Alex Garland

Yesterday

Laurie Penny

The politics of horror

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation. As Murphy drags his not-yet-world-famous cheekbones through an eerily abandoned metropolis, we see Piccadilly plastered with the names and faces of the missing and the dead. Audiences in 2002 were reminded of the

Deborah Ross

Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed

First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later  (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last film was generally (and rightly) regarded as a desultory cash grab, there is much riding on this one. The verdict? It’s entertaining but not outstanding. The biggest surprise is its tonal swerve into sentimentality. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, however, bring character and heft and, just to put your minds at rest, yes, it’s as

Tuesday

Jenny Colgan

Secrets of the dorm: Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, reviewed

Oh hell, the novel after the Big Book. It’s so, so difficult. David Nicholls took seven years to follow up One Day with Us. Alex Garland gave up after The Beach and went off to write films. Lawyers prevent me from speculating on precisely what it did to Allison Pearson. And Kiley Reid’s Big Book was a joy. Her debut novel Such a Fun Age was razor-sharp, incredibly funny and utterly unafraid: commercial fiction with serious things to say and with wide appeal. It won prizes and sold brilliantly. Of course it’s difficult to follow up. And Come and Get It, whose title is difficult to remember and has nothing