Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Stoke-on-huh?

    Stoke-on-huh?

    Sam Wade’s Stoke (published by the fabulous ShortBox) is set, presumably, in Stoke. Given that the place-name element ‘stoke’ means (roughly) ‘place’, there are quite a lot of those in England. With its ethnic diversity, mattress store and bare-knuckle kick-boxing, my guess was that it’s probably not the true-blue, rural Stoke that I live in,… Read more

  • Molecular anecdoty

    Molecular anecdoty

    I don’t follow cook-book publishing that closely (or indeed at all), but you can’t help noticing a few things if you work in a library. One is that we seem to have bid farewell to the conventions of my youth, where the majority of cook-books were either reference manuals, like Bee Nilson’s The Penguin Cookery… Read more

  • Convincing melancholy ghosts

    Convincing melancholy ghosts

    Ég Man Þig is a quietly melancholy horror movie from Iceland, based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Its title translates to English as I Remember You, and it is indeed largely concerned with memory and loss; it is in fact an outstanding example of the way that fantastical forms of fiction can deal effectively… Read more

  • Thrills and white poppies

    Thrills and white poppies

    It’s subtly positioned and easy to miss, but beneath the volume number, and below Rebellion’s logo on the spine, on each volume of this beautifully re-issued Charley’s War omnibus, is a white poppy. Nobody reading this could possibly miss Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s intentions, but the old Titan Books editions had the traditional red… Read more

  • Realistically surreal

    Realistically surreal

    Is the reality we construct for ourselves from our sensory inputs an orderly one in which every phenomenon is readily explicable, and chains of causation are visible, like the universe described by science? Or is it a confusing one in which things happen for mysterious reasons, and odd symbolic resonances seem to determine actions and… Read more

  • Fear of the unknown

    Fear of the unknown

    I only ever read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a haphazard manner, and my familiarity with his oeuvre has owed as much to Sandy Petersen’s 1980s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu as it has to the few stories I read before diving into this mammoth volume. His imaginary milieu, the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is a peculiarly… Read more