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Synopsis
The entertaining, moving, and unpredictable new thriller from multi-award-winning bestseller Chris Brookmyre is a wholly original masterpiece.
Millie Spark can kill anyone.
A special effects make-up artist, her talent is to create realistic scenes of bloody violence.
Then, one day, she wakes to find her lover dead in her bed.
Twenty-five years later, her sentence for murder served, Millicent is ready to give up on her broken life - until she meets troubled film student and reluctant petty thief Jerry.
Together, they begin to discover that all was not what it seemed on that fateful night . . . and someone doesn't want them to find out why.
Chris Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of his award-winning debut Quite Ugly One Morning, which established him as one of Britain's leading crime novelists. His 2016 novel Black Widow won both the McIlvanney Prize and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. Brookmyre's novels novels have sold more than two million copies in the UK alone.
PRAISE FOR CHRIS BROOKMYRE
'Guaranteed to keep you guessing'
Ian Rankin
'Extremely sophisticated crime'
Sunday Times
'Exceptionally good'
Guardian
'In the pantheon of great crime writers'
Elly Griffiths
'Scales new heights of invention'
Times Literary Supplement
'Brookmyre writes beautifully . . . I was hooked'
Literary Review
Release date: March 4, 2021
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 416
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The Cut
Chris Brookmyre
That was the way she saw it, anyway. She didn’t physically die that day, but everything thereafter was merely a prelude to interment, a succession of holding areas before final admission to the grave.
The world she once inhabited had been thousands of miles across, spanning a multiplicity of cities, time zones and cultures, all of it promising wider realms beyond which she hoped to reach one day. Then it had all been reduced to a succession of tiny boxes and confined spaces, all in preparation for that tiniest box in that most confined space of all.
The rain was a swirling smir as she walked down Great Western Road; walking along it, but somehow not upon it. As always, it was like she was traversing a memory or an echo of a place, even ones she had never visited. This version of it did not feel real; or maybe the harsher truth was that it was real, but she was not.
Undeniably, the rain was real, and worsening. This would have consequences for her mission. Vivian had set her a task: she had asked Millicent to go and purchase something for her from John Lewis, in town. She had also instructed her to buy herself a cup of coffee and a cake. This latter Millicent had immediately filed under ‘optional’, as in, ‘not happening’, on the grounds that Viv would never know. But that was before Viv had given her something called a loyalty card, which had to be stamped as evidence that she had achieved her goal.
Millicent knew what she was about. Asking her to fetch a pebble from the seabed merely to get her into the water.
‘You just need to take it in small steps,’ Vivian kept saying. Viv saw a world that she assumed Millicent would be eager to explore and make the most of, if she could only get over her reluctance. All Millicent saw was a world in which she did not belong. The one in which she did belong had ended decades ago. This one held nothing but fear and danger, a place she did not recognise or know how to navigate.
She did not feel she could even affect it, interact with it. At best she could drift through this realm like a wraith. A ghost. She remembered that movie from a better time: Patrick Swayze unable to open a door, reluctant to accept the alternative of passing through it. Millicent could relate. She had problems with doors these days too.
There was another prescribed element to this morning’s exercise, which was that she had to use automated transport, specifically the Underground. She was not allowed to walk. Millicent liked to walk. It was simplest. It was one way in which she could comfortably experience the freedom of the wider world around her. She could do so without being noticed by anyone, without having to negotiate any new technology. Without making herself conspicuous.
Viv said she wanted Millicent to bring back her tickets as proof.
More pebbles.
Tickets could be plausibly lost. So could loyalty cards. Then it was a matter of whether Viv wanted to call her a liar to her face.
That would just leave the purchase. She could manage that much. She would walk the whole way, she had thought: down Great Western Road, across to Woodlands Road and then along Sauchiehall Street to the Buchanan Galleries. But she had reckoned without the Glasgow weather. As she crossed Otago Street, it changed from a swirling smir to a torrential downpour, and she knew that if she tried to walk all the way to town in this, she would be as drenched as had she jumped into the river. She dashed for shelter instinctively, and despite her unease, she propelled herself towards Kelvinbridge Underground station.
She had actually missed the rain. That was one of the weirdest things about her time away. For more than two decades she had seldom felt more than a few drops of it. She had seldom felt much sunshine either. Weather had become something that happened on the other side of walls and windows, in that fading world she was no longer connected to.
