Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

THE KARPMAN DRAMA TRIANGLE by Denise Mina ★★★★★

This was excellent. In a single, short video call, Denise Mina told the story of a dysfunctional family AND delivered a tense drama. She even cleverly used the roles in the Karpman Drama Triangle to do it. I'm impressed.

THE BIRDS ON A TRAIN by Lee Child ★★
I liked the set-up of the story: the train journey, the arrival at Hastings, the establishment of the kind of man our assassin for hire was. I wanted to see where it was going to go. Then there was a sudden, unexpected event and a rapid and unexpected ending. The ending was amusing in the context of an Hitchcock-inspired story, but it felt too rushed for me.

LIKE A BUN AT BEWLEY'S by David Thomson ★

I must be missing something. This story made no sene to me. It was like listening to a guy in the pub who thinks he's a raconteur but who keeps losing the thread, adding more swagger than story. I couldn't figure out which Hitchcock movie or TV episode it was inspired by or what the ending meant.

A dream like story. Strong emotions. Vivid flashes of detail. A sense of threat/ dread from a lack of agency. I didn't understand everything in the story. That was OK. I don't think I was meant to. The MCman, a short story writer, doesn't really live in the present. He lives in his imagination and the shadow cast by his past. He refuses to admit his motives or acknowledge his desires. He lives in pursuit of a ghost.

PSYCHO GEOGRAPHY by Guy Adams ★

TThere are stories where the words "clever", "artful" and "concept-rich" are not praise. This is one of them. More of a lecture than a story. So laden with semiotics that it collapsed in on itself.

SPLIT YOUR SILVER TONGUE by S A Cosby ★★★★★

Short, intense, surprising, horrifying and memorable. The siutation went from ambiguous to potentially erotic to truly and unexpectedly horrific as smoothly as changing up through the gears on a powerful car.

DANIELLE'S THE DEAD ONE by Sophie Hannah ★

This one didn't work for me. I could see it was meant to be amusing, but I found it tedious. It was a joke that took so long to get to the punchline that I no longer cared. The only part that made me smile was the discussion about whether a director can have more than one masterpiece.

THE HUNTER by Vaseem Khan ★★★★

I thought I knew where this one was going, right up to the point where it went somewhere else entirely. The ending was shocking and very very good. My whole understanding of the story shifted. It was wonderfully well done.

STRANGERS ON A SCHOOL BUS by Peter Swanson ★★★

A twist on Hitchcock's 1951 'Strangers On A Train', (195) adapted from Patricia Highsmuth's debut novel, but I didn't see the twist coming. A clever idea that slowly unfurled as a dectective interviewed teenager Jane Weir about her conversation on a School Bus with Lisa Kelly. The reveal was suprising but a little abrupt. Even so, the ending was satisfying.

It's tough, being inside Jaoanne's head. It feels real and more than a little unstable.

I don't knoe why she's hiding or who she's hiding from but I really want to find out.

This is astonishingly good. It's complex and full of trauma but complete.y believable. The two timelines of the story are perfectly intercut to deepen understanding and increase tension. The narration is first-rate-

An intriguing, unconventional mystery. I like how it calmly considers being very old, with its physical limitations and discomforts and with the knowlldge of life inevitably coming to an end but not yet being over.

I enjoy watching Jane Marple think. I like that she's doing more than solving a puzzle. She's assessing and reassessing herself and the people she meets so that she can be sure she's seeing them clearly.

These stories are like opening a time capsule to the 1960s as seen from the point of view of men who were aleaady adults when World War II started. It's grim but thoughtful. It speaks of generation that depends on a dogged determination not to lose what we have rather on hopes for a brighter future.

These stories are like opening a time capsule to the 1960s as seen from the point of view of men who were aleaady adults when World War II started. It's grim but thoughtful. It speaks of generation that depends on a dogged determination not to lose what we have rather on hopes for a brighter future.