Anyone who regularly reads this blog will hopefully be aware that each December I try to celebrate the Christmas ghost story tradition by posting a festive horror story of my own. In most cases they are brand new, but in all cases they are completely free-to-read.
And this year is no exception. Despite what has clearly been a tough twelve months for everyone for all kinds of reasons, the business of scaring people to death still goes on for us thriller/horror writers, in which spirit I’m delighted to say that, having been determined to come up with an entirely new Christmas terror tale this year, the result - STUFFING - is now here. You can commence reading it right now, as I’ll be posting it in three installments, starting today, and I reiterate that it’s entirely FREE.
Hopefully it will chill your blood as surely as any frosty morning or raging snowstorm.
In addition, I should add that while we’re on the subject today of spooky stories, I’ll also be reviewing Brit horror star Mark Morris’s remarkable semi-biographical collection of his best stories, WARTS AND ALL. You’ll find that, as usual, in the Thrillers, Chillers section, at the lower end of today’s blog.
Before then, I trust you will stick around long enough to enjoy PART 1 of STUFFING.
(PART 2 will appear right here next week, Thursday December 16, and PART 3, the final installment, on Thursday December 23).
If you have enjoyed this first part of STUFFING, please feel free to check in for the next installment - which you’ll find free-to-read right here on December 16. But you might also be interested to know that, to date, I have also published two collections of original Christmas-themed horror and ghost stories in ebook, paperback and Audible: IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER and THE CHRISTMAS YOU DESERVE.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
WARTS AND ALL
Just accept that four strangers have been thrown together in unusual circumstances that require them to relate spooky stories. It could be that they’re all trapped in a cellar by a broken lift and are awaiting rescue (a la Vault of Horror), or perhaps they’re all connected to various items available in a backstreet trinket shop (as in From Beyond the Grave).
Without further messing about, here are the stories and the casts I would choose:
Green: A middle-class blowhard is stung by a mysterious plant and develops a sudden and increasingly violent aversion to the colour green, a bizarre mental condition, which his unfortunate family must face alone as a bitterly cold Christmas approaches …
Bob – Philip Glenister
Hilary – Vicky McClure
Claire – Suranne Jones
The Fertilizer Man: Old Tosho loves his allotment, but hates the local yobs who continually steal his vegetables. He defends the plot as best he can, but cannot be there all the time. Then he is approached by a fertilizer salesman, who guarantees that with his new special compound, everything will grow a lot more quickly. The question is, what will grow? …
Tosho – Phil Davis
Deakin – Joe Cole
Fallen Boys: A school party is escorted down a Cornish tin mine where a famous tragedy once played out. But there are stresses and strains within the group, dangerous ones that are likely to cause serious and even life-threatening problems. On top of that, there are grim forces at work down here. Never let it be said that history doesn’t repeat itself …
Tess – Simona Brown
Against the Skin: Hard-drinking poacher, Lee, attempts a late-night pickup, fails and then finds himself on the wrong bus home. Very drunk, he ends up in a part of town he doesn’t know, in an old depot he doesn’t recognise. Lee has slept through the journey and is now the only person on the bus, but that doesn’t mean he is in this place alone …
Lee – Joe Gilgun
In addition, I should add that while we’re on the subject today of spooky stories, I’ll also be reviewing Brit horror star Mark Morris’s remarkable semi-biographical collection of his best stories, WARTS AND ALL. You’ll find that, as usual, in the Thrillers, Chillers section, at the lower end of today’s blog.
Before then, I trust you will stick around long enough to enjoy PART 1 of STUFFING.
(PART 2 will appear right here next week, Thursday December 16, and PART 3, the final installment, on Thursday December 23).
Hope you all enjoy, and best wishes for the season …
If you haven’t, why not? The great man dominated the festive schedule for over ten years, each time commanding audiences of twenty-five million plus.
But if you’re genuinely new to this master of old-time comedy, this ultimate ‘Lord of Misrule’, as he soon became known, never fear. You’re going to learn everything there is to know about him, warts and all, over the next two hours …
When they came out of the railway station, the town, which had a name they’d never heard of until they’d looked it up on Wikipedia, was dressed for the season, and yet was strangely bereft of atmosphere. That was possibly because no snow had fallen yet, though the air was frigid, and the mid-afternoon sky much darker and greyer than it had a right to be even in late December. Most likely it was because the place, like so many other provincial towns in 21st century Britain, had seen better times. Glowing Father Christmases, angels with carol sheets and penguins in cute scarfs and bob-caps adorned every lamppost. Festive lights zigzagged overhead, shimmering translucently as rainbow colours pulsed through them. But even on the main street, many of the shopfronts were boarded, or their windows empty, grubby and pasted with ‘To Let’ notices. Though it was Christmas Eve, it was still a shopping day, the last one before the holiday, and yet the pavements were deserted, only rags of litter skipping on the ice-edged wind.
“Bit woe-begotten,” Kerry commented.
“Not especially merry,” Max agreed.
They walked a short distance, passing under the brick arch of a railway bridge, before locating a taxi rank. A single car sat there, its engine chugging, its exhaust pluming.
“The address I’ve got,” Max said through the driver’s window, “is 15, Hockton Mill Lane. I’m not sure which part of town that’s in …?”
The driver, fiftyish, jowly and bearded, and wearing a flat cap under a Parka hood, gave a near imperceptible nod towards the rear of his vehicle. It was reasonably warm in the back, though Max and Kerry huddled together as the car swung from the pavement, cutting into the sparse flow of traffic.
They drove for several minutes, passing on either side a succession of walled-off mills. It was a grotty scene, with working streetlamps that were intermittent at best. After that, they passed a park, the tall shape of a Christmas tree spangled with fairy lights standing far out in the darkened heart of it, then entered a residential district, more coloured lights visible behind half-curtained windows. Still, there was hardly anyone around.
Diverting from the main road, they passed a school, and then took a narrower lane downhill into a valley. The road descended slowly but steadily, trees enclosing it from either side. Occasionally, on the left, they passed entrances to what looked like more industrial sites, though the only buildings they glimpsed amid the leafless branches were unlit and seemingly derelict. This continued for a few more miles, Max sensing that they were now at the edge of the small town and heading out into the sticks, which was no surprise really. The object of today’s exercise was famous for his reclusive nature.
He caught the driver watching him through his rear-view mirror. The driver averted his gaze back to the wooded lane.
