“But it is not spring that I remember: rather those days when the lights were on by eleven o’clock, and wet roofs and the mill chimneys shivered behind a curtain of water. The seven stories are all told in a first-person (mostly female) voice of an adult looking back on pivotal moments in childhood, set against an industrial urban backdrop and within the world of a highly unorthodox nuclear family.Īll the stories here are closely observed, showcasing the author’s exemplary skill at painting secondary characters with a simple literary flourish: “Myra was little, she was mere, rat-faced and meager, like a nameless cut in a butcher’s window in a demolition area.”Īlso, Mantel reliably locates the right sensory details to evoke a childhood disrupted by arcane family dynamics and the ambition to escape provincial life in the North of England. Mantel’s new story collection, Learning to Talk (published here for the first time, originally in the UK in 2013) has a much narrower focus-that is, a troubled Catholic childhood in and around the village of Derbyshire in the North of England in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The trilogy’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is as fully rendered as any fictional character in modern times, and these epic works are wonderful to read from first page to last. So successful is this behemoth work that one reads The Mirror & the Light (the last novel in the series, coming in at a mere 700 pages) with the same page-turning fervor as Wolf Hall, and its successor, Bring Down the Bodies. Somehow Mantel contrived to break (or reinvent) the code for this genre, transforming the hoary conventions of novels set during the reign of King Henry VIII into narratives with a contemporary point of view superbly suited to our latter-day sensibilities. Recently, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey suitably defiled the public domain.Let’s be clear right from the start: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy stands at the apex of historical fiction in the 21 st century. And then there’s movies that will never even get a sniff of a chance for a sequel, like Sandra Bullock’s Premonition, the Daniel Craig clunker Dream House, or the eerily and aptly-titled The Disappointments Room. Same goes for sequels, as Jason, Jaws, the living dead, and an American werewolf make their appearances. As you might expect, the list features an inordinate number are remakes, the biggest offenders including The Fog, Jacob’s Ladder, Flatliners, and Martyrs. No movie listed here achieved higher than 9% on the Tomatometer. Here lies a group of wretched movies with the lowest Tomatometers of all time – with a minimum of 20 reviews – now rising and shambling into our guide to the worst horror movies ever made. We’re scraping the bottom of the cauldron for this one, freaky folks. (Photo by Paramount Insurge/courtesy Everett Collection) The Worst Horror Movies of All Time
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