#weldon_fay

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

(choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

Evil and Children (childish innocence an ideal vessel for evil - and sometimes, the children themselves are not so innocent)

Susan Hill, I"m the King of the Castle  (devil-child, jealous of rival, torments the life fronm him)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw  (neurotic governess tries to protect two innocent charges against half-sensed, wholly evil ghosts)

Stephen King, Carrie  (bullied girl in junior high school uses Devil"s power to take revenge)

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos  (alien race seeks to capture England by breeding race of hyper-intelligent, soulless children)

Surviving (shipwreck or desertion the door to new adventure)

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout  (English children marooned in Australian outback, taught survival by Aboriginal boy)

Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe  (18th-century shipwrecked sailor builds new life on desert island)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver"s Travels  (18th-century sailor tries to teach Europena "culture" in fantasy lands he visits)

Jim Crace, Signals of Distress

The Devil (takes many forms and can"t be resisted - or can he?)

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

James Blish, Black Easter  (nuclear scientists enlists Devil"s help in bringing about Armageddon)

Fay Weldon, The Heart of England  (evil forces in Glastonbury countryside interfere with yuppie lives)

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick  (bored Connecticut housewives play with witchcraft - and raise the Devil)

The Wilderness (surviving the most inhospitable areas of Earth)

Brian Moore, Black Robe  (17th-century Jesuit among 17th-century Indians: bloody, hopeless culture-clash)

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra  (battle for survival - and against unrelenting evil - on the empty planet Venus)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (African jungle used as metaphor for the evil in humanity)

Patrick White, Voss  (half-crazy explorer leads doomed 19th-century expedition into heart of Australia)

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)