“You’ve probably realised we’re going to see Bernie Cleghorn,” Max said chattily. “I mean from the address. I run a podcast, you see … about VIPs whose time has gone, and Bernie’s agreed to give me an interview. First time he’ll have spoken in public since the 1980s.”
The driver said nothing at first, finally grunting: “Who’s that then, mate?”
“Bernie Cleghorn? The TV personality?”
Again almost imperceptibly, the driver shrugged.
Max felt vaguely irritable. It would have been understandable if the guy had been a recent arrival here, an immigrant maybe, but everything about him bespoke local, including his East Midlands accent.
“Probably before my time,” the driver muttered.
Kerry nudged Max discreetly, as if to say: “I keep telling you this”.
As always, Max was frustrated. She’d been on at him for several days that this whole podcast hobby of his was too expensive, that this particular venture was too near Christmas, that they had other things to do, that no one would care. She clearly had no clue what an achievement it had been securing this interview. And it wasn’t as if Bernie Cleghorn had been as much a nobody as some of the others he’d travelled out to speak to. Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing had held ITV’s prime time Christmas Day slot for eleven years on the bounce. Eleven years! These days, there were massive online squabbles about which show should or shouldn’t be awarded that honour even for one year, and none of the winners ever seemed to satisfy. Even Dr Who, one of network television’s most expensively produced programmes, had failed to nail itself immovably to the Christmas Day schedule, and yet Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing, which, by comparison, had virtually been thrown together, had reigned at the top of that bill, unchallenged, for over a decade.
And yet this guy didn’t remember it? Seriously?
“Surely there’s been something about Bernie in the press?” Max persisted. “Some local journo must have written a feature on him? The great comedian who now lives here in retirement? Has he never snipped a ribbon? Never turned on a Christmas light?”
“Sorry, mate.”
“Maybe he just wants a quiet life,” Kerry said, attempting to be helpful. “How many of us would want to be pestered all the time about things we’d done decades ago?”
“You must remember Buckleberry Bear?” Max said, sitting forward.
“Max, he doesn’t.” Kerry patted his hand. “I told you. Hardly anyone does.”
“Buckleberry Bear?” the driver said unexpectedly. “That rings a bell.” He frowned. “Great big white thing, wasn’t it? Twice the height of a normal bloke. Whopping big teeth.”
“That’s right,” Max nodded.
“Think I remember. I was only a kid, of course. Didn’t it do TV adverts and stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“Wore a Christmas jumper?”
“On the Christmas show, yeah.” Max sat further forward. “Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing.”
The driver shook his head. “Something about that thing I didn’t like. Don’t know what. Didn’t its eyes go red when it got angry?”
“That was only a gimmick. A joke.”
The driver drove on. “Well, it didn’t make me laugh.”
“I thought he was worth a fortune,” Kerry said, as the taxi dwindled into the gloom. “Supposedly he is.” Max looked through the dead vegetation twined around the rusted bars of the gate.
The house sat at the other end of a patchy, leaf-strewn lawn. It was a sizeable structure, probably containing several reception rooms downstairs, maybe five or six bedrooms up. It looked Victorian, all dark industrial-age brick, turrets, garrets, teetering chimney stacks. There was even a weather-cock on its topmost spire, though that was unlikely to turn much due to the tall trees on three sides and the fact the house was deep in the river valley.
“Bernie Cleghorn made a stack of money in his time,” Max said, noting with puzzlement the moss on the house’s brickwork, the nests cluttering its eaves. “He was one of the most famous TV comics of the 1970s. Yeah, he was a creature of his time … he was saucy and sexist, but they all were back then, weren’t they? But it wasn’t just the Christmas show. That’s mainly what he’s remembered for now, but he had his ordinary show too, Cleghorn’s Crazy House, and there were twelve episodes of that each year. I suppose …” he shrugged, “I suppose financial problems could tie in with why he suddenly vanished from the public eye.”
“You mean he wasted it all?” Kerry said.
STUFFING
1
Hello, and welcome to Forgotten Heroes, the monthly podcast that takes a deep dive into the popular culture of Britain’s yesteryear, specialising in informal but hopefully informative discussion with people once famous for all kinds of different reasons though now united by an untimely return to anonymity and irrelevance. We focus mainly on their finest moments, but if possible learn about their lesser ones too: the scandals, the gossip, the court cases, maybe even the incidents that terminated their once glittering careers. No subject is out of bounds in Forgotten Heroes; we never shy from asking the awkward questions.
As always, the show is brought to you by myself, Max Jervis, ably assisted by my lovely sidekick, Kerry Brannigan, and broadcast on Saturday, December 25. And yes of course, that’s an important date by any standards, which we don’t intend to let slip by. For this reason, today’s show is a festive special, the subject of which is that Spirit of Christmas Comedy himself, the one and only Bernie Cleghorn … who we were able to catch up with at his home in the East Midlands yesterday. Those of you who are longer in the tooth, will no doubt remember the stitches Bernie used to have us in on Christmas Day evenings long, long ago, while those who are shorter will have heard fond recollections of his rollickingly funny annual TV romp, Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing. If you haven’t, why not? The great man dominated the festive schedule for over ten years, each time commanding audiences of twenty-five million plus.
But if you’re genuinely new to this master of old-time comedy, this ultimate ‘Lord of Misrule’, as he soon became known, never fear. You’re going to learn everything there is to know about him, warts and all, over the next two hours …
***
When they came out of the railway station, the town, which had a name they’d never heard of until they’d looked it up on Wikipedia, was dressed for the season, and yet was strangely bereft of atmosphere. That was possibly because no snow had fallen yet, though the air was frigid, and the mid-afternoon sky much darker and greyer than it had a right to be even in late December. Most likely it was because the place, like so many other provincial towns in 21st century Britain, had seen better times. Glowing Father Christmases, angels with carol sheets and penguins in cute scarfs and bob-caps adorned every lamppost. Festive lights zigzagged overhead, shimmering translucently as rainbow colours pulsed through them. But even on the main street, many of the shopfronts were boarded, or their windows empty, grubby and pasted with ‘To Let’ notices. Though it was Christmas Eve, it was still a shopping day, the last one before the holiday, and yet the pavements were deserted, only rags of litter skipping on the ice-edged wind.
“Bit woe-begotten,” Kerry commented.
“Not especially merry,” Max agreed.
