A Virus of the Mind

According to the Urban Dictionary, a meme is "a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable." Which sounds to me like perfect Wednesday afternoon fodder for the blog, no? I'm all about corrupting the young, after all...

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Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack:

Certainly not. I could get crumbs or smears all over my pretty books! If I really must eat, I'll put down my book before stuffing my face.

What is your favorite drink while reading?

Coffee or tea; instant with a dash of hazelnut syrup or Twining's Everyday with a sugar and a half. That said, I'm not averse to a nice glass of wine (usually rose) while reading, but only when I'm reading something that doesn't - how to put it politely... - something that doesn't require my full attention.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

No, certainly not. Just the idea of writing in a book gives me cold sweats! In fact, back in the day, when I came across books that I'd borrowed from the Uni library that had been annotated in pencil, I'd often rub out the markings. I'm that guy.

On the other hand, the better to remember choice quotes and key passages from books I've to review, I do use these funky Post-it Note marker flags fairly often. Sometimes I like to alternate the colours...

What?

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Not by bending a page or the book itself I don't. I do have a few purdy bookmarks kicking about which are lost as often as not, or else keeping my place in books I've abandoned in my heart but not yet in my head, so I tend to use the press releases that come with most of the books I've been reading lately to keep my place. If, God forbid, there's no press release, a stray takeaway menu or the like will suffice.

Fiction, nonfiction, or both?

Mostly fiction - though I'm not at all averse to a good bit of non-fiction so long as the subject matter intrigues me. In fact, only a few weeks ago I was reading The Lost City of Z by David Grann, which you'll be hearing about very shortly. So there.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere?

I'll endeavour to finish entire sections of books before I call it a day, actually, but chapters or paragraph breaks will do in a pinch. Given when I tend to read, tiredness often comes over me all of a sudden, and whatever goals I might have set for myself fall by the wayside when the Sandman comes a-calling.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?

You must already know what I'm going to say?

No, I would never consciously hurt a book, not by drawing on it, folding its pages or heaving it across the room in disgust. Books are like people: there are good ones and bad ones, and you wouldn't dream of scribbling gibberish on the margins of a person if they insulted you, would you?

Admittedly, I am occasionally guilty of unconsciously hurting a book. If something I'm reading is driving me crazy, I can be a little careless with its virgin spine. A crack here and a dint there. All utterly by accident, of course...

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?

Not really, no. Generally, if a word is used properly you can understand the gist of it simply by studying its context. If I want to use it myself at a later date, I'll look it up. If it's not used properly, if it's just a fancy word for the sake of a fancy word, then no, I'm not going to dignify that sort of showiness with any more of my time or attention.

What are you currently reading?

Had a bit of a marathon yesterday with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet because I'd like to have a review up before it comes out tomorrow. Finished it at 2 in the AM, will get my thoughts on it down in pixels today, and when I'm done with that, I'm hoping to start the new Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

What is the last book you bought?

I found a gorgeous hardcover copy of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas in a used bookstore the other day and bought it for a song. Couldn't resist. I'll confess that I didn't love Cloud Atlas the first time I read it, back in the dark ages, but deep down I believed that I should, and the ravings of a certain Twitter chum have me hoping that sometime soon I'll have the time to give it another go. So.

Are you the type of person that reads one book at a time, or can you read more than one?

These days, it's a rare thing for me to be reading only one book. At the moment, for instance, I'm reading short stories from the forthcoming Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio collection, the second tome of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence, and as of a few hours from now - I hope - The Prince of Mist.

I didn't used to be this way. What with the blog and all, I feel my attention is being pulled in so many directions simultaneously that reading just one book is a poor use of my time. Reading slumps, I tend to find, are fewer and further between if there's always another book to go to when your primary read is driving you to distraction.

Do you have a favorite time/place to read?

Mostly on the living room sofa in the wee hours. It's not surprising, some nights, to find me hunched over one tome or another at 4AM. Burning the midnight oil means no distractions, and I've ever so easily distracted...

Do you prefer series books or stand alones?

Stand alone books, for sure. I've got my head in some many multi-volume narrative arcs at the moment that it's already going to be hard to keep track of what's what come the next part. Self-contained stories represent a welcome respite from that mental chess.

