Roleplaying: Buried Histories (CoC 7th)

Well, its been a very long time since i used this space (blows off cobwebs) but i recently ran a short RPG scenario over skype and as is the modern way I've written it up for my own, my players, and anyone elses entertainment. So read on, and hopefully enjoy! 

Buried Histories
A scenario of Call of Cthulhu (7th edition)

Session 1: Wreck of the Old ‘44
Autumn, 2018. A series for fierce storms have swept down from the north across Central Europe, causing disruption wherever they pass. In the midst of one such thunderstorm in the Sudeten Mountains, a lightning strike unleashes a rockslide that blocks one of the main roads close to the Polish-Czech border, and in the midst of all the rock and soil that cascade across motorway is a more dramatic bit of debris - a World War 2 Reichsbahn Locomotive! News crews flock to the scene, followed quickly by treasure hunters. The train is identified as leaving Krakow in late 1944, as the Red Army broke through the Ukraine and sent the Germans into full retreat. Rumours swirl as to its contents, National Governments start to lay claims based on speculations, and the Polish Army seals off the abandoned mine that rest of the train supposedly still sits in. Frustrated by the delay, French Professor Jacques DuMartin, expert in artifacts stolen by the Nazi Regime, has pulled a small group together to slip the blockage and explore the derelict before the site can be “ruined”.

Heading up the mountain in a hired 4x4, Professor DuMartin is accompanied by his graduate assistance Adrienne Gabri, local guide and outdoorsman Gerhard Lustberger (Neil Benson), along with documentary crew Octavia von Vulcan (Andrew Clark) and cameraman Dieter Rost (Steve Parkinson). They are aiming for what they believe to the covered roof of the Mine’s rail-line, where surface vents previously overgrown now appear to have been uncovered by the landslide. Leaving the car behind they make slow progress up the mountain, but are able to gain entry after a couple of attempts to find secure anchor points on the crumbling brickwork.

Rappelling down into the darkness, their hopes are immediately rewards - long hidden in the darkness is a train, mostly intact, just standing there waiting. Octavia and Dieter home in on the cattle truck near the end of the train, hoping for footage of victims of Nazi atrocity but are disappointed to find merely personal effects belonging to German troops, along with, more strangely, their medical discharge papers. The others walk the length of the train, noting what appears to be a tank on one flatbed, and a couple of trucks containing crated objects on another. On the far side of the train, the entrance into the rest of the mine seems sealed off, and piled by the rusted steel gates is a pile of bodies, in German Uniform, all apparently shot. The Professor and Adrienne start to photograph the site, adding tags to the bodies for later matching, whilst Gerhard, Octavia and Dieter go back to the train.

Alongside the two trucks they also find a large wrapped object, and decide to open it. With the camera rolling it is revealed to be some of black stone obelisk, covered in tiny hieroglyphs. To Dieters frustration the poor lighting conditions make it hard to get clear footage of the writing. Just as they are about to move on, and check the rest of the train, they hear movement, over to the side near the ruined front of the train. And then from the darkness a voice; “Hello? Is anyone there? Please, help me”.

Session 2: Abbott and Costello Find a Nazi Gold Train
(Note: With Neil (Gerhard) unavailable, this follows Octavia and Dieter)

Gerhard, Octavia and Dieter run towards the voice, fearing someone trapped down in the spill where the landslide broke into the tunnel. Dieter loses his footing, but falls bravely protecting the camera from harm, instead ripping up his jacket and cutting his shoulder - better make sure those Tetanus shots are up to date! They quickly find a man camped out in the darkness who introduces himself as Rudi Brandenaur and explains that he was hiking up in the woods when the storm hit and swept down here. He’s been trapped for six days with no phone signal, low on food and cold, but otherwise apparently unharmed apart from a nasty blow to the head that seems to be making his a little hazy as he starts to move around again.

Conscious that they now have a potential medical case to evacuate, the Professor suggests that they split to cover as much of the train as possible, with Octavia and Dieter taking Adrienne, which he takes Gerhard and Rudi. The journalists, keen for a human interest angle, insist of keeping Rudi with them, so the four of them head to the back of train to start poking around. A brief detour to the tank displays Adriennes historical knowledge, and yields some great footage of the carefully stowed equipment inside the long dormant war machine. Then they looking to the rear most carriage of the train, and are shocked at what they discover.

