Trump; and Dystopian Fiction.

What makes a good dystopian tale? A lot of attention had recently been drawn to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, A Handmaid’s Tale. The reason? The book itself shows the downfall of American society from the liberty to the exact opposite. For women at least. At first women are fired from their jobs before seeing the… Continue reading Trump; and Dystopian Fiction.

Not so Sweet Pea.

You may have noticed a new TV series on Sky called Sweet Pea. What you might not realise is that there is a series of books by CJ Skuse. I recently read the first one (titled Sweet Pea) to see what all the fuss was about. What I found was a wonderfully sardonic first hand… Continue reading Not so Sweet Pea.

Book to film – the good, the bad and the downright disastrous.

Book to film. The following blog post contains spoilers. We’ve all been there. Sitting in the cinema, the film has finished, the lights go up. And we say, “The book was better.” Of course, some book to film adaptations are better than others. But no one will ever make the perfect adaptation because no two… Continue reading Book to film – the good, the bad and the downright disastrous.

Burn, Witch, Burn. Stories of Witches.

There has been a huge upturn recently in the number of books about witches and witchcraft. Practicing witchcraft, being a witch, has become almost trendy. But literature, like society, has taken its time to get here. Let’s go back to when witches were dragged into popular culture kicking and screaming. The witch trials and the… Continue reading Burn, Witch, Burn. Stories of Witches.

According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense.

According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense. It’s 2025 and 28-year-old Ben Richards is living in a dystopian America. The economy is in the toilet and the country is run by a totalitarian state. The gap between rich and poor is so vast that the poor have been pushed to… Continue reading According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense.

The Train was on Time – Regret, Reverence and Remembrance

The Train was on Time (Der Zug war pünktlich) by Heinrich Böll is a short novel following the journey of a German soldier, Andreas, returning from leave to Przemyśl in Poland to rejoin the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1942. From the early stages Andreas senses his own death coming and spends much of… Continue reading The Train was on Time – Regret, Reverence and Remembrance

Thérèse Raquin – Zola’s Putrid Exploration of Guilt and Punishment

Around 2002 I was working in Our Price. I would spend a lot of time talking to lots of people about music and films, but also books. It was in one of these conversations with a customer; I must’ve been talking about my love of French literature, around that time I was devouring all the… Continue reading Thérèse Raquin – Zola’s Putrid Exploration of Guilt and Punishment