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Re-run of the Repressed

or why every franchise monster you’ve ever loved ends up as a dog on a leash …

[Contains mild spoilers for Alien: Earth, Halloween, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine and A Nightmare on Elm Street]

The idea for this issue has been gestating in my chest ever since I watched the last couple of episodes of FX’s Alien: Earth series, so look away now if you don’t want any spoilers.

Jeri the synthetic Xenomorph from the 1994 Dark Horse limited series Aliens: Stronghold by John Arcudi and Doug 

In those final episodes, as Wendy and the rest of the Lost Boys assert their autonomy to escape Prodigy control they wind up recruiting a Xenomorph as a sort of acid-breath-Lassie that comes at Wendy’s call to tear their corporate henchie pursuers into dog food.

What this series really crystallised for me was the way that in any long running horror franchise there is an almost inevitable slide towards the domestication of the monster. Something which begins as pure unbridled terror, always seems to end up completely defanged: a pet.

But to work out why something isn’t scary anymore perhaps we have to explore what made it scary in the first place.

How horror gets horroring

In terms of scare factor, or the horror affect, there are two main theories and they both begin with Freud. I think most people these days would agree there’s probably quite a lot wrong with Freud, but his concept of the Uncanny outlined in his 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (the Uncanny) is quite a useful jumping off point for this discussion.

In this essay Freud defines the Uncanny as, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”.  Heimlich means something that belongs to the house, familiar and intimate, but can also mean concealed, kept from sight or withheld from others. Consequently, Unheimliche describes something eerie and frightening. Something that was intimate, hidden and/or buried but which is now revealed. The unexpected and terrifying return of that which has been repressed. 

The Shape A.K.A. Michael Myers … Bill Shatner at his most cutting

Years later in his seminal essay for Film Comment magazine, “The Return of the Repressed”, Robin Wood used this psychoanalytical framework to explore how movie monsters can be read as the reemergence of what society represses in order to function. Specifically (but non-exhaustively), female sexuality, threats to the nuclear family, questions of race, class and heteronormativity.

The evidence seems hard to argue with. Taking these one by one, readers will be only too familiar with the “horny women die first” or “sex signals death” trope. This can be seen in the opening of Friday the 13th, the death of Tina at the hands (talons) of Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) or the gruesome end of Mike and Harriet in My Bloody Valentine (1981).

Freddy also maps to the idea of parental sin (in this case he really is the return of repressed familial guilt), while Night of the Living Dead transforms racial violence into stumbling disinterred flesh. Frankenstein’s creature and Jason Voorhees, both throwaway children, are proxies for the dispossessed underclass and finally, homoeroticism and inversion of the family are common themes in many vampire movies.

As Wood points out, each of these films present opportunities for society (ie the monster’s victims) to attempt to deal with the repressed that the monster represents. In what Wood terms reactionary horror, victims must return to the bounds set by society (ie “good values“) in order to banish the threat (A Nightmare on Elm Street, I’m looking at you). In more progressive films (e.g. the original Night of the Living deadand The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) the underlying injustice/original sin must be exorcised before the status quo can be restored (at least temporarily).

Weird be getting weirder

But not all horror seems to work this way. Mark Fisher uses his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016) to suggest that there is another category of monster altogether: those threats that are ontological, that is to do with the nature of being, rather than merely psychoanalytical. For him, something like Lovecraft’s cosmic horror or Carpenter’s The Thing are eruptions into human reality of “the outside”. 

Where the psychoanalytical uncanny can be said to make the familiar strange, these xenosemic horrors introduce the genuinely untranslatable. The term (from xenos, foreign, and sema, sign) describes monsters that operate outside human symbolic systems entirely. In contrast to hidden meanings that are uncovered, these are meanings that were never human to begin with. 

If all monsters are scary because they function either as something which has been hidden through repression or something that is totally outside human meaning, then both are essentially categories of the unknowable “other”. Given this understanding it’s possible to see how successive franchise outings tend to cancel this out.

Phase 1: eruption (“I admire its purity”)

In this phase we get the monster as its purest manifestation of “the outside” or “the repressed”. 

If we think of the original Alien, the title tells us everything that we need to know about the eponymous creature. Back in 1979 there were no taxonomies, it was just “that goddamn thing”. Much of its horror derived from its unintelligibility. 

Similarly, Michael Myers was credited as just “the shape” in his inaugural outing and described as “purely, simply, evil,” by Doctor Loomis, the psychologist who treated him for years. Myers’ fixation on Laurie appears to have no logic or motive. (In fact, Myers is an interesting example of an entity that sits within both of the categories we’ve defined here. Although he’s positioned as the return of repressed familial violence, he functions in the film as a kind of xenosemic intrusion, in that he is both motiveless and essentially unkillable.)

Freddy Krueger for his part is at his most psychotically primal in, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Returning to the notion of the Unheimliche, he inhabits the most familiar and intimate place that his victims should be safe within, their dreams. In NightmareFreddy hardly speaks at all, and while an origin story exists, the film itself doesn’t explore it. 

Phase 2: codification (“There are certain rules that one must abide by”)

Once that first movie has been a success, well then, the amputated head is well and truly rolling. 

Subsequent franchise films demand lore and as fans and films build meaning around the creature, it starts to become explicable. Mythologies arise, witness Jason’s immortality, the Alien lifecycle (absent from the original instalment) or Freddy’s dream lore. Even naming a creature lessens its otherness. The viewer’s attention shifts from asking the question, “what the hell is that?” to “who dies next?”

Phase 3: icon (“Welcome to prime time, bitch!”)

Success breeds success and consequently, the monster becomes a brand identity. It appears on lunch boxes, becomes a Halloween costume, or is the focus of thirteen limited edition Funko Pops (yeah, yeah, I’ve got them all too).

Now franchise instalments increasingly dwell on filling out esoteric bits of lore, providing backstory and/or are peppered with endless easter eggs. 

Terrifying

Phase 4: domestication (“This is a multi-million dollar installation. He can’t make that kind of decision. He’s just a grunt.”)

