Ariadne's Thread

“But what if someone died wearing it?”              This refrain is familiar to anyone who has a penchant for vintage or pre-loved clothes, usually uttered by a friend whose expression contorts in distaste at the thought of wearing clothes that another person has lived, loved and potentially perished in.  Admittedly, this sort or sartorial squeamishness is becoming less common, as environmental awareness increases and secondhand clothes become items of sustainability, rather than eccentricity.           And yet it’s a concern that is located at the heart of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), a peculiar film that can be found at the point where the Italian giallo horror genre and David Lynch meet.  The plot, if you will excuse the pun, is threadbare.  There is no comforting three act construction that audiences have gotten used to in their films; no conclusions, no resolution.  Instead, there is...

Read Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls The genre of this book is impossible to pin down, as it incorporates aspects of gothic, sci-fi, thriller, criminal investigation and…time travel?!  A serial killer is able to murder young women across time, utilising a ‘haunted’ house, and his only survivor begins to piece it together.  You would think that under the weight of so much genre, the narrative would collapse, but the consistent threads are enough to fascinate and pull you through the chaos of interweaving narratives.  Which, incidentally, force you to ponder the nature of hauntings, memory, trauma and time.  Usually, I struggle with crime novels, because while I acknowledge that a disproportionate amount of crimes happen to women, crime fiction can often devolve into a sadistic catalogue that may as well be entitled “Girls, and the awful things to do to them.”  Thus, a balance between realism and good storytelling can be hard to find.  Beukes, however, gives...