Penguin Random House is publishing five brand new dramatic audio adaptations of the best-selling 2000 AD graphic novels. With world rights, this is the first time that these stories have been available in this format, and can be purchased via Audible, Apple Books and Google Play.

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Dune (2021)

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbet’s seminal sci-fi classic isn’t its first adaptation, but despite a soft spot for David Lynch’s version, I’d say it’s much the most successful. Partly that’s because it’s stayed pretty close to the book, keeping plenty of its weirder flourishes and not trying to crush everything down into a single film.

Partly it’s because the design is truly spectacular, working in all kinds of weird and wonderful influences to create a world that feels both familiar and alien.

For my own personal taste I could’ve lived with a few less lingering shots of pensive Timothy Chalamet as Paul, and a bit more exploration of the culture and politics via the stellar supporting cast, but it’s a big film that never bored me, and I very much look forward to the next installment…

Dark

It’s always nice when a new season of something you like drops on a streaming service, but even better is when you discover a series that already has several seasons sitting completed on a streaming service. So it was for me and Dark.

It starts as an ever so slightly sinister and very nicely shot and acted German soap opera, played out in a community with secrets in the shadow of a nuclear reactor. But it quickly hits you with a gobsmacking time-travel revelation, than never stops hitting you with more, ending up in the most complex knot of time-travel paradoxes I’ve ever witnessed.

One could argue that by its third and final season it’s gone slightly off the boil, but it’s still unlike anything else I’ve seen on TV.

Age of Ash

Before Daniel Abraham gained success as one half of James SA Corey, author of The Expanse, he was known for writing subtle, character-focused fantasy.

Now he’s gone back to it, beginning a new series set in the crossroads city of Kithamar. Abraham builds his characters with painstaking patience, mostly avoiding big action and big politics in favour of emotional heft at a thoroughly detailed street level.

It’ll be fascinating to see where he takes the story in future installments, as he’s opted not so much to move the world forward, as to show the same events from different points of view, elevating bit players to central cast.

Perdido Street Station

From a brand new book to one published over 20 years ago – China Mieville’s definitive New Weird manifesto is a dizzying mosaic of a novel taking place in the sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon.

The disparate lives of a rogue’s gallery of bizarre citizens collide and intertwine – a disgraced scientist, a winged man who’s lost his wings, and an artist with an insect for a head to name a few – as something very unpleasant grows in the shadows.

Mieville is well known for rich prose and epic imagination but he shows a quick wit and a deft touch with character here too.

 Horizon Forbidden West

I resisted even trying to get hold of the notoriously difficult-to-get-hold-of Playstation 5 for some time, mostly because there weren’t any games coming out that I felt I really needed to play. But that changed this year with the release of Horizon Forbidden West.

I’d very much enjoyed the precursor Zero Dawn – an open world adventure in a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by a mixture of primitive tribes and killer machines.

Forbidden West suffers slightly from being a sequel – the setting doesn’t feel quite so classic as that from the first game and there’s a slight sense of diminishing returns to revelations about the nature of the apocalypse. But the beautiful detail is second-to-none – leaves, light, water and weather more lovingly rendered than in anything I’ve seen before. The characters even sweat, for god’s sake.

Protagonist Aloy remains a highly appealing character, and trashing giant machine dinosaurs piece by piece never gets old.

Elden Ring

Horizon is beautifully realised and fluid to play, but very much an example of the classic open-world formula, with a map scattered with various categories of challenges, and exhaustive logs to help you keep track of errands done and still to do. It feels safe, familiar.

Elden Ring, on the other hand, feels anything but. It’s very much a development of From Software’s famously unforgiving, frustratingly abstract and gloriously gloomy Dark Souls games – but shifting the action to a vast open-world has created something that feels truly revolutionary.

It’s immense and uncompromising, by turns beatiful, horrible, fatalistic and mysterious, a trippy mix of gothic fantasy and cosmic horror, a fairy tale turned into a rotting nightmare. It has very few characters and, by contrast with something like Horizon, almost no dialogue and somewhat clunky gameplay. The ‘story’ if you can even use the word to describe its slow unfolding, is dripped through to the player in shreds and fragments.

