Guillermo Del Toro

  By winning the Oscar for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water shifted the status of outsiders to the inside. Its liberal credentials are revealed in a variety of ways, from the fully fleshed out key roles taken by a voiceless woman, a middle-aged gay man and a black cleaning woman to the […]

No Spoilers Guillermo Del Toro and I have a bit of a history; I was there for his first film, he optioned one of my books and for a brief, glorious time we worked together. The Mexican director has the seemingly Latin ability of being able to make a cinematic point within the context of […]

So there I am, standing in the shop window of a bookshop in Bluewater shopping mall of all places, next to a gigantic man dressed in leather stockings, a thong, wings and size 11 court shoes. It was my own fault. I had wanted to write a novel that updated the Faust legend. I thought; […]

NO SPOILERS It should have been a shoo-in for Guillermo del Toro, the director of gothic films like ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. An American-language big budget stab at High Gothick, complete with fleeing heroine, dastardly baronet and crumbling mansion – but somehow ‘Crimson Peak’ goes terribly wrong. All the elements are in place, […]

Someone asked me online if I’d ever write a sequel to ‘Spanky’ and I suddenly remembered that I’d written one. It’s called ‘Spanky’s Back In Town’ and it’s in my collection ‘Personal Demons’. I seem to recall that it involves Rasputin and an excavation site beside the Thames. Apart from that it’s a bit of […]

Guillermo Del Toro’s wonderful new book has a forward by James Cameron and an afterword by Tom Cruise, and me in it somewhere toward the end. This is the poshest company I’ve ever been in. I was surprised to find myself in ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities’ because the fantasy director’s notebooks, interviews and […]