Is the Horror Novel Entering a New Golden Age?

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Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet Native American, has written a terrifying story about a spirit that seeks revenge. The Only Good Indians won both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards for best horror novel at last year’s Horror Fiction Awards.

Earlier this year, British-American author Catriona Ward released her third literary horror novel, The Last House on Needless Street. Ward previously published two novels, Little Eve and Rawblood.

“Horror is in a very exciting place,” says Neil Mcrobit, who hosts the Talking Scared Podcast and interviews some of horror fiction’s biggest names. Frequently mentioned along with Rebecca Netley’s novel The Whistling is The Haunting Season, which collects the stories of authors such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Imagin Hermes Gower, and Bridgett Collins.

Paul Trembley, the author of one of the scariest novels out there, A Head Full of Ghosts, says, “With so many new voices being published, there’s never been a more exciting time for horror readers.” Tembley suggests two debut novels, Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, about two young Vietnamese women going missing decades apart; and Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us, a genuinely creepy novel about grief and a widower fighting the evil that inhabits the smart speaker in his house. Jones also recommends Haley Piper’s Queen of Teeth, which revolves around a woman discovering teeth between her thighs, and Shane Hawke’s Anoka, a collection of Indigenous horror stories.

Author Jonathan Sims, who wrote Thirteen Stories, and hosts horror podcast The Magnus Archives, has an interesting view of how the horror market is currently changing. He says that many of the best horror writers are not on shelves, but online. He points to podcasts such as Pseudopod and Nightlight as examples of where readers can find some of the most exciting voices in horror.

Adam Nevill, whose The Ritual ended up on the big screen, recently self-published his latest novel, Cunning Folk, which follows a man who suspects that his hostile neighbors are in control of evil forces.
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Caleb Femi: A Merchant of Joy

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Caleb Femi’s family lived in a housing estate where the walkways were swabbed down every Monday. His imagination transformed the space into a wonderland. In his debut poetry collection Poor, Femi explores the North Peckham Estate, described as a “paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under / A blanket, shielded from the world.” The poem contrasts the lofty ideals of its architects and the reality of a boy found stabbed to death in a stairwell in November 2000.

The bespectacled 28-year-old from South London is astonished that readers have found the collection dark, and says it’s a celebration of fantasy. The estate he grew up on fed his imagination in unexpected ways; the mural that appeared on the wall was the catalyst for many of the things that happened on the estate. Taylor, the young boy who was stabbed, was a close friend of his, and his death was a source of guilt.

Caleb Femi — poet, filmmaker, and photographer — became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. His pictures provide a different perspective of urban youth and challenge the discourse about them shaped by news photography. His poems use street language and imagery to amplify how urban boys are just as delicate as raindrops. In many ways, Femi is still that little boy who found a wonderland in the smell of detergent.

After moving schools for sixth-form, his teachers taught him a love of poetry, sparing him from the fate of many of his peers. Femi studied English literature and teaching at a Tottenham comprehensive school but quit after two years due to the strict “Gove curriculum.” For someone who loved Yeats and Pope, a rigid curriculum in a government school was a bitter disappointment. In 2015, his poetry career took off, and he made film-poems to order. In 2017, he was included on the Dazed 100 list.

A young people’s laureate’s tenure coincided with the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he wrote in his diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?”

The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the disadvantages of being poor and urban. He lives in a Deptford flat with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi and dreams of making films and writing poetry. Femi, a guy obsessed with laughter, leaves the shop and walks through the rain towards an underpass, with the word “FANTASTIC” printed on the back of his coat.

Luke Kennard wins Forward poetry prize

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Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets, a collection of prose poems responding to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for best collection, beating other nominees in a competition judged by poet Shivanee Ramlochan.

Kennard said he started writing Sonnet 66 at a party and then got hooked on writing reactions to all 154 Sonnets.

Caleb Femi won the prize for best first collection for his work Poor, which explores the lives and times of a Peckham estate.

Femi’s debut book grabbed the judges from the first page. Nicole Sealey won the Forward prize for best single poem for Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.

Ramlochan praised the poem, saying that it shows there are poems embedded in all sorts of documents, and the jury said the poems showed how the poetic imagination can be bold, limitless, and reach deep into our lives.

A Documentary About Japanese Photographer Daido Moriyama

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“The Past is Always New, The Future is Always Nostalgic: Photographer Daido Moriyama” is the title of a documentary about renowned photographer Daido Moriyama. As a young photographer, his work focused on fashion, but as he matured, it transcended those boundaries and he became known worldwide. This documentary offers an intimate look into the life of a genuine artist.

His work has brought many national and international awards. In 2019, he won the Hasselblad Award, which is considered the “Nobel Prize of Photography.” He is past 80 years old and still going strong and inspiring photographers young and old.

This documentary follows Moriyama as he photographs the streets of Japan. We see how his work is born and watch him interact with bookbinders and editors as he reissues his groundbreaking 1968 photo book, Japan A Photo Theater. It’s a fascinating look at the everyday life of Japan’s most acclaimed photographer.

By the way, the camera Daido is using in this film is a Nikon Coolpix S7000.

Dashiell Hammett — Cameo in “Two Sharp Knives”

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This clip is from the CBS 1949 Studio One production of the Dashiell Hammett short story “Two Sharp Knives.” Hammett’s cameo is that of the character Slim, not listed in the cast of characters. This is the only film footage of Hammett I’ve been able to find. I’m sure there must be more.

I had a short communication from Dashiell Hammett’s granddaughter, and she believes this is the only known recording of her grandfather’s voice.

Abdulrazak Gurnah Awarded Nobel Prize

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Abdulrazak Gurnah has been awarded The Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

A native of Zanzibar, Gurnah fled persecution and emigrated to England in the 1960s to study. His books include 10 novels and many short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, noted that Gurnah’s novels “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”

The prize hasn’t been awarded to a black African author since 1986, when Wole Soyinka won. He is the first black writer since Toni Morrison in 1993 to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize. 2001 saw his sixth novel, By the Sea, longlisted for the prize. Olsson said that Paradise “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness.”

“[Gurnah] has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals,” Olsson told reporters in Stockholm. Gurnah said he believed it was a set-up when he was told of his victory in his kitchen.

“I thought it was a prank,” he said. “These things are usually floated for weeks beforehand, or sometimes months beforehand, about who are the runners, so it was not something that was in my mind at all. I was just thinking, I wonder who’ll get it?”

“I am honoured to be awarded this prize and to join the writers who have preceded me on this list. It is overwhelming and I am so proud.”

He has never before received due recognition for his work, according to his longtime editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle.

“He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it’s just killed me. I did a podcast last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that has been just ignored. And now this has happened,” she said.

In explaining Gurnah’s work, Pringle said it’s always dealt with displacement, “but in the most beautiful and haunting ways of what it is that uproots people and blows them across continents.”

“It’s not always asylum seeking, it can be so many reasons, it can be trade, it can be commerce, it can be education, it can be love,” she said. “The first of his novels I took on at Bloomsbury is called By the Sea, and there’s this haunting image of a man at Heathrow airport with a carved incense box, and that’s all he has. He arrives, and he says one word, and that’s ‘asylum.’”

“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense,” said Olsson. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

In 2017, after criticism regarding financial misconduct and sexual abuse, the Swedish Academy made steps to become more transparent in deciding the Nobel Prize. After the uproar generated by Peter Handke’s win in 2019, the American poet Louise Glück won the prize last year, a decision that wasn’t subject to controversy.