Picture this: You're 80 years old. Most people are kicking back with grandchildren, maybe tending a garden or binge-watching shows. Not Ramsey Campbell. This Liverpool legend is still out here crafting nightmares that slither into your brain and permanently set up shop. Fresh off turning 80 on January 4th 2026, he's proving age is just a number when it comes to writing psychological horror. His most recent novel, An Echo of Children is a slow-...

The Big Issue is a fiver (£5) now. I can remember the shock and disbelieve it was £2. Then £2.50…and so on. My sister gave me this copy. She bought it from an Eastern European women from outside Asda. Like most folk that catch her eye and don’t look away, I usually just slip her £2 and say I don’t want the magazine. Win-win. But not for the magazine. There’s a guy on the bridge at the shopping centre. He’s there every day and plays some musical...

Richard Laymon , an American master of horror, passed away on February 14th, 2001 from a sudden heart attack at just 54. Born in Chicago in 1947, Laymon married his beloved Ann in 1976 and raised a daughter, Kelly, while working as a teacher, librarian, and magazine editor. He wrote over 30 novels and 60 short stories, starting with The Cellar in 1980. He had a raw, fast-paced, often shocking style that found massive success in the UK and Europe...

David Szalay (2025) Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. That puts David Szalay into the stratosphere of book sellers. Last year’s winner, Orbit , Samantha Harvey’s quote on the cover is ‘Brilliance on every page’. ‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making new friends. After a while...

‘Can we enter heaven with one leg?’ The little girl named Saja in Jabela, who lost her leg in an Israeli airstrike on her house before entering an eternal sleep due to the destruction of all hospital in Gaza had asked I think she entered with two.

Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00264cj/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026ch9/leonardo-da-vinci-series-1-2-part-two-paintergod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(2024_film) Ken Burns that heavyweight of public service films and whose documentary films have attempted to explain...

Our Man in Moscow – Panorama. BBC iPlayer My son worked in Moscow a few years ago. He liked it there. He always said that Muscovites are more open than you would imagine and that the streets felt safe unlike cities such as London. He returned to the UK after the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine which saw tanks roll in from February 2022. The company he worked for was London-based and had decided to withdraw all of its...

I had to check Allan Bennett is still alive. He’s 91 now. Books don’t have to be new to be read. His diary entries and moral outrage with Tony Blair as he cosied up to George Bush (junior) over the invasion of Iraq over dumbed up files that never existed…well, with the moron’s moron Trump treating the Doomsday Clock as a pinball machine that spits out Nobel Peace Prizes we’re beyond satire, but not common sense. Bennett has got more than a wee...

Alphabet You Can’t Inspired by Soulfire77’s Frankenplot competition (and beholden to him for the title above) I thought I would offer to donate £25 to ABC to see what anyone can come up with for ‘an Alphabet story’. This means a coherent story where every word starts with the next letter of the alphabet eg “A bear called David eats figs greedily ..“ type thing. It doesn’t have to be a story, it could be a poem or a non-fiction prose piece, any...

We might try to get right with God by obeying his commands. This would prove difficult. No human being has ever gone through the whole of their lives without breaking any of God's commands. If you break only one of them, you have become a law breaker. If you don't commit murder but do commit adultery, you have broken God's laws. James 2:9,10. We think that God's laws are right in our minds but putting them into practice is another matter. We...