Recommendation: Things We Leave Behind by Mark West

This is Mark West's second collection of short stories, featuring 18 tales: two new, the rest published in various anthologies over the years. As such, it contains a number of West's stories that I've already read and admired, including 'Come See My House In The Pretty Town' (folk horror plus scary clowns), the genuinely creepy 'Mr Stix' and 'The Witch House', and the surreal 'Time Waits...' Special mention here must go to 'The Bureau Of Lost Children', possibly West's finest tale, a panic-inducing story about a father losing his son in a crowded shopping centre.

Lots of the stories in Things We Leave Behind feature father/son relationships, or are about family more generally. The majority of West's protagonists are fathers and husbands, and the supernatural forces they face are scary not just because they are dangerous but because they risk disrupting the family unit. This is particularly clear in the stories 'Last Train Home' and 'Fog On The Old Coast Road'; in both, the protagonist is trying to get home to his family and is stopped from doing so by the horrors of West's fiction. I particularly liked the latter of these two pieces: a creepy ghost story with a fantastic last line.

I was rereading some of Stephen King's early short stories at the same time as reading Things We Leave Behind and there's a clear influence at work, transposed to these shores and made very British. It's there in the everyman/woman protagonists that populate his work; there too in the fact West writes wonderfully well about childhood and being a kid.  But there's a seedier, gorier side to his fiction as well, as shown in 'The Taste Of Her' and 'The Zabriskie Grimoire'. These are stories not ashamed to acknowlege horror's seedier roots; indeed in 'The Glamour Girl Murders' to relish in it.

A final theme, like so much horror fiction, is the past and its influence on the present. It informs 'Mr Stix' in which a childhood terror passes from mother to daughter, 'What Gets Left Behind', a superb story about a man returning to the site where his childhood friend died, and my favourite of the stories new to me here: 'What We Do Sometimes, Without Thinking'. This is a superbly realised piece about the past, childhood, and a haunting that feels both Jamesian and contemporary at the same time. Like the book as a whole, it's highly recommended to all horror fans.

Things We Leave Behind  (UK | US)

Some Mini-Recommendations

I already had a backlog of books I wanted to write recommendations for; and then I went on a short holiday and read 'quite a few' more, and realised I was never going to catch up. So here are a few books I thoroughly recommend, with the briefest of notes why. Hopefully my terseness will not put you off trying any of them.

Beneath - Kristi DeMeester
I kinda guessed that the debut novel from Kristi DeMeester would be brilliant, and I wasn't wrong. It's a quasi-Lovecraftian horror story set in fundamentalist Christian Appalachia. This is a book that oozes atmosphere, with the author's skilful prose describing a world that feels sickly, feverish, on the brink of delirium and apocalypse.

Body In The Woods - Sarah Lotz
A splendid psychological thriller, this, about things that don't stay buried, both physical and emotional. A story about friendship, debts, and when you might end up paying back too much. It's also the type of book about which it doesn't do to say too much, so I won't. A hugely enjoyable read.

Stranger Companies - Linda Angel
A collection of short stories and prose pieces, Stranger Companies' success lies in its authorial voice. Linda Angel's style has echoes of writers like Brautigan, Amis and Zadie Smith, but also seems wholly her own: wise-cracking, playful and dark. She can do plot too, particularly in the longer piece that ends the collection, 'Deathsmell'.

I Am The New God - Nicole Cushing
Nicole Cushing's novella has a brilliant premise: a man known as 'the hierophant' exchanges letters with an ordinary seeming young man whom he believes to be 'the new god', a diety who will replace the current incumbent. And the young man starts to believe the letters might be right... Starting, brutal, compelling.

Mutator - Gary Fry
Another slice of Yorkshire horror from Gary Fry, taking what might seem a well-worn premise and making it new. For while Mutator borrows tropes from both classic horror literature and creature-feature cinema, Fry also muses on modern scientific notions of evolution & adaptability... and creates the original monster of the title in the process.

High-Rise - J.G. Ballard
Ballard is not a writer I'm as familiar with as I should be, having only previously read Super-Cannes and The Atrocity Exhibition. High-Rise is a novel with a well known central premise, set in a building as distinctive as any haunted house. This is not so much a realistic book as one that takes a realistic premise (that external environment affects both our psychology and social structures) and single-mindedly extrapolates it into something grotesque. It's clever, mordant and revolting; I loved it.

Recommendation: You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin

A few brief, inadequate words of recommendation for Malcolm Devlin's debut collection, You Will Grow Into Them:

Anyone who's read any of Devlin's work before will not be surprised that these stories are all expertly constructed, brilliantly told. But reading them together really brings home the range of his talents, both in terms of genre-tropes and more importantly emotional depth and characterisation.

It begins with 'Passion Play', a story about a teenage girl acting out a police reconstruction of the disappearance of her best friend. A story focussed on doubling, then, as both external events and the two teenage girls reflect and distort each other. It's a theme continued, in a very different manner, in the second story 'Two Brothers'. Here William waits for his older brother to return from his first term at boarding school; when he does William finds him changed, more assured, colder. A parable about growing up, and what we might lose in the process (at least when seen from childhood's perspective) this is a brilliant piece of work.

