Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Four — “The Road”

Yesterday’s entry in The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale was all about voices from the past coming back to haunt those in the present. Which begs the question: has the reverse ever been the case? Can the future ever travel back in time to affect the present? And if the future from which these ghosts originated was far flung enough, would we even understand what we were seeing?

These are the questions that 18th century philosopher Gideon Cobb and scientist Sir Timothy Hassall must contend with on Day Four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Hope you are wearing comfortable shoes, because we have some miles yet ahead of us. Don’t worry, I’ll share my trail mix as we walk down...“The Road”...

At the invitation of Sir Timothy Hassall’s wife Lavinia, Gideon Cobb has travelled far from the busy streets of London into the  lonely English countryside to lend his rationalism to a most irrational problem. A series of strange, inexplicable events has occurred in a clearing of the forest. Tetsy, the young daughter of a the local landlord, is this manifestation’s only witness.  The year previous — exactly one year ago, Sir Timothy points out, the 27th of October, 1768 — Tetsy says that she was in the woods walking alone when she heard the noises:

“Weren’t much at first. Like some sort of whistles or squeaks. I thought birds, but t’weren’t birds...then they started to burst out more. Very loud. And between whiles there was quiet. And then I was laid on the ground and I could feel it starting to shake and the noises came nearer. A roaring and a rattling like nor I ever did hear...There seemed to be voices, too...yelling and screeching, yelling for their lives by the sound of them. And footsteps running under the ground I was lying on...right under me where I lay...But the queer thing was they sounded like feet on cobbles...”

Sir Timothy believes that what Tetsy witnessed in the forest are the revenants of the army of Queen Boadicea, the queen of an ancient British tribe, who failed in ousting the Roman Empire from Britain in 60 or 61 BCE:

“Imagine that hereabouts in the far past there was some great catastrophic event...a massacre...Now is it not possible that an event of such spiritual force somehow imprinted itself on the very landscape?”

Cobb, ever the rationalist, will have none of it. He claims that what Tetsy heard in the forest were her own heartbeats beating upon the ground. He believes that the girl’s imagination was influenced by the ancient tales told to her by her mother of Boadicea marching her army through the woods:

“All those sad barbarians, sweating the blue woad off their bodies as they fled, tossing their spears away, yelling and screaming in their terror, and behind them the trumpets and the drums — the rolling drums — of the Roman army.”

And so, to either prove or disprove Tetsy’s tale, the party moves from the local hostelry to the woods. There, in the clearing that Sir Timothy has had roped off, Gideon Cobb comes face-to-face with his worst nightmare: the bright and shining future to be built by overly rational men such as himself is not at all what he imagines it to be.

“The Road” was originally written by Nigel Kneale for the 1963 BBC television series First Night. A year later, the script was enacted again for Australian television. Neither broadcast survives.

In 2018, BBC Radio 4 transmitted an audio drama based on Kneale’s original script. Adapted for radio by Toby Hadoke, the drama stars Mark Gatiss (of League of Gentlemen fame!) as “Gideon Cobb,” Adrian Sarborough as “Sir Timothy Hassall,” and as “Lavinia Hassall” Hattie Morahan, the daughter of the man who directed “The Road” in 1963. It is a wonderfully creepy adaptation. The sound design alone makes it perfect for the spooky season:

That’s it for day four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. I hope all this walking hasn’t tuckered you out too much. Since we are already in the country, I thought we would head on over to Beeley’s farm tomorrow for Day Five. Mr. Beeley is having some trouble with his pigs. The local vet doesn’t seem to know what to make of it all, but Mr. Beeley and his men think they have it all sorted out. It has something to do with the old woman living next door...it has something to do with a...“Murrain.”

Gideon Cobb in today’s story was an insufferable horse's arse, was he not, Blog-o-weeners? But I would hope that even he in all his rationalist wisdom would take the following to heart as the absolute truth:

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Two — “The Photograph”

Welcome back, Blog-o-weeners, for day two of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Yesterday, we had a brief introduction to the life and work of the Manx science fiction and horror writer, then we got down to brass tacks by visiting a lovely little home by the sea called “Minuke.” Today, let’s read another offering from Kneale’s 1949 short story collection, Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Today, let’s sit for “The Photograph.”

“When he stuck them sideways out of the bed, his legs felt as if they were doing a new thing, something they did not understand...”

Young Raymond has been ill lately. Very, very ill. But Mamma and Gladys, his sister, think he is well enough to get dressed in his best Sunday clothes — the nice green suit with the white curly collar — and take a ride in a horse-drawn cab into town to have a photograph made.