She hurried beneath the canopy that descended from Great Western Road to the station below, the rain hammering upon the brown Perspex in angry squalls. As she stepped onto the escalator, the sensation of movement and the feel of the rubber handrail exhumed an anxiety that went all the way back to childhood.
Auntie Phyllis had taken her into town as a treat. They were going shopping and then for something called high tea. Millicent recalled her excitement at the scale and grandeur of the department store, a wonder of colours, textures and lovely smells. It was the first time she had ever seen a moving staircase. She had been transfixed, leaning over to watch the strange illusion of the metal stairs seemingly collapsing and compressing themselves into nothing as they disappeared into the grate at the bottom.
‘Millie, for goodness’ sake. Stand away from there. What if your hair gets caught in the mechanism and you get dragged down?’
The machine had been instantly transformed before her eyes from a mechanical wonder to a diabolical threat, but she had not merely envisaged an agonising incident of her hair being yanked from her scalp. Rather, she saw her entire body being ground head-first between the metal teeth, like she was being pulled through the big mincer at the Cooperative butcher counter. A fear of escalators had stayed with her through childhood.
She watched the maw of the ticketing hall nearing and widening below. The sight brought on a precipitous panic at being conveyed inexorably downwards, as though into hell. She turned and attempted to ascend, but couldn’t climb fast enough to reverse her progress, merely staying at roughly the same point, like treading water.
She saw two young boys gliding down towards her, wondering briefly why they weren’t in uniform. Then she remembered that her estimation of young people’s ages was still undergoing a recalibration. Anybody under thirty looked to her like they ought to be in school. They could be twenty, she realised. Teenagers, at least.
‘Sake,’ one of them said with a laugh. He was wearing a blue baseball cap from which rainwater was dripping. ‘Whit ye daein’ ya maddy?’
‘Let me past,’ she urged, a burn in her thighs as she tried to up the pace of her climb.
‘You’ll knacker yoursel’,’ said the other. He had a rash of rather angry red acne, one particularly pressured red lump looking almost pulsatile in its lividity.
‘If you’re wanting back up, you should just let it take you down and then swap over to the other stair.’
She stopped trying to climb, gripping the rail as the escalator continued to take her down backwards. What he had said made sense.
She turned around gingerly but swiftly, concerned to be facing the right way at the crucial point when she would have to step off. It was a remnant of her childhood phobia that she considered the moment of alighting still fraught with peril. She exited with a skip that must have looked considerably jauntier than it felt, its purpose being to give her feet maximum clearance from the metal teeth.
The two boys had stopped to observe the end of her descent. She could read a mixture of concern and amusement in their faces. She wondered which had caused them to wait.
‘Are you all right, but?’ the one in the cap asked. ‘Have you had a funny turn?’
‘Do you want us to call somebody?’ asked his spotty pal.
It was perhaps the thought of Viv being asked to ride out to the rescue that prompted a reflex response.
‘Don’t bloody patronise me.’
‘Hey, there’s no need to be rude. Just trying to help.’
‘No, you’re quite right, and I should reciprocate by helping you, perhaps by recommending something to cover up your acne. The first thing that leaps to mind is a bucket.’
The words were out before Millicent was aware of speaking them, hearing them like they were being said by someone else. That was how it always felt when she inhabited this persona and donned its mask.
There was a bulging look of shock in his eyes, but instead of anger or hurt, it gave way to an eruption of laughter. His companion looked tickled too, though only after a moment’s hesitation to see how his mate was taking it. In their laughter there was no anger, no malice, but no absolution either.
She heard their voices echo as they walked away into the ticket hall.
‘Aw man, she pure ripped you. A bucket, man.’
‘Never mind cream for ma plooks. It’s something for this burn I need.’
‘Mad auld bat.’
With those words, she saw herself through their youthful eyes, and it was worse than any insult they might have thrown back. She was a crazy old lady, bamboozled by a moving staircase and lashing out at those trying to help her.
To be fair, Jerry was surprised that it had taken quite this long for one of the braying posh boys to accuse the weirdo from Dreghorn of being a thief.