Two stories in, then, and I'm already smitten.

By the time I finish the fifth story, 'Dogsbody', I'm already thinking this collection will be topping some end of year best of lists. 'Dogsbody' is quite simply the most original take on the werewolf theme I've read in years, so much so that I don't want to say too much here. Just read it. Suffice to say it tackles social stereotyping, tabloid hysteria, the buried emotions of modern masculinity, and so much more. Superb.

'The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him', preposterously, might be even better. A realistic tale that would make a great play, being set in a single location and on a single night. It takes place in a house where "the widow" poisoned a general, in an unnamed country ruled by a despot. Games of influence and power and patronage play among a group of dinners being served the very same meal the murdered general ate the night he died...

And then there's 'The End Of Hope Street'. The finest short story in an impossibly good collection. An extended riff on Cortazar's 'House Taken Over', it tells of the houses on the titular street becoming "uninhabitable" - normal, suburban middle-class homes suddenly change, in an unspecified way, so that people can no longer live there. Literally: they die if they cross the threshold again. Each incident is accepted matter of factly by the residents of Hope Street, taking in their now homeless neighbours, even though their home could be next...

It's a masterpiece. I'm going to read it again after writing these rushed and no doubt clumsy words. 

One of the short story collections of the year so far.

You Will Grow Into Them (UK | US)

Recommendation: Some Will Not Sleep by Adam Nevill

I have a theory/well-rehearsed drunken ramble that all great horror writers are also great short story writers. Here's yet more evidence that I'm right.

Adam Nevill is of course best known for his successful horror novels, but he's a formidably good short story writer too. Indeed, reading a number of his shorter works together made me realise just how good; nearly every piece in his debut collection is first-rate.

The stories in Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors were written between 1995 & 2011 and are arranged in chronological order, allowing the reader to see Nevill's progress as a writer (aided by the autobiographical story notes at the rear of the book). Almost everything here displays Nevill's stengths as a writer: his ability to evoke an atmosphere of dread from the everyday world, the terror of violence both physical and psychic, the vivid details of the worlds he creates. In particular, he's brilliant at evoking the physicality of the monsters and demons that stalk his fiction: the way they move, the way they hold themselves, the way they smell or make the air taste foul around them. This concreteness gives Nevill's creations a hold on the reader's imagination for days afterwards; I'm still able to visualise the bloated, pasty beings of 'Mother's Milk', and the terrifting creature from 'Pig Thing' more clearly than I might wish...

My personal favourite stories here were the insidious home invasion depicted in 'Yellow Teeth', the bloody gothic Western of 'What Hath God Wrought?' and Nevill's original spin on the haunted house story, 'Florie'.

I must mention too that the limited edition hardback of Some Will Not Sleep, produced by Nevill himself is a beautifully book. With neat timing, Nevill has just announced that a companion collection, Hasty For The Dark, will be released later this year. In the meantime, Some Will Not Sleep comes highly recommended.

Some Will Not Sleep (UK | US)

Recommendation: Alectryomancer & Other Weird Tales by Christopher Slatsky

Alectryomancer & Other Weird Tales is the first collection from Christopher Slatsky, and a pretty special debut it is too. Each of the stories here fits firmly into the US 'post-Ligotti' school of weird fiction, while displaying Slatsky's singular, evocative style.

In common with much horror, Slatsky's tales typically begin with some realistic scene setting, into which an element of the strange or the bizarre intrudes: a stain looking like a human form in one story, foundations breaking through the earth in another. But what makes these pieces extraordinary is that the intrusion is not just (or not even) a physical one, but the eruption of an intellectual or artistic conceit into the story itself. I don't just mean that the characters and events of the tale are increasingly governed by and reacting to the weird, but that the imagery and language gradually seem infected too, overwhelmed by the concept Slatsky is working with. So, the story that begins with the stain looking like a person ('Loveliness Like A Shadow') becomes saturated with imagery of statues, reflections, photos, and instances of pareidolia.

It takes a skilled stylist to pull this off without it becoming boring or impenetrable; it takes an accomplished horror writer to keep doing so and still have the results be so unnerving and atmospheric. Fortunately, Slatsky is both. His stories are dense, intricately woven yet surprising creations that utilise everything from cosmicism to body-horror to achieve their effects. My favourites included the aforementioned 'Loveliness Like A Shadow', plus the insectoid creepiness of 'An Infestation Of Stars', the architecture-based cosmic horror of 'No One Is Sleeping In This World', and one of the scariest creepy cinemas stories I've read, 'Film Maudit'.

A deep, dark, compelling collection, Alectryomancer & Other Weird Tales is required reading for literary horror fans.

Alectryomancer & Other Weird Tales (UK | US)

Recommendation: Case Of The Bedevilled Poet by Simon Clark

Case Of The Bedevilled Poet is the first in a new line of horror novellas from NewCon Press. It tells the story of Jack Cofton, a poet in London during the Blitz who, in a compelling opening scene, narrowly escapes death from a Nazi bomb.

But after this escape, Crofton's life becomes decidedly strange: an off-duty soldier insults and attacks him, and complete strangers all start repeating the same words to him: "And suffer you shall before you die." London suddenly seems filled with a sense of threat and violence which, while ambiguous, is directed towards Crofton. Seeking shelter in a pub, he encounters two old men who, preposterously, claim to be the real Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Crofton doesn't believe them of course, but he's in no position to turn down their aid...