They walked a short distance, passing under the brick arch of a railway bridge, before locating a taxi rank. A single car sat there, its engine chugging, its exhaust pluming.
“The address I’ve got,” Max said through the driver’s window, “is 15, Hockton Mill Lane. I’m not sure which part of town that’s in …?”
The driver, fiftyish, jowly and bearded, and wearing a flat cap under a Parka hood, gave a near imperceptible nod towards the rear of his vehicle. It was reasonably warm in the back, though Max and Kerry huddled together as the car swung from the pavement, cutting into the sparse flow of traffic.
They drove for several minutes, passing on either side a succession of walled-off mills. It was a grotty scene, with working streetlamps that were intermittent at best. After that, they passed a park, the tall shape of a Christmas tree spangled with fairy lights standing far out in the darkened heart of it, then entered a residential district, more coloured lights visible behind half-curtained windows. Still, there was hardly anyone around.
He caught the driver watching him through his rear-view mirror. The driver averted his gaze back to the wooded lane.
“You’ve probably realised we’re going to see Bernie Cleghorn,” Max said chattily. “I mean from the address. I run a podcast, you see … about VIPs whose time has gone, and Bernie’s agreed to give me an interview. First time he’ll have spoken in public since the 1980s.”
The driver said nothing at first, finally grunting: “Who’s that then, mate?”
“Bernie Cleghorn? The TV personality?”
Again almost imperceptibly, the driver shrugged.
Max felt vaguely irritable. It would have been understandable if the guy had been a recent arrival here, an immigrant maybe, but everything about him bespoke local, including his East Midlands accent.
“Probably before my time,” the driver muttered.
Kerry nudged Max discreetly, as if to say: “I keep telling you this”.
As always, Max was frustrated. She’d been on at him for several days that this whole podcast hobby of his was too expensive, that this particular venture was too near Christmas, that they had other things to do, that no one would care. She clearly had no clue what an achievement it had been securing this interview. And it wasn’t as if Bernie Cleghorn had been as much a nobody as some of the others he’d travelled out to speak to. Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing had held ITV’s prime time Christmas Day slot for eleven years on the bounce. Eleven years! These days, there were massive online squabbles about which show should or shouldn’t be awarded that honour even for one year, and none of the winners ever seemed to satisfy. Even Dr Who, one of network television’s most expensively produced programmes, had failed to nail itself immovably to the Christmas Day schedule, and yet Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing, which, by comparison, had virtually been thrown together, had reigned at the top of that bill, unchallenged, for over a decade.
And yet this guy didn’t remember it? Seriously?
“Surely there’s been something about Bernie in the press?” Max persisted. “Some local journo must have written a feature on him? The great comedian who now lives here in retirement? Has he never snipped a ribbon? Never turned on a Christmas light?”
“Sorry, mate.”
“Maybe he just wants a quiet life,” Kerry said, attempting to be helpful. “How many of us would want to be pestered all the time about things we’d done decades ago?”
“You must remember Buckleberry Bear?” Max said, sitting forward.
“Max, he doesn’t.” Kerry patted his hand. “I told you. Hardly anyone does.”
“Buckleberry Bear?” the driver said unexpectedly. “That rings a bell.” He frowned. “Great big white thing, wasn’t it? Twice the height of a normal bloke. Whopping big teeth.”
“That’s right,” Max nodded.
“Think I remember. I was only a kid, of course. Didn’t it do TV adverts and stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“Wore a Christmas jumper?”
“On the Christmas show, yeah.” Max sat further forward. “Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing.”
The driver shook his head. “Something about that thing I didn’t like. Don’t know what. Didn’t its eyes go red when it got angry?”
“That was only a gimmick. A joke.”
The driver drove on. “Well, it didn’t make me laugh.”
*
The house sat at the other end of a patchy, leaf-strewn lawn. It was a sizeable structure, probably containing several reception rooms downstairs, maybe five or six bedrooms up. It looked Victorian, all dark industrial-age brick, turrets, garrets, teetering chimney stacks. There was even a weather-cock on its topmost spire, though that was unlikely to turn much due to the tall trees on three sides and the fact the house was deep in the river valley.
“Bernie Cleghorn made a stack of money in his time,” Max said, noting with puzzlement the moss on the house’s brickwork, the nests cluttering its eaves. “He was one of the most famous TV comics of the 1970s. Yeah, he was a creature of his time … he was saucy and sexist, but they all were back then, weren’t they? But it wasn’t just the Christmas show. That’s mainly what he’s remembered for now, but he had his ordinary show too, Cleghorn’s Crazy House, and there were twelve episodes of that each year. I suppose …” he shrugged, “I suppose financial problems could tie in with why he suddenly vanished from the public eye.”
“You mean he wasted it all?” Kerry said.
“He was never extravagant, as I recall. Bit eccentric maybe. This place would probably be worth a few bob if he spruced it up.”
“Or blew it up,” she replied, “and built something completely different.”
It was hard to argue. Thanks to their not having seen another house for several miles, this one’s aura would have been bleak regardless of its condition.
“Bernie’s main trouble was that he fell behind the times,” Max said, finding an old bell-push on the left side gatepost. It was only just visible through hanging tendrils of ivy, but when he depressed it, there was no discernible sound. “Do you know what I mean?”
“What? Oh … erm, yeah, sure.”
The intense cold was distracting, but Kerry tried to focus. She was only forty, so she didn’t even remember the 1970s. She’d seen snippets of Bernie Cleghorn’s old shows, and had read about him, but all it amounted to really were fleeting images in her mind’s eye: of a television celebrity famous for his ginger ‘Coco the Clown’ hair, his comic songs and sketches, Annette, the sexy French maid who was often on screen with him (whom he referred to as ‘the Saucepot’), and that big horrible polar bear thing the taxi guy had mentioned.
“I mean, it wasn’t particularly risqué,” Max said. “But then, in the 1980s, the alternative comedians turned up, and TV comedy was ruined for evermore.”
“Ruined?”
“Kerry, they weren’t that good, okay? So they hated Margaret Thatcher. Wow! Who didn’t in public? But that was about the only thing they had in common with TV executives. And when she’d gone and they suddenly weren’t students anymore and had mortgages to pay, they had to step up and earn their keep properly. Some of them even ended up being funny. But Bernie Cleghorn could still have performed them under the table.”
Kerry knew better than to argue. Max was set in his views. He was only five years older than she was, so he barely remembered the 1970s either. But pop culture of the past was his one fascination in life. Anything he hadn’t experienced himself, he’d studied in detail.
