Can’t Stop the Music

The 1970s wasn’t just an amazing decade for movies, as I outline in The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, but a pretty fab period for music as well…and, of course, the two often intersected. Wendi Kaufman of The Happy Booker asked me to take part in her site’s recurring “If I Only Had an iPod” feature, where writers tell you what they’re listening to, or would like to listen to, or have listened to in the past… anyway, here’s my (mostly) film-related ’70s tunes.

12 January 2006 | listen to this |

Read This: The Atrocity Archives

“Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War-era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H.P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret infomration to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.”

That’s from Charles Stross’s afterword to The Atrocity Archives, which collects two stories starring Bob Howard, a low-level programmer in a British intelligence agency dedicated to protecting the realm from the Nameless Ones on the other side of the universe. The fact that Bob’s a programmer allows Stross to work in all sorts of great project management humor into the stories along with the occult terrorism: Think The Ipcress File landing in The Dunwich Horror by way of Office Space, and you’ve got an approximation of where the book’s headed. Now, it might just be me, because I love any new twist on the Cthulhu Mythos , but I could barely put this book down over the weekend. (Although, strictly speaking, it’s not really Mythos, just trading on the milieu.) One caveat: If stories about the Nazi’s occult activities squick you out, you’re not going to like “The Atrocity Archive” at all, as its secret history goes into great (and explicit) detail about the Third Reich’s plans and activities, and the title is literal. But since you can read “The Concrete Jungle” online, why not give that a try? (And, yes, I’ve recommended that course of action before…)

9 January 2006 | read this |