By this final stage all of the creature’s otherness has been neutralised, the poor creature’s ability to scare hollowed out and filled with merch. Witness Alien: Earth or those annoying pet raptors from Jurassic World.

Here Xeno! Fetch!

Each successive phase of domestication builds upon the last, smoothing over the entity’s essential unknowability, locating its contradictions and otherness within a familiar web of meaning, estranging it further and further from its original horror affect and turning it into (gasp!) a product.

The villain was old man capital all along!

In much the same way that Adorno theorised that radical art is always disarmed by the culture industry, horror’s monsters face extinction not from pitchfork wielding mobs, but from familiarity and the relentless appetite of our cultural metabolism.

And yet, some monsters resist. 

Carpenter’s The Thing endures perhaps because it never spawned a franchise. There is no mythology, no merchandise, no (un)happy meals. Similarly, the “It” in It Followsremains unnamed and undigested (for now at least). These remain what they always were: unknowable, unassimilated and genuinely terrifying. 

The monster that stays wild stays scary.

Playlist:

My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World is the Barnes & Noble Speculative Fiction Pick for April 2026. It’s available here.

Alien³: of bald caps and bad dreams

[Warning: contains a brief mention of sexual violence and major spoilers for Alien³ ]

Welcome to an occasional series of posts where I kick around sequels that are widely derided and make a case for their re-evaluation.

– Bangs gavel –

So, in the dock before us today we have: Alien³.

The case against the second sequel to Squidly Rott’s (sorry) haunted house in space film is pretty well documented, but let me summarise it here.

  1. In its first ten minutes, the movie does away with two of the emotional anchors of its immediate predecessor, Aliens, namely Newt and Hicks. Emotionally it’s all downhill from here.
  2. There are long stretches of the movie where there’s not much tension (and very little else).
  3. The quadrupedal alien, aka man’s worst friend/xeno-woof, is objectively goofy.
  4. The inhabitants of Fiorina 161 (Fury) present a cast of poorly developed characters, most of whom all blur into one dude with a skinhead and a Bible-itch.
  5. They kill Ripley
  6. THEY KILL RIPLEY
  7. I SAID THEY KILL RIPLEY!

Traditionally, the movie’s apologists have pointed to the chaos around the film’s production and it’s worth taking a moment to remember exactly how much of a definition of development hell this movie was.

So stay frosty, people, I’m going to do this as quickly as I can, (you can also just skip ahead. For those gentle readers with a yen for this sort of grimoire there’s an in-depth account here):

The mere existence of this book speaks volumes

Producers Walter Hill & David Giler hired William Gibson for a cyber-punk styled sequel that Fox airlocked, then Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) came aboard with Eric Red (Near Dark) just as Sigourney Weaver became disillusioned on the series’ obsession with guns, so David Twohy (Critters 2) delivered a Cold War-in-space draft without Ripley until Fox demanded her reinstatement, after which Vincent Ward (The Navigator) pitched his space-monks on a five-mile wooden planet with writer John Fasano before being jettisoned because, well, actually insane, whereupon rookie David Fincher inherited the mess with Larry Ferguson (Highlander), whose portrayal of Ripley Sigourney Weaver rejected, which forced Hill & Giler back, only for them to be secretly rewritten by Rex Pickett when Fox hated their ending, in a move worthy of Weyland-Yutani itself. Giler then produced another nine(!) revisions of the movie, but by this point they were already building sets.

(Phew.)

David Fincher has famously stated that working on Alien³ was the worst experience of his life due to Fox’s overbearing presence. After filming wrapped, there were extensive reshoots and extra sequences inserted into the film at the studio’s insistence prior to its release. (And let’s not even mention those dire publicity photos of poor old Sigourney in a bald cap).

Buy me a cup of tea?

Eventually, the movie was released in 1992 to very mixed reviews and domestic underperformance. Fincher himself (perhaps unsurprisingly) treats the film the way the rest of us treat the last two Indiana Jones sequels. I mean, there were only ever three Indy movies right?

Alien 3 DC | Movies / Series | Filme aliens, Filmes classicos e ...
Whoever produced this poster’s strapline clearly had no sense of irony.

But, despite (and perhaps because) of this, Alien³ is deeply weird and eerie, certainly possessed of a more haunted and tragic atmosphere than any predecessor or sequel. Certainly, I can’t imagine any contemporary franchise instalment taking the risks this film does and one could make the case that the film’s balls-out nutso bravery flies in the face of the reheated duds that have come in its wake.

So, working through the common objections one by one:

Newt & Hicks, nixed.

Yeah, a difficult one, but I think Newt and Hicks not making it to Fury works pretty well as a statement of intent. This film is a departure from what has come before and it sets the tone unashamedly for what’s to come. This isn’t going to be a gung-ho film about space marines.

Newt and Hicks’ deaths also mean that Ripley is grieving throughout the narrative and Weaver’s performance is easily the best thing about the film. In fact, I’d argue that it’s her best work in the series. The loneliness, vulnerability and strength that she brings to the portrayal of grief here are visceral.

Nothing to see here, (prison) guvnor

Similarly, I’d argue that the long lingering shots of the corridors and ventilation shafts that comprise Fury’s prison facility are freighted with a deep sense of liminal horror. The opening scene, where the camera creeps through the crash debris of the EEV, its slow tracking through the tunnels and shafts of the lead-works combined with the surveillance footage of deserted corridors, crackling fluorescent lights and humming machinery are all reminiscent of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s deep-time classic Homo Sapiens. These are all spaces that should be populated, but aren’t, possessed of a sense of dread, of something missing or withheld, charged with the same creepypasta unease as the Backrooms.

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Depopulated, de-centred

Nowhere is this eerie payload more evident than in the emergence of the creature itself. This chest-bursting moment is at complete odds with the gross-out splatter-core of the original movie. In both the theatrical version and the assembly cut the alien’s birth is intercut with Hicks and Newt’s funeral, but in each version, the xeno-woof (theatrical)/oxo-morph (assembly cut) emerges from its animal host in an unpeopled space. In the assembly cut ,the birth is even followed by a long, lonely pull-out from Babe the ox showing the birth site surrounded by empty space.

Even with poor Spike the dog’s death throes in the theatrical cut, the birth scene has an odd, disassociated feel to it more than one of straightforward horror. Partly, I think, this is because at this point in the series chest-bursting had become an expected staple of the Alien movies, but also because, yet again, this pivotal scene is happening unbeknownst to Ripley and the prison population. The humans are de-centred in their own story.

This Whippet was originally planned to star as the Xenomorph for a ...
Whippet … good? (with apologies to Devo)

Xeno-woof/Oxo-morph

Much has been made of Fincher’s dog-in-a-suit xeno-woof, but in the film’s defence the only dog shots are mercifully brief and, in the assembly cut, were cleaned up by the DVD restoration team with greatly improved compositing. For me, the creature works as a classic form of weird ontology that upsets categories, is it a dog/ox/alien? The cute post-birth puppetry of the bambi-burster only reinforces how disturbing the creature’s mutability is.

Look at me! I am soooo cute!

But also, I will eat your fucking face.

A seven foot walking cock with metal teeth

It’s no secret that H.R. Giger designed the xenomorph to be a seven-foot ambulatory cock with metal teeth, but Alien³ is the only movie in the series that draws an explicit parallel between the creature’s threat to bodily autonomy and sexual violence.

From this point of view, it’s possible to view the prisoners’ lack of individuality, specifically their shaved heads, uniforms and blurred identities as a way of collapsing them into a kind of faceless hostile masculinity.

Certainly, from her first entrance into the prison mess hall, Ripley is the focus of a predatory male gaze and her female identity is blamed explicitly by the prisoner’s leader, Dillon, for bringing “temptation” into their midst.

This ugly mood comes to a head most starkly when a group of prisoners attempt to sexually assault Ripley at the lead-works, but is also directly paralleled in the way in which the alien itself “leers” over her later when it traps her in the infirmary, its secondary jaw hovering with what seems to be sexual menace.

Both of these grim moments stage Ripley’s body as a site of threatened violation, reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes and drawing uncomfortable parallels between male and monstrous aggression.

Chip in, so I can buy a bald cap of my very own?

THEY KILL RIPLEY!

Yes, they do. But there’s a grace and beauty in her final sacrifice. It can be read as a final and definitive act of agency and autonomy. A noble fuck you to Bishop 2 and the Weyland-Yutani goons trying to exploit her and the alien embryo that she carries.

Again though, the film (at least in its theatrical version) delivers a strange and disturbing final image. In her last moments, as Ripley tumbles to her death, the alien bursts from her chest. She grabs it, holding it in an uncanny mirror of a mother-infant embrace, cradling it until they’re both swallowed by the molten metal below.

It’s a touching and deeply weird moment, which feels to me at least, like a fitting and dignified capstone to the trilogy.

In the end, Alien³ may be flawed, but I would say that its utter strangeness and sombre mood make it far more than a failure. Yes, it is bleak, but it’s also a very weird and eerily singular film with an emotional impact that, for me at least, lingers long after the credits have rolled.

But, more importantly, what do you think?

Playlist:

My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World is published on April 7th 2026 by Titan Books. Pre-order it here.

“It Follows” and the emotional register of late-stage Capitalism

I’ve read a lot of articles recently that chuck around the phrase, “the logic of late-stage capitalism” as a kind of rhetorical flourish. Hell, I’ve probably written a few myself, so I‘m not throwing any shade here. But it’s hard to read these words without thinking about the oft-quoted line (attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) that, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Saying we’re in “late-stage capitalism” though, kind of implies that we’ve moved through earlier stages and are now somewhere near a known ending. It has all the portentousness (and silliness) of a song by The Shamen. The logic at play here is more Captain Kirk than Mr Spock, enabling us to turn out despairing articles, give a Gallic shrug and then pop down to Waitrose for more hummus without troubling ourselves too much with what might actually come next.

From a historical perspective, this feeling is familiar. As far back as ancient Rome, figures like Cato and Cicero made their names partly by weighing in on the decline of civilisation. So believing the end is nigh seems to be a recurring cultural pattern. In my own lifetime alone we’ve had nuclear annihilation, Y2K and the War on Terror. None of these were trivial periods to live through, but we often seem to dramatise the present moment as a final gasp. Maybe, it helps to give the quotidian a glamorous touch of black lipstick. And maybe that’s part of the horror genre’s appeal (well, that and the lipstick).

“Metaphor for capitalism, innit” – Hobie tells it like it is.

Which brings me to It Follows, a horror film that explores a lot of things, but at least one of them is investigating the unrelenting dread resulting from being pursued by an ending. In the film, Jay, a young woman becomes the target of a shape-shifting supernatural entity after a sexual encounter. This creature follows her at a walking pace, killing its victim when it catches them. The entity can look like anyone. It never stops. It can be delayed by passing the curse on to someone else, but ultimately (the repressed) always returns.

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Which makes the movie and It an eerie metaphor for Capitalism: an often invisible entity, that becomes known only to its victims (something which it bears in common with Carpenter’s They Live) and which can only be avoided by exploiting other victims in a sort of manic Ponzi scheme.

Much of the creeping fear that the movie engenders is due to Its nature. Because the creature at the movie’s core can’t be reasoned with, it has the implacable quality of a primal force. It can look like your neighbours. It can look like your parents. It wears the mask of what you know.

Like Capitalism then, the entity in It Follows demands that we keep moving and keep the questions to minimum: that we keep on running, spending and consuming. It wears us down. Slowly, quietly and relentlessly.

During the film’s finale, the protagonists try to trap the entity in a swimming pool. For a moment it appears that the gambit might have worked. Jay survives, but the final shot shows her walking away with her boyfriend while, in the background, a figure walks behind them.

The End … or is it? Mwahahaha.

That circular, open ending is one of the things that makes It Follows so compelling and disturbing to me. The curse hasn’t been ended, it’s merely been postponed, unresolved. And that feels a lot like the emotional register of whatever this thing is that we call “late capitalism”.

We’re integrated components of a system that is dizzily documenting its own demise, but the endings that we might reasonably expect: collapse, revolution and transformation never quite arrive. (For me, there’s something of a parallel here, between that bit of old post-punk wisdom that any significant resistance ultimately gets packaged up and sold back to society as a life-style.) We’re controlled by the very system we’ve constructed. Telling ourselves that there is no alternative, instead of an ending we get packaged decline, reboots and bit-rot.

This is why the term “haunted capitalism” feels a more appropriate epithet to me than “late-stage.” Capitalism doesn’t die, it persists, populated and animated by the ghosts of futures that never fully arrived: dead city centres, empty social media networks and nostalgia for discontinued chocolate bars. We’re surrounded and invested in an epistemological infrastructure that exists only as a sort of grim hangover cure.

It’s entirely possible that Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, might be one route out of our current predicament. Not as escapism, but as refusal. As a way of unthinking the system we’ve convinced ourselves is “natural.” Most economists seem to agree that our current economic model has its roots in the changes wrought during the 17th century such as early industrialisation, enclosure and colonial trade.

So before that, there were other logics and other systems available. Not better, necessarily, but different. So Hyper-capitalism isn’t inevitable. It’s no more a function of human nature than a Saturn V rocket is a function of a matchstick.

Having fun? You could buy me a cuppa, Guv’nor

It Follows doesn’t offer a clean ending. But then neither really does Capitalism. That is its horror and its ultimate trick, teaching us to fear its (almost but never quite materialising) collapse while numbing us to the horror of the present. Perhaps, it’s more accurate to think of it as a curse that we carry, not a structure we can challenge.

So, to resist haunted capitalism, perhaps we have to do more than call it “late.” Perhaps we have to try to imagine the unimaginable: not an apocalypse, but a departure. A refusal. Maybe that is something that we as fantasy, horror and science-fiction writers can do. We can lean-in to the job of re-worlding our future. Rather than documenting dystopias we can attempt to imagine how we might finally break the curse, by envisioning a world that no longer accepts it.

Because, failing that, I don’t think there’s a swimming pool big enough.

Less something broadcast and more something that slipped through: Schalcken the Painter

“Turn from the light. Your breast bare. Look into the dark.”

I encountered the BBC’s adaptation of Schalcken the Painter one Christmas night in 1979. Looking at Wikipedia now, I can confidently inform you that it was shown under the Beeb’s Omnibus arts umbrella, part of the corporation’s a Ghost Story at Christmas tradition. Since then, it has rarely been repeated, although the BFI released an edition of the film on DVD about a decade ago which is where I rediscovered it.

But that first viewing many years ago, was part of the serendipity of the three terrestrial TV channels of the time. As a child, I’d just turn the dial to commune with the great collective unconscious in the sky and keep turning it until something found me.

The “Schalcken” commissioned for the TV production depicting the doomed Rose and the painter in the background. Artist unknown.

Schalcken was that something. Feeling much less like a programme than something that manifested when I was up later than I should have been, it was a story beamed directly into me. Without knowing anything about it or having a copy of the Radio Times to hand, the film was charged with what Simon Reynolds might call a hauntological atmosphere, a static-tinged invocation of the past where the absence of any context felt like a presence. It was less like something that had been programmed and more akin to something that had slipped through.

The film is an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story of the same name. Both centre on a young Dutch painter, Godfried Schalcken, who was known for candlelit portraits of young women that were both suggestive and intimate. Apprenticed to the miserly Gerrit Dou, the story concerns one such work by the young painter. It depicts a woman carrying a candle while the figure of Schalcken himself stands behind her, sword half-drawn. A shadowy something lurks nearby.Subscribed

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Narrated by Charles Gray, the film reveals that Schalcken produced the painting after experiencing a terrifying vision of his lost love, Rose, Gerrit Dou’s niece, following her marriage to an unearthly rival, Minheer Vanderhausen. After the marriage, she returns to the family home to beg for help, but Schalcken is unable to aid her. Subsequently, he becomes embittered and is ruined by ambition and regret. Cursed by strange visions of Rose’s fate, he paints the picture that is the tale’s inspiration.

Looking back now, for me the most striking aspect of Leslie Megahey’s production was its sound design. The foley work is close-miked, claustrophobic and opinionated. Coins clatter guiltily. Mealtimes are a medley of scraped cutlery and clocks ticking. Above all, the ghoulish Vanderhausen is introduced by a subtle creaking cue and a basso throb.

Maurice Denham is at his gnomic best as the acerbic Gerrit Dou. (Setting up one scene for his students, he dismissively indicates his two models: “St Anthony. Temptation. Devils … you will imagine the devils”). Jeremy Clyde’s Schalcken is at once amoral and careerist. Cheryl Kennedy’s Rose is, alas, little more than a human plot point. And there is something magnificently ghastly in John James’ monolithic Vanderhausen.Subscribed

Many of the film’s scenes are painterly tableaux that echo the Dutch Masters. They are composed as slow, locked-off shots demanding attention and suggestive that things are happening just outside their frame. The overall pace is profoundly mesmeric. As a kid who revelled in the reckless blood-spurting, page-turning chaos of 2000 AD, the film’s sense of stillness was agonising and compelling.

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If Le Fanu’s original tale is a masterful example of gothic grimoire, Megahey’s adaptation is more satisfyingly grounded and disturbing, I think, in that it explores aspects that the source material only hints at. Namely, the commodification of the erotic, the sex worker economy and the casual treatment of Rose as an object for sale to the highest bidder, in this case the eminently unsuitable Vanderhausen.

Encountering this film without any context made it all the more unnerving. Lacking much to orient me, its docudrama approach, unsettling atmosphere and languorous sense of dread were perfect. But I do wonder how much of its impact was a function of the way it found me, free of frames of reference or any sense of what it was.

A perfect example, perhaps, of the uncanny as a format rather than a plot, its final few scenes lurking in my memory for days after I saw it and still capable of evoking a sense of dread years later. But that mood lay not only in the tale itself, but in how it arrived, formally unplaceable, aesthetically estranged. Schalcken the Painter wasn’t just uncanny in content. For me, bathing in the flickering TV light that night, it was the uncanny

Years later, I rediscovered the film and watching it now, it’s still chilling, but since I know so much about it, its sense of dread has receded. Knowledge of its origin has dispelled its hauntological charge. That notion I had of not-knowing, the feeling I was watching something that might be forbidden has faded, taking with it the creeping sensation that instead of a slightly hokey Christmas ghost story, I was witnessing a transmission from the outside.

My weird fantasy debut The Lighthouse at the End of the World is published by Titan Books April 2026. Pre-order it here.

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Questions for this issue:

  • I’d love to hear from anyone else who has encountered the uncanny as format?

Playlist

  • You can hear Sheridan Le Fanu’s original gothic tale read by the wonderful Ian McDiarmid here.
  • Watch Leslie Megahey’s the adaption here. You’ll need to login due to age restrictions (there is some nudity, well, it was the 1970s). The reproduction is low quality, although IMHO that only adds to its atmosphere.
  • The BFI’s Graham Fuller analyses the film: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/why-i-love-schalcken-painter
  • You can buy the BFI DVD edition here. Apologies for the Amazon link but the BFI shop seems to be closed right now.

policing perception: weird fiction, the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the warped borders of the real

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeve’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

Woah! Déjà vu, dude.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet. The sky is the same old blue.

Perhaps after a while, you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.

Few books map out this territory more ingeniously than The City & the City by China Miéville or The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson. Both of these novels deal in epistemic slippage, the boundaries of what is knowable and what is known, (what Miéville himself has referred to as “sublime backwash”). Each exists though at the polar opposite of the other. Where Miéville presents us with a world where the epistemological structure is brutally policed, Hope Hodgson describes a universe where there is absolutely and gloriously no epistemological structure whatso-fucking-ever.

In Miéville’s murder mystery, Inspector Borlú a policeman from the city of Besźel investigates a murder that requires him to work with a partner in the twin city of UI Qoma. Nothing too odd there you might think, except for the fact that the two cities share much of the same physical space. In order to maintain the illusions of separateness and sovereignty, citizens of one city must “unsee” anything pertaining to the other, ignoring people, buildings and even events that occur right in front of them. Failure to do so results in an intervention from the shadowy and terrifying force known as Breach.

Treated with a near mythical dread, Breach, disappear any violators or evidence of transgression, maintaining the ideal of separateness. They have an almost supernatural ability to detect and punish any infractions and in many ways function much like the Agents in the Matrix. They’re spectral, terrifying antagonists who are rarely perceived and cannot be beaten. Only they have access to the duality of the world as it is and as it is perceived.

One of the brilliant things about the novel is that crossing between the cities is a bureaucratic activity. Visitors must queue up to pass through a universal access point, Cupola Hall, filling out forms and editing their perceptions as they go. (Imagine entering Narnia via passport control.) Breach, then, isn’t just a surveillance force, it’s the living embodiment of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the period between the rise of print and the digital age, when truth was shaped by centralised, text-based notions of authority.

Now, let’s flip this on its head.

Never fails.

In House on the Borderlands, if there is an equivalent of Breach they’re all out for coffee and donuts. Within the book’s framing narrative, an old man dwells in a remote house that seems to be perched precariously on the edge of space and time itself. Violent swine-things emerge from the wilderness and attack him (and his dog!). A pit opens into infinity. The house falls into disrepair as does reality itself. Time speeds up and slows down and the old man sees the solar system wither and die, meeting with the spirit form of his lost love in the process. (Clearly, the cosmic horror equivalent of drunk-texting your ex).

Here is a world without perceptual control. Consequently, the old man witnesses everything, including the heat-death of the Universe and it does him in. There’s no central authority to frame events, no system to structure reality, everything is in a state of turmoil and collapse.

It’s easy enough to see the connection here. Both novels dramatise the opposite ends of the epistemic spectrum. In The City & the City Borlú experiences the effect of a suffocating truth apparatus: ultimately you-can-only-see-what-you’re-allowed-to. In The House on the Borderlands we get a peek at what happens when no-one is in charge, not even reality itself.

It’s fair to say that we’re somewhere in the middle of these two extremes right now, that the five hundred years or so since the invention of print has been the equivalent of sleeping on Borlú’s sofa: uncomfortable, but still governed by house rules. We got verifiable truth, experts and certified sources. (A Breach of sorts also, perhaps). But it’s hard not to feel that that period is coming to an end, that while we were sleeping the internet and digital culture pushed our bed into the old man’s house on the edge of the abyss.

What is clear here is that command of the truth equates to political power. Breach wouldn’t be able to exert its control without the compliance of the citizenry of Besźel and UI Qoma. In the House on the Borderlands human history (and, ergo, all politics) is vapourised against the sheer scale of cosmic time.

But noticing that shit-gets-strange is not the same as deciding that the moon landings were faked, or that JFK was an alien. Engaging with the weird isn’t a call to relativism or an embrace of conspiratorial thinking.

There is a philosophical and moral distinction, I think, between questioning the framework and denying reality itself. While the weird draws attention to how things fit together (or not) and why, it is not an invitation to retreat from the rational. Rather, it should encourage us to ask how the rules around truth are made, who enforces them and what happens when they falter.

In world where politicised digital culture exhorts us to pick a side, the blue pill or red pill perhaps instead we should be asking: where did these pills come from? And who’s interest does it serve to keep us squabbling?

Or as Tony Benn once pithily framed it :

  • what power have you got?
  • where did you get it from?
  • in whose interests do you exercise it?
  • to whom are you accountable?
  • and how can we get rid of you?

If “doing your own research” simply means finding other people on the internet who already agree with you then I humbly submit you’re doing it wrong. Each one of those bits of confirmation bias edges us closer to the old man’s pit and the swine-things.

