My old friend David Fox alerted me to this fellow.

That master of the Freudian gothic, Patrick McGrath, will be appearing at the Kilkenny Festival on Wednesday, August 13. A full length interview is in the works, but for now we’re proud to present Patrick’s top five gothic tales of all time, lodged with the Revelatorium while he was in Dublin the other week to promote his new novel Trauma.

1. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (1847)

“Last month I re-read Wuthering Heights and was once again overwhelmed by the magnificence that is Heathcliff. There’s the moment where Cathy has just died, and he goes down to the sexton of the church and says, ‘Listen, I’ll pay you well for this, but I want you to take out the side of her coffin, and then when I’m dead, put me down beside her and take out the side of my coffin that’s facing her, and when they dig us up in fifty years they won’t be able to tell one from the other.’ That’s love!”

2. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

“Again, I re-read it over the summer and it really holds up as a gothic reflection on the divided self.”

3. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (1891)

“A similar theme of the doubled self, but from a very different perspective, and that wonderful device of the painting absorbing the stain of sin, and the man himself remaining inviolate.”

4. Dracula – Bram Stoker (1897)

“I remember writing an introduction to this a couple of years ago, and seeing it as a sort of mandala in which every gothic idea was given its fullest development. There’s almost no gothic notion that doesn’t play out in Dracula, you can list them all: the incubus, the succubus, the night, horror, vampirism, cannibalism in a sense. There’s no transgression that isn’t somehow dealt with.”

5. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (1902)

“Heart of Darkness, although it seems to transcend genre, is such a powerful allegory of a journey into the heart of horror, in deep time. It’s like (Poe’s) ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, that sense of regressing into a very primitive place as the jungle gets more dense and primal and threatening, more full of mystery and dread and violence. Marlow goes down the river and sees that the heart of darkness is what has happened to Kurtz – in the absence of human institutions he’s become a beast.
“But here’s the interesting thing: Conrad ends the story in a very funny way. He takes Marlow back up the river, back across the country, back to Brussels, because Kurtz has asked him to go see his fiancé, a patient little Belgian woman who’s been waiting for Kurtz to come home. And she says to Marlow, in effect, ‘Did he think of me and did he die well?’ And Marlow says, ‘Yes.’ He tells this white lie just to give comfort to this woman, because he can’t bring himself to speak of the horror. What an interesting way to finish a story about the grimmest horror imaginable, to move from the most appalling of mortal sins to the most forgivable of venial sins.”

‘Play It All Night Long’, ‘Lawyers Guns & Money’, ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’, ‘The French Inhaler’, ‘Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner’, ‘Excitable Boy’, ‘Boom Boom Mancini’, ‘Reconsider Me’. ‘Splendid Isolation’, ‘Life’ll Kill Ya’, ‘Keep Me In Your Heart’.

Sardonic, ironic and melancholic, Warren Zevon was the Hunter S of the LA singer-songwriter set. A person could learn more about literature and the human condition from WZ’s lyrics and liner notes than an entire stack of New Yorkers. It’s a bitter indictment of the awards show circuit that one of America’s greatest songwriters had to die of lung cancer before they’d give him a Grammy.

Never meet your heroes, the old saw goes. To which we might add, never read their biographies either. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: the Dirty Life & Times of Warren Zevon (HarperCollins) was written by Zevon’s ex-wife Crystal, drawing on the subject’s journals, plus interviews with almost a hundred sources, including close family members, friends and collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King and Carl Hiassen, who wrote the foreword.

Not for nothing did Zevon call one of his Best Of collections Learning To Flinch. I read this book through my fingers. Converse to the usual impulses of wanting to believe the myth was for real, some part of me hoped that Zevon’s noir sensibility, his F Scott Fitzevon schtick, was at least three-parts persona. Not so. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is one of the most brutally honest, unflattering, and yet strangely uplifting accounts of a musician’s life you’ll ever read. Crystal Zevon doesn’t pull any punches, but this is not a hatchet job enacted by an embittered ex. It’s a book written with obvious love, adhering to its subject’s last wishes that she should spare his legacy no blushes.

Warren Zevon was an alcoholic. To unpack this simple fact is to learn that when the singer blacked out he beat his wife, behaved abominably towards his children and was a nightmare to work with. He was possessed by the demon drink in the same way Burroughs was pursued by the Ugly Spirit; alcohol made him arrogant, irresponsible and downright dangerous. It compelled him to chase skirt, crash cars and shoot guns indoors. Even Zevon’s staunchest friends wanted to beat the crap out of him at some stage.

He finally quit boozing around the time of the Sentimental Hygiene album in 1987 (which contained the all-time great rehab anthem ‘Detox Mansion’) and spent 17 years on the dry. By all accounts he substituted drink for a sex addiction that rendered him incapable of holding down a relationship for longer than a few months. (Jordan Zevon’s duty as a son was to dispose of his dad’s porn stash after he died. What he didn’t realise was the offending tapes contained film of the old man having sex.)

