Recently Published

My essay A Good Man, Dreadfully Punished: Frank Darabont's The Mist, has just been published in the first Electric Sheep Anthology, The End. The text is a 'fictional' adaptation of the events leading up to the downbeat conclusion of The Mist, examining what the end of the narrative signifies for the film's protagonist as well as the other minor characters within the film.

Here is a brief extract...

'It's the End of Days,' murmurs Mrs Carmody. The mist, dreadful in its density, rolls against the glass frontage, pressing against it as if it wrre a solid mass, sealing off the customer's view and stranding them in the supermarket. The large panes, reinforced, may later bow, crack, splinter and break but for now, at least, they hold.

The book is available via Strange Attractor Press by following this link.

The Mist - Electric Sheep Anthology

Electric Sheep have just announced on their website their forthcoming anthology The End to which I have contributed:

"Taking ‘The End’ as its theme, this new anthology includes essays on the bad endings of bad girls, low-end sounds in Lynch’s films, personal and collective apocalypse in Ingmar Bergman’s work, the ending of road movies, French master Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished masterpiece Inferno, a graphic piece on The Night of the Living Dead and an image-based recollection of Decasia. "

My contribution is a 'fictional' adaptation of the events leading up to the downbeat conclusion of The Mist, examining what the narrative end signifies for the film's protagonist as well as the other minor characters within the film. Here is a brief extract...

The end of this story begins with a single gunshot. A murder in a supermarket, by the checkouts. There is a calling out for blood, holy justice through sacrifice. A child, blond and innocent, is first singled out and then the woman who holds him close to her. A fevered mob descends upon them both as others try to defend them. There is a lashing out with fists and makeshift weapons. As fights break out, the only armed man in the supermarket takes his pistol out from behind the waistband of his trousers, takes careful aim and slowly squeezes the trigger. The dull thud of the single shot echoes along the aisles. The bullet breaks through the milk bottle that a woman holds and enters her stomach. The fighting stops; silence as the woman falls to her knees. Her blood spills out, a deep copper red blossom that soaks into the floral pattern of her dress.