I’d love to know what’s behind that face of yours. I stare at you and I stare at you and I can’t see anything...
Running on empty: a review of Breathless (1983)
Author: dhounam
Former medieval historian, painter, translator and Javascript developer. More recently, author of Gifted (2015), Pariah (2016), Mortal (2023), and Those Who Wait (2024)
Hey, hey, hey, hey
Four syllables that say everything that needs to be said. From the Queen of Pop...
Silas Marner: a short novel
Most novels are much longer than they need to be. George Eliot's Silas Marner, although unsatisfactory in the end, is a rare exception...
Four seagulls and a dove: a sad story
The first sign of trouble was when we got dive-bombed by an angry adult seagull...
The ship was lost, the crew perished: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
No other novel in English ends with a punch like Charlotte Brontë's sublime last novel
He’s not a naughty boy, he’s the Messiah!
So here's the trope I'd like to eliminate from Young Adullt fiction: messianic main characters. Fuck 'em.
Avast there, ye swabs!
The whole point about the bad guy is that he thinks he's the good guy. For a great villain, go back to Treasure Island and Long John Silver...
The invisibility of Vincent Van Gogh
The paintings are there somewhere; you just can't see them. Art, sadly, has become almost invisible, eclipsed by the art lovers
Unpersuaded: a disappointing classic
Last year, on a whim, I decided to revisit Persuasion… and was genuinely taken by surprise: it seemed to me not merely disappointing but actively bad...
The People’s Crusade as an exercise in mass formation psychosis
When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense… and then their attention gets focussed by a leader or a series of events on one small point—just like hypnosis—they literally become hypnotised and can be led anywhere.
Donald Hounam 