What was good this week…

Roger N. Morris has started writing full-time. For those not in the know Roger helped kicked off Macmillan New Writing with Taking Comfort way back in April 2006, and I think all us MNWers harbour that ambition to burn whatever tie keeps us at the day-job. It means when you check into a hotel and they ask for your occupation, you can, without feeling sheepish, write "novelist" in the little box.
Even though he would find this embarrassing, I’d say Roger is fast becoming the darling of the crime-fiction world. And for good reason. His books are selling well, receiving critical acclaim both in the UK and abroad, and he’s a bloody nice bloke too.

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Being a film buff, I’m constantly on the look-out for cult movies or those films that would be cult movies if anyone actually bothered to watch them, movies like Welcome to Dongmakgol, a wonderful anti-war film from Korea that I happened on by accident this week.
Without going into too much gushing detail, the story follows two opposing sides in the Korean War who get stranded in an isolated mountain village that knows nothing of the conflict destroying the country about them. In fact the villagers are dangerously naïve and take in soldiers of both sides resulting in a fraught yet hilarious stand-off that is both moving and electrical - I personally didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or hold my breath (I think I did both and began choking).
Throw in a stranded American pilot and the film is set up for a tragic and captivating finale. It’s a reminder that Hollywood really doesn’t make them like this any more, and why flicking through the recent releases from the likes of Japan, China and Korea can actually be more rewarding than renting the latest turgid Hollywood "blockbuster".

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In December I attempted to read David Isaak’s Shock and Awe, yet everything appeared to conspire against me, from the trip to Prague and Vienna, to the on-going edits for The Horde of Mhorrer, to Christmas itself. Only last week was I able to get some kind of momentum going on the book, and now that it has, I’ve shifted up a gear.
Shock and Awe is wonderfully written, and confidently so. I don’t usually read thrillers (my bookshelf is unashamedly littered with a few classics, or those from the horror/fantasy/sci-fi genres), but this book has well and truly carried me away – I can taste the salt of the sea, the sweat in the Californian sun, and feel the tension mounting. The atmospherics are tangible, and the morality debate raises some serious questions on terrorist semantics.
With luck – and partly because Sarah is sleeping through the day due to her crap shift patterns – I’ll be finishing it this weekend. I get the feeling that when the last page is read, I’ll be missing the adventures of Hammond and Carla…

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This is also the week I decided to return to the genre that started my writing-fixation: Horror. And it’s almost like returning to the scene of the crime, for me especially, as I’m retooling an old short story of mine called Splinters. The story – now seventeen years old - was popular with my friends at school, but it has a greater resonance now due in part to this country’s obsession with the property ladder. Splinters is a body-horror story that follows a property-obsessive aiming to convert the cellar of an old Sheffield terrace into a games room to add to the value of his house. Yet by doing so he disturbs something he hadn’t bargained for.
And yes, blood will be spilt.
Plenty of blood.
If it’s any good, Splinters might well find its way onto this blog or on the website. Or maybe on the pages of a property paper: a morality tale on biting off more than you can chew – literarily.
Watch this space…