Patrick
Chapman has published eight poetry collections since 1991, as well as a novel, three
volumes of stories, and a non-fiction book about David Cronenberg. Other work
includes an award-winning short film, television for children, and audio dramas
for Doctor Who and Dan Dare. He is a founding editor
of poetry magazine The Pickled Body. His next poetry collection, The
Following Year, will appear from Salmon in 2023.
A book you loved
reading at a child.
The Bloody
Chamber by Angela Carter was
a touchstone for me when I was a child. A collection of disturbing gothic miniatures,
it filled me with a sensible dread of werewolves, and a feeling that reality
itself was provisional. The book’s subversion of fairy tales showed how a story
depends on how it is told, as much as what happens within it. When Neil Jordan
made a film based on this book, co-writing the script with Carter herself, I
was mesmerised. I took seriously the injunction to beware those who are hairy
on the inside. The book led me to Jordan’s own collection, Night in
Tunisia, and The Dream of a Beast, his fantastical novella that
feels like it was inspired by his work with Carter.
A book you have
given as a gift / recommended to a friend.
Vermilion Sands collects J.G. Ballard’s short stories set in
that holiday resort of the future, where plants sing opera, buildings can
empathise with the feelings of their occupants, and sculptors in aircraft perform
a kind of topiary on the clouds. This is a playground for the beautiful
stranger and the beautifully strange. It’s a surrealistic landscape, a Palm
Springs of the mind, filled with the disaffected leisured rich, and influenced
by Ballard’s own delight in the works of Dalí and other painters. His first
published short story, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956) is also his first tale set in
Vermilion Sands. If you’re new to Ballard’s short fiction, that’s a great place
to start. I’d recommend reading Vermilion Sands as a standalone
collection, even if you already have a copy of the enormous, beautiful Complete Short Stories.
A book you have read
more than once.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is the best vampire book
ever written, and it isn’t about vampires. It’s better than Dracula, Carmilla,
the Lestat books. It’s better, even, than ’Salem’s Lot, and the
author of that book – who cites Matheson’s novella as an influence – would
surely agree. There’s nothing supernatural in the story. These vampires are not
ghosts, nor are they properly undead. To say more would be to spoil the plot.
What can be said is that, in the same way that Jaws is not a film about
a shark, I Am Legend is not a book about bloodsuckers. It’s about
loneliness, morality, ethics, and the failure to recognise one’s own true place
in society. As the promotional tagline tells us, the last man on Earth is not
alone. The implications of this statement become shatteringly clear as the book
goes on. None of the film adaptations has done the book justice, though the
Vincent Price version comes closest. One day, an adaptation that is true to the
story – and the title – may be made. For me, I suspect, the best version of I
Am Legend will always be Matheson’s novella, which is best read while alone,
with no other humans around.
A book that you started but never
finished.
Final Exit, edited by Derek Humphry, is a handbook for
those who wish to take control over their own departures from this life. Or,
depending on your point of view, it is a dangerous manual on how to commit
suicide. What it does, beyond the practical instruction it gives, is make you
think about life, hope, illness, despair, and ethics. I bought it thinking I
might need it and stopped reading when I realised that I didn’t. Perhaps the
book is out of print now, or illegal, or superseded by the internet, and it has
proven both liberating and troubling to different constituencies. Final Exit
is the first ‘whodunnit’ in which the answer is not the butler, the adulterer,
or the embezzler, but the reader.
A book with personal
resonance.
Ray Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles is what was known as a ‘fix-up novel’ – stitching many related
short stories together with linking texts. Bradbury’s masterpiece stands up
well today as an allegory of genocide, with its Martians being quite similar in
many respects to the American ‘everyday citizens’ of the 1940s, as well as to
the ‘Indians’ destroyed by the arrival of Europeans. The book is a warning
against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a cry of despair at how,
wherever humans go, we bring our own frailties with us. Its ending can be read
as either hopeful or salutary. The Martian Chronicles has personal
resonance because in 2014, I had the privilege of producing an adaptation for
BBC Radio 4, directed by Andrew Sewell, and starring Derek Jacobi and Hayley
Atwell. The writers, Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle, had to compress the story
into 45 minutes, which they did admirably, though much was left out. This is
another story I’d like to see given a decent film adaptation, probably as a
trilogy. The 1980 television miniseries did a not-bad job, but it was very much
of its time. The Martian Chronicles speaks to us today most clearly as
an ecological fable. As we rush headlong into the collapse of our own
civilisation it’s not too late to look up, slow down, and remember there’s no
place like home.