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is as painful as an intervention session, but despite all the dirt, it’s hard not to feel respect when one reads of the courage with which Zevon confronted his doctors’ diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, or that legendary last Letterman appearance, or considers the guts required to write his final 2003 album The Wind in the knowledge that he had mere months left on the earth.

Of all the voices afforded their say in this compelling car-crash of a book, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Dave Barry delivers perhaps the best epitaph.
“I’d say he kicked death right in the balls.”

Our interview with Warren Zevon, published shortly after his death in 2003.

His last will and testament, The Wind.

“War produces very surrealist effects. The bus on top of a block of flats after a bombing raid, or a five-storey building collapses and we can see all the individual homes, the furniture still in place.” – JG Ballard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55vUH_Ppb0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opdlYl0Fq8M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yH7IHiN68&feature=related

Today’s dispatch from Little Miss Mondo…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_Features

Playwright, novelist and master storyteller Billy Roche rang the Revelatorium red phone to tell us he’ll be reading from his revised, reissued and exquisitely designed hardback edition of Tumbling Down (Tassel Publications) at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum on Saturday (26th), and at the Winding Stair Bookshop near the Ha’penny Bridge, Thursday August 7th at 6.30.

Donning his best step-right-up stovepipe, Billy told us: “Don’t forget we’ve the festive day here in Wexford next Saturday (26th) behind the Market gates in the Bullring, beginning at 10 o’ clock in the morning. Stalls featuring bookshops and what-not and Bui Bolg and a small theatre with puppeteers and storytellers and a writer’s corner and short films and a bandstand that kicks off at lunch time with Pierce Turner followed throughout the afternoon by the wonderful Odi, Whist, Niall Colfer and his band and Chaplin at around 4.15.”

You can read our interview with Billy in the current issue of Hot Press.

Standard Operating Procedure – A War Story
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
(Picador)

If George Steiner once referred to the Nazi death camps as the Bluebeard’s castles of the 20th Century, then Abu Ghraib is the De Sadean dungeon of the 21st. Standard Operating Procedure, written by Paris Review editor and New Yorker writer Gourevitch, drawing on interviews conducted by The Fog Of War director Morris, is nothing less than a horror story, the tale of how the Bush administration instructed the US military to bypass the Geneva Convention by classing inmates as ‘security detainees’ rather than POWs; of how incompetence caused snags in the chain of command that led to rogue soldiers subjecting Iraqi prisoners to the most barbaric abuses; of how the language of torture can be couched in euphemisms (‘sleep adjustment’ or ‘stress positions’) that that sound as benign as yoga. Standard Operating Procedure is a contender for non-fiction book of the year. It will make you angry and outraged, but most of all, afraid.

The Cellist Of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway
(Atlantic)

The Cellist of Sarajevo is the third novel from 33-year-old Vancouver author Galloway, and his first to be published in these parts. Heavily blurbed (JM Coetzee, Yann Martel, Khaled Hosseini, ZZ Packer), it also packs an irresistible premise. In sniper-strafed Sarajevo, a lone cellist sets a chair in the middle of the street at four o’ clock for 22 consecutive days to play Albinoni’s Adagio in memory of those shot dead while queueing for bread outside his building. Unbeknownst to the musician, a university shooting star named Arrow stands on guard as a counter-sniper, intent on protecting her oblivious ward. Simply but powerfully written (“There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.”), The Cellist of Sarajevo is taut and confident, forging high art out of the horror.

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
James Meek
(Canongate)

Acclaimed novelist and journalist Meek’s follow up to the prize-winning The People’s Act Of Love, …Descent, is the story of a divorced war correspondent intent on writing a cash-in thriller, partially based on the author’s experiences covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. His keen eye for detail effortlessly captures the rivalry and cameraderie of war reporters. He’s not so sharp when he strays beyond that into the more genteel territory of upper-middle class London dinner parties, with some of his dialogue tending towards the verbose and clunky. Nevertheless, Meek is a brilliant prose stylist who can combine serious literary panache with a high concept thriller writer’s grasp of pace.

Further reading:

Our conversation with veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson, from November 2002.

An interview conducted with war reporter Lara Marlow via sattelite phone in April 2003, as US forces encroached upon Baghdad.

The strange and incredible story of Bill Carter’s season in Sarajevo.

Henry Rollins on his experiences performing for American troops for the USO.

From Henry’s show, an eye-opening conversation with fellow USO performer Joan Jett.

Here’s the NPR skinny on the new HBO show from The Wire boys David Simon and Ed Burns, Generation Kill, based on the book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright.

And finally, an extraordinary talk with soldier-poet Brian Turner on Fresh Air.

Tucked up in bed after dark, the assembled Revelatorium bookworms have been lately bewitched by Joe Hill’s wonderful collection of short stories 20th Century Ghosts, originally published in 2005 by PS Publishing, reissued last autumn by Gollancz.