From the moment he first rocked up at the halls of residence, he had felt like he didn’t belong, and little that had happened since had disabused him of this notion. It would have been reassuring to learn that everybody felt the same way, being new to uni, new to living away, new to the city, but he felt like he was an absolute beginner surrounded by veterans. Which would have made some sense had they all been second- or third-year students, but so many of his fellow freshers seemed so much more comfortable in their new environment. It was like they had all been on an induction course. Maybe it was a final-year option at posh schools.
He had come back from his morning lecture and was walking through the common area when he detected an energy change in the room. He didn’t need to believe in a sixth sense or any of that pish to know that his presence was the thing that changed it. He immediately felt scrutinised. Had to be that prick Danby. Who the hell had that for a first name? Him and his mates acted like they owned the place, probably because they knew that given enough time, they probably would. Or Daddy would, at least, but when he signed it over to them, they’d tell themselves they had earned it. Born three-nothing up and convinced they’d scored a hat trick.
Danby had been talking to the warden when Jerry walked in. He suspected that wasn’t good.
‘There he is,’ he heard Danby say, before calling out: ‘Hey, you, Rob Zombie, I want a word.’
Jerry had spent years growing his hair into dreads like Chris Barnes, Rob Flynn or indeed Rob Zombie, but he doubted Danby would have recognised any of them. The guy had called him that purely because of what it said on the T-shirt he was wearing.
Jerry just kept walking to his room, where he slung his backpack and his battle jacket on the bed and closed the door. Less than ten seconds later, there was an insistent hammering on it. Even the cadence screamed entitlement.
Part of him wanted to let the fucker stand there, just lock the door and stick on his headphones, but he knew he would only be postponing a problem.
Jerry opened his door, and there, of course, was Danby, with his two wingmen hovering behind, and that lassie Philippa, who was always staring at him like he was a sideshow freak.
More significantly, he was also in the company of the warden, pulling up the rear. She had an uncomfortable expression. She didn’t want to be there but knew she had to.
‘What do you want?’ Jerry asked.
‘I think you know.’
This skinny hipster fud wanted his avocado smashed.
‘Mate, given that you rarely condescend to speak to me, I’m at a loss here. Help me out.’
‘My phone’s gone missing. Toby says he saw you with one that looks remarkably similar to mine.’
Yeah, there it was. Boy was calling him a thief, right to his coupon. Jerry looked to the warden to confirm she was taking in the significance of what just happened. She wore a neutral expression, like she was just here as an observer, but the lack of a greater response spoke volumes, far as he was concerned.
‘In the interests of social harmony between the classes, I’ll limit my response to saying I think Toby should get his eyes tested. Cannae see you slumming it with my three-year-old generic Synergis handset.’
‘I didn’t see you with an old Synergis,’ said Toby. ‘I saw you yesterday with a new Galaxy Nine.’
At this point the warden decided to arbitrate.
‘Look, let’s not turn this into something it doesn’t have to be,’ she said, looking appealingly toward Jerry. ‘Maybe it was a prank, maybe it was a misunderstanding, whatever. But if you have Dan’s phone, just hand it back and we can leave it at that. Is that fair?’
She looked to Danby for his assent, which he gave with a grudging nod. He would be wanting to take this as far as he could, and Jerry guessed getting his missing phone back would be less of a result than getting the rough-spoken metalhead oik emptied from the halls.
‘So just to be clear, your phone goes missing, and your first thought is to come banging on my door accusing me of stealing it? I’m trying to work out which prejudice drove you harder, that I sound like I’m from the wrong socio-economic background, or as we call it, Ayrshire, or whether you noticed I’m a bit brown and that put me at the head of the queue as a likely suspect.’
Danby’s face flushed with outrage, just like Jerry knew it would.
‘Don’t you dare try and insinuate this is about race.’
‘Not nice being accused of something horrible, is it, mate?’
Danby turned to the warden.
‘Philippa saw him the other day coming out of that dodgy electronics place on Dumbarton Road, Fonezone. Everybody knows it’s full of hooky gear. The owner pays cash and asks no questions.’
‘I’m confused. Toby saw me with your phone yesterday, but Philippa saw me selling it in Fonezone. Is it Shröedinger’s handset?’
‘I saw the guy behind the counter give you money,’ Philippa mumbled uncomfortably, looking at her shoes.
