I recently read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in a single day, firstly because it’s short, and secondly because it was really good. It had a wonderful immediacy that very few novels do, certainly not the long, slow novels I’ve been reading lately, like Crime and Punishment and Night and Day. Particularly surprising was the accessibility of the work, for something that was written two-and-a-half centuries ago, a little after Shakespeare was alive.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

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Oh, this is cool and creepy. I have only recently been made aware of the existence of ‘The Slender Man’ and it is one of the creepiest things I have seen in ages. I watched all the videos last night in the dark, and even though I was talking with my housemate as I watched them, they still rather unnerved me in a way nothing has done in a while.

An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.

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Horizon recently did an episode on Growing Old, different theories on why it happens, how it might be slowed or prevented. It wasn’t the most interesting Horizon episode I’ve seen, apart from suggesting that studies had proved, or strongly suggested, that antioxidants have little benefit to slowing the aging process, as many products and adverts proclaim. It inspired a few thoughts within me though, like how I want to have a white beard when I’m old. I’ll probably wear tweed too, so I look like some old professor, and maybe I’ll even be one.

When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.

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Satan’s Little Helper is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, and that’s not bad for a film that cost me £1. It was one of those films I bought from a Poundshop last Halloween, expecting nothing more than some cheap laughs at the terrible scripting and atrocious special FX, but recently I saw it on an IGN feature on the ten most under-appreciated horror films of the noughties. That raised my expectations for the film somewhat, and it didn’t disappoint.

One of the reasons the film is so good, despite being obviously low-budget, is that it works with its budget-constraints rather than against them. Most budget horrors over-reach, trying to create scary, supernatural monsters, and falling into the traps of cliche. There were only a couple of times in Satan’s Little Helper where the effects let it down, but these were minor and brief. Mostly the film avoids gore, making its sudden appearances all the more shocking, not that the film relies on jump-scares.

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I’m not sure there’s been enough quite enough discussion of Modern Warfare 2 on the internet these past few weeks, so I think I’ll add my opinion to the mix, at least on certain aspects of the game and its predecessor. Firstly, I should say that I wasn’t that bothered about playing this game, though I enjoyed Modern Warfare 1, and only bought it because it was cheap. I’m not a huge fan of first-person-shooter games (I’ve never gotten on with Halo for example), but as a videogame narrative, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) was one of the best games I’ve played. I’d rank its story-telling up there with Silent Hill 2. Modern Warfare 2 though, even as I played it, never really sucked me in. It had cool moments, but is missing the certain feeling of the first game. Going back to Modern Warfare 1 now highlights the difference, the tenor that has altered for the sequel.

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Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

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I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

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One of my favourite genres of videogame is the ’survival horror’, which is a fairly odd choice considering that the protagonists of these games are frequently awkward to control, underpowered and die a lot, slowing the games to a crawl, and yet these often have some of the best stories in videogames, Silent Hill 2 showcasing one of the pinnacles of videogame narrative. Ironically, despite the necessarily fantastic horror-elements, survival horror games tend to be among the more realistic videogames, often featuring ordinary people as their main protagonists rather than super-human soldiers, world-class racing drivers or magic-wielding warriors. Being ordinary people, or, at the least, people unprepared for the horrors that await them (as in the Resident Evil series) they are never far from a potential death, and are forced either to make do with what they find lying around (a stick with nails in it and a large iron pipe in Silent Hill, an inordinate amount of progressively more damaging guns, beginning with a pistol and shotgun, all with very limited ammunition in Resident Evil) or run from anything and everything. Consequently, these games are all about caution and pedantic resource management.

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I just watched the extended version of The Two Towers, having watched The Fellowship of the Ring last Saturday. If nothing else, those films are epic. Really, the sheer scale of them is immense, and the cohesiveness of all the elements, any one of which could so easily be rendered ridiculous through cliche or insincerity, is nothing short of a marvel. Of course, by now, you’ve probably either seen the films or have no interest in seeing them, and, either way, have a firm opinion of them which I am unlikely to change, and have no desire to.

For my part, I’d kind of forgotten how good they were. Though each of the extended films runs to around two-hundred minutes, just twenty minutes shorter than Sergione Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a masterpiece which I have the utmost respect for, the Lord of the Rings films do not seem to last nearly as long: with Once Upon a Time in America, admittedly an emotionally draining film, you feel like you’ve been there a long time, a life-time in fact; but with Lord of the Rings, time seems to disappear.

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There was a point about halfway through The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where I thought it could rival the works of Makoto Shinkai, who I obviously respect a lot as a writer, where because of her actions, because of her emotional immaturity and inability to face her close friend when he tries to ask her out, Makoto, the eponymous protagonist inadvertently pushes him away, into the arms of her friend, at which point she realises she did actually want to be with him. Of course, since the film’s premise concerns a girl leaping through time, the ability which allowed her to sidestep his advances in the first place, equally allows her to fix her mistakes, otherwise the story might have expanded on the repercussions that avoiding difficult situations can have on the people around you.

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