Sleeping with the Lights On

Sleeping with the Lights On - Review

Before considering the contents, I ought to say what a great-looking book this is - small and beautifully formed with a really unusual cutaway front. It's a great gift book if you know someone who's into their horror. Because that's the topic we're dealing with here: ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.

There is always a danger in having an academic write about genre fiction that it all gets a little po-faced (or, in this case, Poe faced). And, I'm afraid, Darry Jones, an English professor specialising in nineteenth century literature and popular fiction, does rather have this tendency. It's not that his analysis lacks interest, but it can be a touch short on readability. There's also a distinct over-reliance on Freud, apparently not realising his work, from a scientific viewpoint, is more fiction than science.

The book is divided into sections on monsters - including, of course, vampires and zombies - 'the occult and the supernatural', 'horror and the body', 'horror and the mind' and 'science and horror' (featuring Frankenstein), with a final section that highlights twenty-first century work. It covers books, film and TV, though the medium that comes across strongest is film. It did seem that on the book side, there was a heavy bias to the literary over the popular (Jones, for example, doesn't distinguish sufficiently between the covers of Dennis Wheatley's books and their content), where the approach to films verges on the trashier the better - but I suppose that reflects the academic reverence for 'literature'.

I've always been more into science fiction and some areas of fantasy than out-and-out horror, partly because I see no entertainment value in gore, but it's interesting to read about genres that give us insights into readers and writers, and there's no doubt that Sleeping with the Lights On really delivers in this respect. There's plenty of enjoyment of discovery - for example, I was interested to learn that Arthur Conan Doyle’s father was a painter who specialised in fairies, given Conan Doyle's disastrous Cottingley fairies photographs incident.

I was all set to give Jones a drubbing for having a whole sub-section on vampires without mentioning one of the greatest TV shows of the turn of the millennium, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This omission seemed to illustrate perfectly the over-seriousness of some of the text... except, in practice, Jones merely keeps Buffy, with its excellent subversion of the genre and inversion of expectations to the end as an example of the way things should be. There was an effective contrast here with some of the moribund churning out of sequels and copies that often typifies Hollywood horror. While I still feel that Buffy ought to have at least been touched on in the vampire section, this was excellent to see.

Overall, this is a genuinely attractive object, and a book that will make both the horror fan and the horror hater think again about the genre.

Sleeping with the Lights On is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog