Following on from my recent Mewsings revamp, I’ve completely revamped my main site. The new-look site is not only mobile-friendly, but focuses on various creative projects I’ve done, and is hopefully more fun to browse. Most of these projects aren’t new to the site (new stuff will follow), but they’ve been given a bit of a polish. So, all the poems that have featured in this blog now have their own proper page (see the poetry index), and The Laughing Ghost has its own page, which even allows you to download the sheet music, for a proper Halloween sing-along!

Meanwhile, I’ve finally got my novel The Fantasy Reader ready for publication. It will be out, as an ebook and a paperback, on the 2nd of November. The book should have its own mini-site by then, but at the moment there’s just a blurb. On the other hand, despite my announcement at the end of last year, I’m going to have to put off my other novel (Hello World) till next year. I really didn’t expect it to take this long to get The Fantasy Reader ready, but I like to do the job properly.

Anyway, hope you like the new-look site, and thanks for reading!

In a strange way, Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom reminds me of the Lewton/Tourneur Cat People from 1942: both centre on a human ‘monster’, whose monstrousness was passed onto them by a parent (Irena in Cat People inherits her mother’s lycanthropy, Mark in Peeping Tom is the creation of his biologist father’s constant experimentation with fear); both try to escape their curse when a new relationship (Irena’s marriage, Mark meeting Helen) reminds them of all they’re missing by not being ‘normal’; and when they fail to become ‘normal’, both lapse with renewed vigour into their monstrousness, with tragic results. In both cases, the still new-seeming sciences of psychiatry and psychology utterly fail to help (in Cat People, the lascivious Doctor Conway tries to seduce, rather than cure, Irena; in Peeping Tom, the police bring in a psychologist, but he’s more interested in the ‘extravert’ film director, than the introvert killer who comes to him for advice). The main difference, of course, is that Peeping Tom’s Mark is not a supernatural monster, but one created by human means. In him, the cold, experimental eye and camera of his father has become a symbol of the abuse he suffered as a child, and which, like so many of the abused, he takes up in adulthood as his only way of dealing with a world he’s been made utterly unfit for.

Mark’s goal in life is to complete the documentary his father was working on, and so show the ultimate results of Doctor Lewis’s experiments on his only child: that it has made him into a serial killer, intent on filming the moment of terror as it appears on his victims’ faces before they die. In a way, this is Mark’s only way of getting revenge on a father who, though dead, is still a dominating presence (his initial response to being asked who owns the house he lives in is that it’s his father’s, even though he’s long since inherited it).

I feel Peeping Tom is the wrong title for a film that’s not really about voyeurism: Mark isn’t hiding behind his camera, he’s using it as the only way he knows of interacting with the world. The camera completes him; its lens is the perfect metaphor for his own disconnection from the world of normal human relationships. (Something heightened by the fact that Mark, an English boy born in the house he’s still living in, is played by the Austrian Carl Boehm, his accent as much a signifier of social alienation as it is for the Serbian Irena in Cat People.)

The only person to see through Mark is Helen’s blind mother, played by Maxine Audley, who sleeps in the room beneath Mark’s cinema, and hears him watching his silent movies every night. She instantly dislikes him — a man shouldn’t creep around in his own house.

Powell played the (only briefly-seen) villain in his own film.

Peeping Tom is infamous for effectively ending Michael Powell’s career, after the British critics tore him and his film apart — not because he so explicitly mixed psychological aberrance, cinema, and the saucy-minded prurience of early 1960s Britain, but because he dared to invite his audience to see that his lead character wasn’t just a monster, and perhaps thereby see themselves in him. The film’s sin was not to exploit its audience’s prurience (film critics of the time were surely used to that), but to see beyond it.

Something I learned from Michelle Paver’s Arctic ghost story, Dark Matter, is that the word ‘haunted’ derives from the Old Norse ‘heimta’, meaning ‘to bring home’, and the Old English ‘hamettan’, ‘to give a home to’. Which adds a certain significance to the words of her protagonist, Jack Miller, as he writes in his diary:

‘I never expected this, but I feel at home here. I love Gruhuken. I love the clarity and the desolation. Yes, even the cruelty. Because it’s true. It’s part of life. I’m happy.’

Gruhuken is an isolated spot on the Arctic coast, where Jack Miller has travelled as part of a scientific expedition (ill-fated from the start, as accidents and bereavements prevent two of its five members from reaching it). For four of the five — public school friends Gus Balfour, Algie Carlisle, Hugo Charteris-Black and Teddy Wintringham — it’s something of a jolly adventure, but for middle-class-and-failing Jack Miller it’s a last chance. Stuck in an eight-year Slough of Despond since the pre-World War II financial slump meant that the best he could do with his degree in physics was land a place as a stationer’s clerk, Miller is perhaps on the edge of contemplating suicide, which may be why he feels so at home when he finally reaches the bleak Arctic (‘That first sight of it. Like a blow to the heart. The desolation. The beauty.’): it looks like the world feels to him. But by the time he reaches it, his resentment has started to thaw, as he finds something in the rather boyish expedition leader, Gus, to like, even admire, despite his own bitterness at Gus and co.’s cheery acceptance of their own privilege.

Of course, it can’t last. Gruhuken is haunted. Like Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall, Paver solves the two main problems of the haunted house story: she’s got her mixed bunch of people to her ghost-friendly, isolated location, thanks to their embarking on this scientific expedition to a land where it becomes solid night for four months of the year, and where they’ll be too remote from the nearest human settlement for immediate help; and she’s going to keep at least one of them there no matter what, as Jack Miller feels this is his only shot at fixing the dreary despair his life has slipped into, a feeling that mixes inextricably with a need to win boyish Gus’s admiration — plus, of course, a rational man’s sense that an ordered life and a strict routine ought to be all he needs to keep him from going doolally.

The Arctic is established as a place that brings out the bleakly practical, if not the basely savage, in man. We see Algie skin and gut a still-living seal, then talk casually about bashing out the huskies’ back teeth to stop them chewing through their leashes. This is a world on the brink of the Second World War, which will be full of man’s (industrialised) savagery to man, but human nature’s no different here, far away on the Arctic coast, as Miller begins to sense. A man came here some time ago, and ‘He was ugly, and he had that abject manner which brings out the worst in people, particularly men.’ As such he might be an exaggerated image of Miller’s own idea of himself, downtrodden and feeling that he deserves what life has thrown at him; while the rage he senses emanating from the thing that lingers in Gruhuken could well be his own resentment towards what life has done to him. Ultimately, you’re only ever haunted by yourself; you bring your own ghosts with you, that’s why you feel so at home.

Like so many modern ghost stories, here the haunted are surrounded by scientific paraphernalia — usually this is deliberately for the sake of detecting the ghost, as in, for instance, Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972), or 2011’s The Awakening. In Dark Matter, the scientific equipment is for taking measurements related to the weather, and nothing to do with the ghost at all, but it’s perhaps significant that Miller’s final descent into all-out terror begins when an accident destroys his last remaining timepiece, Gus’s travel clock, which simultaneously breaks his connection to Gus, the civilised world, rationality, and time itself.

It’s the descriptions of the Arctic that really make Dark Matter work. It really feels like a land of extremes, so wild and bleak and inhuman it might be as far as away Mars, and just as inhospitable — where a single mistake, like forgetting to light a lamp, or knocking one over, can lead to a stark and inevitable death. The one thing I can’t get out of my head, though, is the ‘bear post’ — a relic of a previous encampment, it seems to embody everything the book’s about, from Algie’s rather casual cruelty to animals, to other men’s un-detailed cruelty to one of their own kind (‘When men know they won’t be found out, they will do anything.’). Never fully explained, this brutally simple object accrues far more horror than even the ‘gengånger’ — ‘the one who walks again’ — with its ‘wet round head’ does.