Italian zombies and Universal monster kits

There's heavy frost and even some new snow round our way this weekend. J. bought twelve stone oil lamps in the Habitat outlet store yesterday: they look like white apples with fiery leaves set out along the veranda of the chalet/shed/beach hut. We were out there at midnight as the frost took hold. I popped out for a bit between films - I had a triple bill last night - the sublime, the ridiculous and the utterly grim. The grimmest tale was Vincent Price - relatively young and magnificently morose - in 'The Last Man on Earth', which I was surprised to find was an italian movie. It's the very first adaptation of Richard Mattheson's 'I am Legend'. Definitely the best, too. Its foreignness really helps that air of unreality. The landcape, the houses, Price's co-stars - even the coffee cups - seem diffrent, more sophisticated. It's like watching an arthouse zombie apocalypse. They mess up the storyline about the dog and lose the true pathos of the novel, but the final revelations about cures and antidotes and Price's character's status as 'legend' is really well done. I can't believe this is a film I knew nothing about till now.

Then I relished the sublime 1960s 'Village of the Damned' - it's genteel and brutal and unstinting in its horror. It comes to an abrupt halt once the story is told. It's as clipped as the spoken English of any Fifties starlet. My final movie of the night was the ludicrous 'Creature from the Black Lagoon', which I've always loved.

This time it reminded me of the glow-in-the-dark model kits I used to get as a kid. There was a shop in South Shields called Rippons, and they'd always get the best stuff in. One year - probably 1978 - they stocked a range of Universal monster kits. My Granda' would assemble them on Saturday nights, painstakingly at the kitchen table. He'd have layers of newspaper out, and all the parts of the kits, and those tiny brushes and paintpots and the tubes of incredibly powerful glue.

The walls of their living room were filled with the kit rifles and handguns, battleships and sailing ships he had built over the years. While my Little Nanna stirred up a panful of the broth she always made on Saturday nights, and all the grandkids watched telly as late as they wanted in the front room, Granda' would work at the kits, hunched and squinting at the precise little parts.

He did the same for my Universal monsters, one a week that autumn: Dracula frozen mid-swirl of his cape; the Frankenstein Monster with his arms outstretched, lumbering over a graveyard; Godzilla looking rather chunky (he wasn't Universal, was he?) and the Creature, stepping out of his Black Lagoon, claws outstretched. The monster would be ready and dried by Sunday lunchtime, when it was time to go home. On each kit a different bit would be glow-in-the-dark luminescent green: Frankenstein's monster's hands and bolts, Dracula's whole head, and the talons of the Creature. My Granda' would paint the rest of the models as per instructions in thickly lathered metallic paint. The models woul absorb sunlight all day long and radiate palely through the night, seeping into my dreams.

I think a marathon of Universal monster movies might be next on the cards, after my run of Fifties sf.

Meanwhile, I'm still hugely enjoying reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Kind-of grown up Hogwarts. The chapter the students spend learning to fly like geese and travelling in formation to antarctica is wonderful. Beautifully written. There's lots of interesting stuff, here. About magic being the indissoluble linking of word and thing, and the beginning of a magical education being the acceptance of that. That idea gave me pause for thought - remembering instantly the very first lectures of my university career, and the cornerstone of all the theory we were asked to accept from day one. That was the very opposite of magic, I suppose - all that stress on the arbitrariness of language and the man-made fibres of poststructuralism, postmodernism, whatever they went on to call it. Unmagical in its cynicism. We'd all opted to study literature but we were told that we had to question whether it even existed at all. 'What is literature? What are texts? What is language? Is language language?' Aaaagghhh! Educated in the Eighties. I suppose it was bound to result in a generation of two of readers who go on to like nice thick books, saturated in magic and fantasy. Books you can disappear into, no questions asked.

A thick book I enjoyed recently was Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves. My review of it was in yesterday's Financial Times, and should appear online soon. It's her first follow up to the massive Historian - her Dracula novel from five years ago. What I liked about her Drac book was that it began all classy and smart, like an academic reseacrh-heavy romp-around. But pretty soon there are chases and monsters and before the end that vampire's glowing in the dark at you.