It’s a slaughterhouse. Half a dozen bodies are strewn inside what looks to be a dining and rest area, blasted (or torn) apart. Whilst 70 years old, the area is still noticeable covered in blood and body parts, dessicated and dried rather than rotted and eaten. Adrienne struggles to stomach it, and heads outside, but the journalists are made of sterner stuff, so send Rudi to look after her and start filming. They surmise that the victims were killed with grenade and gunfire, and once Adrienne returns (having sent Rudi to get the Professor and Gerhard) they start to capture the scene, cataloguing and tagging the bodies.

They are interrupted by a burst of orange light from the front of the train, that coincides with a striking vision of the carriage immediately after the massacre, complete with sights, smells and sounds of dying men. It passes, but the shaken journalists step outside to clear their heads and record some narration. The silence is shattered by a shot. Then another. Again they leap to action, running down the train in the darkness, lit only by the camera light. As they reach the fore-most intact carriage, now lit by eerie orange glow, they see Rudi stagger out of the doorway, falling onto the track. Octavia, with a better view, seems him appear to...change...into something else, something inhuman, before rolling under the carriage itself. She urges Dieter to bring in the camera to capture it, but Dieter again stumbles in the darkness, losing his grip on the camera and the moment is lost.

Disappointed and on edge, they head into the carriage which is full of large, thin crates. They find no sign of Gerhard or the Professor, but do find a pair of pistol cartridges, which Octavia is able to identify as .45 calibre, ruling out a German gun being fired. One of the crates is open, revealing what looks like a wall panel, covered in glowing Amber in intricate, curved patterns. They head back out of the train only be confronted with what can only be described as the reanimated corpses of two german soldiers, lumbering towards them. They hurriedly retreat back to the carriage in search of a weapon, pursued by the undead.

Inside, a close quarters brawl ensues as the undead appear intent in grappling the two journalists to the ground. Octavia attempts to pull the crates down to form a barrier but only succeeds in disarming herself, and Dieter is able to slip free of the unnaturally strong assailants at the cost of his already damaged jacket. Eventually, with the inventive use of a mirror, which seems to trigger some atavistic human feeling on one of their opponents, they are able to dispatch them, only to hear a scream - Adrienne! - from the far end of the train.

Once more scrambling to run the length of the train they only get in each others way, falling, rather than leaping from the train and down to the trackbed. There, they find themselves surrounded by more undead soldiers, and leading them, holding a .45 pistol on them, is the Professor.

Part 3:  The Machine Gunners
We start with Gerhard. As the journalists head up to the end of train, he and Professor DuMartain start to move toward the forward end of the carriage. On entering the carriage full of thin crates they start to unbox one, revealing one of the glowing Amber panels, and the Professor becomes noticeably excited at what Gerhard puts down to fame-inducing art find. They are still pulling the panel clear of the packaging when Rudi arrives with the news that the other half of the group have found a pile of bodies; whereupon DuMartin pulls a large calibre pistol and, without warning, shoots Rudi twice in the chest. To shocked to take it in, Gerhard is led outside to the pile of corpses near the mine entrance where, to his horror, the dead start to walk. One of them, now holding Gerhard’s rifle, places it’s dead hands on his shoulders and marches him back to the train with the Professor to confront the two journalists.

Despite a noble attempt to engage him, the Professor is in no mood to “monologue” his plans, and simply makes promises that his captives will not be harmed, something they have a hard time believing. In desperation, Octavia hatches a plan based on the flash of humanity she saw in one of the zombies earlier - barking orders at the “Soldiers of the Fatherland” to resist this “French Communist”. Her remarkable screen presence comes to her aid, and for a moment the zombies freeze, and taking his moment, Gerhard orders the one behind to pass his rifle over, which it does. Dieter breaks back for the train carriage, intent on smashing the amber boards, and Octavia lunges at the Professor.

A brief scuffle ensues, as the Professor calmly fires at Octavia, who dives out of the way, then, feeling discretion is the better part of valour, starts to sprint up the train into the darkness. Dieter leaps into the train and smashes at the Amber, but as he damages it his mind is overwhelmed with a cacophony of voices emanating from the panel, knocking him to his knees in pain. Gerhard is able to fire a shot into the Professors back, injuring him, but the impact is the subject of some sort of strange, protective aura. His disappointment is short lived, as he is pulled to the ground by zombies and, along with Dieter, dragged to the cattle car and locked inside. Meanwhile Octavia, hiding underneath the train in the pitch dark, is confronted by a seemingly unhurt Rudi, who leads her to the Anti-Aircraft truck at the far end of the train.

