Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - with a title like that, you know perfectly well what you are going to get. Especially if you have, like me, read Seth Grahame-Smith's previous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and know his knack with mixing horror themes with older, historical or fictional, stories in which you'd never have expected to encounter zombies or vampires. However, instead of reading the original novel, I'm taking a look at the comic book adaptation by Tony Lee and illustrated by Cliff Richards.
Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution from 1921 is perhaps the most acclaimed of Sabatini's works. However, before I finally read it, my only knowledge of it came from the 1952 film, which I liked but never enough to actually go and try the novel before now. It turns out that I had been missing one of the best historical fiction novels ever written.
I must admit to not being a big fan of the Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The plot was perhaps a bit too simplistic - I found coming-of-age stories dull even as a child - and the characters uninteresting. The only potential character in the bunch was always the pirate Long John Silver and that potential has been over-used ever since then by many other authors and script-writers, either adapting the original story or revisiting the characters in some other way. Xavier Dorison and Mathieu Laufray's take in the four part graphic novel, Long John Silver, is unique enough, however, to make their story stand out from the rest.
My wife and I were invited to attend the opening ceremony of the Heavy Metal exhibition at the Häme Castle on the 21st April. First things first, the exhibition has next to nothing to do with certain genre of music, and a lot to do with heavy metal armour and weapons used in the 16th to 18th centuries. The arms and armour come from the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria and they are, therefore, historical equipment used by the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire under the Hapsburg rule. These are displayed for the first time in Northern Europe, so it was simply a chance of a lifetime to be one of the first people to enjoy the exhibition.
The further back you go in the werewolf genre literature, the less and less similar they are to the modern Hollywood-influenced genre stereotype. Alexandre Dumas was a prolific author who wrote The Wolf-Leader some time after he got into financial troubles and ended his cooperation with one of his most important collaborators, Auguste Maquet - with whom he had written the famous d'Artagnan Romances. I'm not enough of a Dumas scholar to say whether my disappointment with The Wolf-Leader might be the result of Dumas having worked alone this time, but I cannot but wonder if there's a connection.
It is not too often that one gets to dress up as a historical figure and star in a movie (even a short one). So, I beg of you to forgive me if I use this chance to express my elation about such an opportunity.
The new Accessible Exhibition has just opened at the Olavinlinna Castle, located in Savonlinna, Finland. Last year, me and my family were invited to take part in the production of the video footage that is a part of this exhibition (read all about it here). Although you will have to travel to Savonlinna to see the entire 10 minute video, the Finnish National Museum has released two trailers of the video that you can enjoy anywhere you may want to.
The first of these is a so-called short trailer and you can spot yours truly at around the 12 second mark, walking down a castle hallway.
The second one is a so-called long trailer, featuring quite a lot of scenes not seen in the short one. You can spot me and my wife and daughter at around the 30 second mark. I'm standing in the background while my wife and daughter are seated at a table, playing a historical board game.
Matt Tomerlin's The Devil's Fire is the first novel in a series of three, telling the story of Katherine Lindsay whose husband is brutally killed in front of her before she herself is dragged aboard a pirate ship. It is set in the somewhat over-used time period when Nassau was the pirate haven in the Caribbean. Forced to share a cabin with a pirate captain for several months, Katherine begins to get used to the life at sea. But the shadow of her dead husband is ever-present...
Black Sails is a Starz produced series telling the story of events leading up to Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island. The protagonist is Captain Flint, the year is 1715 and the setting is mainly Nassau on the New Providence Island of the Bahamas - the historical pirate haven from 1713-1718. In addition to Stevenson's pirate captain, the show stars historical figures such as Anne Bonny, Benjamin Hornigold, Jack Rackham, and Charles Vane.
Rima Jean's The Noble Pirates is a tale of a woman participating on a booze cruise with her friends when a sudden storm removes her from her own time of 2011 and throws her through time in to the year of 1719 and into the hands of pirates. I did not expect much from a time travel pirate novel, which sounded suspiciously too much like a romance novel to boot, but I was very pleasantly surprised by what it turned out to be.
