To The Last Page

Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...

In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...

At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...

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, ...

Roger Keen's writing has a way of getting under your skin. That's undoubtedly down to the nature of the approach that can be seen in the hugely ambitious semi-autobiographical and metafiction works The Mad Artist and The Empty Chair , books that are practically designed to enfold and wrap you in their rich complexity, but there are similar rewards to be found in the dark imaginings of genre work like Literary Stalker . A collection of some of his short stories confirms the impression that no matter what style he works in, Keen has the ability to draw you in, exploring his own experiences and ideas while at the same time invoking and attacking the reader's own sensibilities, sensitivities and insecurities from every conceivable angle. Once you start on any of these tales, you are no longer on safe ground. So much so that I confess that halfway through the first title story I immediately checked the contents page to see if Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) conta...

As he demonstrated in his previous novel  Literary Stalker , Roger Keen is a master of the metafiction, using a complex narrative structure to delve more deeply into underlying and often troubling mental processes that can be otherwise difficult to unravel. He employs that device again to remarkable effect in The Empty Chair , blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction in a similar way to his first novel The Mad Artist , exploring individual hopes and aspirations running up against social conventions, artistic conservatism and impossible family expectations. Keen takes that one or two steps further here, merging reality with fantasy in an ambitious unconventional approach to narrative that is the only way of encompassing the range and depth of a subject that has very real and meaningful human concerns. It's certainly a clever idea to filter the majority of those concerns though the semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical character of Steve Penhaligon, working in the 1980s fo...

You shouldn’t ever confuse an author with his characters, otherwise I imagine you would find Stephen King a very disturbed individual and, judging by how many serial killers operate in the crime fiction genre, you’d need to be wary about attending too many writing festivals, conventions and book signings. I’d even give J K Rowling a wide berth, just to be on the safe side. I’m fairly sure however that Roger Keen is a nice guy, but you can never know for certain. I mean, how can you really know what goes on in the mind of a writer who imagines indulging in the stalking and brutal murder of critics, so-called friends and literary associates who he believes have ignored and slighted him over the years? Someone who not only imagines killing people in meticulous detail, but who seems to have put an awful lot of research into it. All for the sake of literature of course. Nick Chatterton (or should that be Roger Keen) not only indulges in such fantasies in Literary Stalker but he also sets a...

I should mention upfront that Roger Keen is a friend – at least in the Facebook sense if not of the "inner circle" type that he refers to in his book – and I have met him a couple of times. This is not as an excuse for giving his book a favourable review, which it richly deserves on its own merits (I purchased it myself and didn't not receive it as a gift or with the expectation of a review), but to point out that Roger, as anyone who knows him or has perhaps even read one of his film reviews on the internet will testify, is ever inch the perfect gentleman. Quiet, polite, soft-spoken, gracious and congenial with an intelligent and positive outlook, reluctant to criticise when there are favourable points that can be made – Roger is nothing, in other words, like the paranoid, LSD-tripping, dope-smoking, alcohol-fuelled aggressive, surrealist, hippy dopehead artist of the 1970s that he writes about in The Mad Artist , a fictionalised memoir of a past that I suspect that few ...