Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist ‘The sea has given and the sea has taken away.’ Harbour is Lindqvist’s third supernatural novel. This one is set on the fictional island of Domaro in the Swedish archipelago, where Anders and Cecilia have a holiday cottage. One winter day, the couple set out with their six-year-old daughter Maja …
Tag: supernatural
The Midnight Palace
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated by Lucia Graves) Re-post of original review Secret Societies and Ghostly Terror by Bookheathen) ‘Never mind the number of candles on your birthday cake,’ writes Zafon in his introduction to The Midnight Palace, ‘for those in the know, it’s what lies beneath them that matters’. Zafon’s first four published novels …
Not all universes are the same (part three)
The Amber Spyglass "While the beasts of prey, Come from caverns deep, View'd the maid asleep." These three lines by William Blake from his poem The Little Girl Lost preface the first chapter of The Amber Spyglass, the final volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Aficiandos of Blake will know that his maid …
Continue reading Not all universes are the same (part three)
Vampires in the Twilight
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 4 What an explosion it has been! In the past, film makers drew their ideas from literature. And of course they still do. However, it appears that, in the 21st Century, cinema and television have also been a trigger for the proliferation of novels in which teeth, blood …
Romancing the Undead
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 2 Like Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla was seized upon by the public as new and bold. It helped boost le Fanu's image as a master of the gothic and of the Victorian ghost story. For all that, le Fanu's work, and Carmilla in particular, has not …
One Bite Too Many
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 1 Vampires have long been popular in books and film. So have elves, wizards, witches, werewolves, zombies and Doppelgänger, not to mention gods, demi-gods, devils and angels. They are the elements of which fantasies are made. Long before a fantasy genre existed (or indeed the movie industry), they …
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