As the above makes clear, there's a lot of plates set spinning in this story, and if the author was less talented all we'd have would be a load of smashed crockery. Fortunately, Simon Clark is too accomplished for that to happen, in part because the setting of London under siege by the Luftwaffe is so convincingly realised, both in terms of the concrete details and the depiction of the British public under fire. The characters of 'Holmes' and 'Watson' are also well done; a potentially absurd scenario actually becomes the source of pathos as the story progresses.

On one level, Case Of The Bedevilled Poet is a fast-paced, plot-driven tale, racing along with the same narrative verve as the Sherlock Holmes stories themselves. But at the same time there's weighty thematic concerns raised, in particular the idea that the 'death drive' (based on Freud's theories of a universal urge towards self-destruction) is behind both the violence directed towards Crofton and the world-wide conflagration of WW2 as a whole.

Overall, Case Of The Bedevilled Poet is an exhilerating read, and a fine start this range of NewCon Press novellas. (UK | US)

Recommendation: The Secret Of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett

The Secret Of Ventriloquism is the debut collection from Jon Padgett - and what a debut it is. I'd seen a lot of praise for this book before reading it, so much so that I wondered if it could actually live up to the hype. Now I find myself adding to that praise unreservedly: The Secret Of Ventriloquism is utterly, fantastically, indubitably brilliant.

The stories within cover a range of styles and influences: 'The Indoor Swamp' for example is a largely plotless, Ligotti-esque mood piece, whereas 'The Infusorium' is a longer work, full of vivid characters, plot reversals and the influence of noir. Padgett also gives us jet-black humour in 'Murmurs Of A Voice Foreknown', a one act play, and a story written in the style of a ventriloquism manual.

But despite this impressive variation, these stories all seem to take place in the same fictional geography, with images, events and motifs criss-crossing between them. Padgett-land is a place of thick smogs, mysterious plan-crashes, dream-logic, and the mysteries of 'greater ventriloquism'.

As such, The Secret Of Ventriloquism is not just a collection of good stories, but a good collection of stories, structured and arranged to hint at wider horrors that we never see. If the key to good horror writing is atmosphere (as I keep repeating) then Padgett proves himself a master of it here. Each story builds tension individually, but also contributes to the overall, escalating feeling of unease, of a malaise physical and mental. It's magnificently done and demands to be read by all aficionados of the genre.

The Secret Of Ventriloquism (UK | US)

Recommendation: Asian Monsters (ed. Margret Helgadottir)

Asian Monsters is the third anthology in the 'Monsters' series from Fox Spirit Press, following on from European Monsters and African Monsters. It's a beautifully designed book, with evokative, sepia-tinted cover art from Daniele Serra and interior art from a range of artists. Two of the stories are in the form of comic-strips too.

The fourteen stories here (edited by Margret Helgadottir) take creatures from various strands of Asian folklore and give them new twists. If, like me, you're as boringly British as they come, you'll be sure to find beasts and creatures new to you in these pages. As such, it's an anthology that feels more original than many. I assume that most of these tales are based on old myths and folktales, but the the stories in Asian Monsters all feel like fresh retellings, the authors using their stories to investigate contemporary and human concerns.

Every story here is worth reading; here are a few words on my personal favourites:

'Good Hunting' by Ken Liu exemplifies the combination of the traditional and the modern I mentioned above; indeed it's about the journey from one to another. This story starts with a familiar setup–a demon-hunter seeking out his quarry–but ends up somewhere completely different, as the magic of spells and tradition is replaced by that of industry and modernity. It's a spectacularly well written story about how both the demon and the hunter adapt and thrive; in its scope its the equivalent of that jump-cut from 2001.

One of the most disturbing monsters in the anthology is to be found in 'Datsue-Ba' by Eliza Chan. Here, the traditional and the modern appear to be in conflict. The central characters are as modern as they come: two unmarried lovers enjoying a break at a Tokyo onsen; but they are unaware of the spirit-like creature there with them, one who sits in judgement over their actions and characters. But while it is a story about judgement, it's unclear whether justice has been delivered, or whether just the stale diktats of dead tradition enacted.

Aliette de Boddard's 'Golden Lillies' also sees the values of the traditional past being forced upon latter generations, although in this case the monster (a deceased ancestor) is actively sought out, by a young woman about to marry. The story is based around the horrific practice of foot-binding, and the reader might wonder if the 'help' the spirit offers is really aid at all, or merely pointless pain and torment.

EeLeen Lee's 'Let Her In' tells of the relationship between mother and daughter, the latter returning from the dead after being forced into an absuive marriage. A wonderfully poignant piece about revenge, cross-generational relationships, loss and love.

Perhaps the best story of all, and certainly the scariest, is 'Blood Women' by Usman T. Malik. Set in a contemporary Pakistan, young children already facing the horrors of bombs and drone-strikes realise that something even more monstrous is out there. It's a vividly conveyed setting, and it's testament to Malik's skills as a writer that the monstrous element still has the ability to shock and scare against this all too human backdrop.