With a clunk, the gate opened an inch.
At first, Kerry thought it had happened automatically, perhaps someone watching from the house with a button at their fingertips. But then she realised that Max had tried the gate with his hand. There was still no sign of actual life.
“We sure there’s anyone even here?” she asked.
“This was the address on his letter.” Max pushed the gate all the way open. “Suppose I could have got the date wrong.”
“You’re not serious!” She followed him onto the leaf-cluttered drive. “We’ve come all this way, and …”
“Relax, I’m joking.”
“Hah hah!”
“You didn’t have to come.” Max strolled along the drive towards the house. “I said that all along.”
“Someone has to discipline you. I know what would happen. You’d get yakking with this guy and all of a sudden you’d end up missing the last train, and not having you around until sometime late on Christmas Day would be the point at which this obsession of yours starts getting inconvenient …”
Max barely listened as he approached the main building. Its grubby front door was colourless and scabby, an unruly veil of ivy straggling down over the top of it. A heap of autumn leaves had blown against the step. As front doors went, this one had the distinct look of an entrance no one used anymore. It was no surprise when the bellpush, which again gave off no audible sound, plus several loud knocks, brought no response.
“Great.” Kerry huddled into her anorak. One glance upward showed a sky so grey it was almost purple. “So what do we do?”
“We can’t leave now even if we wanted to.” Max glanced round at her. “I mean, we didn’t ask that taxi driver to come back for us later on, did we? And I’d be amazed if you can get a phone signal down in a valley like this.”
Kerry looked sufficiently concerned by that to fish her phone out, walk away a few yards and pull a mitten off so that she could prod several numbers.
“Crap!” she said. “Not even a single bar … and now it’s getting dark.”
Equally unsuccessful with his own phone, Max slid it back into his overcoat pocket. “All the more reason to talk to Mr Cleghorn. With any luck he’ll have a landline.”
It seemed pointless knocking again, so, somewhat reluctantly on Kerry’s part, they headed round to the right side of the house. The driveway ended at the entrance to an old car-port, nothing more in truth than a lean-to roof made from wood and plastic, and underneath it a large, dark, heavy vehicle, an old-fashioned automobile, the sort you normally only saw on black and white movies. It was half-buried under boxes, rags and other junk.
Just to get past the vehicle would have been difficult, as more clutter was stacked to either side of it. At the back was a hanging sheet of polythene turned green and opaque with age.
“We sure this is a good idea?” Kerry wondered.
“Our options are kind of limited.” Max stepped forward, trying to sidle past. “We might as well look. A house this size, there could be all sorts going on at the back and you wouldn’t know from the front.” But then he halted, bent down to the nearside bodywork and wiped away the dust coating a tarnished insignia. “Good God. This is an old Humber … a Pullman, if I’m not mistaken.” He straightened up with a minor sense of vindication. “Told you he’d once been successful.”
“Once being the key-word.”
“At least if the car’s here, that must mean Cleghorn is too.”
“You don’t think he still drives this, do you, Max? Look at the state of it.”
Max had no answer for that. For the first time he felt a pang of unease. He’d been overjoyed to receive the invitation from the one-time comedy legend. So many just ignored his approaches. His enthusiasm had still been bubbling when they’d set off from St Pancras that morning, but finally, perhaps inevitably, it was starting to wane. Because anyone with money who let their grand old house go to rack and ruin like this, not to mention who owned a classic car and basically mothballed it, didn’t even attempt to resell it … well, something had to be wrong.
Doggedly, he pressed on, pushing past the polythene, which lifted easily enough. Kerry followed, and the rear of the property lay before them.
What looked as if it had once been an expansive garden was now a jungle of shoulder-high weeds, all brown and frosty in the deepening gloom. Again, there was no sign of life from the house, no light from any of its windows.
“Christ almighty.” Max couldn’t conceal his disappointment.
“Sorry, babes …” Kerry made an effort to sound conciliatory. “But you know, Cleghorn wouldn’t be the first of these guys to come to an ignominious end. Look at Benny Hill, Kenneth Williams.”
Max knew all that of course. He’d once explained to her that it was part of his fascination with entertainers of earlier eras, particularly comedians, that so many of them led strange, miserable lives when they were out of the limelight. But that didn’t mean the guy wouldn’t still be interesting. Far from it. So long as he’d remembered they were coming and hadn’t gone away somewhere for the holiday season.
“Perhaps we should head back?” she said. “I know it’s a long walk, but at some point we’ll get a signal and then we can call a taxi.”
Before Max could reply, they heard a loud, hollow thud. He leaned forward, staring across the garden, eyes narrowing on an upright angular shape at the far end of it. Though partly concealed by the desiccated foliage, it looked like an outhouse of some sort.
Another thud sounded, distinctly from that direction.
“What the devil?” Max pushed forward into the dead vegetation.
“Max, what’re you doing?” Kerry followed.
“I think there’s someone …” he said. “I don’t believe this …”
Forty yards further on, the weeds came to an end and they were confronted by a garden shed. It was in a dilapidated state, visibly rotted, though sturdy enough to remain standing. A padlock hung on its front door, while in addition to that, somewhat bizarrely, what appeared to be lengthy strands of barbed wire had been wrapped tightly around it. There was a single window at the front, but when they tried to look through, it was so scabrous with filth that nothing inside was visible.
“Check out the wire,” Max said. “How weird is that?”
“Max …” Kerry felt distinctly nervous. “Whatever this is, whatever we thought we heard … it’s nothing to do with us. We shouldn’t even be back here.”
He tested the padlock.
“What’re you doing?” she hissed.
“More rust than steel,” he mumbled. “Wouldn’t take much.”
A rustle of movement sounded inside. He jerked back to the window.
“Max!”
“Still can’t see anything.”
“Because there’s nothing to see.”
He gave her a look. “We have to open it up, Kerry. Suppose it’s Bernie himself? He’s an old fella these days. Eighty-odd. He could have got himself stuck.”
“Max … that’s ridiculous.”
The next look he gave her was disconcertingly stern. “And if we walk away, and he dies?”
She couldn’t respond. He nodded and, locating one end of the wire, carefully and gingerly worked it loose from the knot in the middle.
“Max, I …” It was nonsensical, she thought. No one got stuck in a shed by accident, not when barbed wire had been used to hitch it closed. Though if that was what had happened here, who would have done it? Why?