Everyone starts to hatch plans. Octavia uses her journalistic skills to get Rudi to talk, and he confesses (unknowingly on tape!) to being a German Soldier suffering from “a condition” that had allowed him to survive with the train for over 70 years. He explains that a modern corpse was swept in with the landslide, giving him modern clothes, but she is unable to get more out of him that would explain his apparent ability to resist gunfire. Dieter and Gerhard work to clamber out of the roof of the cattle car after several attempts, where they can see the Professors undead workforce assembling a number of panel in a loose semi-circle around a gilded table and seemingly somnambulant Adrienne. Everyone starts to eye up aged heavy weaponry as a solution to their predicament.

From the rear of the train Octavia convinces Rudi to swing the AA gun around and start firing at the ceiling, to bring it down over the far end of the train where the Professor is. As the firing starts, Dieter and Gerhard scramble over to the tank, where Dieter is able to bring the turret mounted machine into action for Gerhard to use, and then takes their single distress flare and tries to outflank to a better shot. The Zombies start to attack, and a furious Professor starts forward, waving his hands menacingly in the air, and something hard bounces off the side of the tank.

Steadily the AA gun starts to chew away at the roof, but a couple of the barrels jam. Octavia stands card at the armoured cupola, pushing off zombies with a trenching tool and a surprising amount of success. Meanwhile Gerhard is struggling with the machine gun; keeping it firing but not really hitting anything, when another gesture from DuMartin catches him in the chest, tearing at his insides for a moment. Gasping in pain, he registers that as the gestures are happening, the glowing panels are blinking out. He vows to stop firing at the Professor, and start firing at the Amber panels.

After creeping around the side of the train, Dieter takes his best shot with the flare gun, but it rolls hopelessly between the panels and only serves to attract DuMartins attention. Another invisible blast smashes into one of the rail cars but is otherwise fruitless. With three panels left lit up, Gerhard is able to chop another down with (finally) an accurate burst of fire. The roof finally starts to collapse; Dieter darts forward to try and rescue Adrienne from the chaos, shaking her from her torpor and darting back away. Back at the rear of the train, Octavia is finally overwhelmed and disarmed, her forearm shattered and zombies climbing into the gun mount when with a snarl Rudi leaps past her and into the pack of undead. He is not seen again.

With the roof collapsing, his panels dark or on fire or both, the Professor pulls out a knife from his belt and starts chanting in a voice that seems to pierce the cacophony. Slowly, a shape is pulled from the air; unspeakably alien, devoid of rational shape. It envelops the Professor, folding him into the nothingness. The archeology tags hung on the zombies flare in flames at his departure, and the fall back to the ground, at rest once more. At these final, unnatural moments, Gerhards mind finally snaps and he is left gripping the now-empty machine gun, shooting nothing at nothing, as silence once again falls across the train.


Aftermath

Battered and bloodied, the four of them are able to rig back up the ropes to the air shaft they came in from, and climb slowly and painfully to the surface. With the sound and fury echoing out of the mountain, the Polish Army are on the scene; they are taken into custody and looked after whilst main entrance is hastily cleared - diplomatic niceties be damned! - and the site fully investigated. After a week or so the site is opened to journalists, who marvel over the well preserved carriages, although any sign of a confrontation inside the tunnel is not apparent and no bodies are shown; official write ups seem to indicate the trains crew must have abandoned it. Of the contents of the train carriages, nothing is said, and the story quickly fades from the headlines.

The four survivors are handed over the Polish police and held for several days, questioned by several levels of authorities including, in a bizarre couple of hours, a pair introduced as “Art Experts from the British Museum” who seem especially interested in what they’d seen in the crates and train cars. They tell their story but the wilder details are put down to shock and likely contamination of the air in the tunnel from decaying munitions; the dessicated corpses, scenes of decades-old violence and lack of wildlife inside the mine all seemingly evidence. A body of a lost German hiker is found, partially naked and suffering grievous wounds unspecified in the press, only adds to the sense that they are all lucky to be alive (and not in jail, they are pointedly reminded).

Professor DuMartin remains missing, never re-appearing at his his University post. His room is however ransacked in the days following the events in the mine, and many of his private notes are missing. Passed onto Adrienne however, are his things he had in Poland, including a number of journals, some dated as far back as the 1920s, all in the same cramped hand. Much is written in code, or phrased ambiguously, but it seems clear he had been searching for the Amber Panels even before they wound up lost in a mineshaft. Other notes detail his frustration at fruitless searches and abandoned trips, which may have garnered him some small fame and recognition, but clearly not what he was searching for.