All in all, Asian Monsters is thoroughly recommended (UK | US)

Recommendation: The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's novel The End Of Everything is a book with a disapearence at its heart: that of 13 year old Evie Verver from her suburban American family home. It's narrated from the point of view of her best friend and next door neighbour, Lizzie. One of the first things you'll notice about this book is the impressive characterisation of Lizzie: at once appalled and fascinated by what might have happened to her friend. Lizzie is on the cusp of adulthood, and like many teenagers is both determined to appear grownup yet still subject to adolescent fantasy. Lizzie does not stay passive in the hunt for Evie, and the ramifcations of her intervention, for herself and others, form a key part of the story.

The narrative doesn't solely focus on the mystery of Evie's disapperence or the identity of her potential abducter, but also on the effects on those left behind. It's a book of secrets revealed - the secrets of the Ververs, of Lizzie, of the surburban world she lives in, and ultimately of vanished Evie herself, who Lizzie perhaps didn't know as well as she thought...

This is the first book by Abbott that I've read, but it's unlikely to be the last. It's wonderfully told, both in terms of the flowing, sinuous prose and the dexterious, clever storytelling. The characterisation is spot-on, and the plot's secrets are often revelled subtelly and obliquely. It's one of those stories whose voice seems to linger long after reading. Well worth reading.

The End Of Everything (UK | US)

Recommendation: Unger House Radicals by Chris Kelso

Unger House Radicals by Chris Kelso is a hell of a book: a hell of a book to read, and a hell of a book to even begin to describe. But here goes.

It starts simply enough: a wannabe avant-garde filmmaker and a serial killer team up, with the goal of filming the killer's crimes to start a new cinematic, artistic and philosophical movement: Ultra-Realism. But the story soon turns to people inspired or affected by this movement, and we see the ripples of Ultra Realism's creation spill out into wider society. The plot is told from multiple points of view, cutting across and contradicting each other (and each expertly caputed by Kelso). From these voices, Kelso weaves a whole damn tapestry of violence, nilhism, fractured psyches, blurred timelines. Except 'weave' isn't the right word; instead say Kelso pulls at one loose thread, until everything you think you knew is unravelled. It's like some unholy combination of J.G. Ballard, Fight Club, real-life accounts of serial killers, and a William Burroughs cut-up experiment.

In the hands of a lesser author Unger House Radicals might have been a huge mess. But it's tightly structured despite its sprawling feel, and Kelso's narrative skills hold everything together. There are brutal scenes here, but Kelso does not depict them gratuitiously or lingeringly. A bleak, playful, challenging yet hugely enjoyable work, Unger House Radicals will almost certainly reward rereading. As it is, after one read Unger House Radicals is one of the most memorable books I've read for a while, and one I can highly recommend.

Unger House Radicals (UK | US)

Recommendation: The Little Gift by Stephen Volk

I recently had the opportunity to read Stephen Volk's new novella, The Little Gift, and what a treat that proved to be. It's a cleverly structured and quietly devasting piece of work, a story with implications that linger long in the mind. It begins with a scene of routine, comfortable domesticity into which death intrudes: a long married couple are woken by their cat dismembering a bird in the kitchen. Cleaning away this 'gift' their pet has bought them causes the narrator to reflect on his past, on his marriage, and how things could have been very different...

The Little Gift is a book about which it's hard to say too much about the plot without spoiling things. Indeed, much of the actual plot takes place off-stage; Volk's narrator is a man at the periphery of a truly barbaric event, affected by its ripples but who neither directly caused it or experienced it. So non-central is he that certain key plot points are revealed while he watches the TV news. Of course, only the best writers could make this technique work, and Volk pulls it off with quiet aplomb. Very subtly, this is also a piece of metafiction - a story about stories, about how we tell stories in our own heads. About how we make every story about us, even when we are merely bit-parts.

Some books, you finish reading them and you're done; but the events of The Little Gift stick around in your head, nag at your throughts, reveal new interpretations as you shower, go shopping or drive to work. It's another remarkable work from one of the best writers we have. You can (and should) pre-order it from PS Publishing here.

Recommendation: Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

I came to this debut collection from American author Michael Wehunt having already admired a number of the stories in various anthologies and yearly best ofs - and yet, it still impressed me even more than I was expecting.

Nearly every story here is worthy of your time, but I'll jump right in and say a few words about my favourites. Your own may vary, as might mine the next time I read them. (And these stories will certainly need rereading.)

'Greener Pastures' is a sustained exercise in atmosphere, set in the a truckers' cafe in the middle of American nowhere. Two truckers fall into conversation whilst staring out into the sodium-lit darkness outside, and it's no surprise that their talk is all about nothingness and empty spaces... Wehunt uses these bare bones to create an utterly compelling, creepy narrative; I've seen this story compared online to a Twilight Zone piece and there's something to that - but it has an emotional resonance beyond any mere twist-in-the-tale piece.