She watched in stiff silence as Max sidled to the left, inch by inch pulling the wire loose from the general entanglement, finally vanishing around the back of the structure. When he reappeared around the other side, the wire loops had noticeably slackened. When he reappeared a second time, they hung limp and loose.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she breathed.
“You heard the same thing I did …”
“Excuse me!” a harsh voice cut in. “What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”
Max dropped the wire and jumped around. Kerry spun too, just as they were bathed in bright torchlight. They stood gaping, blinking.
Behind the light, a tall but spindly figure was just about visible.
“Oh, erm …” Max stuttered. “Mr Cleghorn, is it?”
“Who’s asking?” The voice remained harsh, the tone highly suspicious.
Awkwardly, Max introduced himself and Kerry and reminded the householder that they’d had a visit booked for this afternoon. Even more awkwardly, he then tried to explain what had happened with the shed. All through, the only sign of movement from the figure behind the light was the smoky breath leaking out of it. After Max had finished, and after some lengthy appraisal, the torch clicked off and they were able to see their host more clearly. There was no doubt that it was Bernie Cleghorn. Age hadn’t shrivelled him much; he was more of a beanpole than the athletic specimen Max remembered from his knockabout days, while the tufts of red hair behind his ears had long gone, replaced by lifeless white strands, but he stood upright and unbowed, and had met this intrusion onto his property with an air of robust challenge. What he thought of them was anyone’s guess, but it was probably safe to say that with Max’s tubby physique and scraggy grey beard, and Kerry’s glasses and long auburn hair (also running to grey), they didn’t look much like vandals or burglars.
Despite that, Cleghorn seemed unimpressed.
“Twenty yards further on back there is the River Soar,” he said. “It’s part-frozen at present, but the ice isn’t thick. The river runs fast and deep at this time of year. The ice keeps breaking and what you heard are chunks of it clunking together. It happens every time we have a cold snap.”
“I see. Okay, well …” Max shrugged. “Easy mistake to make, I suppose.”
“So you’re here to interview me?” The ex-comedian didn’t sound enthused.
“That’s what we agreed, if you remember.”
“You’ll have to forgive me. My short-term memory isn’t what it was.” Cleghorn didn’t sound as if he was really asking for forgiveness. “I’ve been out for my afternoon stroll. Sorry you were kept waiting.” Likewise, he didn’t sound especially sorry. “You’d better come inside. Apparently, we’re expecting snow.”
He led them back through the leafage, across a small patio and into the house via a back door. Just before entering, Kerry glanced round towards the shed, now lost from view as the afternoon turned to dusk. Maybe the wind had rattled that flimsy old structure. More likely, there were rats in it. But if those thuds had signified ice breaking on a river, she was Annette the Saucepot.
“Or blew it up,” she replied, “and built something completely different.”
It was hard to argue. Thanks to their not having seen another house for several miles, this one’s aura would have been bleak regardless of its condition.
“Bernie’s main trouble was that he fell behind the times,” Max said, finding an old bell-push on the left side gatepost. It was only just visible through hanging tendrils of ivy, but when he depressed it, there was no discernible sound. “Do you know what I mean?”
“What? Oh … erm, yeah, sure.”
The intense cold was distracting, but Kerry tried to focus. She was only forty, so she didn’t even remember the 1970s. She’d seen snippets of Bernie Cleghorn’s old shows, and had read about him, but all it amounted to really were fleeting images in her mind’s eye: of a television celebrity famous for his ginger ‘Coco the Clown’ hair, his comic songs and sketches, Annette, the sexy French maid who was often on screen with him (whom he referred to as ‘the Saucepot’), and that big horrible polar bear thing the taxi guy had mentioned.
“I mean, it wasn’t particularly risqué,” Max said. “But then, in the 1980s, the alternative comedians turned up, and TV comedy was ruined for evermore.”
“Ruined?”
“Kerry, they weren’t that good, okay? So they hated Margaret Thatcher. Wow! Who didn’t in public? But that was about the only thing they had in common with TV executives. And when she’d gone and they suddenly weren’t students anymore and had mortgages to pay, they had to step up and earn their keep properly. Some of them even ended up being funny. But Bernie Cleghorn could still have performed them under the table.”
Kerry knew better than to argue. Max was set in his views. He was only five years older than she was, so he barely remembered the 1970s either. But pop culture of the past was his one fascination in life. Anything he hadn’t experienced himself, he’d studied in detail.
With a clunk, the gate opened an inch.
At first, Kerry thought it had happened automatically, perhaps someone watching from the house with a button at their fingertips. But then she realised that Max had tried the gate with his hand. There was still no sign of actual life.
“We sure there’s anyone even here?” she asked.
“This was the address on his letter.” Max pushed the gate all the way open. “Suppose I could have got the date wrong.”
“You’re not serious!” She followed him onto the leaf-cluttered drive. “We’ve come all this way, and …”
“Relax, I’m joking.”
“Hah hah!”
“You didn’t have to come.” Max strolled along the drive towards the house. “I said that all along.”
“Someone has to discipline you. I know what would happen. You’d get yakking with this guy and all of a sudden you’d end up missing the last train, and not having you around until sometime late on Christmas Day would be the point at which this obsession of yours starts getting inconvenient …”
Max barely listened as he approached the main building. Its grubby front door was colourless and scabby, an unruly veil of ivy straggling down over the top of it. A heap of autumn leaves had blown against the step. As front doors went, this one had the distinct look of an entrance no one used anymore. It was no surprise when the bellpush, which again gave off no audible sound, plus several loud knocks, brought no response.
“Great.” Kerry huddled into her anorak. One glance upward showed a sky so grey it was almost purple. “So what do we do?”
“We can’t leave now even if we wanted to.” Max glanced round at her. “I mean, we didn’t ask that taxi driver to come back for us later on, did we? And I’d be amazed if you can get a phone signal down in a valley like this.”
Kerry looked sufficiently concerned by that to fish her phone out, walk away a few yards and pull a mitten off so that she could prod several numbers.
“Crap!” she said. “Not even a single bar … and now it’s getting dark.”
Equally unsuccessful with his own phone, Max slid it back into his overcoat pocket. “All the more reason to talk to Mr Cleghorn. With any luck he’ll have a landline.”
