Taking Gwendoline Riley’s exquisitely concise novel for a walk around Manchester, we’re drawn across Piccadilly Gardens, through the Arndale Centre, across to a Salford pub and then back and round to the Central Library and the canal. We marvel at how rapidly Manchester keeps changing – old buildings demolished, new ones thrown up in theirContinue reading “Cold Water Part Two”
Category Archives: Series 2
Cold Water Part One
This small gem of novel is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of early-noughties Manchester. In Part One we journey from Ian Curtis’s Macclesfield memorial stone to a basement bar somewhere between Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly. For Lloyd this is a bit of a homecoming. For Tim it’s a chance toContinue reading “Cold Water Part One”
The Rats Part Two
In part two of our adventure with James Herbert’s The Rats we discover how much the East End has changed, and how much it stays the same. The Regent’s Canal is a crumbling, abandoned ruin in Herbert’s book – today, it’s a polite playground for joggers and cyclists. But cheap tower blocks still loom overContinue reading “The Rats Part Two”
The Rats Part One
Fancy a trip into the dark heart of London’s East End? A place of racist killings, crumbling housing, and striking schoolchildren? We’ve got an unexpected guide for you: James Herbert’s 1974 splatterpunk debut, The Rats. Don’t worry – we won’t be reading the really gory parts. But we will be using the book to navigateContinue reading “The Rats Part One”
Dracula Part Two
This is the second part of our adventure with Bram Stoker’s epic chiller Dracula. Having travelled south from Whitby, we find ourselves in Purfleet, Stoker’s imaginative location for the estate of Carfax and Jack Seward’s asylum. We then head to Piccadilly to pick a virtual fight with the online Stoker cognoscenti over the location ofContinue reading “Dracula Part Two”
Dracula Part One
We’re taking on a book which is as much a myth as it is a novel: Bram Stoker’s 1897 chiller, Dracula. Like Stoker’s eponymous neck-botherer, we find ourselves washed up in Whitby, one of the most theatrical settings we’ve ever seen for a book. We hunt down the bench where the Count attacks poor LucyContinue reading “Dracula Part One”
The Woman in Black Part Two
This is the second part of our adventure with Susan Hill’s classic chiller The Woman in Black. In our ongoing hunt for places which could have inspired the fictional locations of Crythin Gifford and Eel Marsh House we find ourselves in Lincolnshire, where the land merges into the sea seemingly without interruption, where old rockContinue reading “The Woman in Black Part Two”
The Woman in Black Part One
We’re taking Susan Hill’s classic chiller The Woman in Black out for an adventure. It isn’t easy, because the market town of Crythin Gifford and the scary old Eel Marsh House are not real places. But what if they were constructed from real memories, and reminiscent of real places? In part one of our latestContinue reading “The Woman in Black Part One”
Day of the Triffids Part Two
In part 2 of our Day of the Triffids adventure, we follow Bill Masen as he leaves London and heads down into Sussex, on the trail of the woman he finds himself in love with. We discover John Wyndham’s house in the countryside, and travel the Wyndham Way, our name for the road which windsContinue reading “Day of the Triffids Part Two”
Day of the Triffids Part One
We’re back in London, discovering the places and context for John Wyndham’s legendary dystopian tale The Day of the Triffids. Our hero, Bill Masen, has woken up in a London hospital to a world in which everything has changed – almost everyone has become blind overnight, and the plants which Bill helped to breed, theContinue reading “Day of the Triffids Part One”
The Curiously Specific Book Club 