I'm certainly not going to ignore a book simply because it's part something of something, though. Given the prevalence of 'series books' in my genres of choice - something I'll surely moan about at length at a later date - let's be honest here: I could hardly afford to.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?

Above all other authors, I tend to recommend China Mieville and Guy Gavriel Kay; respectively The Scar and Tigana. More people tend to put my advice into practice when I recommend something more mainstream, though, and I'm a decent judge of who would like what, I think. I those cases, it's Dan Simmons I point people towards; The Terror and Hyperion in particular.

How do you organize your books? (by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)

Very, very carefully.

I have six bookcases of six shelves each, and the thousands of books those shelves contain are all ordered by their author's surnames, and then, if it comes to it, by publication date. The notions of genre and category piss me off righteously, and I enact my gleeful revenge upon such pointless pigeonholing by shelving genre fiction with literary fiction - my Ian McEwan sits between a few Ian McDonalds and China Mieville's backlist - and non-fiction right alongside my favoured made-up fare.

Let me tell you this, though. It's nice to have a lot of books. What's not nice, though, is when you get a new Joe Abercrombie, say, and have to reorder every other shelf in your library.

Speaking of which...

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Pilfered from Speculative Horizons. Thanks James!

Unbooking the First

If you follow the BoSS every Sunday, wherein I run down the books and proofs that I receive each week, you'll know that the increasing visibility of bloggers has meant publishers take the enthusiast press that much more seriously. Hardly a day goes by without one ARC or another falling through my letterbox for review here on TSS, and though I do what I can to cover as many of those books as is humanly possible, the sad fact is that many of them go unnoticed - but for a brief mention in the weekly books received feature, that is.

Short of hiring a small volunteer staff to read through and review those novels I'm simply unable to, it takes a name that I recognise, a synopsis that really gets me going or else a publisher or imprint that I have the utmost confidence in to ensure that I'll make the time to read something.

Any of those things - or, I find today, some truly kick-ass presentation.

Because once in a while, a book isn't just a book. Someone goes the extra mile to grab my attention. They slip a CD of recommended music to read by inside the front dustcover - as with The Whisperers by John Connolly; they'll write a letter explaining why they think this book, over all the other books, is worth my attention - many Gollancz releases do this; or bind a printed manuscript for me to read before nigh-on everyone else - see the great Kraken and Neil Gaiman's collection of Stories.

This morning, though, something new...

An unassuming parcel sealed with a wax stamp. Have a closer look at the seal:

It reads "05-08-10," which, and this is just a stab in the dark here, sounds to me like a release date. But for what?

For Sacred Treason by James Forrester, apparently, which a little explanatory note tells me is "a brilliant and enthralling debut historical thriller in the vein of C.J. Sansom." And here's the blurb:

London, December 1563. England is a troubled nation. Catholic plots against the young Queen Elizabeth spring up all over the country. At his house in the parish of St Bride, the herald William Harley – known to everyone as Clarenceux - receives a book from his friend and fellow Catholic, Henry Machyn. But Machyn is in fear of his life, claiming that the book is deadly... What secret can it hold? And then Clarenceux is visited by the State in the form of Francis Walsingham and his ruthless enforcers, who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. If Clarenceux and his family are to survive the terror of Walsingham, and to plead with the queen’s Secretary of State Sir William Cecil for their lives, Clarenceux must solve the clues contained in the book to unlock its dangerous secrets before it’s too late. And when he does, he realises that it's not only his life and the lives of those most dear to him that are at stake...

Now ordinarily, this sort of fiction isn't exactly my cup of tea, but the special treatment the always lovely publicity folks at Headline have given it mean I can hardly resist giving Sacred Treason the old once-over. In amongst all the other books that pile through my letterbox - and I would stress that I'm certainly not complaining - it's been made to stand out where otherwise it perhaps wouldn't have, and you know what? I'm intrigued. So stay tuned, readers, for a review of baby's first historical thiller sometimes before, yes, the fifth of August.

And publishers: take note!

Book Review: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly – slipping away from them – and when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story."