It seemed pointless knocking again, so, somewhat reluctantly on Kerry’s part, they headed round to the right side of the house. The driveway ended at the entrance to an old car-port, nothing more in truth than a lean-to roof made from wood and plastic, and underneath it a large, dark, heavy vehicle, an old-fashioned automobile, the sort you normally only saw on black and white movies. It was half-buried under boxes, rags and other junk.
Just to get past the vehicle would have been difficult, as more clutter was stacked to either side of it. At the back was a hanging sheet of polythene turned green and opaque with age.
“We sure this is a good idea?” Kerry wondered.
“Our options are kind of limited.” Max stepped forward, trying to sidle past. “We might as well look. A house this size, there could be all sorts going on at the back and you wouldn’t know from the front.” But then he halted, bent down to the nearside bodywork and wiped away the dust coating a tarnished insignia. “Good God. This is an old Humber … a Pullman, if I’m not mistaken.” He straightened up with a minor sense of vindication. “Told you he’d once been successful.”
“Once being the key-word.”
“At least if the car’s here, that must mean Cleghorn is too.”
“You don’t think he still drives this, do you, Max? Look at the state of it.”
Max had no answer for that. For the first time he felt a pang of unease. He’d been overjoyed to receive the invitation from the one-time comedy legend. So many just ignored his approaches. His enthusiasm had still been bubbling when they’d set off from St Pancras that morning, but finally, perhaps inevitably, it was starting to wane. Because anyone with money who let their grand old house go to rack and ruin like this, not to mention who owned a classic car and basically mothballed it, didn’t even attempt to resell it … well, something had to be wrong.
Doggedly, he pressed on, pushing past the polythene, which lifted easily enough. Kerry followed, and the rear of the property lay before them.
What looked as if it had once been an expansive garden was now a jungle of shoulder-high weeds, all brown and frosty in the deepening gloom. Again, there was no sign of life from the house, no light from any of its windows.
“Christ almighty.” Max couldn’t conceal his disappointment.
“Sorry, babes …” Kerry made an effort to sound conciliatory. “But you know, Cleghorn wouldn’t be the first of these guys to come to an ignominious end. Look at Benny Hill, Kenneth Williams.”
Max knew all that of course. He’d once explained to her that it was part of his fascination with entertainers of earlier eras, particularly comedians, that so many of them led strange, miserable lives when they were out of the limelight. But that didn’t mean the guy wouldn’t still be interesting. Far from it. So long as he’d remembered they were coming and hadn’t gone away somewhere for the holiday season.
“Perhaps we should head back?” she said. “I know it’s a long walk, but at some point we’ll get a signal and then we can call a taxi.”
Before Max could reply, they heard a loud, hollow thud. He leaned forward, staring across the garden, eyes narrowing on an upright angular shape at the far end of it. Though partly concealed by the desiccated foliage, it looked like an outhouse of some sort.
Another thud sounded, distinctly from that direction.
“What the devil?” Max pushed forward into the dead vegetation.
“Max, what’re you doing?” Kerry followed.
“I think there’s someone …” he said. “I don’t believe this …”
Forty yards further on, the weeds came to an end and they were confronted by a garden shed. It was in a dilapidated state, visibly rotted, though sturdy enough to remain standing. A padlock hung on its front door, while in addition to that, somewhat bizarrely, what appeared to be lengthy strands of barbed wire had been wrapped tightly around it. There was a single window at the front, but when they tried to look through, it was so scabrous with filth that nothing inside was visible.
“Check out the wire,” Max said. “How weird is that?”
“Max …” Kerry felt distinctly nervous. “Whatever this is, whatever we thought we heard … it’s nothing to do with us. We shouldn’t even be back here.”
He tested the padlock.
“What’re you doing?” she hissed.
“More rust than steel,” he mumbled. “Wouldn’t take much.”
A rustle of movement sounded inside. He jerked back to the window.
“Max!”
“Still can’t see anything.”
“Because there’s nothing to see.”
He gave her a look. “We have to open it up, Kerry. Suppose it’s Bernie himself? He’s an old fella these days. Eighty-odd. He could have got himself stuck.”
“Max … that’s ridiculous.”
The next look he gave her was disconcertingly stern. “And if we walk away, and he dies?”
She couldn’t respond. He nodded and, locating one end of the wire, carefully and gingerly worked it loose from the knot in the middle.
“Max, I …” It was nonsensical, she thought. No one got stuck in a shed by accident, not when barbed wire had been used to hitch it closed. Though if that was what had happened here, who would have done it? Why?
“I can’t believe you did that,” she breathed.
“You heard the same thing I did …”
“Excuse me!” a harsh voice cut in. “What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”
Max dropped the wire and jumped around. Kerry spun too, just as they were bathed in bright torchlight. They stood gaping, blinking.
Behind the light, a tall but spindly figure was just about visible.
“Oh, erm …” Max stuttered. “Mr Cleghorn, is it?”
“Who’s asking?” The voice remained harsh, the tone highly suspicious.
Awkwardly, Max introduced himself and Kerry and reminded the householder that they’d had a visit booked for this afternoon. Even more awkwardly, he then tried to explain what had happened with the shed. All through, the only sign of movement from the figure behind the light was the smoky breath leaking out of it. After Max had finished, and after some lengthy appraisal, the torch clicked off and they were able to see their host more clearly. There was no doubt that it was Bernie Cleghorn. Age hadn’t shrivelled him much; he was more of a beanpole than the athletic specimen Max remembered from his knockabout days, while the tufts of red hair behind his ears had long gone, replaced by lifeless white strands, but he stood upright and unbowed, and had met this intrusion onto his property with an air of robust challenge. What he thought of them was anyone’s guess, but it was probably safe to say that with Max’s tubby physique and scraggy grey beard, and Kerry’s glasses and long auburn hair (also running to grey), they didn’t look much like vandals or burglars.
Despite that, Cleghorn seemed unimpressed.
“Twenty yards further on back there is the River Soar,” he said. “It’s part-frozen at present, but the ice isn’t thick. The river runs fast and deep at this time of year. The ice keeps breaking and what you heard are chunks of it clunking together. It happens every time we have a cold snap.”
“I see. Okay, well …” Max shrugged. “Easy mistake to make, I suppose.”
“So you’re here to interview me?” The ex-comedian didn’t sound enthused.
“That’s what we agreed, if you remember.”
“You’ll have to forgive me. My short-term memory isn’t what it was.” Cleghorn didn’t sound as if he was really asking for forgiveness. “I’ve been out for my afternoon stroll. Sorry you were kept waiting.” Likewise, he didn’t sound especially sorry. “You’d better come inside. Apparently, we’re expecting snow.”