So we carry on watching the sky. And if it seems a bit too purple, maybe we don’t insist it’s blue out of habit or call it green out of spite. We just keep looking, keep asking and perhaps resist the pressure to unsee.

playlist

My fantasy debut: The Lighthouse at the End of the World from Titan books is available for preorder now.

cover story

One of the things that is true for most of the writer-types I know, is that we care quite a lot about the covers that wrap our words. I mean, stating it now, it seems totally freakingly obvious, but that old saw about “not judging a book by its cover” suggests that if you are the-sort-of-person-who-does-care-about-that-sort-of-thing then perhaps you might be a bit superficial.

Okay then …

I am a lot superficial.

Looking over my contract with Titan Books I saw that it promised that I’d be “consulted” on the cover for Lighthouse at the End of the World, although “consulted” does feel rather like a weasel word which might shield any number of sins.

Over the years, I have met writers with cover horror stories to tell. Covers that were so anathema to their original intent that recalling them still brings salty tears to their sweet, sweet eyes.

Equally, I am aware that we writers (present company accepted obvs) can be an egotistical bunch of awkwards who feel that nothing short of gold leaf and vegan leather are suitable containers for our genius. So, it was a nice surprise to get a note from my editor last month to say that he would be sending over a few potential covers for consideration. (This is actually my first rodeo – as the t-shirt says so I wasn’t sure what to expect.)

The four options that materialised in my inbox a couple of days later were all brilliant in their own ways and each one thrust a sturdy finger into the eye of the all too common contemporary practice of asking AI to puke up some generic bollocks with wizards on it. (I do appreciate that I am privileged in this regard, but come on people!)

I’m happy to say that the process of going through them was incredibly consultative with a lot of back and forth between me, my agent, my editor and the design team, to determine which would work best. Once that choice was made we went through a few iterations to get it was just right.

And so I’m very pleased to be able to share the final version in all its glory, as revealed on the ReactormagSFF site on the 30th April, along with a neat one sentence pitch:

Enter a London like no other in this fast-paced, captivating fantasy novel filled with warring gods, alternate realities and a working class kid caught in the middle of it all…

Hope you’ll agree it’s gobsmackingly gorgeous. I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks to all the wonderful peepage at Titan Books for their patience and hard work in developing such a great cover. (Although, if there is a gold leaf and vegan leather option perhaps we can explore it?)

Finally, if I may be so bold, preorders really do help a book release land, so if you feel that The Lighthouse at the End of the World might be up your alley, you can preorder it here.

how i didn’t get a literary agent*

* until I did

why did I want an agent?

Self publishing is really popular and I get why. The traditional route to having your book in your sweaty little mitt is long, fraught and paved with having your heart pulled out and tango-ed on repeatedly by people, who for the most part, can’t even be arsed to call you back.

Despite this, I wanted to go trad because from what I could see from the indie authors I knew, the marketing side of that path was a whole second job. The notion of putting my pen down only to have to then source a decent cover, get the book produced professionally and perma-hustle my butt-off to sell it just didn’t appeal at the time. For those of you doing this my hat is in the off position.

pitches

To hook an agent, I needed an elevator pitch sharp enough to slice a rock. Ever the overachiever, I concocted three: a rapid-fire version for if I was stuck in a lift with Carmichael from Umbrella Academy, a mid-length one, and a longish one for the fabled moment when your agent/victim actually wants-to-know-more.

Cue me, muttering my pitches to myself at writers’ conferences, loitering by hotel elevators with a spanner. Spoiler: I never pitched to an agent in person.

yes, Carmichael. He’s basically a goldfish

PitMad & PitReallyFreakingFurious

So then there was #PitMad. Once every three months writers pitched their novels to actual human agents on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Essentially, the brief was to post a 280 character pitch for your meisterwerk including the appropriate hashtags. e.g.

#PitMad #HA Persuasion: Bridgerton x La La Land- Yrs ago, Anne let Wentworth go. Now he’s back—rich, successful, & still wounded. Can she win him back, or has she lost him forever? A slow-burn, second-chance romance of longing & regret. #HistoricalRomance

All participants would retweet the ones they liked (not their own obvs) and the literary gods would ‘like’ any pitch that caught their eye for follow up. I did this a lot of times and yeah, you guessed it, crickets.

what worked for me:

In the end, I realised that the odds were so stacked against writers that the only way of shortening them was to become mechanical and relentless about submitting my manuscript to people.

I bought a copy of the Writer’s and Artists Year Book and with the help of my glamorous assistant/wife scraped all the agents that didn’t hate on fantasy into a big-ass spreadsheet, rated them by how much of a fit the agencies might be (size, focus, vibe et. al.) and then sorted the heck out of them. Then the real fun began.

Ah, agent websites. To quote Kahn Noonien Singh, quoting Melville: “[To] the last, I will grapple with thee from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”

Okay. Maybe I’m overreacting a teensy bit, but while agency pages will all feature monochrome, smiley headshots of their agents, the most useful information i.e. what genres they read, likes/dislikes and their submission statuses is always buried behind an extra click or two. When sifting through hundreds of names, this gets old really quickly .

Suitably informed, I added the appropriate names into my spreadsheet and vroom, vroom it was submission time, baby.

submissions

submit to the ones you’re most interested in first in batches of 10. That way, if you do get a partial or full manuscript request you can let the other agents know, then gasp and chuckle with mirth as they fall over themselves to get in contact with you. Shoe’s on the other foot now, eh, mother-fathers!

tune your comps. These are your comparative books, the titles in your query letter that you’re comparing your manuscript to. Pick recent books, not Frankenstein x Bridget Jones (tempting though it is).

tune your synopsis and have multiple lengths of it .Is it annoying that every agency has a pet length and format? Yes. Is it necessary to stick to them? Absolutely. Remember you have to tell the whole story from start to finish. This is the time to kill-your-darling subplots.

tune your pitch letter and have different versions of that too. This is where all that practice you had pretending you were in a broken lift with Forrest J Ackerman comes in.

grow a thick skin over your robotic heart. Most of the time you aren’t going to hear back (and if you do chances are it’ll be a rejection.) Each ‘no’ earns a silent tear, a spreadsheet update, and another submission. Remember this is a numbers game and you only have to get lucky once.

keep up-to-date

The agency universe is a small one, but is in a state of constant flux. Check regularly to make sure that the list you’re working from is still valid. Agents move agencies. Agencies change names and they close and new ones open. In my case, the agency I was lucky enough to end up with (Greyhound Literary), didn’t even exist in its current form when I started querying.

never give up, never surrender

Years ago, the standard wisdom seemed to be if you had tried ten agencies and no-one was biting then you probably needed to write another book. Not anymore. The agents I met as part of my MFA advised to keep going until you run out of agencies. Publishing is fragmented, and marketing-driven, so persistence is key.