It’s a difficult, weird and unknowable beast, yet utterly compelling, packed with ruined fortresses to explore, secrets to uncover and towering monsters to overcome. A game that seems, at times, to touch the numinous…

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie is out now in paperback from Gollancz.

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Feels like a bit of a boys club, doesn’t it? It seems like we are missing out on the most dangerous of all. The ones who fly under the radar. The ones who, instead of throwing punches, throw shade. The wicked women.

Marla Singer – Fight Club

She’s not technically a killer as we never see her take anyone’s life. There are theories out there that suggest she may not be real, that she is another form of Tyler Durden. I’m not sure I buy this but, either way, there is something psychopathic about a woman attending a support group for testicular cancer…

In the pillow talk scene, Marla says to Tyler, ‘I haven’t been f***ed like that since grade school.’ A great line. But in the original book version she tells him, ‘I want to have your abortions’, which I think sums up the state of her mind perfectly.

Annie Wilkes – Misery

She’s a fan. Kind and helpful and wholesome. And she loves books. People who read lots of books are alright, aren’t they? There is such a quiet malevolence to Kathy Bates’s portrayal of this literary superfan that I still double-take every time a notification pops up in my social media direct messages.

When Patrick Bateman traces the path of the prostitute down the stairs with a chainsaw he eventually drops onto her, he revels in the kill. It’s the exact opposite reaction Annie Wilkes has when she hobbles her favourite author with a block of wood and a sledge hammer to the feet. It’s his fault for trying to get out of bed, she was only trying to help him. Chilling.

Aileen Wournos – Monster

Yes, this film is based on real-life female serial murderer, Aileen Wournos. Even Lecter, it was eventually told, was based on real life killer surgeon, Alfredo Balli Trevino, so she makes this list.

Wournos is not like the other wicked women. She is not subtle. A victim of abuse herself, she is thrown to fits of rage that cannot be controlled. All aimed at men. It’s refreshing but also striking because you know that it really happened.

It’s known that many serial killers eventually want to be caught – it’s the only way they can stop. But Wournos stopped for love. She didn’t want her former girlfriend and love of her life to go to prison for knowing about the murders and struck a deal to keep her out of trouble. It makes her seem human, which makes her crimes worse. Because she wasn’t a monster.

Alex Forrest – Fatal Attraction

This spawned the term bunny boiler to refer to any woman showing an ounce of jealousy or hysteria. Alex Forrest doesn’t kill anyone, either, but she is the perfect example how a woman inflicts damage quietly. Stalking and persistent and with nuance.

The film struck fear into men who contemplated cheating on their partner, which is exactly the brilliance of the female psychopath. There’s a finality to death but torment endures.

The original ending to the film saw Alex frame the lover who spurned her before brutally taking a knife to her own throat. Sure, in the final cut there’s that ‘jump’ moment in the bath before Alex is shot but, I feel, the catharsis of the audience superseded the authenticity of the psychopath and the film is worse for it.

Hedra Carlson – Single White Female

I couldn’t leave this out. I wanted something where the woman’s psychopathy was directed towards another woman because it’s so often aimed towards an unfaithful man. There’s a feeling of disquiet throughout. The audience knows a little more than Hedra’s obsession but it all changes in that moment where she has bleached her hair and styled herself to look exactly the same as the woman she adores. Creepy brilliance.

Psychopaths Anonymous is out now from Orenda Books

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Hollywood star Joan Bennett got top billing as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the loving but somewhat distant matriarch of the family. Her rather caddish brother Roger was played by Louis Edmonds, her daughter Carolyn by Nancy Barrett. Roger’s troubled son David, for whom Vicky was hired as a governess, was David Henesy. Rounding out the main cast were Kathryn Leigh Scott as waitress Maggie Evans and Mitchell Ryan as Burke Devlin, a local man with a vendetta against the Collins family. The show premiered in June 1966.

“There were no monsters when we started,” remembers Ryan. “It was a gothic melodrama, and very romantic.” The response from the viewers, however, was not great: “It was lukewarm. It wasn’t taking its time slot, that’s for sure.”

“The ratings weren’t wonderful, mainly because we were essentially doing a modern-day Jane Eyre,” Scott concurs. “All of the other soaps were doing these steamy plots about divorces and affairs and all of that sort of thing, and what we were doing was fairly staid.”

