Dave Evans emailed me last week to say that FQP have accepted my five page script, Bad Static, for publication in their horror title, Something Wicked.
I have a lot of respect for Dave and everyone at FQP, they work their arses off to put out three quality titles.
No word on who’ll be providing the art yet.
Steve Aylett’s fictional biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve read.Three random lines . . .
Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.
Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.
The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.
It is a masterpiece.
This is the cover to the UK edition.
. . . is providing the art for the four page story Alan Grant accepted for Wasted. His comic work includes Zarjaz and Futurequake and he has drawn Dredd, Sinister Dexter and Future Shocks for 2000AD.
Go check out his site here and if you’re a publisher, go and hire him.
Equus - Original Soundtrack
Music by Richard Rodney Bennett/Conducted by Angela Morley.
Equus has always been one of my favourite films, and not just because Jenny Agutter gets her kit off in it and literally rolls around in the hay. She did get her kit off a lot, didn’t she, Walkabout - that naked swimming scene, Equus - frisky in the stable, An American Werewolf In London - the saucy shower scene, she even got her knickers off in The Railway Children, well, bloomers, but it still counts.
But I digress, back to the record. I picked this up on ebay about four years ago for a few dollars. This is a really fucking brilliant soundtrack, full of sweeping violins and cellos (which remind me of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, in a fleeting, hard-to-pin-down kind of way).
Along with the main themes of the film it has six Richard Burton monologues in which he says things like . . .
“Afterwards, he says, they always embrace. The animal digs his sweaty brow into his cheek and they stand in the dark for an hour, like some necking couple. And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse, not the boy, the horse, and what it might be trying to do.”
and . . .
“Then, with a surgical skill that amazes even me, I fit in the knife and slice elegantly down to the navel, just like a seamstress following a pattern. I part the flaps, sever the inner tubes, yank them out and throw them, hot and steaming, on the floor. The other two then study the patterns, as if they’re reading hieroglyphics. It’s obvious to me that I’m tops as chief priest.”
Burton + monologues = Fuck me that’s fantastic!
Don’t think it’s out on cd, but well worth tracking down on the old vinyl.
So says Sam Tomaino in his review of my short story Shit New World (Murky Depths Issue Three) over on SFRevu.
Much better than Michelle Lee’s review on The Fix in which she says, “. . . the tale itself is little more than a long complaint.”
Well, it is called Shit New World after all, that was kind of the point of the story, and it’s barely 500 words so it can’t be that long.
So then, one good review, one bad. I’m torn between having a celebratory drink or doing a Stephen Fry on it - hopping on a ferry and pissing off to Belgium in a huff.