Author: Kirkland Ciccone
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Return to Horror High
The school I spent nearly six years of my life has changed beyond recognition, but I’ve changed too. For years I wrote books for young adults, but somehow against the odds successfully switched the writing adult fiction. But while I wrote books for teenagers, I found myself touring, hitching my way around schools across Scotland. […]
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Lycanthropy by Patrick Wolf
I saw Patrick Wolf very early on in his career at the original Stereo while he was touring Lycanthropy. The gig wasn’t very well attended, which made sense because Patrick was most definitely a cult artist at that point, beloved by critics and photographed for all the coolest magazines, who presented him as the coolest […]
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The joyful noise of The Monkees
From as long as I can remember, my nightmare always starts and ends the same way every single time. I’m in a large bed that’s improbably being propelled down a busy road full of cars in a city that vaguely seems like it might be somewhere in America, but only a version I’ve seen on […]
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The weirdness of Penguin Classic Crime art
Whoever said you should never judge a book by its cover clearly has ugly cover art on their books. I like artwork to say something, even if I can’t understand what it’s trying to tell me. When Happiness was picked up by Fledgling, I immediately knew what I wanted: “Make it ’90s inspired brutalism with […]
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I Am Kurious Oranj by The Fall
Independent music and ideology go hand in hand, the clue being in the word independent. But independence isn’t necessarily the label bands sign to, but their mindset, how they present their work. What makes one band stand out from another? The Fall never had that problem. In whatever incarnation they arrived, it was always fully-formed, […]
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FICTION: Supermarket Sweep
The witch in the supermarket didn’t look like a witch. For a start, she didn’t have a big pointy hat or nose to match. There wasn’t a hairy wart on her chin and her skin wasn’t green. In fact, she had great skin. There was a good reason for her flawless face, and she explained […]
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Social Dancing by Bis
Trends change, fashions leap around, forever leaving millions of reviewers and bloggers to catch them. Sometimes, however, it isn’t up to us to catch these trends, but to catch up with them. In the case of Bis, a band whose magpie musical styles made them impossible to categorise outside of ‘pop’ (a whole universe in […]
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College rock: a confession
Really, I should have been in a college rock band. The problem was that I came from the wrong country, turned teen in the wrong decade, and my college was a stout tower block rather than a bustling campus with a radio station where all the best songs could be found left of the dial. […]
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I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan – an examination
SPOILERS AHEAD! Lois Duncan was a household name if your house was home to kids with library memberships in the 70s and 80s. Her books for young people were Young Adult before the genre became mainstreamed. Looked down on, these books were known back then as Juvenile Fiction. Not that Lois Duncan ever wrote fiction […]
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Scotlit Blog Interview
One of the earliest supporters of Happiness Is Wasted On Me was Scotlit Daily, the blog dedicated to all things literary in Scotland. They’ve tirelessly championed the Scottish scene and thank goodness for that. Last week we chatted about the book and Scotland’s publishing scene, plus a few topics that you’ll hopefully find interesting…
Kirkland Ciccone 