‘That’s not how the transaction normally goes in a shop,’ Danby added with a note of triumph.
Jerry could tell from the warden’s expression that this had landed. He did remember seeing Philippa on Dumbarton Road. It was too late to deny that he had been in the shop, or even that she had seen what she thought.
He felt a flush of shame and hated them all for witnessing it.
‘I was selling my ancient iPod because I was skint. Not everybody’s daddy sets them up a trust fund,’ he added.
Philippa tutted. Danby spluttered scornfully.
Maybe she didn’t have a trust fund, and maybe Danby didn’t either, but Jerry was damn sure that whatever their fathers gave them, it was more than his. The only thing Daddy had given Jerry Kelly was pigmentation.
Yer maw shagged a sailor.
That’s what they used to say in school. He had heard it a hundred times before he was old enough to even understand why and how it was intended to be hurtful. Half the kids saying it probably didn’t understand at that age either. Some of them probably didn’t even know they were being racist.
By the time he was old enough to grasp what it meant, he was also mature enough to grasp that it represented an entirely unfair and inaccurate depiction of the depths of his parents’ relationship. As far as he was aware, they hadn’t actually conversed long enough for her to ascertain what he did for a living.
He never knew who his father was, and he barely knew his mother either. She had dumped him with his granny and run off several times before he was two years old. Whenever she came back, she always swore to her mother it would never happen again. Eventually she made good on her vow inasmuch as she only ran away once more. She took an overdose in a squat in Manchester.
His granny was helping him out with the rent for the halls. That was how he liked to think of it. He was supplementing that with what he got doing late shifts at a fast-food place. When he applied to uni, Jerry had looked into his options and worked out it would be cheaper to get a season ticket for the train. His gran had insisted it was important that he got away.
‘Find your place somewhere better than this, son,’ she had said.
It had sounded good when she said it. But now anyone could see his place wasn’t here. And one of those people was him.
Doors had opened all along the corridor, people leaning out of their rooms in response to the raised voices. Danby glanced backwards, taking in the scene. It was no longer merely a stand-off, but one with an audience.
‘If you’ve nothing to hide, why not open your door and let us take a look. Because I’d put down a hundred to one that my Galaxy’s in there.’
Danby had a glint in his eye as he said this, sweeping his hand around to indicate everybody who was now looking: a wee flourish to indicate that he thought this was a masterstroke.
Folk like Danby weren’t plagued by questions about their place in this world. Wherever they went, they knew they had a right to be there. From the moment Jerry turned up, they were just waiting for him to become a problem. Or were hoping he’d become a problem so that they would have a pretext for getting rid of him.
The warden took a step forward, putting herself between Danby and Jerry’s door.
‘Just to be clear,’ she told Jerry, covering herself first and foremost. ‘You do not need to submit to any search, and he has no right to demand one.’
Then she addressed Danby.
‘Are you going to ask everybody else to open their doors, and are they to remain under suspicion if they don’t?’
Danby folded his arms, saying nothing, but the unspoken answers were, in order:
No.
But Jerry will.
Meaning this was still a win for Danby, and he knew that.
Jerry had heard it said there were two types of rich people: smart people who knew they’d got lucky, and lucky people who thought they were smart. The Achilles heel of entitled British posh boys was that their assumed superiority meant they always overestimated their own intelligence and underestimated that of their opponents.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Jerry told the warden. He stepped aside and beckoned Danby forth.
‘On you go, if that’s what you really want. But bear in mind that there’s no going back from it.’
Danby looked wary, wondering what he was missing. It was Jerry’s turn to draw attention to their audience.
‘If you do search my room, everybody here will find out unequivocally that I’m a thief . . . or you’re a cunt.’
Jerry let it hang.
The boy wouldn’t have made a card player. There was a quivering twitch to his bottom lip as he realised his mistake and the consequences of it. He’d claimed he’d lay a hundred to one, but Jerry was the guy who had named the stakes.
‘The warden’s right. I don’t have the right to search your room. But believe me, I’ll be keeping an eye out for that phone, and if I see you with anything like it, I’ll be going to the police.’
‘You do that, mate. And don’t forget to check Fonezone an’ all.’
Jerry waited for them to walk away before he shut the door, just to drive the point home. He watched them all depart, then closed it softly.