If 'Greener Pastures' was almost minimalist in the elements it used to scare, 'October Film Haunt: Under The House' takes the opposite approach and chucks everything into the pan. We have a classic creepy house, multiple unreliable narrators, Lovecraftian weirdness, entomophobia, and a clever use of the 'found footage' trope in a prose narrative. All these elements are bound by the story's relentless air of fatalist determinism - Wehunt's characters seem stuck in a situation that they know will lead to their ruin but are compelled to play it out anyway. (Or maybe I'm just seeing my own neurosis and intellectual tics staring back at me from the distorted mirror Wehunt crafts here. Readers of 'Fate, Destiny, And A Fat Man From Arkansas' will know how scary I find those notions.)

Like many pieces here, 'Dancers' fuses genuine, poetic symbols of human experience (the titular trees are ones the husband in a long marriage has gradually encouraged to grow entwined together) and horrific imagery that undercuts this human lyricism. 'Dancers' is a darkly terrible story about possession, fertility rites and old gods.

And that's not to mention the Aickman-inspired 'A Discrete Music', the Stephen King-esqe 'Devil Under The Maison Blue' or the superb, surreal, take on small communities and religious fundamentalism in 'Deducted From Your Share In Paradise'.

Overall then, this is a well-crafted, intelligent, not to mention thoroughly enjoyable collection of short stories, each of which builds on genre classics but displays the author's own distinct voice. A fine debut.

Greener Pastures (UK | US)

Favourite Books of 2016

This year, I've done two different list for my favourite books of the year: one for books published in 2016, and one for books published previously. 

(I'll be posting my annual short stories post after Christmas.)

So, in no particular order, two Top Tens:

2016:
1. The Grieving Stones - Gary McMahon (Horrific Tales Publishing)
A superb novella which mixes folk horror with psychological weirdness to produce something only McMahon could have written. A controlled, slow-burn build up leads us into a ferociously good climax. Cracking stuff.

2. The Searching Dead - Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing)
"I've been reading Ramsey Campbell's books all my adult life, and yet he continues to surprise me. The Searching Dead is up there with his finest novels" - my full review here.

3. Becoming David - Phil Sloman (Hersham Horror)
This debut novella from Sloman, a tale of a serial killer being haunted by one of his own victims (maybe), delights and appals in equal measure. Superb.

4. Year's Best Weird Fiction #3 - Simon Strantzas, Michael Kelly (ed.) (Undertow)

Does exactly what it says on the tin, really. Nineteen tales that demonstrate both the rude health of literay horror fiction and the keen eye of the editors for a good short story. YBWF is a series we're lucky to have.

5. You'll Know When You Get There - Lynda E. Rucker (Swan River Press)
"Quite simply, one of the short story collections of the year" - my full review here.

6. A Country Road, A Tree - Jo Baker (Knopf)
A fictionalised account of the life of Samuel Beckett, centred around his time in the French resistance in WW2. Beckett is one of my favourite authors, and this book is full of allusions to his work (the title is from the set description for Waiting For Godot) as well as skilfully depicting his character as a young man, caught up in the war, unaware of the artistic success ahead.

7. Secret Language - Neil Williamson (Newcon Press)
There seems to be little Williamson can't do with the short story form (I hate it when people call short stories a 'genre'), as this collection demonstrates. There's horror, science-fiction and dark fantasy here, all twisted into shapes only Williamson could imagine.

8. Singing With All My Skin & Bone - Sunny Moraine (Undertow)
"an alluring combination of horror, magic realism and even science fiction" - my full review here.

9. Bodies Of Water - V.H. Leslie (Salt)
"a genuine truimph, a book sure of itself and full of quiet ambition" - my full review here.

10. Phonogram #3: The Immaterial Girl - Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (Image Comics)
The Phonogram graphic novels sound preposterous as a concept - a world like ours except that pop music = magic. But in practice they're a startling exploration of fame, youth, nostalgia, culture and the horror implicit in that famous video for Take On Me.

Other:
1. Everyone's Just So So Special - Robert Shearman (Big Finish)
Robert Shearman gives us a bumper selection of short stories and an overview of world history (with another story hidden within, natch) in this utterly original, delightful, messed-up, and disturbing collection.

2. The Bird's Nest - Shirley Jackson (Penguin Modern Classics)
I absolutely adore Jackson's work, but until the recent Penguin reissues I had some gaps in my collection. Reading The Bird's Nest for the first time was a revelation, a classic to stand alongside Jackson's other works of genius.

3. Lost Girl - Adam Nevill (Macmillan)
"a novel that I know will stay with me, haunting me with the fear that my daughter will grow up into the world it depicts" - my full review here.

4. Gateways To Abomination - Matthew M. Bartlett
"in story after story Bartlett’s protagonists stumble across the strange, infectious voices of WXXT..." - my full review here.

5. Shadows & Tall Trees #4 - Michael Kelly (ed.) (Undertow)
A fine selection of stories from some of the best writers in the horror field: David Surface, Laura Mauro, Alison Moore, Ralph Robert Moore and, uh, more. As with the other issues of S&TT I've read, essential.

6. Albion Fay - Mark Morris (Snow Books)
A novella that mixes traditional horror with more modern fears; disturbing, creepy and seething with repressed emotion and memories. One of Morris's best, which is saying something.

7. A Cold Season - Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher)
An expertly written, engrossing ghost story, but then what else would you expect from Alison Littlewood? I enjoyed every chilly, frozen minute of this one.

