus.com/articles/08758-leave-the-capitol-the-weird-tales-of-arthur-machen (I've finally abandoned the ambitious series about books I'd intended it to kick off - too much work for 0p a word...

Hah! So it's sort of about everything but not really, but really about film, which is also everything, but not really? Thanks PoMo (and/or unemployment). I enjoyed it greatly, but I struggled to remember a thing about it an hour after leaving the cinema. I clocked what I thought were the...

I really liked Cosmos, even though I read the wrong translation by most accounts (I've got the one that comes with Pornografia; the stand-alone one is supposed to be the, er, one). Good era of fiction, that. If you're into the absurdity of it when one of them shouts 'Berg!' get to Ann Quin's...

Yeah, Lovecraft's incredibly bombastic. I enjoy that but you really have to get on board and read a tale in one sitting, I think, cause it's a bit exhausting to start up again once you've taken a breather. Machen's gig is realism with an occasional peak behind the veil. Has quite an impact when...

The Hearing Trumpet. Unreservedly. Funny as fuck and wildly imaginitive.

Yeah, it's got about 40 pages of wonderful, lyrical writing and 100 that read like a filibuster. He suits shorter tales really; he's all about piercing images, sudden horrors and enchantments. The weird thing with Machen tales is, you know something special and unique happened, but when you try...

viktorvaughn's right about Ballard, I think: he's an ideas person, definitely not a draftsperson. Much as I like some of his stuff (B not V, not that V seems so bad), he does have an inflated reputation. I find his short stories unreadably boring, but his 70s novels are compelling and have...

I guess Woman in the Dunes would fit the bill too. An existential take on the fairy tale.

Night of the Hunter, seriously. Chat around it tends to focus on the expressionist cinematography or depression-era setting, but it's pure, gloves-off fairy tale.

People who said Johnson wasn't truly 'experimental' would have a point, in that the formal innovations he talked up had already been made, more succesfully, by the French nouveau roman and our own Christine Brooke-Rose, not to mention various modernists, surrealists and so on before he was born...

Yep, that's the one (both are superb, mind you). He didn't really write anything bad, although his focus did flit between religion / the occult on the one hand and modernity on the other. There's a right little gem called M. Bougran's Retirement which Hesperus publish as an add-on to With The...

I saw Five last weekend for the first time, and loved it. Through the first two chapters I felt like it was really pushing its luck, but then I got drawn in - some of it's really funny, some of it's just beautiful. I guess it's a type 2. film.