Corinna Keefe

Inconsistent Pacing • 26th October 2020

Corona Crime – Robert Pimm (Review)

I’m very proud to announce that this is possibly the first book I have reviewed in the same year that it was released. Normally, here at IP, we prefer to be at least a couple of decades behind the times. Corona Crime is a very new novel – but it is set three centuries into the future. (I don’t like 2020 and I refuse to stay in it, literarily or otherwise.)

Inconsistent Pacing • 12th October 2020

Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi (Review)

If you only looked at Western bestseller lists and film rankings, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Egyptian mummies are the only fantasy storyline which Africa has ever produced. But you’d be wrong – and I was thrilled to see that Children of Blood and Bone has brought a long-neglected mythology into young adult fiction.

Inconsistent Pacing • 18th March 2020

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Review)

Hello and, er, hail Satan, I guess? One of the hallmarks of this three-season Netflix revival of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is how the writers have carefully amended every phrase to be more witchy. So we tell our enemies to go to heaven, commend our friends as hell-sent, and so on.

Inconsistent Pacing • 17th January 2020

Murderous Shakespearean Teens: a review of If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Let us turn to an under-theorized but much-loved genre, which I have just decided to name “Murderous Shakespearean Teens”. We’re thinking of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; we’re thinking Donna Tartt’s A Secret History; at a pinch, we might think of Peter Nowalk and Shonda Rhimes’ How To Get Away With Murder.

Inconsistent Pacing • 19th November 2019

Battle of the zombies: In The Flesh versus The Cured

I LOVE zombie films. This might come as a slight surprise because I normally leave the horror reviews to Dan. I can’t get through most scary movies without hiding behind the sofa and then having nightmares for weeks. But there is just something about shuffling, brains-hungry, undead monsters which really works for me.

Inconsistent Pacing • 31st October 2019

Oceans 8 (2018): In a world without men

The Ocean’s franchise is venerable and well-established. First there was the original Rat Pack movie in 1960. Then came the 2001 reboot, which established the modern style: slick, understated comedy, which didn’t waste too much time explaining the heist. You get to watch the characters muddle about and mess things up with insouciance; then you see the double-speed replay where you realize that, actually, they were in charge of the situation all along.

Inconsistent Pacing • 23rd June 2019

Fen – Daisy Johnson (Review)

How do you choose a new book? Most of us start by looking at the title or the cover. Each person has their own private code of colours, typefaces and titles which signal whether a book is bad – consciously or unconsciously.

Inconsistent Pacing • 5th September 2018

Mission: Impossible – from I to Fallout

Tom Cruise has been running through city centres since 1996, although in his Instagram bio, it says 1981. (This implies that he thinks there was life before Mission: Impossible, which makes no sense.)

The Vagenda • 9th August 2018

Who Is Ice Cream REALLY For, Anyway? | The Vagenda

I should support real jobs. I should enjoy meeting new people. I shouldn’t be avoiding the checkout guy who tried to chat me up, when I was shopping solely for paracetamol, tissues, nose spray, and cough medicine. (Seriously, dude, choose your moment.)

Inconsistent Pacing • 27th July 2018

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr (Review)

Radio is not fashionable any more. More and more people are listening to podcasts, but podcasts are a very different beast to radio. They’re full of star appearances telling sob stories, built into very specific media niches like weird deep-sea anemones. You have to be the right person for a podcast. But radio is for everyone.

Inconsistent Pacing • 18th July 2018

The Vietnam War: a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2017) – Review

Like many people, I am absolutely fascinated by media about the Vietnam War – fascinated, and sometimes disgusted or horrified. I am interested in war movies, in general. They represent a huge number of films made since the industry began, to distract the population, to raise morale, or as naked propaganda.

Inconsistent Pacing • 14th July 2018

An Incomplete List of Unfinished Series

I used to struggle with guilt about books and television I didn’t like. Once I had made it past the first chapter, or past the first three episodes, I would feel like I really had to continue. I made THREE attempts to finish JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and was defeated each time by the endless descriptions of military movements. Pace Alan Bennett, it was as if a hand had come out from the page, and beaten me into a coma.

Inconsistent Pacing • 16th June 2018

The Hopkins Manuscript – RC Sherriff (Review)

This weekend I have delved into the archives to bring you a post-apocalyptic classic. It was first published in 1939 – a year which we now look back on with a painful sense of foreboding. Those poor bastards, we think, they had no idea what was coming. Not to be too dramatic, but it seems like a great book to re-read in 2018.

Inconsistent Pacing • 8th April 2018

The Death of Stalin (Review)

Do you remember the first time you watched Jaws, and you were really hyped up, but it was kind of disappointing? And then you watched it again, and this time you got it, because you knew the secret: Jaws is not a film about sharks. Jaws is a film about fear. I mention it now because The Death of Stalin is not about Stalin. Or sharks. It’s about fear.

Inconsistent Pacing • 10th March 2018

Blood Summit – Robert Pimm (Review)

Politics is a funny thing. It can feel like another dimension: a strange, rarefied place where people really use phrases like “strong and stable” or “Make America Great Again”. New initiatives, elections, treaties, laws and manifestos are constantly being announced. But in practice, change is rare – and that’s rather unfortunate.

Inconsistent Pacing • 24th February 2018

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Women

News from the world of digital analysis of literature, where a study in the Journal of Cultural Analytics has discovered that women are… missing. Absent. Vanished. Fallen off the bottom of the page.

Inconsistent Pacing • 5th February 2018

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Review)

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which expresses a feeling of nostalgia for a life which one has never experienced – perhaps even for a world which has never existed. It may be Sehnsucht which explains my weakness for spy films with men in turtlenecks. The recent reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. suggests that I am not alone.

Inconsistent Pacing • 27th January 2018

Falcó – Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Review)

A good-looking gent in a soft hat leans back in his seat as the train puffs down the track to Barcelona. When the engine pauses in Narbonne, he stubs out his cigarette and walks quickly out on to the platform. Minutes later, a beautiful woman will be found dead. Yes, we are in the chain-smoking, gun-toting, heart-breaking 1930s.

Inconsistent Pacing • 6th January 2018

Ladycastle – Delilah Dawson & Ashley A. Woods (Review)

A paradise of green hills and beautiful women; the little town full of bustle and work; the sound of music in the air. And then a man arrives, as they are wont to do, bringing panic and disruption in his wake.