Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Sunday Scaries. It’s Georges Franju’s birthday, director of 29 films but best known for the stylish and playful Feuilladesque thriller Judex (1963) and the achingly lyrical body horror fairytale Les Yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (1960), both featuring the incredible Edith Scob.

If you’ve never seen it (and know the title only from the largely unrelated Billy Idol song), Eyes Without a Face tells the disquieting story of Christiáne, a disfigured young woman whose surgeon father attempts to restore her beauty through a series of surgeries facilitated by unwilling donors. None of this goes well, as you might expect, and each attempt leaves her more alienated from her identity and consumed with despair. The film slowly builds to a powerful climax and leaves us with a transcendent final image. This film has been hugely influential since its release, and its central concept can be found in numerous unofficial riffs and remakes, like Jess Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orlof, The Face of Another, The Skin I Live In, Scalpel, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Seconds. Celebrate!

Another thing to celebrate this week, at least for me: Five years after its first publication, my queer horror novel/memoir RED X — in advance of its 5th anniversary special edition — has received its first-ever starred review, in Publishers Weekly. In a complex ever-changing industry, Publishers Weekly reviews remain hugely influential among librarians, booksellers, publishers, editors, agents, acquisitions teams, book clubs, influencers and obsessive readers. Starred reviews are uncommon, and are a mark of exceptional merit. They do not necessarily guarantee of increased sales, but they do draw attention to works that might otherwise be skipped over. It is extremely rare for industry magazines to review reprints, so this is doubly exciting. RED X made its debut in the midst of the pandemic, compromising its launch and its marketing and limiting its ability to find its readership. This is a wonderful recognition and a big boost to the book’s visibility. I had a little party for myself this morning and made this simple but delightful olive oil cake — highly recommended!

Strings: Attached

It would normally be a cause for celebration if you received an email telling you that you had received a major prize, one that you hadn’t applied for, one for which you’d been chosen in secret, and one that would allow you to take a year or two to work on the project of your choosing or, indeed, no project at all. So what luck for Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai, who in February was notified that she’d been chosen for the US$175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize. But with the significant prize came a significant catch: She would have to drop everything and run a gauntlet of promotional activities including a six-day festival appearance, an audio interview, a promotional video, a podcast and a piece for the Yale Review. She would, in fact, have to work for it. What a pleasant treat!

As fate would have it, Helen DeWitt was older, overextended, outside her home country, had already cleared her schedule to focus on writing after ‘five very bad years,’ and as she herself would likely observe, was somewhat neurodivergent and easily flustered in her attempts to wrangle wi-fi, email, WhatsApp, Google forms, cellphone roaming, Zoom and the needs of total strangers. “I think I am looking death in the face,” she wrote in her darkly amusing but ultimately dispiriting blog post, which she was embargoed from writing until the results of the prize were finally announced on Wednesday. I was reminded of Doris Lessing’s “Oh, Christ!” upon learning that she had received the Nobel. Some people are just trying to go about living their lives, you know.

I was especially upset for DeWitt as the Windham-Campbell people were determined to get their pound of promotional flesh and that the extent of their accommodations for someone’s obvious disability was to smile and nod and point to the itinerary. “If the superstructure of the prize excludes people who are not able to do all the extra things you want, that hardly seems in the spirit of what was intended by its generous founders,” DeWitt wrote in an email to the organizer. My remark on BlueSky at the time, reflecting not just on this sorry situation but on many similar stories in publishing and the arts, was “Everyone wants to buy a monkey.”

The good news, in its way, is that the formidable writer of difficult people Gwendoline Riley has received the prize instead, and will no doubt put it to fine use.

This week in horror: The Artemis 2 astronauts have returned after a gripping journey filled with extraordinary visuals. As far as I can tell, none of them has brought back a civilization-ending space parasite, but we can always hope.

Currently reading: Despite my reluctance to bring more plastic junk into the world, I as a crafty boy am contemplating buying a fancypants 3D printer. Thankfully, this article in aftermath about printing your own air purifier has prodded me into thinking beyond video game figurines and oddly shaped lamps towards things that are genuinely useful and, well, outside the box. Aftermath is doing some great work on video games, the internet and online culture, and would benefit greatly from your attention and subscription.

Currently watching: Movies with women who are afraid of the telephone. I also watched a true oddity this week: Dementia (1955). In my review on Letterboxd, I said, “Wordless (but not silent) labyrinthian noir with horror flourishes is underseen but has cast a long shadow over American cinema. A young woman wakes up in a sleazy hotel after stabbing someone—or has she? The narrative twists and curls on itself until it is impossible to determine what is real and what is not. Stunningly shot, wonderfully scored, a true one-of-a-kind film experience.” The restored original version, linked above, has a surprising written intro by Preston Sturges, and is mercifully missing the unnecessary Ed McMahon voiceover in the more widely available alternative version “Daughter of Horror”. This would pair well with Carnival of Souls, The Maze, Night Tide, Spellbound and The Spiral Staircase.

Cool story, bro: "A box arrives for your mother. Bath beads from overseas, a set of three candles in glass jars like a church on Christmas Eve. The beads are clear ruby red, perfectly round, hypnotic. They give softly beneath your fingertips until she takes the glass jar from your hands. These are for mother only, she says.” The Ritual of Bathing by Libby Cudmore, in The Dark.

That’s it for this edition of Sunday Scaries. Breaking news: I’ve just heard that Viktor Orbán has conceded defeat in today’s Hungarian election. As Tony Bennett once sang, you must believe in spring.

Until next time, remember: “When I look in a mirror, I feel I'm looking at someone who looks like me, but seems to come from the beyond, from the beyond.”