Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 4

Following on obliquely from comments about the last post, back in prelapsarian days of 1982 a Hollywood movie was made called ‘Making Love’. It was touted as the first gay film from a major studio and starred Kate Jackson and Harry Hamlin, and was meant to be a huge hit, because love is universal, right? The […]

When I was young there used to be (and for all I know may still be) a peculiar little chapbook held together with rusted staples that listed the calendar of England, predicting what your sheep would do, what your birth sign would reveal, lighting up times, tide-tables and so on. I recall that Old Moore’s […]

A huge subject with porous borders, there have been assemblies of writing on the fantastic for a century now. But if you’re starting out and bewildered by where it all leads, this might help. I’ve separated off long-form fantasy, much of which can already be found on this site. Instead let’s concentrate on readable chunks. […]

It wasn’t until the vivacious Philippa Pullar (b.1935) married a chicken farmer that she came to realise her perceived notions of rural life were overly romantic. In the seventies a number of authors began to take up their pens against the cruelties of factory farming. Pullar’s belief in the sanctity of animal life informed her first […]

It never occurred to me that friends could be graded like grapes. My friends are simply people I’ve come to grow perversely fond of. In England, making friends is tricky because for many class is a factor. I have several rough-edged friends whom my other friends avoid. They can be embarrassing on occasion (the English […]

‘I say, sir, a missive from the Royal Mail has arrived for you from a Ms Maggie Armitage. It appears to have been up a dead bear’s bum. Perhaps the sender has been incarcerated for many years and managed to smuggle it out to you. It smells of chewing gum and Toilet Duck.’ ‘Pray read […]

I suspect we try to tidy up our lives as we go along, and prove our mettle when that fails. One could call it ‘rolling with the punches’, but by God there have been a few too many punches of late. An Eeyorish friend of mine said, ‘life becomes easier if you remember that everyone […]

A dinner party last week! A proper old-fashioned, ‘Darling, this pavlova is heaven’ dinner party for friends from Atlanta, Georgia. These are the Good Americans, kind to a fault, charming, interesting, concerned, politically aware, smart. Only one thing had been overlooked. We’d forgotten to mention to them how ill I am now. As if to […]

In Waitrose at the weekend I bumped into Max Schindler, the awesome artist who creates the Bryant & May covers, like the one on the left. I had always pictured him as young, small, rather shy. He was around 6’6″, clad in black, a bit scary-looking, middle-aged, wild eyed and twinkly. We held a mutual […]

They used to talk of the ‘elevator pitch’ – a three-minute blast of information that reduces your book/ film/ play to something even an executive can understand. Today I still produce a synopsis for each book I write, so that editors can present them at internal meetings. But I’m really bad at them, and for […]