The premise is diabolical in its elegance: two strangers meet, exchange idle talk, and one proposes a pact so grotesque it seems almost a joke. “You do my murder, I’ll do yours.” A child’s logic, but a murderer’s ingenuity. This was Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel in 1950, and like the serpent in Genesis, she slithered … Continue reading Strangers on a Train
Category: Literature
Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost: A Ghost Story that Refuses to be Gothic
Ghosts, we are told, ought to terrify. They ought to shuffle about in winding sheets, rattle chains, and mutter warnings about imminent doom. In the long Gothic tradition - from Horace Walpole’s Otranto to the shadowy corridors of Mrs Radcliffe - apparitions exist to unsettle our digestion and our theology in equal measure. Yet Oscar … Continue reading Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost: A Ghost Story that Refuses to be Gothic
The Demons at the Trailhead
“If you talk to any serious hiker they’re like yes, demons are real, make sure you don’t walk along a stream for too long, sometimes a witch trails me for miles, avoid wearing bright colours, and pray before entering the forest. The ancient is still very much alive along the edges.” I stumbled upon that … Continue reading The Demons at the Trailhead
Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
It’s almost too neat that Salomé should have been written in French. The language of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and decadence itself lent Wilde the perfect tongue for blasphemy dressed in silks. The Victorians expected their theatre to teach morality, to improve the soul, to extol duty. Wilde offered them instead a necrophilic waltz in candlelight, where … Continue reading Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
All Roads Lead Back: On Darwish, Memory, and the Futility of Forgetting
Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: ‘All roads lead to you, even those I took to forget you.’ On first reading, it sounds like the lament of a man caught in the undertow of lost love, circling endlessly back to the figure he most wishes to escape. But linger with it a while, and the line grows … Continue reading All Roads Lead Back: On Darwish, Memory, and the Futility of Forgetting
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