Dieter and Octavia are able to keep hold of some of their recordings through integration process - most of the camera footage is unusable, and Dieter suspects some may been tampered with, but the chat between Octavia and Rudi remains intact as does some shakey footage of the Walking Dead. Sadly it is not more convincing than any given high-budget TV show, and they are unable to get anyone to take it seriously. More profitable is the footage of the train, which several news channels are happy to bid for. And then Octavia gets a phone call….Rudi wishes to meet up, to continue their chat.


Keepers Comments

This was my first run at Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and it’s an interesting evolution for one of the classics of the game. The system feels a little more streamlined (in line with modern design) and tighter, and the “pushing” mechanic (where characters can retry at risk of a negative consequence for failure) is dramatic and interesting. I think I was a little generous at allowing it sometimes, but it's a nice addition. Combat retains it’s somewhat brutal nature and I think the PCs were lucky not to lose someone; my main spellcasting villian let me down with some consistently poor rolls against them. Not totally sold on spending Luck, it feels pretty strong, if situational, so i’m pondering on that for next time.

By design this was essentially a sandbox with three main escalations - Rudi, the “Villain Reveal” and the Final Ritual - that could be trigger either for dramatic effect or just if the game was slowing down a bit. As such I wasn’t too sure how it would play out, and whilst I wasn’t totally expecting that much gunfire it was always a possibility. It mean some of the information around was lost, but thats CoC for you - it meant they weren’t really able to properly defeat the Professor and leaves a few hooks for a follow up.

And then i may get to try the new Chase rules...

TV Review: Penny Dreadful, Series 3

So farewell then, Penny Dreadful. Like your characters themselves, you were glorious to look at, often deeply flawed, occasionally mesmerically wonderful and always, always, mad as a box of frogs.  Showtime/Sky's batty period drama has now finished at the end of it's third series, apparently at the behest of it's creator, rounding off some it's long-running characters in typically over-the-top fashion. After ending it's second season by sending it's cast off on wildly different arcs, and trying to establish some sort of wider mythology, this series focuses back a little, understandably, on the shows core, and makes a game effort to tie it all up neatly. But does it? 

DVD of the Week: Crimson Peak

So I was planning on writing up "Spy" last week in a quiet moment between bouts of half-term childcare, but instead I felt it better to come down with a stinking headcold, and yeah, that didn't happen. So I'll try and do that later this week, and this time talk about this saturdays viewing, the Guillermo del Toro helmed Crimson Peak. Expectations were high, because it's del Toro, and he's the sort of director that makes consistantly fascinating film with massive attention to detail, that then not enough people go on to watch. This time we are promised a period-set ghost story, with all the trappings. 

Audio Review: Welcome to Night Vale

It's fair to say that I've been neglecting my growing backlist of podcast listening in the last few weeks. Hours of content lie dusty and unheard, voices crying out into the digital wilderness, their stories left unheard. I have been distracted, absorbed, and entertained by something new and strange, something that has drawn me in obsessively, in a way that feels pretty rare, these days. In a lot of ways I should have been onto this months, if not years ago, only picking it up as it's popularity seemed to explode across the wider geek-scape through the summer. But I'm here now, and, after about 6 weeks of commutes, totally up to date. I am speaking, of course, of Welcome to Night Vale. 

DVD of the Week: What We Do in the Shadows

Ah, Vampires, you just can't seem to keep them down. We still seem to be in the midst of a never-ending zombie-apocalypse, but Vampires have been with us a lot longer, and show no signs of going away. Yes, they've been (mostly) turned from blood-hungry predators to slightly creepy ideal boyfreind material, but that mutability is in many ways a strength, and certainly the more sympathetic, tragic vampire had given us some good stuff as well as the bad. There is also enough breadth of material that I'm surprised there isn't more spoofery around. Certainly there has been a couple of pretty terrible attempts at it, but it's taken a long time for me to finally find on I really, really liked. And that honour goes to indie New Zealand mockumentary, What We Do In the Shadows. 