The appearance of a ghostly member of the Collins family heralded the turn towards straight-up supernatural drama, compounded by the introduction of David’s mother, a malicious Phoenix.

Seeing how successful the supernatural elements were, Curtis decided to introduce a new character, who would go on to define the show. According to Scott: “Dan Curtis, to save the show, came up with the idea – mainly because of his daughters – around Halloween, of bringing on a vampire.” Just under ten months after the show debuted, Jonathan Frid joined the cast as Barnabas Collins.

“When Jonathan came, the ratings doubled,” remembers Ryan. “That just astonished everyone, it was amazing.”

This full supernatural turn did take some getting used to: “I remember Joan Bennett saying: ‘Oh my God, goblins and ghosts?’” laughs Scott.

“Well, yeah, it was the butt of a joke,” says Ryan, “But soap operas are sort of the butt of a joke too. There was no way of turning back because it was incredibly popular.”

The success of Barnabas led to the show becoming a horror/sci-fi series, whilst retaining its soap opera style. Maggie Evans turned out to be the spitting image of Barnabas’ lost love Josette. “I went to the studio one day when I wasn’t working to pick up scripts. I saw Bob Costello, the producer, and June the costume woman wrestling with this clothes dummy that was dressed in ragged finery. They had a green light on her and she was on a dais and they were filming. They said it was the ghost of Josette, what do you think? I said: ‘I think it looks like a clothes dummy!’. They asked me if they would double for the clothes dummy, which I did. With the green light on me and the fan blowing my hair, it was terribly effective. Suddenly I had two roles.”

Barnabas’ history was explored, which led to the introduction of the lovesick witch Angelique, played by Lara Parker, who had cursed Barnabas in the first place.

“I didn’t really think it was such a great job being on a soap opera,” remembers Parker. “I wanted to be on Broadway! But when I got to the actual studio – we had our own studio on the Upper West Side – I was just thrilled because I’d done so many plays and it was a costume drama. We wore hairpieces and bustle dresses and eyelashes, and it was just like doing theatre. It was great fun, so I loved it.”

Over the next few years, the show saw Frankenstein-esque experiments to create life, wars with Lovecraftian creatures, and all manner of other ghastly monsters, with much flitting backwards and forwards (and sideways!) through time.

As with most soaps, the budget was low. The transition to colour in August 1967 particularly exposed some of the show’s shortcomings.

“I loved the black and white,” says Scott. “It’s really interesting, an awful lot of actors, Joan Bennett amongst them, I remember commenting that colour was a backwards step. I understood what they meant because there was something very real and haunting about the grittiness of black and white. Colour did make a difference.”

Throughout the show’s run, there were two primary directors, Lela Swift (who directed both the first and last episodes) and Henry Kaplan.

“Lela Swift was one of the very first women directors,” remembers Scott. “She was tough as nails on the outside, but she was just soft as a marshmallow! She was so caring and helpful to the young actors, like me, who had never been on television before. She could stand up to Dan Curtis, and he really looked to her as a mentor. As a matter of fact, he came on the show directing a couple of episodes under her tutelage before he directed the film, and turned into a remarkable film director. It was Lela Swift who showed him the ropes. We were incredibly lucky to have her.”

“You know, they were like my high school teachers,” remembers Parker. “I just strove so hard to please them. Henry Kaplan used to go around and give people grades. He had key words, like when you had a major realisation, and the music went DUN-DUN-DUUUN, he would say ‘transish!’. He wanted to see the awareness, the transition on your face. He would say: ‘If I don’t see something on your face, you’re not going to get your close-up!’. Then he’d come around after the show, open your dressing room door and say ‘B minus’ and slam your door. I never got an A from him. He kind of jostled us into trying to please him, to give him what he wanted. It’s not an easy thing to do, direct half an hour in one day. I had a great respect for them.”

“They were both pretty eccentric in their own ways,” adds Scott. “They were both characters, they were both larger than life. They were definitely the proper choice for our show!”

Original focal character Vicky disappeared with little fanfare, left trapped in the past. After Moltke left, two other actresses replaced her for brief stints, though neither were overly popular. Vicky was technically killed off, but the malleable nature of reality in the show means that many fans still believe her to be alive.