He led them back through the leafage, across a small patio and into the house via a back door. Just before entering, Kerry glanced round towards the shed, now lost from view as the afternoon turned to dusk. Maybe the wind had rattled that flimsy old structure. More likely, there were rats in it. But if those thuds had signified ice breaking on a river, she was Annette the Saucepot.
To be continued (December 16) …
***
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
by Mark Morris (2020)
A phenomenally comprehensive collection of short and medium-length stories from one of British horror’s most hard-working, productive and popular authors.
Mark Morris, at least as famous these days for being an editor as he is a writer, is still only mid-way through a career that already spans three decades, and is showing no sign of slowing down. What’s more, from his earliest days, he’s produced dark fiction of such high standard (and we’re talking novels here and scripts, as well as short stories and novellas), that he’s been a regular fixture in the mass-market, his shorter works frequently winning selection for Year’s Best anthologies.
And now, PS Publishing have done that record proud in this huge and beautifully produced hardback retrospective, which for the present time at least has got to be your one-stop shop for Mark Morris at his best.
Before we look at the individual contents, here is the publishers’ official blurb:
Mark Morris, at least as famous these days for being an editor as he is a writer, is still only mid-way through a career that already spans three decades, and is showing no sign of slowing down. What’s more, from his earliest days, he’s produced dark fiction of such high standard (and we’re talking novels here and scripts, as well as short stories and novellas), that he’s been a regular fixture in the mass-market, his shorter works frequently winning selection for Year’s Best anthologies.
And now, PS Publishing have done that record proud in this huge and beautifully produced hardback retrospective, which for the present time at least has got to be your one-stop shop for Mark Morris at his best.
Before we look at the individual contents, here is the publishers’ official blurb:
Mark Morris describes himself as one of the UK’s most stubborn horror writers. His first novel Toady was published thirty years ago during the genre’s last great boom period. Back then publishers were falling over themselves to find and publish as many exciting new horror writers as they could. It was an exciting time but eventually over-saturation of the market became horror’s downfall. Faced with too much choice, the horror-reading public became more selective, and the majority of horror books lost money. As a result of this advances were slashed, contracts cancelled, and many fledgling careers were nipped in the bud.
Some writers, though, kept going. They stuck doggedly to their guns, or they adapted or changed, as the market demanded. Mark Morris was one of those writers. As the horror market shrank he looked for new outlets, new markets. He wrote tie-in novels, movie novelisations, audio dramas.
But through it all, he never stopped writing horror.
Warts and All is testament to his dedication to the genre. Collected here are thirty stories, arranged in chronological order, which map a course through three decades of horror writing. The stories herein vary wildly in tone and mood, in theme and content, but all have a thread of darkness running through them. They show how versatile the horror genre can be, and how wide are its parameters …
It’s always a joy when you’re able to delve deeply into a writer’s career, especially a writer with so varied an output as Mark Morris, through the medium of a single volume. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here.
While Warts and All doesn’t contain every single short story that Morris has ever written, PS Publishing have gone out of their way to include as wide a selection as possible, incorporating 30 pieces of work, the earliest dating to 1990, the most recent, an entirely original piece, dating to 2019.
And one glimpse of these simmering contents is all you’ll need to understand just how thoroughly diverse Mark Morris’s material can be. That said, it invariably dances to the theme of horror. Whether that be psychological horror, intense physical horror, horror of the supernatural, horror of the surreal, it doesn’t matter; horror fandom has always been Mark Morris’s target audience, and he’s never let it down. He certainly doesn’t in this book.
The other constant in Warts and All is the sheer quality of the writing. I mentioned earlier that Mark Morris hit the big time relatively early in his career (his first mass-market horror novel, Toady, was published when he was only 26!), and that’s because his prose work has never been less than superbly efficient: crisp, concise, easily accessible, his characters vivid, his locations photographically real, his concepts gut-churning. Even his earliest fictional forays read like the handiwork of a seasoned pro.
On a personal note, one of the things I’ve always liked most about Mark Morris’s stories is the lack of snobbery. Morris has always been on the money when it comes to whatever the latest fad in horror happens to be; never to my knowledge has he ever hit his readership with anything that could be termed out-of-date or old-fashioned. But he’s well-read enough in his own right to know there is a vast range of horror subgenres out there, some of which, through no fault of their own, slip out of the public eye from time to time. And yet this has never stopped him trying his hand at each and every one of them.
For example, it’s quite plain from Warts and All that an ultra-strong influence was exerted on this author, probably in his formative years, by the Pan and Fontana horror stories series, which were often notorious for painting a picture of post-war Britain as a grimy, seedy place where veins of perverse nastiness lurked beneath every veneer of wafer-thin respectability.
There are several examples of that style here, most impressively of all in the thrillingly horrible Salad Days, where a businessman is abducted by an OAP with a grudge against him from long ago. Taken back to an everyday townhouse, he at first thinks he can reason with his kidnapper. The old guy even promises that he won’t hurt him. But something else may …
More chilling (and more Pan-esque) yet is Essence, in which an elderly couple are secretly a pair of career serial killers. Hidden behind their genial appearance and apparent all-round decency, they have raped and murdered dozens of girls. Their secret is an MO that is completely foolproof. Or so they think …
Also set deceptively in the depths of genteel suburbia is Green, which for me has long been one of Mark Morris’s strongest and most terrifying stories, but because it’s just so damn good, I’ll revisit this one later and won’t say too much about the synopsis here.
Perhaps the most horrible story in the entire book, though, and definitely a tale that would have found a home for itself in the Fontana series, is the oldest one here reprinted, the titular Warts and All, which sees 15-year-old Jason and his mother, Beth, struggling valiantly but unable to save their declining Yorkshire farm. At the same time, both they, their animals and their entire property, it seems, are succumbing to an unknown disease that is slowly covering them all in revolting growths …
At the other end of the horror spectrum, meanwhile, Morris also dips his toe into the traditionalist supernatural pond, hitting us with a bunch of tales leaning towards the Jamesian school and even, in a couple of cases, towards folk horror and rural mystery.