TV Review: Penny Dreadful

I'm slightly wary of the ongoing fascination with the high Victorian era. Its a strange time - not yet modern but containing a lot of things that will lead into modernity, and social constructs - the clothes, the language, the locations - that are very familiar, but also different enough that we can be comfortable that it's horrors are safely in the past. There is chocolate box London that you see in so many adaptations, cloaked in snow and poverty, and the grinding mechanical technology so beloved of the Steampunk aesthetic. Its an era at the dawn of most of the modern fiction genres, which probably helps, and right there, mining out  it's dark heart for the horror fans, is Penny Dreadful, now returning for a second season. 

Games Review: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

"This game is a narrative experience that will not hold your hand" intones the opening statement of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, stark words on a black screen that act as the games main promise. And then, true to it's word, it dumps out on a disused railway line in a forest, as "psychic detective" Paul Prospero, and just leaves you to it. And so begins a fascinating, clever, wonderful, and yet deeply flawed experiment in what a game is, and how we, the players, relate to it. It's a game that generated a lot of buzz when it came out, but didn't seem to linger in the wider consciousness as much as fellow "Walking Simulator" Gone Home, but still wound up my first purchase from this years Steam Winter Sale, and the game I went straight onto after finishing Shadows of Mordor, because it seemed right up my street. 

First Impressions: Supernatural

I've quite enjoyed writing up "First Impressions" of all the new shows that aired in the autumn, which gives a nice base-line of what you got you watching a show in the first place, especially compared to a review of a full season. Most shows change and grow enormously in their first 10 episodes or so, and few come out of the gate well rounded or confident in what they want to be. Early episodes can be a scattershot blast of ideas as the writers and actors try to get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and that can often be lost as you look back knowing what the show became once it found it feet. This is a long way of saying that I'd like to more of them, especially as we try and catch up on shows that we've missed along the way. So next up is a show that is now hitting it's 10th series, but I've never seen a single episode of: Supernatural. 

Book Review Roundup: History!

I realised with some pleasure recently that I've hit my target of reading 20 books this year, which may not seem that many to some of you, but feels like an achievement to fit around everything else. It's been an eclectic year and mixed in is a bunch of factual books I've not mentioned here, yet. I'm not quite sure why - many reviews I read of history books tend to double as critiques of the history, as much as the book itself, especially for periods that feel contemporarily relevant, something you'll see a lot this year with all the World War One stuff. Personally I feel that if you're interested in a period you should read around from multiple sources anyway. So with that in mind, here is a round-up, along with a quick summary of why you should read them! 

Book Review: Declare

Over on the Dissecting Worlds channel, we're currently doing a series on Spies and all things Espionage related. We've just recorded the third episode, on the intersection between horror and the spy genre, and when we mentioned this planned episode a couple of months back, one book kept coming up, and it was one that I've never actually heard of. I guess thats kind of appropriate, right? The book was Declare, by Tim Powers, and when at least four people recommend is a "set text" for the subject, then you really have to read it. I'm really, really glad I did. 

TV Review: Penny Dreadful

The long legacy of the Victoria era sometimes feels like it looms too large over the modern age, especially in Britain. After all, it was the time when it could reasonably be said we were the worlds's "Top Nation", and even over a century on it's burned into our national psyche. It's also a time when a lot of the culture we built in the twentieth century started to emerge, driven by an increasingly literate and empowered population in search of entertainment, driving a wave of creativity that still echoes forwards. The late Victorian era, especially - which probably most resembles what we think of as "Victorian" - brought us a boom in the "Penny Dreadful", often dark, gothic serials sold to the mass market as disposable entertainment. So if nothing else there is an amusing irony in the TV show Penny Dreadful being an expensive, classy production sold on an exclusive pay-for TV channel in the 21st Century.

Games Review: Gloom

I think its fair to say that the Web Series "Tabletop" has cost me a lot of money. Its a pretty fun series hosted by Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton) and three guests, where they play boardgames for your entertainment. It's really slickly put together with cut-outs for rules explanations, and on-screen graphics, and edited to be pacey and funny. It's good stuff, but for a family full of gamers its...expensive. Especially for smaller, shorter, more portable games that look like they'll run well for newbies as well as more veteran gamers. One such game was Gloom, a card game based around making your characters as miserable as possible, and then killing them horribly.

Book Review: This Book is Full of Spiders

Or to give it the full title, This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It.