Everything I learned about querying, I learned from Galaxy Quest

so what have we learned?

Querying is hard mentally and emotionally.

On balance, it’s probably just as much work as self-publishing and you have to be capable of dealing with a lot of rejection up front, but on the flip side you’ll then have someone in your corner who has not only bought into your current book, but you as a writer and be with you for the long haul

It is a lot of work, but never forget, you only have to be lucky once.

fac 40: temptation by joy division: released 09.09.82

the cover of fac 40: temptation

Today marks the forty-second anniversary of Joy Division’s genre defying brutalist ur-techno torch song.

Released two years after the departure of drummer Stephen Morris and the hasty drafting in of Manchester scene-stealer and A Certain Ratio stalwart Donald Johnson, this single was the first to sketch out the path that they were to follow over the next decade, from purveyors of icy post-punk to stream of consciousness disco-dipshits.

Fac 40 was the first artifact that showed how the technicians at the heart of this tight-lipped foursome could bend their obsessions with early Kraftwerk, Philadelphia disco and the burgeoning NY club scene into shapes that fit with their own post-industrial motorik aesthetic.

Their first American tour, infamous in some respects because of its effects on frontman Curtis’s health was where the proverbial boys-in-long-coats loosened their skinny ties and learned to feel the groove.

To hear (then) freshly minted keyboard and guitar wizard Bernard Sumner tell it: “when we were in the US that first time … it was like we dropped into this parallel universe where it was okay to have fun. Where it was okay to stay up all night dancing and just messing about”

Curtis has said much the same: “People always think of us as this urban decay, punk outfit, but I was always into new things. I don’t care about genres, I’m into what I’m into. Like, I was at Paradise Garage one night with Barney and it was as though we could feel the ground shifting under our feet; not just the sound of something new; but the sense that there were new ways of being yourself out there, just waiting for us to find them.

As soon as we got back off tour we tried to accent more of that rhythmic side that was at the heart of what we did. With Stephen gone it gave us the freedom to experiment more and Temptation came out of that. You can hear some of Donald’s influence in there too: he was a crucial part of the way our sound started evolving.”

Bass player Peter Hook characterises the change of direction in less existential terms: “at the back of my mind was the thought that if we made dance records we’d probably cop off with more women.”

This aside, it’s difficult to say which were behind the abrupt volte-face in both the tone and concerns of Curtis’s lyrics. Gone is the existential doom and stasis of their third album Paradise. The clouds are clearing, the sun coming up. This is the sound of a heartbroken J.G. Ballard being driven to an all-nighter by Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider.

Surprisingly, Curtis himself revealed some of the reasons behind these changes: “that first tour. Leaving behind England, and I suppose more specifically, Manchester, gave me some space. It gave me the time I needed to sort out some difficult bits of my personal life. I was in a bad place. Ultimately, it took years.”

Joy Division’s subsequent movements are well documented elsewhere. The hop from Temptation to the joyous euro-disco of 1983’s The Terminal Beach was not far. The latter saw Joy Division dominate not only the UK charts but also TV screens. Their quixotic and electric (in all senses of the word) live performances on TOTP, transforming Curtis into an unconventional teen heart-throb who graced the cover of Smash Hits multiple times.

Temptation was the track that hinted that all this was coming to pass, prefiguring the Madchester gold rush (a cultural moment which, despite ushering in, the band always viewed with the avuncular amusement of disco dad royalty). Meanwhile The Terminal Beach’s success bankrolled everything from Factory Records’ journey from marxist agitprop upstart to hegemonic multi-media brand and the Happy Monday’s tragedy tinged fourth album Stop Me and Buy Me One.

Was something lost in all this success? Perhaps.

For all those old post-punks screaming sell-out, one need look no further than the fact that Joy Division mk II (now consisting of Sumner and Curtis and assorted session musicians) are now on constant tour, converted into animatronic versions of their twenty-year-old selves, grinding out pitch-perfect versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart three times a week.

But as one-time Factory boss turned BBC Director General Anthony H. Wilson says of his protégés, “Success is its own prison, darling, but art is always art.”

manilow magic

I think my fascination with weird spaces began as an introverted, book-licking kid, reading about the Bermuda Triangle in the pages of Unexplained magazine. Today, the Triangle might be more famous for the cheese deluxe of the Barry Manilow song, but back then it was a terrifying region where the certainties of Cartesian space and time seemed to falter, with planes, boats, and people entering it only to vanish mysteriously. (Most notably, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind even hinted cheekily at their fate.)

Francois Truffaut shuts his eyes and thinks of the cheque in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind

As I grew older, I discovered these haunted landscapes in the pages of the “old weird” e.g. Machen’s The White People, Blackwood’s The Willows, and later, the deeply ambiguous Québécois outback of Atwood’s Surfacing. These uncertain, liminal spaces got under my skin, needling away, stinging like a hangnail.

This obsession only intensified when I came across Vandermeer’s Annihilation and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In both of these novels, the weird landscape is the driver of the narrative. Roadside Picnic, set in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, explores the aftermath of an alien visit that has left behind mysterious “Zones” filled with gravitational anomalies, toxic hazards, and sinister locales where the shadows “look wrong”.

In the face of the economic exigencies of the late-period Soviet Union, human “Stalkers” sneak into these zones to make off with little-understood, abandoned technology to sell for mis-use on the black market. Red Schuhart, the novel’s hard-bitten protagonist, likens their actions to “children playing with matches in a house on fire. The Zone is the fire, and we’re too blind to see the danger.”