Mr Hill is a master of what they call ‘slipstream’ – speculative and weird tales freighted with the emotional resonance and character depth of mainstream fiction (y’know, the kind that wins prizes and doesn’t get ghetto-ised as ‘genre’). His Locke & Key comics sell out as fast as IDW Publishing can get them on the stands.

Anyway, 20th Century Ghosts is one of the most purely entertaining and imaginative short story collections we’ve read since Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things. The title tale is a lovely haunted cinema allegory. There’s a bloodcurdling child abduction chiller called ‘The Black Phone’. ‘Last Breath’ is the kind of story that follows you around after lights out and makes the floorboards creak. There’s a Metamorphosis-meets-atomic-monster B movie riff called ‘You Will Hear The Locust Sing’. ‘My Father’s Mask’ is one of the plain weirdest things we’ve ever read. And if ‘Pop Art’ doesn’t tenderise you at least a little bit, you’ve got a bag of nails for a heart.

Here’s an interview we did last year, to mark the publication of Joe’s excellent debut novel Heart-Shaped Box.

Vertigo comics’ graphic novel adaptation of Neil Young’s Greendale album is due for publication this autumn. The song cycle has also been adapted for the stage by Katherine Owens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/theater/20sella.html

Here’s our review from 2003.

A couple of days after concluding his European tour in Cork, Neil was on the Charlie Rose show to promote the new Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour documentary film CSNY: Déjà Vu. It’s a remarkable interview.

Hal Willner’s Sea Chanteys extravaganza, featuring Lou Reed, Gavin Friday, Shane MacGowan, Tim Robbins, David Thomas and a host of others, happens tonight in Dublin’s Grand Canal Square. Here’s a quick refresher:

Various Artists
Rogue’s Gallery – Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys
(Anti)

Interested parties will know the back story by now. Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp – a serious connoisseur of gypsy music, lest he be accused of actorly dilettantism – both got deeper into seafaring lore than is either sane or sanitary, and vowed to put together a record of maritime airs.

Enter polymath producer Hal Willner, the latter-day link between the two Harrys Smith and Partch, and a man whose approach to themed albums (previous subjects include Poe, Mingus, Burroughs and Weill, every one a classic) bears more relation to the staging of bizarre interplanetary radio plays than the usual mixum-gatherums.

The result, Rogues Gallery, can be roughly – if fancifully – described as a Hallowe’en masqued ball staged on a decrepit ghost galleon. Featuring a cast of hundreds arrayed over two albums and 43 tunes, it’s an unruly assembly whose various belchings, bilgings and bemoanings lurch in tone and timbre from the bawdy to the doleful. Indeed, the prevailing refrain is Tom Waits’ assessment of The Pogues’ playing on Rum Sodomy & The Lash as sounding like sailors on shore leave. A pungent reek clings to these songs like the smell of the fishheads and tails strewn throughout Brel’s ‘Port Of Amsterdam’.

So you get Gavin Friday doing an unexpurgated, addictive and absolutely filthy ‘Baltimore Whores’, closely rivalled in the ribaldry stakes by Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Good Ship Venus’. You’ve got Nick Cave bellowing about the scourge of the syph (‘Fire Down Below’) while Baby Gramps does Beefheart-on-sea (“Now the Cape Cod girls don’t use no pills/They get their pep from the codfish gills”).

It gets weirder. Character actor par excellence John C. Reilly acquits himself with honours on a brace of tunes, the wonderfully named Jack Shit rollicks through ‘Boney Was A Warrior’ with utter contempt for folk protocol, while Jarvis Cocker contributes the distortion-heavy dirge ‘A Drop Of Nelson’s Blood’ (Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of rum after he was killed in the Battle Of Trafalgar; legend has it that when the ship put to port, the body was intact but the rum was all gone). All that’s missing is Ralph Steadman popping in to supply grisly visuals. Hang on, that is Ralph Steadman, singing the devil out of a macabre ballad from a time when it was technically legal to eat the cabin boy if supplies ran out.

But it’s not all wanton grotesquerie. This is also a scholarly folk artifact, albeit one divested of the preciousness that occasionally plagues such endeavours. Hence the inclusion of craftsmen and women from northern English folk streams (Richard Thompson, Eliza and Martin Carthy, Bryan Ferry and Sting shucking off their respective designer baggage), and a handful of artists who apparently drifted in off Nova Scotia trade routes: the McGarrigles and Wainwrights, plus – praise be! – the divine Mary Margaret O’ Hara, frozen as a figurehead on a prow, approximating the loveliest, loneliest bowed saw you never heard on ‘The Cry Of Man’. Mind you, she’s closely matched for pathos by Andrea Corr, who operates a capella and exhibits exquisite ornamentation on ‘Caroline And Her Young Sailor Bold’.

There are a few misfires, but overall Rogues Gallery works as a sort of calenture, an aural hallucination where the eschatological meets the scatological, where Elizabethan smut gets censored by Victorian prudes and reinserted by wicked historians, where laments become rave-ups soused with the overwhelming reek of brandy, whale blubber, bodily fluids, broken hearts and bloated cadavers.

Consider me press-ganged.