8. The Wanderer - Timothy J. Jarvis (Perfect Edge)
"deeply serious yet it has the tone of a shaggy dog story told in a disreputable public house" - my full review here.

9. Thinking Horror #1: S.J. Bagley (ed.) (TKHR)
A welcome venture, Thinking Horror is a journal dedicated to the exploration of the horror genre: it's aesthetics, its mechanics, its meaning, its history. This first issue has interviews and essays from Helen Marshall, Gary Fry, Nathan Ballingrud, Molly Tanzer and more. Stimulating and satisfying.

10. The Death House - Sarah Pinborough (Gollancz)
A heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, soul-rearranging novel about young people with a mysterious illness, sealed away from the world. It's important to note that I didn't, repeat didn't, blub at the ending. Nope.

Recommendation: The Searching Dead by Ramsey Campbell

However one defines adulthood, I've been reading Ramsey Campbell's books all my adult life. Indeed, the discovery of his fiction (and its impact on my own nascent writing) feels like part of that transition to adulthood, a defining event. A bold claim to make for the purchase of a book of short stories for 50p from a second-hand shop in Cleethorpes, perhaps, but one that feels emotionally true when I look back now.

So it's apt that Campbell's latest work is based around just that change from youth to adulthood, that it so well describes the experience and embarrassments of beginning to write, and that it is told from the point of view of someone looking back at the events he describes. Worried that he may be imagining as much as he is remembering, creating significance where none appeared at the time - much as I am no doubt doing above.

The Searching Dead is the first volume in a trilogy called 'The Three Births of Daoloth'. And, while it's a book that could be written by no one other than Campbell, it also seems to develop something genuinely new from him: a strand of (pseudo)autobiography. It's set in 1950s Liverpool, a location effortlessly and expertly captured in Campbell's prose, a setting of vivid and concrete detail that still evokes the shifting and nebulous horrors so common to this author's fiction. Crucially, it's a time & place in the midst of transition, caught between the old world of rationing, respect for ones elders, omnipresent Christianity and a newer world yet to be fully visualised - a thought made disquieting by the narrator's hints at the dark way the world does change later, which we will presumably learn about later in the trilogy...

The narrator, Dominic Sheldrake, is also shown in a moment of change. The plot centres around Dom and two of his friends and their suspicions about Mr Noble, a teacher at their school. Noble is also involved in the local spiritualist movement, taking it over with his apparently genuine ability to rouse the dead... Dom has been reading Enid Blyton-esque children's fiction and it is this that spurs him into action. He thinks of he and his friends as the 'Tremendous Three' and imagines movie-like dialogue for them. But fiction, at least of the childish variety, is a poor guide and Dom and his friends' investigation does not go to plan.

The book is built around the classic horror motif of someone attempting to raise the dead, but beneath this conceit are reoccurring hints at something larger, at a cosmic horror that will surely become more explicit as the trilogy progresses. Not that this first volume doesn't build to a satisfyingly scary climax of its own. The Searching Dead is studded with some standout set-pieces - a faceless terror following Dom when he visits the cinema being particularly fine. But as ever with Campbell it's the atmosphere that really makes the book; he's a virtuoso at creating horror from small details, each seeming insignificant in isolation but which cumulatively hint at terrors Dom and his friends only partially understand. It's something he does better than anyone.

I've been reading Ramsey Campbell's books all my adult life, and yet he continues to surprise me. The Searching Dead is up there with his finest novels and I for one can't wait for the next volume. Highly recommended.

The Searching Dead - PS Publishing

Recommendation: The Doom That Came To Whitby Town by Gary Fry

Whitby, 2019

The Doom That Came To Whitby Town is the swan song from the much respected publisher, Gray Friar Press, owned by Gary Fry. This parting gift is a novella from Fry himself, in which something ancient and monstrous is uncovered after a cliff fall on the coast near Whitby. The 'something' is spirited away and hidden by the town's authorities, but that doesn't stop its malign influence from spreading...

As might be gathered, this novella is firmly rooted in Lovecraftian tropes, although here they are not treated with the unnecessary, cloying reverence of most modern mythos fiction. Indeed, one gets the sense that Fry was having a blast writing this one, gleefully destroying both his own home town and his protagonist's settled bachorlohood as the story progresses. Whereas much of Fry's work (of which I'm a big admirer) uses horror to explore serious contemporary concerns, Doom is faster paced, lighter on its feet. Most importantly, in places it is genuinely creepy and unsettling.

In part the book works so well because of its use of setting - I was lucky enough to visit Whitby earlier in the year (and to meet Fry himself) and instantly recognised Doom's depiction of narrow streets and narrower alleys, steep hills, deserted pubs, sea frets and maurading Herring Gulls. Much of the story is set in the off season when all the tourists have left, making it easier to visualise in the mind's eye the things Fry only hints at: mishappen beings shambling the misty streets late at night, the locals begining to hide themselves away from prying eyes. There are mysterious deaths, strange pentagrams, visions of the cosmic on the beach (a shout out to Fry's own Emergence, perhaps), and an unhealthy number of things centred around the number five. Even the bastard seagulls are not untainted by what is happening in Whitby town...

A fine piece of work, compelling and entertainng in equal measure.