So, my name is Matt, and I am an Arachnophobic.  Spiders really freak me out, in a way that pretty much nothing else does; just watching them move makes me recoil in horror. Z had to hold my hand through parts of The Return of the King, for instance, and vanquishing even the smallest crawling horror in the bathroom can feel like a major, storming-the-beachheads triumph. Whatever my rational self things, a large part of primitive monkey-man me views them as freaky aliens that have no right to live on this planet. So, reading a book who's plot involves parasitic aliens spiders that turn nest in your head and turn you into a monster may not have been the smartest thing rational me ever did.

DVD Of the Week: Berberian Sound Studio

Some movies are made for immediate reaction. I loved (Marvel) Avengers Assemble for instance, it's impact overwhelming any limitations in it and left me walking out the cinema communing with my inner 8-year-old geek. I didn't need to see more than 20 minutes of Transformers 2 to know I would rather gnaw my own arm off, 127 Hours-style, than watch the rest. Simple, immediate reactions. Other films need longer to work through, to get past that initial reaction and parse something deeper. One of those films is Berberian Sound Studio.

DVD of the Week: Cabin in the Woods

I am not a Horror Fan. I don't dislike Horror, as a genre, and in fact spent a good chunk of last year reading Horror novels, but its not a "go to" genre in our house. I've seen a lot of the classics of the genre, some even at the cinema, but far from a comprehensive list, and the current direction of the genre into overly gruesome stalker/slasher flicks - regardless of any merit they may or may not have - just doesn't appeal. But I've always felt that a good film is a good film regardless of genre, and given the warm reception given to Cabin in the Woods, we had to give it a go.

Reading Plans, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my "To Be Read" Pile

First up, the comics world seems to be buzzing with the news of Gail Simone's removal from Batgirl over the weekend. In some ways I don't have a dog in the fight, as I don't read Batgirl (or any other "Big Two" comics) but two thoughts leap to mind. First, firing someone by email is shitty and cowardly, even if they are the tea-boy, never mind one of your flagship writers. Secondly, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the decision, an industry sector with a growing image problem regards female characters and female audiences, should probably think really fucking hard before adding female creators to the list of the disenfranchised.

Anyway, to what I was actually thinking about.

I've been thinking a lot recently about what to read next year. You see, several years ago I had the shock the realisation that I didn't read anymore, and that was a bit of a kick in the self-image. I'd always been a reader, I'd always had a book on the go, and suddenly, I wasn't and I didn't. So in an attempt to force myself back into a pattern, I came up with the idea of reading lists - planning a list of themed books and reading through them (and blogging about them) as a way of getting back in the habit.

So first I picked 12 "Great American Novels", and then I moved onto 20 Crime Novels. After that, I did Fantasy novels - a genre i'd never got on with - and the folks at Geek Syndicate let me post them up on their site, which was pretty cool. After that I did post-apocalypse novels and this year I'd done Horror. The tourism into different genres has been wonderfully broadening and I heartily recommend it. Its too easy to just read the same stuff, and think that's all that's out there. However, now I'm hitting an unexpected side effect of these projects, which is causing me a few problems.

I'd like to read more Hemingway. I want to read all of "The Dark Tower". I should probably give Scott Lynch another go because many of my friends rave about him and I want to make sure I'm not missing something there. I've not read much Science Fiction - my first literary love - for a long time and want to go back to it, but not sure I could do a year of it. I've unread novels by James Ellroy, Adrian Tchaikovsky and David Brin to get through. I'd asked for at least two History Tomes for Christmas.

So, yeah.

I suspect I'll still try and put together a list this year, but one without theme, just an aspiration of books and authors I want to read, books and authors I'd only discovered from the previous years lists. But no matter what I end up reading, the important thing is this: I'm a reader, once again.

Movie Review: Paranorman

I'm starting to worry that I'm going to soon hit a tipping point where I see more movies with Ewan than I do with Z. This year we've seen six films at the cinema, and I've taken Ewan to see three (including Avengers, which I saw twice, one with each!) and with Ewan now perfectly old enough to watch most 12A output his demands to go to the pictures are increasing. It may also be to do with a weekend afternoon away from his little brother too! Anyway, last weekend we went to see Paranorman, a CG Horror-comedy-drama for kids.

On Books and being a "book person"

I was chatting last on a mini-podcast to support the Horror Reading list I'm doing over at Geek Syndicate, and was asked about the idea behind it. I sort of waffled a bit about wanting to look at other genres, and being a bit snobby about things I know little about, but I've been dwelling on it a bit since and so I thought I'd try and lay out recent relationship with books.