The Strugatskys’ Zone is an eruption into human reality, of what Lovecraft (everybody’s favourite tomb-faced, racist bell-end) would have called “the outside”. Consequently, the novel is much less about aliens than it is about the limits of human knowledge and subsequently the human condition.

Similarly, in Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Area X is a weird space that infiltrates human power structures, replacing them with a mycological plane reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”. As its protagonist (known only as the Biologist) discovers, Area X is a place where the human experience is interrogated, undermined, and ultimately transformed.

What keeps me coming back to these books is their conjuring of non-human presence as absence, evoking Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as, “the sensation of … something present where there should be nothing.” In Roadside Picnic, this absence is the unresolved mystery of the aliens’ purpose. Some believe that Earth was just a stopover, humanity unnoticed, while others think the aliens never left, still lurking invisibly in the Zone: the mutations in Stalkers’ children hinting at, perhaps, a slow-motion genetic invasion.

Similarly, Vandermeer’s Area X is a metaphor for the climate crisis, a rebellion against humanity and capitalism by a Gaian hyper-entity. The Biologist’s journey through Area X, where the landscape observes her as much as she observes it, suggesting a move beyond the human towards a type of becoming-animal futurity.

These books resonate now more than ever, I think, because the early 21st century is a profoundly weird and eerie space. The climate crisis, flame-throwing cyber-dogs and generative AI have woven a sense of the uncanny, of presence-where-we-know-there-is-only-absence, into the texture of everyday life. The Bermuda Triangle, the Zone, and Area X have swallowed the world, making our sense of the human feel contingent and in urgent need of reinvention.

The Maz-master is a man at ease with his uncanny carpet choices

As Bazzer the Mazzer once sang,

“Bermuda Triangle, makes people disappear.

Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near.”

High on hauntology: brexit

Hauntology is a type of cultural archaeology these days, given that its moment has almost certainly passed. It’s perhaps unfairly characterised as the whining sound emitted by Gen-Xers as our brief moment of cultural hegemony (comic book movies/post-modernism) is squeezed between the more demographically generous buttocks of millennials and baby boomers.

But then we were always the forgotten generation. The latchkey, step-parented kids who watched too much TV, stayed up too late, ate too much junk food, and swallowed way too many drugs.

As much as Simon Reynolds might (reasonably) reject this as a “lazy” analysis in Ghosts of My Life, hauntology, at least in its Fisherian incarnation, does have something of the quality of an old man declaring war on the moon. If nothing else, the emergence of Grime and UK Drill rebutted Fisher’s notion that Jungle was the last revolutionary pop music pretty much at the very moment that he was asserting it.

But while the hauntological cultural moment may have passed, daily struggles with the consequences of Brexit seem to suggest that we are very much living at its political apex.

This is because if there was one cultural frame for the whole Brexit project, it was the one of a Britain isolated from a fascist Europe, fighting as the plucky underdog and winning the Second World War single-handedly.

Indeed (and as Rafael Behr has pointed out), to listen to Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Paul Dacre, and Boris Johnson, one could be mistaken in thinking that it was they who stormed the beaches on D-Day, completed years of national service, or presided over the sunset of the Raj in India… except… they are, of course, too young to have done any of this.

Enough said.

In place of lived experiences of WWII, these ontological jokers draw on a national ur-myth whose foundational canon would have been served up regularly during their long summer respites from the Winchester College bullies: Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and countless 1970s WWII action movies. (Although Farage has more in common with Basil Fawlty in “The Germans”).

All of these gesture towards a Britain that never existed. A cosy “cor-blimey guv” Albion of officers and men, where the little people knew their places. A Blighty standing toe-to-toe “alone” against Fascism which had yet to suffer post-war decline or post-imperial embarrassment. (Dog whistle alert: is it possible that part of this myth’s appeal is the sense that this Britain was so much whiter?)

Come along now, chaps.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

It is worth remembering perhaps, the Conservative Party’s original antipathy for the EU has its roots in a deep suspicion of the demands of the European Social Chapter and a fear that this was introducing “socialism through the back door”. (Reverse echoes of Truss’s paranoid anxieties of invisible supra-sovereign forces working to undermine a national government?)

Allying this dislike to the screen memory of a Greater Britain, spitfires over Dover, Rule Britannia, and the “good” empire, resulted in a toxically hallucinogenic brew that the Conservative Party was forced to ingest as some sort of ayahuascan post-imperial hangover cure.

JRM has some really good shit.

Watch high priest Rees-Mogg’s eyes rotate behind his wire-rimmed spectacles like that snake from The Jungle Book. Witness lonely Gove’s cocaine jitterbug or Truss’s dead-eyed X-Files-lite rants about the deep state.

Retro’s opioid hit is, of course, that it gives the comfort of what we’ve known before, a Freudian return to the womb/nanny, along with a convenient yardstick that renders all other political practices inadequate by comparison.

It created a subjective/objective purity test where outspoken beliefs in Brexit dividends were more important than any rational concerns rooted in its evidential costs. A position which provided the pretext for Johnson to purge his party of anyone other than the faithful.

Like HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, the delicious cognitive dissonance from this hauntological hit caused a psychic crisis which sent our ruling elite scurrying for higher and higher doses of post-truth (e.g. legislating to make Rwanda a safe country, an obsession with getting out from under “the yoke” of the European Court of Justice.) It’s monkey which they have, as yet, been unable to shake off.

“Open a trade border in the Irish Sea, HAL” “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”

The predictable paranoid comedown from all of this has meant the right have already started on the betrayal narratives: Brexit wasn’t done properly or has been sabotaged by fifth columnists/deep state forces. Ignoring, of course, that the Brexit that they espoused was a construct that would never have been achievable in any of the political contexts from which the UK was starting.

Is there any escape from this toxic nostalgia? Currently, it is hard not to agree with Fisher’s grim analysis that we are trapped within a mirrored box of our own making. As time passes and the veterans and survivors of World War II are gathered up, all we see are reflections of reflections.

To paraphrase Orwell’s O’Brien: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Nigel Farage driving around in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy forever”. Perhaps, all we can do is hope that as the hauntological cultural moment has passed, then perhaps soon its political variant will do the same.