Books, Fiction and Miles Fielder

The highs and lows of Harry Potter’s outrageous fortunes

An evaluation of each of the films from the Harry Potter series

28 Jun 2011

Having earned £6 billion worldwide, Harry Potter is the highest grossing film franchise of all time. And while the critical reception hasn’t always matched the commercial one (no Academy Awards yet), the films have been as successful as JK Rowling’s…

Lars Husum and his novel My Friend Jesus Christ

A wild and bizarre slapstick farce

6 Aug 2010

Given that My Friend Jesus Christ reads like a Dogme movie, you can’t help but feel Lars Husum’s time working as a dramaturge at Lars von Trier’s Copenhagen film production company Zentropa fed into his debut novel. ‘It’s not conscious, but I see your…

Jeff Lemire - Sweet Tooth

29 Jul 2010

(Titan/Vertigo) It’s hardly surprising that Jeff Lemire’s current ongoing series (the first five issues of which are collected here) should be a bleak, post-apocalyptic yarn that recalls, among other precedents, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Lemire…

Mike Mignola gets back to the drawing board with Abe Sapien, Hellboy and BPRD

24 Jun 2010

Miles Fielder chats to writer and artist Mike Mignola about the expanding world of his demonic offspring and literally getting back to the drawing board

Lars Husum - My Friend Jesus Christ

24 Jun 2010

(Portobello Books) Before authoring this, his first novel, Danish writer Lars Husum worked at filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Copenhagen production company Zentropa as a script doctor. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that My Friend Jesus Christ has…

Joe Gores - Spade and Archer

4 Dec 2009

It’s a tall order writing a prequel to one of the greatest American hardboiled crime novels. But if anyone was going to pull off a forerunner to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon it was Joe Gores, like his predecessor, a war veteran, former private…

Eddie Campbell

The comic artist/writer brings his life's work together

17 Sep 2009

Glasgow-born, Brisbane-based Eddie Campbell is best known for illustrating From Hell, his and writer Alan Moore’s exhaustive graphic novel investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s the Oz-based ex-pat’s autobiographical comics, however, that…

Val McDermid - Fever of the Bone

3 Sep 2009

Staying true to gruesome form, the first murder in the Fife crime novelist’s latest slice of Tartan Noir could’ve been committed in 1880s Whitechapel. After the body of a young girl is found with her genitals removed, psychological profiler Tony Hill…

Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice

9 Jul 2009

Less than half the length of his last 1000-page tome and riffing on the relatively straightforward hardboiled crime genre as opposed to the exhausting literary mash-up of Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel is the reclusive author’s most…

Howard Chaykin - American Flagg!

28 May 2009

With a penchant for eroticism and violence, US comics visionary Howard Chaykin is releasing another groundbreaking work. Miles Fielder chats to him.

Chuck Palahniuk: Pygmy

28 May 2009

Having tackled the taboo subject of porn in his last book Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk’s tenth novel sees the controversy-courting author moving onto another no-no topic with this wickedly witty tale of terrorism in the American heartland. A terrorist attack…

Daniel Depp - Loser’s Town

19 Feb 2009

(Simon & Schuster) CRIME DRAMA Daniel Depp’s claim to fame to date is being the half-brother of movie star Johnny and co-writing The Brave, which was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at Cannes in 1997. As a former Hollywood…

Thomas Hettche - What We Are Made Of

17 Jul 2008

CINEMATIC THRILLER (Picador) The blurb on the flyleaf of Thomas Hettche’s German Booker prize-shortlisted novel likens his page-turning thriller to the films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. Certainly, Hettche’s prose style is cinematic, not…

Spent

Joe Matt

20 Sep 2007

The confessions of a self-justified jerk-off continue in this follow-up to The Poor Bastard, which collects the next four issues of Matt’s ongoing comic Peepshow. If anything, Spent (as in ejaculated and knackered) is an even more brazenly confessional…