I paid this guy in North Hollywood a dollar to take his photograph. He said his name is Charlie and appreciated the dollar very much.
My father, Orlando, was born one hundred years ago today. Sadly, he did not live to reach his centennial, but he is fondly remembered as one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever known. He made a living designing nuclear-powered submarines! ’Nuff said!
The sun is low and hot on this autumn day. About 20° hotter than it should be. Beautiful day nonetheless.
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.
[wdi_feed id=”1″]
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.
Recent Comments