More Weird Tales from the Vault of Fear
Before Elvis there were EC comics. In the history of horror and censorship, EC comics are a legend: cool, cult objects from the shady, esoteric side of post-war American popular culture, before the King broke through on Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan, like the fetish photographs of Bettie Page, the Ed Gein murders, and wild rockabilly.
This Time It's Personal
I worked with Andrew Motion at UEA, and take it from me John Cooper Clarke would’ve made a much better Poet Laureate. I’ve seen him perform his work every chance I’ve got, from those early punk gigs to art centers, through the weirdness of the eighties, when you never really knew what you were going to get ...
Things that Walk
We are repeatedly forced to confront our own mortality, allegorising through fantasy the central anxiety of existence. Death, like the Weeping Angels, Nesbit’s recumbent Norman effigies, and our mates in the playground creeps up on us, removing us from the stream of time, leaving only a memory. Even the Doctor cannot save us forever.
The Other 19th Century
1838 – William Sykes and the notorious Saffron Hill Gang brought to justice for robbery, kidnapping and murder. Discovery of the MS. Papers of the late Rev. Francis Purcell of Drumcoolagh. Signora Psyche Zenobia decapitated by clock in Edinburgh.
Batman and the Literary Gothic
Like the reflection of Poe’s House of Usher in the ‘black and lurid tarn,’ the Batman has been the Gothic Other of the American comic book superhero since his first appearance in National Allied’s Detective Comics # 27 in May, 1939. The comic book was a still a new medium, and Detective Comics was originally an anthology title ...
Dear John
As a teenager in the seventies, I was a classic prototype for the provincial punk. I grew up in a council flat, I was a working class only child; isolated, idealistic and already out step with the locals. In those days, my hometown was hard-core ted – you didn’t have to be very different to catch all kinds of hell around there...
The Day I Met Dr. Who
One of the nicest memories I have of my late-father is standing in a queue with him, surrounded by empty Daleks, waiting to get Dr. Who’s autograph. We were at a summer fete in Norwich, in some bleak little park, and I remember that the grass was washed a vivid green by incipient showers. It was 1973, so I was nine years old.
The Last of the Soho Poets
Colin was like a character from the pages of Conrad or Kipling, or even Dickens, a dissident intellectual, a traveller, and a man whose wit, wisdom and generosity of spirit enriched the lives of everyone who knew him.
Letting Go and Moving On – A Review of My Year
On mental illness and recovery, the importance of old motorcycles, going pro, and retiring from the Unthank School of Writing...
Tales from The Boneyard
Our Anniversary, The Teenage Werewolves, and Dr Diablo & The Rodent Show...
My Alopecia Story
In the spring of 2014, all my hair fell out, pretty much overnight...
Sunk in Shark Alley - Sunday Post Interview
Historian on the incredible bravery and terrible tragedy when 450 on stricken ship died at Danger Point...
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb - Interview
Stephen Carver is the author of the new book The Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life & Work of W.H. Ainsworth. He also has written The 19th Century Underworld and Shark Alley. He taught literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
The Honest Truth - Sunday Post Interview
What the Dickens? Forgotten author who once outsold the literary giant. Literary historian, editor and novelist Dr Stephen Carver tells Sally McDonald The Honest Truth about why the great man is so unknown nowadays.
A man at the top of his game - EDP Interview
Some say you can’t stick your arm out in the street in Norwich without knocking over a writer. Derek James talks to one of them about his latest book… and becoming an author.
'The Essence of the Gothic': In Coversation with Audrey Chin
What is Gothic literature? Is there a difference between the modern and Victorian variety? Or the Asian and European ones? Why is it a literature of subversion?
And the winner is...
On winning 'Doylean Honours', the award for ‘Excellence in Scholarly Writing’ from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society for my article ‘Dinosaurs, Disintegration Machines and Talking to the Dead: The Wild World of Professor Challenger’.
Conan Doyle and Professor Challenger (Podcast)
This episode, Paul and I are delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr Stephen Carver, author, biographer and recipient of one of the ACD Society’s Inaugural Doylean Honours for his excellent Wordsworth Editions blog on the Professor Challenger stories. We talk with Stephen about the appeal of Professor Challenger to readers and to Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist and Challenger’s spiritualist conversion...