At the photographer’s studio, Raymond is fretted over by one and all. The photographer, a man in “black clothes…[with] no hair on his head, and…yellow eyes that moved in a sort of liquid,” poses Raymond on a chair, positions his arms, and tidies his clothes and hair. The man stands beneath the black cloth of his camera and insists that Raymond “keep-quite-quite-quite-still—” Then, with a click of the camera’s shutter, Raymond’s image is captured.

Raymond’s trip to the photographer has taken a toll on his health. That night, as he lies in bed suffering from pains in his arms and legs, his sister visits him with a surprise:

“She held something up, high above his chest. A reddish-brown picture. He knew the table in it, the huge chair, the book, the shiny plant, from some time in the past.

There, too, was that terrible face.

After a moment he turned to her, She smiled and nodded. ‘It’s the photograph, darling. Isn’t it nice?’

He twisted his head away, and his neck ached. Tears came out of his eyes. He felt angry and frightened; as if he had lost part of himself.”

Gladys sets the picture upon the mantelpiece of Raymond’s room so that he can see it all the time. She exits the room, leaving Raymond with the photograph, a burning candle, and his own thoughts.

Only it isn’t just his own thoughts that command him to “keep-quite-quite-quite-still.” There is something else in the room with him, speaking to him. Something wearing a green suit that is now colored reddish-brown, something with brown fingers with their nails split wide open, something with little bony teeth...

“The Photograph” is short and (bitter)sweet. It never lingers on its images for long, yet we see everything that Kneale desires us to see, and we see and feel them clearly. Through small details, we understand that Raymond is not just suffering from a brief illness, that his trip to the photographer’s studio isn’t a whim on his mother’s part. The way she and Raymond’s sister act around him — the deep lines that crease his mother’s face when she looks at him, the false jollity that his sister puts on, the way both of them hover around him — we realize that this photograph might be his last. It will be how the family remembers him.

That fear of being reduced to an image, of being replaced in the minds of one’s loved ones by a photograph, is what drives the final horror of Kneale’s story. In the space of a single page, Kneale gives us the uncanny appearance of the “picture-child.” Like the rest of the story, its form is outlined in short, sharp sentences with a scalpel’s precision.

Horror has a particular source in much of Kneale’s work: technology. The ways in which the supernatural finds an entry into our world via technology is a theme that Kneale will return to again and again. We will find that ancient beliefs and spirits coexist with new fangled contraptions in many of his stories — a new house, a camera, a telephone, recording equipment, the computer. Keep an eye out for this theme as we continue through The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale.

As mentioned earlier, “The Photograph” is one of the “other stories” included in Kneale’s 1949 collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Comma Press released a new edition of this book a few years ago, and you may be able to find it at your local library.

If you’d like to sit back and have someone read it to you — and who doesn’t love to have someone read a spooky story to them?! — then please visit Redbeard - Horror Books & Vinyl over on YouTube. There you will find a great selection of spooky books and music — reviews, book hauls, and more. You will also find a video of Mr. Redbeard reading “The Photograph”:

For you Doctor Who fans and lovers of old British television, there is also this episode of Late Night Story. LNS was a BBC show that featured Tom Baker reading macabre short stories directly to the camera. These episodes were bedtime stories usually shown at the end of the broadcast day. Seems like the perfect way to sign-off for the day, if you ask me! (All we got  when it was time for the TV to go night-night here in the United States was the lousy National Anthem.)

Tom Baker and Late Night Story is also the perfect way to sign off this second day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Come back tomorrow, and we will talk about the ghost in another kind of machine. You won’t want this telephone call to go directly to voicemail. You’ll want to pick up on the first ring, because...well...“You Must Listen.”

And always, Blog-o-weeners, this holiday season, be sure to live by those immortal words spoken by a wise man:

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day One — “Minuke”

Happy Silver Shamrock Day, Blog-o-weeners!

That’s right, it is finally that special day of the month of October — the twenty-third. What makes this date so special? Why, it’s the date when Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch opens. It’s on the twenty-third of October that we find poor old Harry Grimbridge running for his life from a couple of three-piece suit-wearing creeps who seem intent on finding the shop owner and getting back the Halloween mask in his possession.

And it’s on the twenty-third of October that I thought we would begin a condensed, tightly focused mini-Blog-o-ween of sorts. So welcome to what I am calling...The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale!

Now, if you recall from my post on 1 October, I was having a teensy, wee bit o’ trouble finding my raison d'être for this year’s frightening festivities. No matter how much I tried to brainstorm a theme for Blog-o-ween 2025, I just couldn’t muster anything more than a dreary drizzle. It seemed that Blog-o-ween was destined to be...