He let out a long sigh. He had derived some satisfaction from the sight of Danby and his retinue walking away, defeated, but it felt like a Pyrrhic victory. He had come out of it on top, but it hadn’t been a pleasant experience for anybody.
To his surprise, he actually felt bad for Danby. Probably because he had stolen his phone.
As Millicent shuffled towards the ticket machines, she saw a man hastening from the escalators, rainwater cascading off a recently folded umbrella. She hung back, letting him pass. She anticipated that she would need some time at this and didn’t want anyone asking her if she wanted help. As she waited, she took out a piece of paper bearing Vivian’s instructions.
‘Why don’t you just come along with me?’ Millicent had asked as Vivian wrote it all down. ‘It’s you that’s wanting this stuff.’
‘Of course I could get it myself, but the whole point is for you to venture out there on your own. It’s going to be arduous the first time, we both know that. It will be arduous the second time too, but it will get easier the more you do it, and your future self will thank you for not shying away just because it’s hard.’
Like Millicent didn’t know what it was to endure hardship.
Vivian was a seventy-five-year-old woman who lived in a realm of boundless opportunities, indefatigable in her optimism, seemingly waking every morning with a smile on her face and a fresh and exciting plan for her day. She radiated enthusiasm and imbued any room she walked into with a sense of well-being that made you want to smash her face in with an axe. Millicent pictured her slumped on the settee, the blade embedded from forehead to cheekbone, bisecting one eye. She saw vividly how she would achieve it, every intricate step. She could almost feel the syringe, imagine the blood spurt. The memories never left, no matter how she tried to banish them.
It was an unworthy thought. Vivian was so patient, so generous, so kind. She really didn’t deserve having Millicent in her life, an unwarranted burden. It was another reason things would be better if she wasn’t around much longer.
She stepped forward and examined the screen. To her relief, she could instantly see what Viv told her to look for: Concession single. Why concession? she wondered. What was being conceded? Then she remembered. She qualified: OAP, albeit without the P part. She had missed a bit on the superannuation.
The Underground was a circle; two circles in fact, inner and outer. Perhaps she could just go round and round for a while, then come back and tell Vivian the shop never had the thing she wanted. But she knew what Vivian was like. If she came back without reporting success, she would only make her do it again tomorrow.
Millicent knew what it was to be facing something inescapable. Submitting to someone else’s will was all but second nature, a place of comfort and security. It was her own will that presented all the problems.
She took her ticket and followed the sign for the platforms, her progress stopped by the barriers. She couldn’t see a guard, so she remained in place, waiting with a patience ingrained over decades.
She heard a door open and saw a man in a yellow over-vest emerge from the ticket office, heading in her direction.
‘Problem with the ticket?’ he asked.
Millicent was unsure how to reply, then it dawned on her that the answer was no. There was no problem with the ticket, or with the machine. The problem was with her. It had been a year now, but she still caught herself waiting outside doors, until it belatedly struck her that she did not need permission to open them.
That was what Vivian didn’t understand; what nobody seemed to understand. Just because the doors to the world had been unlocked, that didn’t mean Millicent was capable of walking through them. When you have not known it for so long, freedom could be a terrifying thing.
She stopped at the head of the staircase and took some slow breaths before descending. Reassured by the quiet, she walked down to find the Outer Circle platform deserted but for a man and a toddler, the man holding his daughter’s hand while he thumbed inevitably at his phone. Everybody seemed to be transfixed by these tiny portals into places they would rather be, heedless of what was before them in the here and now. She knew what that felt like, but she also knew why this world wasn’t enough.
She thought of how long she had ached to be out here in the very place this man and so many like him were shunning. That was until she got here and found that it wasn’t the place she remembered. The world she had left behind was long since gone, and couldn’t be contacted again with any device.
She heard a rumble from along the tunnel.
‘Come on, Toots.’
Gripping her father’s hand, the little girl approached the train with mild trepidation, perhaps afraid that when the doors slid open, they might close again on her.
Millicent coaxed herself to step through them without anyone else’s prompting. Before she could do so, the calm of the platform became a riotous cacophony, an overwhelming mass of noise and colour and movement as the train disgorged dozens of passengers: schoolkids in bright uniforms, screeching and shouting over each other as they bustled forth.
