To The Last Page

The start of this decade has been tough on Spanish literature with the premature deaths of at least two notable writers. The death of Javier Marías in 2022 was certainly noted in the UK, but not so much Almudena Grandes who died less than a year earlier of cancer at the age of 61. That's perhaps understandable as few of her works have been translated into English, but she was a major figure in Spain and particularly associated with her home city of Madrid. As writers, the two were very different in style and content, Marías certainly the more literary of the two, but Grandes had her own important part to play in the chronicling of lives in her works. No more so than in her final series of novels, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes from an interminable war), works all centred on a painful subject kept under a veil of silence that few had tackled directly; the horrors of the Civil War and the lasting impact of the Franco years.  My experience of reading Almudena Grandes t...

The idea of illustrating Kafka or even turning  his work into a graphic or comic storytelling is not as strange as it might seem. I have a terrific edition of Robert Crumb's Kafka for Beginners and Peter Kuper's dark angular illustrations work also well in his adaptations of Kafka's stories. That goes for the most famous works that at least have a surreal and nightmarish quality, which along with terror of the authorities and the hell of faceless bureaucracy is practically a definition of Kafkasque as most people know it. The Japanese artist Nishioka Kyodai covers several of the most famous pieces but also ambitiously takes on some of Kafka's lesser known short works. The artist(s) finds a way, for example, to illustrate the definition of the imaginary creature 'Odradek' in The Concerns of a Patriarch (otherwise known as Cares of a Family Man ) as an angular and geometric abstraction, and there is a similar approach in he mixes that style with more traditional...

What do you look for in a horror book, or a horror movie even? Personally, scares don't count for much for me and I would prefer the situation to be at least half-way plausible and make a meaningful point about society and our attitude to death. So that kind of rules out zombies even if you want to hang a commentary on it about mindless consumerism. There are exceptions of course, and it's all the more impressive when you can be surprised by an unexpected new take on the genre. I got that with The Girl With All The Gifts and I've found that also with Simon Clark's Blood Crazy . While not exactly a zombie horror - there are no living dead here - Blood Crazy has a similar sense of a feeding frenzy being unleashed on society, and indeed the sides are drawn across pretty distinct generational dividing lines that does suggest there is a deeper commentary to be found here. But first of all comes the shock, and it comes fairly quickly. Staying a night at friend's house, ...