...which would make me Judd Hirsch, I think. Or Henry Gibson at the very least.

Anywho.

It was after my blog post on 1 October — whereby I promised to be back in time for Silver Shamrock Day — that I remembered la raison de la saison: Nigel Kneale.

Though his name does not appear in the credits of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, British writer Nigel Kneale wrote the first draft of the picture. Kneale may not be a household name these days, but to folks like John Carpenter and Joe Dante, Nigel Kneale was the cream of the crop when it came to writing that special heady blend of horror and science fiction that only British writers seem capable of delivering (see also: John Wyndham and John Brunner).

It was Joe Dante (originally assigned H3:SOTW’s directorial duties) who enlisted Kneale to write the picture’s screenplay. This was due mainly to his and Carpenter’s admiration for Kneale’s landmark work in televised terror: the Quatermass series for BBC (more on that later!) Dante said that Kneale’s draft was not “horror for horror's sake,” and that the “main story had to do with deception, psychological shocks rather than physical ones.” Unfortunately, the 1980s were not a time in motion picture history when the psychological took precedence over the physical. For filmmakers and filmgoers, the 1980s were all about pushing the envelope when it came to blood and gore on the screen.

I mean...we had a magazine called GOREZONE, for the love of Mike!

Nigel Kneale later claimed that it was Dino De Laurentiis, head of production company Dino De Laurentiis Corporation (natch!), who demanded changes be made to the script. Said changes included more graphic violence and gore. Not wanting to be associated with such work, Kneale asked to have his name removed from the screenplay altogether. So it was left to Tommy Lee Wallace (H3:SOTW’s new director) to rewrite Kneale’s efforts. Even though it is Wallace’s name in the credits, he has always credited Kneale’s original story and first draft in interviews.

Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, in 1922. In 1928, his family returned to the Isle of Man, and it was there that Kneale was raised. In the 1940s, unable to enlist in the army due to photophobia (a sensitivity to light), Kneale moved to London and worked for BBC Radio. He acted in radio plays and wrote stories for magazines such as Argosy and The Strand. In 1949, he published a collection of his tales. In 1950, that book won the Somerset Maugham Award.

For the first day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, I’ve chosen a story from Tomato Cain and Other Stories. It is a short story steeped in the fears and anxieties of home ownership. Let’s take a trip to post-war Britain and hear the story of a house that is on the market for a song. It has a strange past and an even stranger name. Let’s take a open-house tour through...“Minuke"...

“The estate agent kept an uncomfortable silence until we reached his car. ‘Frankly, I wish you hadn’t got wind of that,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how you did: I thought I had the whole thing carefully disposed of...’”

It is after the Second World War in England, and an estate agent is driving the unnamed narrator to see a house. At first glance, the narrator seems to be someone who is in the market for a home, but as the estate agent’s story of the house unfolds, the reader quickly gets the sense that the narrator is simply a curiosity-seeker. No one could possibly want the home that the estate agent is describing. What’s wrong with the house? Well, for starters, the name is off-putting.

“It was taken by a man named Pritchard. Cinema projectionist, I think he was. Wife, a boy of ten or so, and a rather younger daughter. Oh — and dog, one of those black, lop-eared animals. They christened the place ‘Minuke’, M-I-N-U-K-E. My nook. Yes, that’s what I said too. And not even the miserable excuse of its being phonetically correct.”

The house was built in a hurry along a coast-road overlooking the sea during the interwar period, and that’s when the estate agent says he sold the house to the Pritchards. Everything started out fine until little things began to go wrong. First, the plumbing seemed to go haywire. Then, the plaster on the walls in the bedroom crack from floor to ceiling. Next, Mrs. Pritchard is injured when a hatch door between the kitchen and dining room comes down on her wrists. The funny thing about that, said Mr. Pritchard to the estate agent, is when he tried to lift it off of his wife’s arms

“...it wouldn’t come! I got my finger under it and heaved, but it might have weighed two hundredweight. Once it gave an inch or so, and then pressed harder. That was it — it was pressing down!”

And that’s just the start of the Pritchards’ troubles with Minuke.

What is the cause behind these problems? What does one of the men who helped build the house have to say about the enormous flat stones that were found on the site and used as the foundation of Minuke? And what of the old Norse — or older! — burial mound?

Tomato Cain and Other Stories had long been out of print before Comma Press released a new edition in 2023. It comes with a new forward by Mark Gatiss. Your local library might have a copy.

You can also find “Minuke” in many horror anthologies. The Internet Archive has a copy of Ghosts: A Haunting Treasury of Forty Chilling Tales edited by Marvin Kaye that includes Kneale’s excellent haunted house story.