The Doom That Came To Whitby Town (UK | US)

Recommendation: Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

Horror is perhaps the most subjective literary genre to judge, because in the end it comes down to how the book emotionally affected you. Did it scare me? Did it creep me out; did its shadow linger after I closed the pages? I think most readers of the horrific, the weird, and the strange would admit that those books & stories which most scared them did so in part due to qualities outside the book. Because the books that really stay with us are those that play on our existing phobias, bugbears, and neuroses.

So it was with me and Adam Nevill's Lost Girl.

Lost Girl takes place in a near-future England, slowly collapsing as climate-change wreaks havoc across the globe and millions of displaced people move northward. Within this grim setting, Nevill tells the story of a character known only as 'the father' on a quest to find his missing daughter, who was snatched two years earlier. In the future depicted here, a single missing child is small-beans to the overworked authorities, and the father must employ his own methods to track down those who abducted his child: methods which increase in violence even as his quest appears more and more hopeless.

Part of the reason this novel had such a powerful effect on me is surely because I'm a relatively new father myself; the parts of the book describing the daughter's abduction, the father's descent into grief, pain and despair, triggered no end of 'what if' scenarios in my head. (And given how vivid & starkly the father's plight is described, I'm sure this was the case for the author too.) Indeed, this is a subject matter that, even before was a father, could induce a sickly panic in me as a reader; I remember similarly feelings of panic reading Ian McEwan's The Child In Time.

But more than that, I've always been fascinated and appalled by climate change. I remember studying it at university, twenty years ago now, and while it was a horrifying concept then it seemed far away enough that we would do something about it. Obviously. Why wouldn't we? But now it's decades later, we've done comparatively little, and it really is the last chance saloon. The idea of runaway global warming has a different emotion intensity now, and not just because it's that much closer. It's because it no longer feels like something the previous generation has done to me, but something I've colluded in doing to my daughter's generation. Nevill's central plot, about a father trying and failing to protect his child, is of course the perfect metaphor for his wider theme.

The book's depiction of the England of tomorrow is frightening in its plausibility. It's a society still clinging to its old ways, its old shape; the police, politicians, inner cities, countryside, class division, motorways and other familiar features of British life all still present. But it's an England far hotter, overrun by criminal gangs, struggling with mass immigration, infectious diseases and the fear of imminent collapse. It's a place being reshaped not by a single apocalyptic event but by the slow accumulation of entropy and disaster. (The fate of other countries, the book suggests, has not been so kind.) It's a grimly realistic view of what life in the face of slow-motion environmental collapse will actually be like. And of course, like all depictions of the future, it's also a depiction of how we live now. Although it was released over a year ago, it's hard not to see in the world of Lost Girl a distorted and magnified version of our current Brexit small-minded idiocy.

The obvious book to compare Lost Girl to is Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece The Road; it's a testament to Nevill's skill as a novelist that Lost Girl comes out well from that comparison. Taut, brutal, violent, scary (but with only the merest hint of the supernatural), thought-provoking, emotionally-wrenching and possibly prophetic, it's a remarkable piece of work. It's a novel that, even after a single reading, I know will stay with me, haunting me with the fear that my daughter will grow up into the world it depicts. With the fear that if she does, it will be because I (and all of us) failed her and allowed her to become lost.

Lost Girl (UK | US)

Recommendation: Through A Mirror, Darkly by Kevin Lucia

Through A Mirror, Darkly is a dark and accomplished collection of interrelated novellas from Kevin Lucia, all set in the small American town of Clifton Heights. The stories are bookended by a framing narrative, the tales purporting to be read by the owner of the Arcane Delights bookstore after a manuscript mysteriously turns up in his store.

Readers will notice the legacy of the great Charles L. Grant in this setup, and it's a tribute to Lucia's skills as a writer that his stories hold up against Grant's. The influence of King and especially Bradbury are also clear in the small-town setting and the readable yet evocative prose. Less integrated, perhaps, is the more overt references to the mythos of Chambers and Lovecraft that pop up. This may be personal taste, but I felt Lucia too accomplished a writer to need to lean so heavily on the work of others. Clifton Heights is such a well-imagined setting that it deserves its own mythos.

The individual stories in the volume are nicely balanced and sequenced, with each shedding more light on Clifton Heights and a wider narrative, but still feeling distinctive in their own right. Opener Suffer The Children is an intriguing take on the Christian faith and personal loss, whilst Admit One tackles that evergreen horror theme of the dangers of getting what one wishes for. And I Watered It, With Tears has perhaps the most straight-forward horror plot here, as a group of strangers are trapped inside a civic centre and are gradually picked off one by one by something nightmarish inside. Despite a certain contrivance to the setup, once the piece hits its stride its a grimly effective piece of horror.

Yellow Cab was my favourite piece, telling the story of a young taxi driver who picks up some very unusual fares in and around Clifton Heights. The driver's aimless life is nicely contrasted with the definite but nebulous destination his passengers ask him to head for... This story displayed all of Lucia's strengths, most prominently an expertly controlled sense of mounting, creeping dread.

Overall, a great read. You can purchase Through A Mirror, Darkly here.

