The Dry Bones of the Churchyard

It's a bright, sunny day although the pond in the park is icy. Of course, it was designed as a skating pond in the early 1900s.

I feel quite buoyant, given that I woke up this morning and read the latest Starlin Thanos graphic novel. It's awash with images of death and decay. Then I finished the dvd I was watching last night: Roger Corman's The Terror, a 1963 no-budget vehicle for Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson.

 It's a ponderous Gothic romance about castles, crypts, cemeteries and blindings by a bird of prey. Cheap as chips and the kind of thing you'd watch at the drive-in if you were a character in American Graffiti.


I have a jerky, public domain copy that I spotted in a charity shop yesterday afternoon. I have a dim recollection of watching it before: BBC Genome says it might've been the screening on the 11th December 2004. That was when I was living in Marwick Street in Haghill, just before I moved to Cumbernauld Road. I thought it might have been at my dad's house but this makes more sense.

Maybe I'm in a morbid frame of mind; I'm finding Jessica Jones fills me with a sense of unease and I'm reading Dracula for the first time ever. It's clear that the Marvel version I commented upon last time is very faithful to the book. I'd heard it was slow and dull. Lucy Westenra doesn't rise as one of  the undead until 250 pages into nearly 500 but it doesn't feel old-fashioned to me.




Last week, my walk to work in the dark mornings and early evenings was soundtracked by Big Finish's Jago, Litefoot and Strax: The Haunting and The Master of Callous.

As you probably know by now, I find the work of Justin Richards, who actually visited this library back in  August 2013, to be deadly dull. The Haunting from 2015 reworks the plot of The Krotons ( a firm favourite of mine) in a tedious retread of absolutely every Victorian adventure he's written. It exists only to recycle all the Moffat gags about Strax. It's distracting also to hear Lisa Bowerman, so recognisable as Bernice Summerfield, playing cockney Ellie. Harmless but so pedestrian. (1 out of 5 Talmars)

The Master of Callous by James Goss and Guy Adams is quite another matter entirely. In these four discs, we are introduced to the King family and their mine, which contains a mineral vital to the Time War but one which causes insanity.


Insidiously, the War Master takes control of the colony: first, using the founders' dirty little secrets to blackmail and destroy them, then offering the surviving colonists new mining technology and finally orchestrating a bloody Ood massacre. We might cheer on Derek Jacobi's civilized, insinuating Master as he turns the tables on his torturer, the colony governor, like an audio Anthony Hopkins. But we also hear him allow sympathetic characters like Martine King  to die by inches in the chilling Persistence of Dreams. He ferrets out lies and topples the oppressive regime in an elaborate plot but unlike the Doctor, he abandons people to dreadful deaths because he likes it.


I enjoyed hearing again the Midwestern tones of David Menkin as the treacherous Herschel; he also played Quincy P. Morris, the heroic cowboy character in  Dracula, for Big Finish.
This is the best BF box set in a while. I'm looking forward to River Song's upcoming encounter with the Hannibal Lecter of Time Lords. (5/5 Talmars)

An incarnation of the Master also appears in  Dave Rudden's Twelve Angels Weeping, a hardcover collection of wintry DW stories from Penguin Books. As an English teacher, I was delighted with the quality of the writing: "the name (Master)...fit him far better...the smugness of it".
Doctor Capaldi has a "thundercloud of grey hair" and "...less than a smile than a baring of teeth". Doctor Jodie's eyes show " a little anger and a lot of kindness".
It's difficult to pick favourites: Rudden's story Student Bodies displays  unsettling unease while there's great tenderness in The Rhino of Twenty - Three Strand Street. This is the best original Who fiction since Steve Cole's Combat Magicks. (5/5 Talmars)



I was going to blog about the Netflix Luke Cage series today but it seems it's a companion piece to or part of a mosaic formed with Jessica Jones. So, perhaps I'll hold off until I finish the JJ boxset. It's far more bleak and ominous than Cage or even Daredevil season two. Iron Fist looks like frivolous fluff by comparison.




Also coming up, possibly: Mike Grell; Superman 1948; Doctor Who and the Adjudicators


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