If you need to know what happened to the Pritchards and Minuke right this very instant, well you are in luck there, too. Here is a reading of the story from Tony Walker’s excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

That’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. Come back tomorrow and we will continue this year’s celebration of all things Nigel Kneale. Be sure to wear something nice and comb your hair, because it's Picture Day here at LARPing Real Life. We will have to sit still...quite, quite, quite still for..."The Photograph."

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and each other, and please don’t forget to live by these words from a great American patriot...

They Paved Blog-o-ween and Put Up a Parking Lot

Welp, kiddies, it is that time o’ year again. Time for the days to start getting shorter. Time for the leaves to turn the colors of a 1970s basement game room. Time for your cardigan sweaters to be taken out of the cedar chest at the foot of your bed.

It is — you guessed it — time for Spooky Season.

And that can only mean one thing: it’s time for me to spend the next thirty-one days spewing forth a whole bunch of gobbledygook about my favorite scary books, movies, old time radio programs, podcasts, music, and whatever other format you can think of. 

I’ve spent the month of October for the past four autumns blogging about all things Halloween. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. By the time I fall across the finish line of my annual thirty-one day marathon of the macabre, I am pooped — but also pretty proud. I look back at past Blog-o-weens and think, “Well done, sir. Well done.”

For the past four years, I have been rarin’ to go a good week before 1 October. Sometimes — as was the case with last year’s Lots of Salem’s Lot (my thirty-one day trip through Stephen King’s 1975 novel of vampires in small town Maine) — I have a majority of my posts locked and loaded by the beginning of September.

Alas, this year, I’ve got nothing.

Not an overarching project, not a particular subject, not a single post. Not even a goofy gif. I got nada, niente, nichts, rien — in short (and in English), nothing.

I wracked my brain for much of this year looking for an “in” — some overall structure that would grab ahold of me the way last year’s day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter reading of Salem’s Lot did. No such luck. Sadly, nothing stood out to me, and (sadder still) nothing excited me. Finally, as the time to begin drew nigh, I had to ask if I wanted to subject myself to thirty-one days of dreariness, if I wanted to spend a month trying to hit a thousand words a day on topics that left me cold. That’s not how I want to enjoy my favorite time of year.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, Blog-o-weeners. There is another, more important, factor in my decision to give Blog-o-ween a pass this year: I’m busy writing a novel. As I type these words, I am hard at work on the third draft of my giallo. This is a work that has been in progress for what seems like forever. Indeed, I’ve been working on it so long that each of the past four Blog-o-weens have felt like a sort of vacation from the characters and situations of my book. This year, I feel like I need to keep my momentum going and plow through to the end (of this draft, at least). I am hip-deep in all the chapters that I promised myself during the first and second drafts I was going to fix later. Well...it’s later!

But old habits die hard and all that, and I don’t want to let October go by without at least writing something scary, so I’ll tell you what...if you promise to stop back here a little later on in October, I’ll promise you a mini Blog-o-ween.

As many of you know, I am a great admirer of Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. (It should never have been saddled with the Halloween franchise moniker and the expectations that come with it. It’s its own thang.) A good friend of mine back in Pittsburgh (hello Gil!) is also a fan, and he loves to celebrate what he calls “Silver Shamrock Day.” This day falls on the date that H3:SOTW opens: 23 October. So here’s what we’ll do...beginning on 23 October, we will celebrate the 9 Days of Blog-o-ween. From the 23rd through to the 31st, we will try to cram thirty-one days worth of love for ghouls, ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, werewolves, and whatever the heck else we can grab hold of into those nine days. It’s better than nothing, no?

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and look out for each other. It’s getting crazy out there, but you’ll be okay if you keep one thing in mind...

Blog-o-ween 2023: Goddess of Filth & The Queen of the Cicadas by V. Castro

Well, campers, that day that we feared was just around the corner has finally come. It’s the final—

No, it’s not the final chapter. Today is the final Friday—

No, not THAT final Friday. Lemme finish, will ya?

Today is the final “Long Form Friday” for Blog-o-ween 2023. For the previous three Fridays of our month-long celebration of all things spooky and Halloweenie, we’ve taken our time with tales that were slightly longer than the usual run of short stories and oral tales. These were novellas or novelettes that could be read in a single evening or (if you were too chicken) afternoon. There was short long fiction (or was it long short fiction?) by Elizabeth Hand, Stephen Graham Jones, and Carlos Fuentes. As much as I love all of those writers and their works, I think we’ve saved the best for last, kiddies.