The thing is, way back, I've always been a prolific reader. My parents will tell how I pretty much vanished into books in my early teens and stayed there until I left for university. At university I read and read, and even after I left university I accumulated books at a great rate largely thanks to the large about of second hand bookshops that proliferated around the University area of Leeds. The thing was, looking back, I think the volume was high but the range was narrow. I read Science Fiction, and pretty much nothing else, picking up an unhealthy disdain for Fantasy and Horror as genres along the way. Whilst I rarely re-read the same book (there's a few beloved exceptions) I suspect I was reading a lot of similar material and a lot of crap with spaceships on the cover, although I did manage to find some non-SF fiction I love to this day.

This really reached a peak in 1997, where I spent a long time hospital with very little else to do but devour fiction, although this did let me discover George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series so at least it wasn't all spaceships!

Without really noticing it though, I started to read less and less as the years went on. I became a father in 2001, I got more and more time- and energy- consuming jobs, and finally, a few years back, I had a moment where I couldn't remember what the last book I read was. I mean, I was still reading, occasionally, and mostly history or pop-science but certainly nothing at any great pace. Which was a bit of a stab at my self-image as a voracious reader and I had to do something about it. The answer was "reading lists" - nothing too demanding, just some sort of focus - and rather than sink back into SF I put together a lost of "American Classic" to read, enjoyed several of them, and discovered Hemingway, Vonnegut and Chandler.

So that was a win. After that I did "Crime Fiction", followed by facing by prejudices head-on and reading a year of Fantasy Novels, some of which (whisper it) I really really liked. Oh Dear Team, Oh Dear. In fact, this general project has been so successful that I'm thinking of doing a reading list of SF novels, just because it's been so bloody long since I read them in any volume!

Box Set Blues: True Blood, Series 1

Ah, Vampires. Savage, blood sucking monsters who descend in the hours of darkness to defile innocence and cause the ruin of all that touch. Somewhere along the line this became a romantic ideal, and whilst I'm not sure why, the pointy toothed fiends seem to be everywhere at the moment, running around and waving their subtext in everyone's faces. On the whole the Vampire hasn't done much for me since Near Dark, but the one show I have been recommended from a couple of places is True Blood, the HBO adaptation of the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlene Harris. So onto my Lovefilm queue they went, and now we've seen the whole first series, I can answer the big question of was it worth it?

TV Review: The Fades

I nearly missed this. I suspect a lot of people did. Late on a Wednesday night, BBC3, I never saw much publicity for it, and if it wasn't for some strong support from Twitter people I would never have seen this show. I've tried to push people I know, people with similar tastes to me to watch it, and most of them had never heard of it either. And that's a damn shame, because The Fades is one of the best shows I've seen this year.

I guess at first glance it doesn't look like much - a little bit of Skins, a little bit of a supernaturally themed Misfits, the first episode is light on the horror, and up on the quips, and awkward teenage angst, and the usual sort of "discovering secret powers as an analogy for growing up" thing that Young Adult fiction is so full of. But this isn't Young Adult fiction, and this isn't light on horror, and the youth of it's main characters is misleading - this is already grown up, proper, dark, horrific stuff.

At it's heart is Paul (Iain De Caestecker), 17 years old, dorky, who discovers he's an "angelic" - a human with magical powers - and is dragged into a growing war between Angelics and the eponymous "Fades", increasingly angry ghosts who have been unable to "ascend" and are stuck wandering the earth. Stealing pretty much every scene he's in is Paul's best friend Mac (Daniel Kaluuya), and we also get his perpetually angry sister her best friend (and later Paul's girlfriend) to round out the young cast. The whole cast is excellent - really, really, excellent for some of them, notably Mac, who I've mentioned, but head Fade John and dead-in-episode-one-but-still-hanging-around Angelic Sarah.

As the series goes on, and gets less "darkly funny" and more just straight "dark". I certainly didn't laugh once in the finale, although some parts were less horrifically bleak than others. Notable the moment - which you'll know if you've seen it - that had me half off the sofa in shock. Even it's ending is true to that trajectory. Its ballsy television, well executed and with some new and fresh things in the mix. I'd have to be mad to say to it's not without the odd niggle, but in so many places its really investing in trying something different its churlish to mention it.

And really I can't believe they didn't push this more. I can't believe more people haven't seen it. I can't believe they haven't commissioned a second series already. Because it deserves to be watched. If you've not seen it - find it. Watch it.