Before apparently dying in a plane crash, Burke Devlin was also recast. Mitchell Ryan describes the reason for his leaving candidly as “John Barleycorn”. “I was really behind the drink in those days,” he remembers. “It’s a shame because Dan and I were friends. We remained friends and he was very generous and quite lovely. A couple of years later I got to sober up and everything. It was unfortunate, that whole period of my life.”

Later introductions would include Quentin Collins, played by David Selby. Barnabas’ werewolf cousin became the show’s other heartthrob: “The show was a life-changer,” remembers Selby, “I had my own theme song!” Said theme song was the Grammy-nominated tune ‘Shadows of the Night (Quentin’s Theme)’, which featured Selby’s vocals, and is your new earworm. You’re welcome.

Understandably, given the need to produce five episodes a week, the recording schedule was punishing: “We started at 8am,” Selby remembers. “We had read the script around a table the day before (after taping was finished). We blocked the show and then put it up for the camera rehearsal. Then we taped it. It made for long days. At night we had to learn the next day’s script.”

Dark Shadows is frequently used as an example of gaffe-filled TV. “The bloopers were numerous,” acknowledges Parker. “There were mics coming into the shot, and prop men scurrying across the back behind us in the scene. So many things went wrong – not to mention the many times that actors went out and forgot their lines or said the wrong name… we were very under-rehearsed! But like everything else, we got used to it. We were all quick studies and young and enthusiastic, and we got used to it.”

The show came to an end in April 1971. Curtis went on to produce a large number of hugely successful TV and theatrical films, including The Night Stalker and Burnt Offerings, before managing to resurrect Dark Shadows in 1991. The revival only lasted one season, but is well-loved by a loyal fanbase. Another attempted revival was the 2004 pilot but sadly, despite a great cast and some well- done horror sequences, it was not picked up and the pilot remained unaired.

Kathryn Leigh Scott started a publishing company which has released a number of Dark Shadows books, including The Dark Shadows Companion, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the show, and Dark Shadows: Return To Collinwood, which coincided with Tim Burton’s 2012 film.

Lara Parker wrote a novel giving more background to her character, Angelique’s Descent, in 1998. “I started writing and I just discovered that I had a kind of knack for doing this gothic romance. You know, it’s not literary fiction, it’s definitely genre. I just started thinking about my character’s childhood. She supposedly was born in Martinique, and we had actually taken several trips to the Caribbean. I tend to take notes when I’m inspired, and I’d taken a lot of notes about the fish and the shells and the areas that we sailed around, and so, as writers tend to do, I just started using my notes. I started writing about Angelique’s childhood and it just kind of came to me.”

Parker has subsequently written a number of novels within the Dark Shadows universe, most recently Heiress Of Collinwood in 2016.

Appropriately enough for a show where death was never really the end, Dark Shadows has also been resurrected on audio. In the first instance, many of the original cast were reunited in 2003 for Return To Collinwood, co-written by Selby’s son Jamison. First performed as a play at a convention, then recorded as an audio drama, Return sees characters gathering at Collinwood for the reading of Elizabeth’s will.

Audio producers Big Finish began releasing Dark Shadows full-cast audio plays and dramatic readings, starting with The House Of Despair in 2006. “Dark Shadows isn’t known over here [in the UK] that well,” says range co-producer Joe Lidster. “But it was shown in the Nineties on the SciFi Channel. A guy called Stuart Manning, who was working at Big Finish doing cover design – amazing designer –suggested they go for the licence. At the time Big Finish didn’t have a huge amount on aside from Doctor Who. I think it appealed to them to say: ‘Let’s go for an American thing, a different fanbase’.”

A large number of Dark Shadows alumni have returned to the series. “It’s fun to be doing just your voice,” says Parker. “My voice has deepened but not so much that you can’t recognise Angelique, apparently. You don’t have to be in make-up, you don’t have to do your hair, you just act for the microphone. It’s really fun to make the moment work with just your voice. I do very much enjoy doing them and they even let me write a story. They’re very very sweet people!”

Mitch Ryan returned to Dark Shadows for the first time in 48 years in…And Red All Over, opposite Kathryn Leigh Scott. “It’s a wonderful kind of a job, you just go in a recording booth and read it,” he says. “They were pretty good scripts, more up-to-date adventures.”