Millicent clutched herself, paralysed. She wanted to close her eyes as they swarmed around her, but to do so was to place herself back in an amalgam of dining halls, corridors, public areas. Too many voices, too many bodies; aggression, suspicion, grudges and hatreds in the air. Keenly honed instincts sensing weakness and vulnerability; counter instincts hardening her carapace.
‘The noise of you,’ she heard herself say. ‘Like seagulls on a tip.’
Yes, that would shame them all into a meek silence. She’d probably get a written apology too.
Stupid cow.
Mad old bat.
Jerry remained staring at the door, unable to clear the sight of Danby and his pals from his head. He had got away with it, but that felt incidental. What was troubling him was that he didn’t know why he had stolen the guy’s phone. When you didn’t understand your own reasons for doing stuff, it was a very bad sign.
He poured himself a glass of water while he booted up his laptop. He urgently needed distraction, to get his head somewhere else. He remembered that on the walk back from his last lecture he had got an alert informing him that Complete and Utter Cult had dropped their latest episode, a special edition on lost and abandoned movies.
The description mentioned Frankenheimer’s Island of Dr Moreau and Gilliam’s Don Quixote. This was perfect. Grand visions and hubristic folly: there was nothing like someone else’s failings to make you feel better. But when he opened his browser and went to the channel, what he saw felt like a cold knife in the guts. The image they had chosen to illustrate the episode was the poster from Mancipium.
That poster.
The very mention of Mancipium had once meant something irresistibly enticing, but now he felt haunted by it. Enslaved, one might even say. There was a time when his favourite YouTubers talking about it would have been the most exciting thing in the world. But one night everything had changed, and he didn’t live in that world anymore.
Jerry’s gran used to run a video shop, back when that was a thing. She had started off renting pirated VHS and Betamax tapes from her house. She circulated lists so customers could phone up, then she’d drive around delivering the rentals and picking up returns. By the time Jerry came along, she had long since gone legit with a shop on the parade, between the chippy and a tanning salon.
Jerry spent most of his pre-school years in the back shop, unless one of his gran’s friends could take him for a while. He was serving customers by the time he was ten, and by the time he was thirteen – before streaming finally killed the place off – he had regularly been left to mind the store of an evening while his gran worked shifts at Tesco.
His gran was his legal guardian, effectively his single parent, but the way he saw it, he hadn’t been raised by her alone. He was raised by his gran and her movie catalogue, surrounded by tapes and DVDs all his life. He didn’t just mean the shop, either. Gran seldom threw anything out. The house was full of old tapes that were no longer fit for rental, as well as barely watchable nth-generation pirate copies dating back to the business’s illegal dial-a-video origins.
There wasn’t a lot of Truffaut or Ingmar Bergman in there. It was a collection curated by the tastes of what folk were wanting to rent in Ayrshire through the Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s. Aside from a selection of cartoons for the kids, of which he knew every frame by the time he was four, it was predominantly a blend of Hollywood hits and exploitation movies, with the ratio heavily favouring the latter. In any given year, there weren’t that many blockbusters, which was why the store’s bread and butter was what were known as straight-to-video titles, and of those, the genre that always guaranteed a steady return was horror.
Long before anybody had coined the term ‘fuck budget’, Gran had decided there was only a finite number of things she could afford to be arsed about. These included, at a basic level, putting food on the table and making sure Jerry was dressed in clean clothes. At a higher tier of importance was ensuring he was doing well in school and not getting in bother with the teachers. The allegedly damaging effects of whatever films he happened to be watching at a tender age did not weigh heavily on her mind.
Jerry first watched Zombie Flesh Eaters when he was nine. It didn’t warp or traumatise him for life, but it did mean there was no going back to Star Wars or Harry Potter after that. It was like when he first heard proper metal. Everything else seemed tame by comparison.
He worked his way through every horror film on the shelves, and not only was it a buzz, but it changed how he thought about films. He rewound and watched the gory bits over and over until he could see how they had achieved the effect. Then he started to notice other elements that contributed to the experience: the shot juxtapositions that fooled the eye, the framing techniques that generated suspense. It was his contention that you could learn more about composition and editing from watching horror than from the entire works of any acclaimed arthouse auteur.
Horror wasn’t merely a genre, though: it was a culture. It had its history, its apocrypha, its m
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