It’s been over twenty years since I last read ‘Dracula’ and I was a little surprised to find that my opinion about it this time was essentially the same. It’s 50% utterly wonderful, a wildly evocative mystery story with enough half-spoken to lead to a century of derivative works, none of which can quite capture …
Probably the least well-remembered of Wells’s three groundbreaking science fiction works of the late 1890s, The Island of Doctor Moreau has suffered even more then The Time Machine from a series of poor quality adaptations, and an odd sort of uncertainty of what the point of the story is. Whether you view the book as …
If obsessively uncovering secrets through ancient sound is our job here, then this is very much on-topic. It’s not exactly an obscure occult text, but The Lost Stradivarius is a great ghost story anyway, Falkner pitching it at a sweet spot somewhere between The Great God Pan and the works of M. R. James. It’s …
Looking back at people looking forward never fails to fascinate – in order to judge predictions, of course, but also because of what these stories tell us about the cutting edge of thought and values at the time. On the whole The Time Machine works well from this sort of perspective, the predictions are far …
I’m sorry to say that I’ve previously only been familiar with the Disney version of The Jungle Book, and while I was aware that the original was different, I didn’t realise that the almost entirely different story of Mowgli was only one of five included. Among the others we have the also-fairly-well-known story of Riki-Tikki-Tavi, …
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole of its day, The Diary Of A Nobody is perhaps less hilarious than it was back in 1892, but it’s no less readable and seems to evoke its age better than any of the supposedly naturalist contemporary fiction. By reading it I have learned that: Dull, respectable men in …
George and Weedon Grossmith – The Diary of a Nobody Read More »
Thirty-five years after witnessing the last public hanging of a woman in Dorset, Thomas Hardy set out to show how an innocent soul can be so let down by the cruelties and hypocrisies of our society as to end up on the gallows. Tess herself may well be more a representation of an ideal than …
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented Read More »
I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray aged 18 and found it to be life-changing. Not for the witticisms which Wilde is so famous for, but for the philosophy of art and morality which it expressed. When I got to university I enlarged the preface and put it up on the wall of my …
Better known these days for his artistic contributions to the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris was also a prolific author and prominent socialist thinker. News From Nowhere is a glimpse at a utopian future – or rather it is a novel-length thesis on how things should be, presented in novel format, with the convenient …
“”The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story”… …Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?” – Harry Quilter “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror …