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Everything about Helen Oyeyemi's third novel screams divisiveness. White is for Witching is the sort of novel you'd think you would either love or hate: dense, difficult and deliberately disjointed, hardly more than 200 pages long and yet told from the perspectives of four dramatically different narrators - one clinically insane and another inanimate - it's a haunted house story second and a unapologetically literary novel first. Breathlessly poetic at times, though often so ethereal as to be frustratingly obfuscative, Oyeyemi's remarkable voice distinguishes White is for Witching from the countless other genre efforts to touch on similar territory. And yet I didn't love this book. Nor did I hate it.

Miranda and Elliot are twins in their late teens living in a stark gothic house in Dover that's been in their family for four generations. Inseparable until their quirky photo-journalist mother dies abroad on assignment, Miranda takes her loss to heart. "She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable," as her brother puts it, and when Miranda is discharged from the mental hospital she had checked into after the tragedy, the distance between them is palpable. Elliot looks ahead; Miranda looks back. Her efforts to move on - in her state of body and mind, her further education and her relationships - are lamentably lackadaisical, no matter her determination. Because something, some thing, is holding her back. Wherever she goes, the house is with her...

The seeds of a great, creepy tale are all sown early on, but a tremendously promising start does not stop White is for Witching from losing any sense of forward motion in the going thereafter. Oyeyemi's idiosyncratic narrative techniques, which to begin with allude and collude tantalisingly, gradually come to overpower the tale, to manhandle its development in order to properly showcase a few neat literary tricks. But the cost of the author's protracted dalliance is substantial: halfway through this short novel, there's been so little movement in terms of character, plot and conflict that the reader's very investment in any of the aforementioned elements is called into question.

Thankfully, the pace picks up when Miranda starts her first semester at Cambridge. Oyeyemi introduces a new narrator for these passages, and Ore functions admirably both as a device to imbue much-needed context on all the vague craziness of White is for Witching's first half and as a character in her own right. Ore's more earthly presence means that the going, tough and sinewy to start with, gets markedly easier after her introduction. It's only a pity that Oyeyemi so delays her arrival.

What White is for Witching is, undeniably, is funny. The interplay between Elliot and his sister is superb, snappy and smart, revealing character and history absent in Oyeyemi's somewhat indulgent exposition; and Miranda's pica, a condition that compels her to gobble chalk and plastic in favour of the sumptuous treats her gentle father prepares, makes for a few particularly memorable moments. Oyeyemi has a wonderfully wicked sense of humour that lifts the dreary proceedings from the dark and the deathly towards something altogether lighter and more pleasant.

White is for Witching has a chilling and atmospheric, if rather diminutive narrative at its heart, but its greatest failing is that the author seems substantially more interested in storytelling than story, and though the latter half of Oyeyemi's third novel improves in that regard, its early-going is enough of a trial, I fear, to dissuade many readers. Literary smarts do not in themselves a great novel make, and White is for Witching could have done with more attention paid to the basic elements underpinning what amounts, ultimately, to much ado about very little. That said, if you have the head for it, there's every chance you'll love this book - or else despise it. Would that had I managed to muster such extremes of feeling in either direction myself...

***

White is for Witching

by Helen Oyeyemi

April 2010, Picador

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

The BoSS for 09/05/10

After last week's rather unremarkable edition of The BoSS... a return to form! Right off the bat, the proofs and advance reading copies which have popped through my letterbox in the past seven days have me excited to start on one or another of them. Don DeLillo, Neal Stephenson, Cormac McCarthy - and that's just for starters. In fact, to hell with this little introduction, let's get to it! After all, the sooner I'm done writing this, the sooner I can started reading the books discussed herein. It's werewolf week, everyone!

Click through to read Meet the BoSS for an introduction and an explanation as to why you should care about the Bag o' Speculative Swag.

Read on for a sneak peek at some of the books - past, present and future - you can expect to see coverage of here on The Speculative Scotsman in the coming weeks and months.

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Point Omega
by Don DeLillo

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

05/03/10 by Picador

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "In the middle of a desert 'somewhere south of nowhere,' to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. For two years he tried to make intellectual sense of the troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – 'Just a man against a wall.' The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an ‘otherworldly’ woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible."

Commentary: I studied White Noise at Uni for one of my courses a few years back, and devoured Underworld thereafter for my own pleasure - or should I say enlightenment? - and though Dan DeLillo is never, ever easy reading, his novels have always been experiences I haven't soon forgotten. I should say Point Omega will be my first DeLillo since the two aforementioned narrative landmarks and from all that I've heard, the author in question has only gotten more difficult. Reviews of his latest have been divisive, but at less than 128 pages it should be a quickie, and I'm keen to make up my own mind on the latest from this postmodern literary master.

All That Follows

by Jim Crace

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

15/06/10 by Headline Review

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "A gunman seizes hostages a short drive from Leonard Lessing's house. His face leaps out of the evening news – and out of Leonard's own past...

"Lennie Lessing is a jazzman taking a break. His glory days seem to be behind him, his body is letting him down, and rather than continue to take on the world, he relives old gigs and feeds his media addiction during solitary days at home. Increasingly estranged from his busy wife Francine, who is herself mourning the sudden absence of her only daughter, Leonard has found his own groove: suburban and safe from surprises. He could continue like this for years. Then comes the news bulletin that threatens to change everything.

"Leonard has a choice to make."

Commentary: After reading - and needless to say loving - The Road by Cormac McCarthy (more on whom later), I set myself on something of a literary trip through the apocalypse which took in, amongst several other world-shattering sights, my first experience of Jim Crace: The Pesthouse. It was a great read, and though it's not considered as among Crace's best novels, nothing I've read since - Quarantine and Arcadia - has quite toppled it in my estimation. Nor do I expect All That Follows to break with that tradition: though I've high hopes for this narrative, split as it is between England and America in 2006 and 2024, the markedly mixed critical reaction to it has my expectations rather guarded.

Bareback
by Kit Whitfield

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

04/01/07 by Vintage

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "Lola Galley is used to doing things she doesn't want. She certainly doesn't want to be assigned the case of Richard Ellaway, the man who, under a cold full moon, mutilated a good friend of hers. But being a bareback, what she wants and what she gets are seldom the same. For those born feet-first, life is comfortable, and one night a month they lock themselves in a secure room to fur up in peace.

"Barebacks, trapped in their human skin and drafted at eighteen into the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity, don't have it so easy. A full moon means patrolling the silent night in search of transformed citizens breaking the curfew. The rest of the month, Dorla agents mop up the after-effects of the trespasses, the fights and the maulings. Resignedly, she takes the case - but before Ellaway can be tried, her maimed friend is murdered. Lola wants justice. She'll settle for the truth. But in a divided world, asking for the truth may bring answers that you don't want to hear."

Commentary: I really did love In Great Waters. You can read just how much here. Bareback was her first novel, and we'll just have to wait and see if it's half as sophisticated and lyrical as its esteemed successor - though an ostensibly modern-day setting which has werewolves for 99% of its population just doesn't seem to me a premise as ripe for Whitfield's considered and very English treatment as merpeople in 16th century Europe. Nevertheless, I'm very excited to find out once and for all.

The Sunset Limited

by Cormac McCarthy

Release Details:

Published in the UK on

07/05/10 by Picador

Review Priority:

3 (Moderate)

Plot Synopsis: "A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life-or-death decision must be made.

"In that small apartment, Black and White, as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history – mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett.

"White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men – though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it.

"Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life."

Commentary: Hold your horses, readers. To answer your question: no. This isn't Cormac McCarthy's first novel since The Road took all our breaths away, but rather a reissue of a 2006 play... or perhaps, as the publicity would have it, "a novel in dramatic form." This edition, one imagines, is being released in anticipation of an adaptation coming down the Hollywood pipeline shortly, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones of No Country for Old Men - certainly the most successful of all the adaptation of McCarthy's body of work to cinema. I'll admit to being good and hyped for the film, and this is a perfect opportunity to bone up on its source material. That said, my feelings of McCarthy are rather mixed: I loved The Road, along with every other discerning reader out there, but Blood Meridian, my only other experience of the man, was so devastating as to almost put me off reading entirely. So we shall see...