As a bonus (hey...this is the FINAL Long Form Friday, so we’re going all out!), you’re in for an extra-special treat, because we are highlighting not one but TWO books by the same author. Both books deal with the birth of legends. In one, it is the birth of a new urban legend; in the other, it is the rebirth of an old god. Today, we’re going to sit at the feet of Mexican-American writer V. Castro and listen as she spins the tales of the Goddess of Filth and the Queen of the Cicadas.

Goddess of Filth starts with a Saturday night séance between five friends. Lourdes, Ana, Perla, and Pauline are saying their goodbyes to their friend Fernanda, who is leaving San Antonio, Texas, for college. Hoping simply to mimic the coven from the movie The Craft, the five girls inadvertently call something from out of the past...something from out of the darkness. And we’re not talking about the return of that height of Nineties fashion, chokers!

When Lourdes calls out to the air “I want to reach a spirit. An old spirit, one from before the world was what we know today,” she gets exactly what she asks for. Returning her call is Tlazoltéotl, the Goddess of Filth, the eater of sin and the unclean. Tlazoltéotl enters Fernanda, who begins to crawl about the floor, blood dripping from between her legs, speaking Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Packing on the “freshman fifteen” is suddenly the least of the college-bound Fernanda’s worries.

With the help of Dr. Camacho, a college professor who specializes in Aztec history and their language, the young women learn just what it is that the ancient goddess wants from Fernanda, from them, and from the world. There are, however, forces that do not believe that what is inhabiting the once meek and mild Fernanda is a force of good. Fernanda’s mother and the local priest view Tlazoltéotl as a demon possessing the young woman, and Father Moreno will do anything to exorcize that demon.

What is it that Tlazoltéotl wants? Will Fernanda ever be free of the goddess? Just what does Father Moreno have hidden away in a freezer in the church?

Moving on to a slightly longer tale (but one that you can easily read in a day or two — I mean, what else have you got going on?!), Castro’s The Queen of the Cicadas (La reina de las chicharras) is another story of possession and the rebirth of the old gods and goddesses. Here, it isn’t an innocent bit of fun that calls out to an Aztec goddess, but the violent murder of a Mexican farmworker in 1950s Texas. When the young woman Milagros is killed by the white wives of the landowners, Mictecacíhuatl, the Aztec goddess of death, hears her cries and promises her that she will be reborn. Milagros becomes a vengeful spirit, an urban legend like Candyman, Bloody Mary, or La Llorona.

Years later, on the same ranch that has now become a destination wedding-style B&B, two damaged people, Belinda and Hector, find themselves embroiled in the story of Milagros-Mictecacíhuatl. While they spend their time discovering Milagros’s story and what the return of Mictecacíhuatl will entail, Castro also gives the reader the fates of the women who murdered the young farm worker, a dive into Mexican folklore, and a look at Mexican history. It’s a lot going on in a 214-page book!

What I love about both of these books (aside from the folk horror aspects, natch) is that the return of Tlazoltéotl and Mictecacíhuatl is not presented as a bad thing. It all feels like there is a natural cycle at work. It’s just time for the goddess of filth and the goddess of death to come back and clean up this mess that (white, colonizer) humanity has made of the world. In the hands of a non-Mexican writer, these stories would be reduced to simple vengeance tales, where the horrors are committed by the goddesses and their followers. But in Castro’s hands, we have two tales of darkness and hope, where the light and the dark aren’t two mutually exclusive realms. They are forever intermingling and changing and evolving. Goddess of Filth and The Queen of the Cicadas are both incredible works of folk horror that are terrifying and heartening at the same time. I don’t know how she did it, kiddies, but she done did it!

V. Castro was born in San Antonio, Texas to Mexican-American parents, and currently lives with her family in the United Kingdom. She has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award twice — in 2021 for both of today’s stories, The Queen of the Cicadas (Superior Achievement in a Novel) and Goddess of Filth (Superior Achievement in Long Fiction). That neither of these books won the award for which they were nominated should be in no way seen as a slur on the good name of the Horror Writers Association, but let it be known that I have a strongly worded letter ready to go in my Google Drive ready to go if it happens a third time. You have been warned, HWA!

Well, I hope this final “Long Form Friday” isn’t a bittersweet one for you. We had a good run, you gotta admit. And really, let’s look on the bright side, you now have a nice, tight group of authors whose other books — some longer, some shorter — you can enjoy, too. Pick up Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand or My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones. How about Inez (Instinto de Inéz) by Carlos Fuentes? And V. Castro has a new book out this year you can check out, The Haunting of Alejandra, which is about a woman haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona. All of these books are guaranteed winners, and they are guaranteed to give you...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!