LIST.CO.UK/FESTIVAL PREVIEWS FESTIVAL BOOKS
LOUISE WELSH The Glasgow author tells us which short stories give her the creeps
Think horror, think Stephen King, think John Ajvide Lindqvist, think books big enough to fight off the walking dead. But small can be as creepy as a Chucky doll. And sometimes you’ve got to read quickly because ‘the dead travel fast’. If you find yourself in a horror short story don’t refuse to believe in the supernatural. Learn from ‘Dracula’s
Guest’, a bite-size chunk of Bram Stoker’s bloody classic. Jonathan Harker ventures to an unholy village, despite being warned that it’s Walpurgis Night, when the dead escape their graves. Wolves, lightening and beautiful corpses ensue.
You can’t fight the uncanny with book learning, as the Reverend Soulis discovers when the Deil visits the
village of Ba’weary in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’. And it’s best not to venture onto the moors at night, unless you have no option. In ‘Seeking the Houdy’ by James Hogg, a man on a desperate search for a midwife gets a weird foretaste of the future. Perhaps horror is most frightening when it enters our homes. Shirley Jackson disrupts small town America
with an ancient rite in ‘The Lottery’, a short story which resulted in a rush of cancelled subscriptions when it was published in The New Yorker. And ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrates that when madness is in the mix, the bedroom can be a dangerous place. Indeed, sleeping is downright tricky, as a student discovers in HP Lovecraft’s gross-out tale ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’.
WW Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ contrasts parents’ longing for a dead son with the dreadfulness of resurrection. The knock on their door is as horrifying as the beating which filters from under the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. When it comes to horror keep it short, keep it pacey, but most of all, keep it scary. ■ 12 Aug, 7pm, £10 (£8).
ALICE OSWALD Giving life back through poetry
‘As your poet laureate, I’m ordering you to go,’ announced Carol Ann Duffy at the Bath Literary Festival this year. She was talking about Alice Oswald’s event the following evening. ‘She’s a much better poet than I am.’ When the laureate says that, you listen. Oswald is performing her book-length poem, ‘Memorial’, in its entirety and from memory, at the Book Festival. We can presume that the Bath decree still stands. The poem is a reworking of Homer’s ‘Iliad’, exploring ways of remembering that epic’s 200 dead soldiers in the present moment. It takes 90 minutes to perform. ‘I get this feeling before- hand of a spool of dead soldiers in my head, queueing up, wait- ing to be expressed, and it’s actually very, very intense. At the end of it I’m always absolutely shattered.’
Aloud is the way you’re meant to encounter the poem, and Oswald has saturated her book with repetition and internal music that’s meant to be heard. ‘I do very much believe in poetry as a kind of tune or music. But also in a kind of superstitious way, I feel that for those names actually to be sounded out loud is even more than for them to be written on a page. It’s a kind of giving of life back to those people.’ (Charlotte Runcie) ■ 14 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
TOP 5
HOUSEHOLD NAMES This week is bursting with people that your whole fam- ily might know Michael Palin It’s a whole quarter of a century since the former Python took his place at the Book Festival, but you have to say he’s seen quite a lot of the world in the interim period. His next book and TV travel show is about Brazil, but he’s here to tell The Truth about his new novel. 13 Aug, 6.30pm, £10 (£8).
Simon Callow To some, he’s the foremost proponent of Charles Dickens in the public eye. To others, he was in Four Weddings and a Funeral. And to others still, he’s Tom Chance alongside Brenda Blethyn’s Alison Little. To all, he’s a belov- ed British actor and raconteur. 11 Aug, 4.30pm, £10 (£8).
Paddy Ashdown The warm and likeable former Royal Marine and leader of the Liberal Democrats gets stuck into two events, one about our ever- changing world and the second on an incident in WW2. 14 Aug, 8pm 15 Aug, 10am, £10 (£8). Gordon Brown The only former PM in the Book Festival village is in town to deliver this year’s NLS Donald Dewar Lecture discussing his hopes for the future of Scotland and the UK. 13 Aug, 4.30pm, £10 (£8).
Lucinda Dickens Hawksley Literary household names don’t come any bigger than the guy who would have been 200 this year. Thankfully his great-great- great-granddaughter is around to keep the flame burning as she talks about her own illus- trated guide to the man and his works. 16 Aug, 12.30pm, £10 (£8). (Brian Donaldson)
9–16 Aug 2012 THE LIST 33