Red Riding

Over the past few days I read Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace, the final two volumes in the "Red Riding" series of dark crime thrillers. In Nineteen Eighty the Yorkshire Ripper killings continue and the police are heavily criticised for failing to stop the murders and honest cop Peter Hunter is assigned to look over the investigation and basically police the police. However Hunter soon finds that he has lifted the lid on a world of horrific violence and police corruption and before long his investigation threatens to destory him and everyone he loves. In Nineteen Eighty-Three three seperate plot lines, linked by the investigation into a missing girl, bring the series to a bleak and brutal conclusion. Read seperately the books don't really make much sense, although I thought Nineteen Eighty was the best in the series, which actually has a more conventional plot-line and a more sympathetic narrator. It's been a very good and very well-written series but the problem is that it is so unrelentingly gloomy and violent.

Last night I listened to the second part of a radio adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, and also an episode of The Price of Fear in which Vincent Price introduced the story of a writer who decides to spend a night locked in to a wax museum's Chamber of Horrors in order to get inspiration, however next morning he has mysteriously died of fright.

Later on I listened to a radio adaptation of a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone called "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" based on a story by Charles Beaumont, about a future society in which at the age of nineteen everyone is forced to undergo a form of plastic surgery in which their face and body is changed to one of a series of templates, and so everyone looks and acts exactly the same. It was a good story and worked really well on the radio.

It was another really dull and ordinary day at work again today and I was glad to get back home.