Recommendation: The Race by Nina Allan

A few words of recommendation about this excellent book from Nina Allan. I'll say upfront: this book is almost impossible to talk about without spoilers. You have been warned.

The Race is a complex, experimental novel of multiple narratives, each of which seems to ripple out from the previous one. It eases you in gradually, with a first section that seems, initially, to be a well-written but relatively simple science-fiction story. It tells the story of Jenna, living in a place called Sapphire, a town in an alternative version of England, after some disaster. Sapphire is a place with little going on apart from the racing of genetically modified 'smart-dogs', a sport which Jenna and most of the other characters are involved with, one way or another. This includes her brother Del, a shady character - the plot hinges around Del's schemes finally catching up with him, affecting his family and Jenna herself. Sapphire, whilst an interesting setting, is something of a backwater, and the reader might confidently predict that Allan will expand the scope later in the novel, zooming out to explain more about this world and how it came to be... that's how these kind of stories work, right? Well, Allan certainly does zoom out, but not in a way anyone is likely to predict.

(If you ignored the spoiler warning above, they really are coming now.)

The second part of the novel immediately pulls the rug from under us–it is set in our real world, and focuses on a character called Christy. Christy is an author, and she writes stories which are set in the town of Sapphire... Christy, like Jenna, has a brother whose violent actions destroy the relationships of those around him. The reader is given to understand that the fictional events of the first part of The Race are, at least in part, a reflection of this second 'non-fictional' section. But is Christy writing to explore her own experiences, or to hide from the implications of them?

And so The Race continues, with each part raising questions about the last (and the whole). There's a further section set in our world, in which Christy features but as a secondary character, which sheds new light on her brother and those caught up in his wake. And there are sections set back in the science-fiction world we encountered originally, although far away from the initial town of Sapphire. It's never spelt out exactly when in her story Christy wrote each of these sections–what did she know about the dramatic events of her own life at the time of writing each fiction? How much do the stories Christy writes reflect her experiences and how much pre-figure them? The relationship between fact and fiction in The Race seems as much a feedback loop as anything linear.

As you might expect from Allan, the book is exceptionally well written. The menacing, bordering on surreal ending of Section 2, where the unreality of fiction seems to bleed into the real world, is a particularly highlight. Even better is a stunning set-piece later in the book in which a ship at sea is menaced by a gigantic whale; it's a genuinely terrifying and awe-inspiring scene, as the passengers fear their ship will be capsized in the black oceans. The idea of such a threat, emerging from nowhere to engulf everything, seems an apt metaphor for the acts of violence, small and large, that are scattered throughout the worlds of The Race.

In summary, this is an excellent book, structurally sophisticated yet gloriously readable. Highly recommended.

Recommendation: Singing With All My Skin & Bone by Sunny Moraine

A few brief words of recommendation about this fantastic (in both senses) collection of short stories from Sunny Moraine. There's nineteen stories here, and they are all rich and satisfying and worth taking the time to savour. The tales in Singing With All My Skin & Bone are often in the first-person and often addressed to a "you" either inside or outside the tale. So they feel less like prose and more like the speech of someone who has to try and articulate the story of their life. Moraine’s characters are those society considers oddballs and outsiders, and their stories do not always have happy endings.

The style is an alluring combination of horror, magic realism and even science fiction. Many read like extended metaphors for our lives and how we form relationships now: the stripping back of a partner in Love In The Time Of Taxidermy; the finding of your own skull in Memento Mori; the social media suicide epidemic of Dispatches From A Hole In The World; the subterranean magic in the title tale. Sylvia Plath, I imagine, would be nodding her head in violent approval at Moraine's work.

Moraine's prose is typically lyrical and poetic, but gruesome where it needs to be too. A lot of the stories veer towards body-horror, but the body (as the collection's title alludes to) is a source of power too, a source of control over one's own fate.

And then there's Cold As The Moon which with one line (a 21st Century update of a very famous E.M. Forster quote) managed to break my heart, utterly and completely.  

A superb collection and another brilliant title from Undertow. 

Singing With All My Skin & Bone (UK | US)

Recommendation: Gateways To Abomination by Matthew M. Bartlett

Gateways To Abomination is a deeply unsettling collection of short stories all set in the New England town of Leeds. Some of the stories here are almost self-contained narratives, whilst others are vignettes adding atmosphere and depth to the setting. And the setting really is key to this book. Leeds is a place of devilry, strange crimes, fetid secrets. The corruption is in the air-literally, as in story after story Bartlett’s protagonists stumble across the strange, infectious voices of WXXT, a local Leeds radio station…

The power of the book is thus one that builds cumulatively as you read; unlike most short story collections this is one that demands to be read from front to back rather than cherry picking if you want to get the full effect. Reoccurring imagery, characters and themes link the stories together but Bartlett cannily ensures things don’t dovetail together too neatly. The gaps and caesuras, the static between the voices on the airwaves, do just as much to build the dread as what is present and audible.

Bartlett’s narrative voice is matter of fact as he presents his horrors, which makes their ambiguity all the more effective. There’s some disturbingly effective imagery here but this is no gore-fest, it’s more restrained and frightening than that. 

A fine horror book then: weird, distinctive, creepy and darkly humorous. If you want to tune in to Gateways To Abomination you can do so here (UK | US).