Welcome!

This is my word garden on the internet. I’m Michael Walters, author of The Complex, a novel out with Salt Publishing. I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I also have a PATREON where you can follow me and get more about my writing in particular, including notes on the novels I’m reading.

And check out my film collections in the sidebar—I do love a film challenge!

May 29 2021, 11:41

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Events organically unfold, the images are striking, the narrative is confusing, characters are not who they seem to be, and in the last twenty minutes he reveals what’s really going on, sort of.

May 27 2021, 19:46

The Straight Story (1999)

If David Lynch were trying to somehow redress all the darkness of his earlier films in one go, then he would make The Straight Story.

May 26 2021, 18:12

Lost Highway (1997)

Lost Highway is a puzzle. It opens with a jealous husband who thinks his wife is having an affair, and ends with a deadly resolution, but what happens in between is ambiguous and complicated.

May 24 2021, 12:59

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

A howl of pain from Laura Palmer, the murdered girl that opened the story of Twin Peaks. It’s difficult, heavy, hard to watch in places, and grapples with incest, rape, drug-taking, murder and domestic abuse.

May 18 2021, 17:41

Wild at Heart (1990)

Wild at Heart is a series of deliberately melodramatic, hyper-violent and sexual scenes stitched together into a road movie, with a tenuously-made connection to the Wizard of Oz.

May 12 2021, 15:02

Blue Velvet (1986)

Blue Velvet has a fearsome reputation but is also culturally beloved. Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance has become iconic, and its themes foreshadow those in the massively popular Twin Peaks.

May 09 2021, 20:10

Dune (1984)

I went into Dune thinking I would see something the critics were missing – I mean, how could the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man direct a complete dud? – and... it’s so over-the-top, it manages to not be awful.

May 06 2021, 18:40

The Elephant Man (1980)

The Elephant Man is as traditional and straightforward as Eraserhead is surreal and obtuse. Both are black and white, and Lynch does use some dream imagery in The Elephant Man, but they’re at opposite end of the narrative spectrum.

May 02 2021, 13:35

Eraserhead (1977)

So imaginative and pure and watchable and laugh-out-loud funny, which I didn’t expect at all. A psychosexual puzzle about the horrors of unplanned parenthood, marriage, intimacy, capitalism, poverty, dreams – you can take it any direction you like.

April 23 2021, 19:23

Why read?

It’s been a tough year, and in the tumult of it, I stopped enjoying reading (again). Instead, I watched films, which are just as wonderful, but do a fundamentally different job.

April 23 2021, 12:46

Swimming with David Lynch

Spring arriving has given me a creative kick. April has been pretty meta literature-wise. I’ve been reading about reading, reading about writing, writing about reading and, of course, writing about writing. It’s all good.

April 01 2021, 13:10

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I bought it three years ago in a bookshop sale, in spite of the cover, which honestly put me off reading it for a long time.

March 05 2021, 09:01

It’s Spring

This time of year is always strange. There is a drumbeat of family birthdays, including mine, and the pandemic has heightened the sense of time passing. My mother died at the end of February 2014, so this is seven years, unbelievably, since then.

February 15 2021, 09:22

A flotilla of metaphors

Lying in bed this morning, between the alarm going off and pulling back the duvet, it occurred to me that sentences can capture the high-level aspects of a story as well as the nitty-gritty.

January 17 2021, 10:15

Slippery surfaces

Am I doing weekly summary posts now? Perhaps I am. It helps me notice what impact the week’s books and films have had on me. Hand-written notes just get lost in the stream of ink on paper.

January 09 2021, 15:26

Autumn and The Long Goodbye

In Ali Smith’s Autumn, when discussing a piece of art, Daniel Gluck asks the young Elisabeth, ‘And what did it make you think about?’. I love that question.

December 30 2020, 14:56

My 2020 in books

I’ve had a tough year reading books. I fell into the trap of seeing reading as work and lost the joy of it. Writers aren’t supposed to admit to not enjoying reading.

December 26 2020, 17:04

Language muscles

This week I watched: Heart of Midnight (1988), The Grinch (2018), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), De Palma (2015). This week I read: Equilibrium, by Tonino Guerra; The Art of the Novel, by Milan Kundera.

December 22 2020, 21:42

Why do I write here?

I’ve written more posts on my blog in 2020 than ever before. It was tricky to start with — I had to find a new voice and get in a groove. As the year ends, and I begin to think about 2021, I find myself wondering, are they worth the time I put into them?

December 21 2020, 20:01

London Gothic, Nicholas Royle

The protagonists of London Gothic are walkers, art lovers, film buffs and train nerds. They are loners, in the main, fascinated by urban spaces and routes between places.

December 15 2020, 20:55

She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

This isn’t a horror film, though it is marketed as one. The camera is often still as figures move towards us, faces blurred by lights or shadows, which creates a sense of dread.