Andy Campbell's latest is absolutely stunning, probably Dreaming Method’s best work to date and a real refinement of that strand in Andy’s work that I can only describe as Northern Council Estate Gothic, unheimlich is precisely the word for this one. David Lynch meets Ken Loach anyone? Blair Witch in Bradford? Maybe the touchstone is something like Sydney Lumet’s “The Offence” or even Peter Collinson’s, “Fright” (did Ian Bannen only play psychos in the Seventies?) The product of a childhood (mis)spent watching the Saturday Night BBC2 Hammer Horror and Amicus* double bills and haunting the post-industrial dead zones of provincial Northern towns, high on cheap weed and looking for a good fear buzz, I’ll wager. (Much like myself then!) Andy suggests you get the lights down and the sound up for this one, and that there’s a lot of detail you won’t get to on even your third or fourth visit. The time limit’s a brilliant idea, a brilliant innovation, and adds real pace and tension to a form that can otherwise become rather diffuse, one of the main drawbacks of hypertext/new media stuff (unless you’re one of those arch-theorist for whom the whole point of the endevour is, like, how it challenges conventional narrative through it very diffuseness, yeah? and thereby justifies the whole freight of Academic propositions the project is supposed to illustrate (too much of this kind of smug, bloodless stuff around for my tastes.)) It also really helps that Andy has been worrying away at computer-based fiction for at least as long as, oooh, Robert Coover, for example and is a visual artist first by inclination and now by profession.

I can only pray that the highly-anticipated (by me, mostly) Dreaming Methods/ Six Aborted Novels collaboration (Six Aborted Dreams?) comes about. Man’s a genius!

Link Problems!

try cut and pasting this

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/theflat/

*when did we suddenly get so shit at/stop making horror movies?

UPDATE!

THE FLAT has now been updated!!!!!

Right, now I MUST get some writing done!