The Girl With Glass Feet

by Ali Shaw

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
01/01/10 by Atlantic Books

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "A mysterious metamorphosis has taken hold of Ida MacLaird - she is slowly turning into glass. Fragile and determined to find a cure, she returns to the strange, enchanted island where she believes the transformation began, in search of reclusive Henry Fuwa, the one man who might just be able to help... Instead she meets Midas Crook, and another transformation begins: as Midas helps Ida come to terms with her condition, they fall in love. What they need most is time - and time is slipping away fast."

Commentary: Doesn't this sound lovely? Ali Shaw's first novel is already riding high on a wave of good feeling and positive press, and the little I've read of it since receiving a copy do nothing to dispute that. The Girl With Glass Feet has the potential to be great wee fable in the mode of The Life of Pi and Of Bees and Mist and I'm very much looking forward to unwinding with it after finishing one massive tome or another.

Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
01/10/09 by Atlantic Books

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. Three times during history's darkest epochs, violence has invaded and devastated the cloistered community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe. But they now prepare to open the Concent's gates to the outside world, in celebration of a once-a-decade rite. Suddenly, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world - as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet...  and beyond."

Commentary: Speaking of massive tomes, this behemoth of a book - weighing in just shy of 1000 pages - could well be the next novel on my to-be-read stack I tackle. As with Don DeLillo, Neal Stephenson, he of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, has never been easy reading, but in my experience his fiction has always, equally, been thoughtful and immensely rewarding. Maths and science have never been such fun! Anathem is Stephenson's first narrative since the conclusion of the epic Baroque Cycle and I'm rearing to get a start on it.

The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

Release Details:

Published in the UK on
29/04/10 by Quercus Publishing

Review Priority:

4 (Very High)

Plot Synopsis: "Jack finished university three years ago, but he's still stuck in a dead-end job in a sinister call-centre in Manchester. When the beautiful (and rich) Jennifer comes into his life he thinks he has finally found his ticket out of there. Trouble is that his boss is interested in Jennifer as well, and there's something strangely bestial about him...So when Jennifer buys Fell House, a mysterious old mansion out in remote Cumbria, a house party on a legendary scale seems like the perfect escape. But as the party spins out of control on a seemingly neverending night, they must face up to the terrifying possibility that not all their guests may be human - and some of them want to feed."

Commentary: Though the buzz on Tom Fletcher's debut hasn't been huge, my blogging colleague over at Kamvision devoured of an early copy of this one and enjoyed the experience very much. In fact, he called it "insightful, moody and truly engaging," and I have plenty of respect for Jason's judgment, so my hopes as regards The Leaping are high. Werewolves! I like werewolves; though I'll confess it's been a while since I've read a truly great werewolf story. Between this and Bareback, I think I'm pretty much sorted on that front. Unlike the standalone Kit Whitfield, however, this is the first installment in a series of novels... I mean, of course it is. At this point, though, I've got my head in so many different multi-part narratives that I long for the self-contained stories of old. That said, if Jason's on the money - and he usually is - this is a hell of a horror novel, so I won't hold The Leaping being volume one of a series against young Mister Fletcher.

Film Review: The Crazies

In 1968, with the original Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero practically invented the zombie film as we know it today. Shambling legions of rotting corpses were soon to become the most defining characteristic of his iconic career in cinema: a career that continues even as we speak - though with an insipid modern trilogy that pales into insignificance next to the original zombie triumvirate, the spark of ingenuity that made Romero's early movies so remarkable has, I fear, come and gone. But long before the likes of Survival, Diary and Land of the Dead - before even Dawn and Day redefined the genre the zombie allfather came to make his bread and butter - George A. Romero wrote and directed a little-known standalone horror film called The Crazies.

The Crazies touched on many of the same themes that would preoccupy Romero for decades to come: contagion, isolation, the struggle for survival, the erosion of morality in the wake of society's collapse. A small town is brought to the brink when a military craft containing an experimental bioweapon crash-lands in the area. The virus kills all those that come into contact with it before reanimating their corpses with a single purpose: homicide. David and Judy, a brave young couple once proud to call Evans City their home, narrowly escape the contagion only to find the odds on their survival slim at best, because the military has arrived, and they aim to contain the virus - at all costs.

