Breakfast in the Ruins

Phil, Miles, and Graham (by late Marconi T1154 Transmission) join me in Derry & Toms for an uncomfortable encounter with Guy N. Smith’s Bamboo Guerillas, a book whose notoriety among paperback collectors we've been egging each other on to explore for a few years. Commissioned to push wartime sex and violence to extremes, it leaves us wondering what all that unpleasantness actually achieved, and what its existence tells us about the market that produced it. Along the way, we get into Tenko, Darkie’s Mob, and the brilliantly cynical jungle war films Too Late the Hero (featuring our old friend Percy Herbert) and The Long and the Short and the Tall (featuring no Percy Herbert at all... sad face emoji). Content warning for discussions around sexual violence and torture, of which there is a lot in this book. Also boners. So many boners. I mention Jeff Popple's excellent blog post about sleazy pulp war novels and Horwitz Press (which I repeatedly referred to as Horowtiz Press). You can read that here.

  Graham and Phil are back as we round off this year’s Halloween run with Breeding Ground, Shaun Hutson’s sequel to Slugs. Having apparently learnt nothing from our previous encounter, we’re heading into London’s sewers for another helping of slimy, metal-infused, mucusy death. Can a second dose deliver the same revolting pleasures? Join us as we get stuck into Hutson’s particular brand of paperback nastiness and consider the wisdom of returning to a book series (soon to be three) whose principal attraction is people being eaten by things you normally find under a plant pot. Pull on your wellies. Wash your salad leaves thoroughly. Bring salt.

Our Halloween run continues as our mate Gemma joins us to revisit her horrifying history with the Point Horror series, courtesy of Caroline B. Cooney’s Freeze Tag. We’re heading back to a world of ominous paperback covers, American teenage envy and playground games with potentially fatal consequences. Along the way, we discuss childhood cruelty, teenage obsession, sympathy for the outsider, questionable behaviour from the beautiful people, and the discovery that supernatural powers are unlikely to improve your love life. Because no excursion into adolescent horror would be complete without adolescent drinking choices, our accompanying ghoulish booze pays tribute to the crap we drank as teenagers. Come for the paperback nostalgia. Stay for the poor decisions.

It's Halloween season again at Breakfast in the Ruins, and we're kicking things off with a journey into the darker, more monstrous corners of Robert E. Howard's imagination! This time, I'm joined by author and friend of the show Andy Darby to discuss Howard's gloriously gruesome sword and sorcery tale The Valley of the Worm, along with another of his rip-roaring adventures, The Gods of Bal-Sagoth. Expect prehistoric horrors, ancient evils, mighty-thewed warriors, a bit of literary archaeology and plenty of enthusiasm for the weird fiction of one of Weird Tales' most celebrated contributors. We also chat about Andy's latest book, Sword Songs: An Anthology of Dark Fantasy – Volume 1, a collection of four bloody tales of dark fantasy, murderous gods, haunted places and grim destinies. You can pick up a copy through AbeBooks UK or ThriftBooks. So sharpen your blades, gird your loins and keep an eye out for anything enormous and wriggling in the undergrowth. Halloween has arrived at Derry and Toms!

It's our 150th episode, and we've now been at this for seven Earth years! So how do we celebrate this milestone? By sitting on the sofa and gassing about one of our earliest reads, a book we read in the 1970s that turned out, on reflection, to be a massive gateway drug in terms of where our interests would head just a couple of years later. We're looking at Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree... a tale of the Multiverse?