Thursday 28 July 2016

A partial & subjective list of the influences, inspirations and random thoughts behind The Quarantined City:

The short stories of Charles L Grant
My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Twin Peaks
The decades old associations of the smell resulting from an accidentally smashed jar of paprika
A school trip to Eyam circa 1985
The short stories of Jorge Borges
The experience of deja-vu
The baby from Trainspotting
Under The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
My stag do, Cork
Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Pirandello
My cat (George)
The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
The second-hand book-stall in the covered market, Oxford
The Dark Tower novels, Stephen King
What I think A Tale Of Two Cities is about, despite having never read it
The arboretum park, Nottingham
Invisible Cities, Calvino
Gremlins
Friends (no, really)
The drawings of Escher
It Only Comes Out At Night, Dennis Etchison
The music of Mogwai
Descriptions of real-life ‘near death experiences’
L’Auberge bar (Le Crotoy, France)
Weekend break to Rome
Memento Inception
The Double, Jose Saramago
The feeling of disorientation when visiting somewhere you've never been before, where the layout of the streets makes little sense
Auto De Fe, Elias Canetti
The Beautiful Strange, Shirley Jackson
The Exorcist, William Peter Blattey
The experience of deja-vu
Desolation Row, Bob Dylan
Northern Exposure
What happened to me the day my drink was spiked
The Plague, Albert Camus
Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End Of The World, Haruki Murakami
The Orphanage
Ultraviolence, Lana Del Ray
The novels of Philip K Dick
Hempel’s Ravens paradox
The short stories of Ramsey Campbell
My hazy & no doubt woefully inaccurate understanding of modern physics & cosmology, especially quantum entanglement & parallel universes 
The City Of Glass, Paul Auster
The Information, Martin Amis
The lines from TS Eliot's Four Quartets I can remember 
Black Flowers, Steve Mosby
One specific scene in The Shining
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Ghost Story, Peter Straub
That drawing which is a young girl looked at one way, and an old woman the other
That drawing which is a rabbit looked at one way, and a duck the other

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