 

 

It was a neat premise at the time, though hardly original even then, but between some God-awful acting and symbolism so obvious as to insult an inattentive brick wall, The Crazies was, at best, a decent movie; a good movie, potentially, shackled by budgetary constraints (to say the least) and a flimsy, unfocused script. People tend to look back on it rather more fondly than it deserves, I think, perhaps because of the later achievements of its cult director... but I digress.

The Crazies remake, helmed by Breck Eisner, shifts the action from Pennsylvania to Iowa and makes a sheriff and a deputy out of the fire marshals of the original, neither of which differences are of much import at the end of the day. Otherwise, it's a faithful, though not at all slavish updating of the 1973 film. And you know what? Incredibly, it works. When news broke that The Crazies was to be remade, I, along with no shortage of other commentators, fell to declaiming Hollywood for its dire lack of inspiration; some went so far as to say its fascination with classic horror had reached the bottom of the barrel, though I'd assert that George A. Romero, even at his worst, is a far cry from the bottom of the barrel.

Needless to say, I didn't have high hopes for The Crazies remake, and when the greatest claim to fame of its director was Sahara - that infinitely forgettable cash-in on the success of The Mummy - why indeed would I? But Breck Eisner equips himself surprisingly well herein: he exercises more restraint than I'd have imagined possible in a film of this nature, and restraint is a rare and precious commodity in horror these days, given the genre's contemporary tendency to overindulge in all its nastiest, most shocking aspects. While The Crazies still has a few grim moments - unbidden, a horrific set-piece involving a maniac with a garden fork comes to mind - they're all the more effective because they're not par for the course. Eisner has little time for extreme, pseudo-pornographic close-ups of guts and suffering. There's nothing truly distinctive about his efforts in the big chair, but it's nonetheless a cut above the directionless derivative we so often see passed off as filmmaking in the remake-dominated genre these days.

The script is similarly sufficient. Timothy Olyphant, who gained notice in the foul-mouthed and much-missed HBO Western Deadwood, and Rahda Mitchell, who I fear will never eclipse her role in the darkly fantastic cult thriller Pitch Black, lead the cast. Neither bring their A-game to The Crazies, but then, for yet another B-movie remake, why would they? Nor are their roles particularly interesting; David and Judy are rarely anything more than two-dimensional archetypes, well-meaning rabbits caught in the abominable military's headlights. That said, even unremarkable acting is a step above the awful gurning of the original film, and what the script lacks in character, it more than makes up for in tension, in purposefulness: the action here is substantially more gripping than in Romero's first iteration, the narrative pacier overall and the denouement, though it's interrupted by a curious calm, ultimately proves satisfying. 

The Crazies isn't a great film - you hardly need rush out and buy the DVD right this second - but it's a fine way to spend an hour and a half; it takes a fine idea sullied by superficial limitations 40 years ago and does it justice at last. Slick and refined, The Crazies is among the very best of the films of this seemingly never-ending wave of mostly horrific horror remakes, and though it doesn't quite eclipse Watchmen director Zack Snyder's retooled Dawn of the Dead, it comes surprisingly close to equaling its effectiveness. Colourful, if not crazy, and shocking, if not scary, Breck Eisner's remake is - wait for it - the best thing to happen to a George A. Romero film in years.

Vincenzo Natali Neuromanced

Huh. Synchronicity much?

Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube, Cypher and the forthcoming subject of the last post, Splice - my second most highly anticipated film of 2010 after Chris Nolan's Inception - is to helm an adaptation of William Gibson's literary cyberpunk landmark, Neuromancer.

The story just broke. This is what I would call Very Good News - especially considering the caliber of the talent previously attached to the project. Hayden Christensen was to star (need I say more?) with veritable unknown director Joseph Khan in the big chair, whose previous work on music videos by the likes of Britney Spears, Blink 182 and the Backstreet Boys hardly told a happy tale of the Neuromancer adaptation's prospects.

Natali, meanwhile, after an absence of some years, looks to be making his much-anticipated return with great vengeance and furious anger via Splice, and the Neuromancer movie sounds like a perfect fit to his talents.

Though I'll confess: I have a few of his books in the big ol' library, Neuromancer included, but I haven't read any William Gibson. Anyone out there prepared to act as his champion?