What is absolutely clear is that these audios are not mere fan-service. “We’re doing a continuation,” says Lidster. “In [2015’s 13-part serial] Bloodlust, we introduced two gay characters. If Dark Shadows was still being made in the Eighties, they would have introduced gay characters, because that’s what American soaps were doing at the time. The TV series is very white, it wouldn’t have been had it carried on. They would have become more socially aware. It’s not retelling stories from the TV series – we are continuing the TV series. Honestly, it’s a real honour to do.”

Dark Shadows’ legacy can be seen in the friendly vampires of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The
Vampire Diaries, and the setup is mirrored in contemporary shows like Hemlock Grove. But the original classic isn’t going to be forgotten anytime soon…

“They have these autograph shows in LA and people come up with pictures of me in Dark Shadows,” says Ryan. “It’s amazing – things that hang on forever. Fans are quite extraordinary.”

What is it that has given Dark Shadows this amazing longevity?

“I think it must have been the investigation of the vampire,” suggests Ryan. “It’s an incredible folk horror story. You could see very clearly that it wasn’t doing very well and then, when the vampire came, it did a thousand times better. It had to be that. Then, I think, it got a little out of hand, from what I gather, with all the ghosts and all the different strange people. But it was fun!”

“For me, it’s the American Doctor Who,” says Joe Lidster. “It’s a bunch of crazy people making something they can’t make! The budget is not there, the technology is not there… that is not stopping them. It’s the imagination and the storytelling, and that’s what I want to do with the audios. Keep that imagination and that storytelling. Respect what’s gone before but really push it and tell some new, exciting stories.”

“As the years roll by – you realise it’s 50 years now – I slowly became aware of how wonderful it was,” says Parker. “I grew to really love the fans and look forward to seeing them. I guess it changed my life in that it gave me something really permanent to hang on to, and to be proud of.” She also credits the show’s reworking of classic literature for its success: “They were richly written, and even though it came out corny people get caught up in it. Those are timeless stories.”

“I think it’s because we had our own little studio in Hell’s Kitchen,” says Scott. “The fact that we were all by ourselves. At the top of the street there was a little French bistro and we used to go up there after work. The technicians, the stage hands, the writers, the actors, directors… Dan Curtis would take all of us out for dinner. If you were written out of the script you didn’t worry too much because you knew he’d bring you back. There was this wonderful sense of family, and that’s one of the most important things I could say about the show.’

“Dark Shadows was at a time of turmoil in the US,” explains David Selby. “There was Vietnam, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassinations. Dark Shadows was an escape. The show was something we had not seen before on television… a vampire, a werewolf, witches. The show moved around in time… there were great characters, great actors and writing, and great music. It was done on tape but we never stopped so it was really a ‘live” broadcast… warts and all. The fans came aboard and never got off to this day. How lucky I was to be a part of something I hold dear.”

Dark Shadows: Bloodlust is available from www.bigfinish.com. Image credits (including main image): © MPI Home Video

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These two brand-new full-cast audio dramas follow the Fourth Doctor and Leela into an uproarious tour through time and a prehistoric encounter with an esteemed palaeontologist.

“I so love doing all this, I never ever get tired,” said Tom Baker on taking on the role of the Doctor for his tenth year with Big Finish  “It’s as if each one is the very first one – and the more improbable it is the more I love it because I, of course, am totally improbable myself!”

The volume consists of two rip-roaring rides starting with ‘Tribulations of Thadeus Nook’ by Andrew Smith, which sees The Doctor and Leela encounter Thadeus Nook, a most enterprising young gentleman using time travel for his own financial gain by conducting Time Tours. The Doctor is horrified at the irresponsibility – but it’s just the tip of the iceberg, because Thadeus Nook is about to learn that history is often best left in the past.

Next up in the volume is ‘The Primeval Design’ by Helen Goldwyn. Taking place in Dorset, 1830, the Doctor has taken Leela to meet Mary Anning, the noted palaeontologist. However, the duo immediately stumble into trouble when a body is found that has been attacked by an animal… but one of a size unknown in the area. It turns out some things might be better off staying buried…

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series 10 Volume 2 is out on 10 February and is available now available to pre-order as a collector’s edition box set (on CD at £24.99) and as a digital download (at £19.99), exclusively at the Big Finish website.

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