A good example comes in Down to Earth, in which a young couple move to a house on the edge of the countryside. The husband views it as a lot of work but probably worth it. The wife, however, rather oddly, becomes inordinately interested in the overgrown jungle that is the house’s back garden …
Also set in a world of domestic-bliss-that-might-have-been is Coming Home, in which Jane and Gerry, happily married, recently installed in a new house, and expecting their first child, seemingly have everything to live for. Except that Christmas is approaching and Jane feels too tired to face it. What’s more, she is increasingly troubled by strange sounds in their new home, a grotesque smell and a weird voice on the phone …
Still in the world of the uncanny, an entirely different kind of supernatural threat can be found in We Who Sing Beneath the Ground, in which a dedicated teacher, concerned for an absent pupil, makes an unofficial call at the kid’s home, a ramshackle farm on a weather-beaten Cornish headland. The place is a dump, but neglect and mess are not the only problems here. There’s something much, much worse …
Also set in Cornwall is one of Morris’s very best ghost stories, Fallen Boys, which again I’m going to talk about a little more later on, so suffice to say here that it was rightly hailed as one of the best spooky stories of 2010.
Of course, no one could have learned any aspect of their spec fiction writing trade in the 1990s and not been exposed to the surrealist school, wherein weirdness became as prominent a feature as suspense, though in the hands of an expert like Mark Morris, the work never became any less readable. Quite the opposite.
Some writers, though, kept going. They stuck doggedly to their guns, or they adapted or changed, as the market demanded. Mark Morris was one of those writers. As the horror market shrank he looked for new outlets, new markets. He wrote tie-in novels, movie novelisations, audio dramas.
But through it all, he never stopped writing horror.
Warts and All is testament to his dedication to the genre. Collected here are thirty stories, arranged in chronological order, which map a course through three decades of horror writing. The stories herein vary wildly in tone and mood, in theme and content, but all have a thread of darkness running through them. They show how versatile the horror genre can be, and how wide are its parameters …
It’s always a joy when you’re able to delve deeply into a writer’s career, especially a writer with so varied an output as Mark Morris, through the medium of a single volume. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here.
While Warts and All doesn’t contain every single short story that Morris has ever written, PS Publishing have gone out of their way to include as wide a selection as possible, incorporating 30 pieces of work, the earliest dating to 1990, the most recent, an entirely original piece, dating to 2019.
And one glimpse of these simmering contents is all you’ll need to understand just how thoroughly diverse Mark Morris’s material can be. That said, it invariably dances to the theme of horror. Whether that be psychological horror, intense physical horror, horror of the supernatural, horror of the surreal, it doesn’t matter; horror fandom has always been Mark Morris’s target audience, and he’s never let it down. He certainly doesn’t in this book.
The other constant in Warts and All is the sheer quality of the writing. I mentioned earlier that Mark Morris hit the big time relatively early in his career (his first mass-market horror novel, Toady, was published when he was only 26!), and that’s because his prose work has never been less than superbly efficient: crisp, concise, easily accessible, his characters vivid, his locations photographically real, his concepts gut-churning. Even his earliest fictional forays read like the handiwork of a seasoned pro.
On a personal note, one of the things I’ve always liked most about Mark Morris’s stories is the lack of snobbery. Morris has always been on the money when it comes to whatever the latest fad in horror happens to be; never to my knowledge has he ever hit his readership with anything that could be termed out-of-date or old-fashioned. But he’s well-read enough in his own right to know there is a vast range of horror subgenres out there, some of which, through no fault of their own, slip out of the public eye from time to time. And yet this has never stopped him trying his hand at each and every one of them.
For example, it’s quite plain from Warts and All that an ultra-strong influence was exerted on this author, probably in his formative years, by the Pan and Fontana horror stories series, which were often notorious for painting a picture of post-war Britain as a grimy, seedy place where veins of perverse nastiness lurked beneath every veneer of wafer-thin respectability.
There are several examples of that style here, most impressively of all in the thrillingly horrible Salad Days, where a businessman is abducted by an OAP with a grudge against him from long ago. Taken back to an everyday townhouse, he at first thinks he can reason with his kidnapper. The old guy even promises that he won’t hurt him. But something else may …
More chilling (and more Pan-esque) yet is Essence, in which an elderly couple are secretly a pair of career serial killers. Hidden behind their genial appearance and apparent all-round decency, they have raped and murdered dozens of girls. Their secret is an MO that is completely foolproof. Or so they think …
Also set deceptively in the depths of genteel suburbia is Green, which for me has long been one of Mark Morris’s strongest and most terrifying stories, but because it’s just so damn good, I’ll revisit this one later and won’t say too much about the synopsis here.
Perhaps the most horrible story in the entire book, though, and definitely a tale that would have found a home for itself in the Fontana series, is the oldest one here reprinted, the titular Warts and All, which sees 15-year-old Jason and his mother, Beth, struggling valiantly but unable to save their declining Yorkshire farm. At the same time, both they, their animals and their entire property, it seems, are succumbing to an unknown disease that is slowly covering them all in revolting growths …
At the other end of the horror spectrum, meanwhile, Morris also dips his toe into the traditionalist supernatural pond, hitting us with a bunch of tales leaning towards the Jamesian school and even, in a couple of cases, towards folk horror and rural mystery.
A good example comes in Down to Earth, in which a young couple move to a house on the edge of the countryside. The husband views it as a lot of work but probably worth it. The wife, however, rather oddly, becomes inordinately interested in the overgrown jungle that is the house’s back garden …
Also set in a world of domestic-bliss-that-might-have-been is Coming Home, in which Jane and Gerry, happily married, recently installed in a new house, and expecting their first child, seemingly have everything to live for. Except that Christmas is approaching and Jane feels too tired to face it. What’s more, she is increasingly troubled by strange sounds in their new home, a grotesque smell and a weird voice on the phone …
Still in the world of the uncanny, an entirely different kind of supernatural threat can be found in We Who Sing Beneath the Ground, in which a dedicated teacher, concerned for an absent pupil, makes an unofficial call at the kid’s home, a ramshackle farm on a weather-beaten Cornish headland. The place is a dump, but neglect and mess are not the only problems here. There’s something much, much worse …
Also set in Cornwall is one of Morris’s very best ghost stories, Fallen Boys, which again I’m going to talk about a little more later on, so suffice to say here that it was rightly hailed as one of the best spooky stories of 2010.
Of course, no one could have learned any aspect of their spec fiction writing trade in the 1990s and not been exposed to the surrealist school, wherein weirdness became as prominent a feature as suspense, though in the hands of an expert like Mark Morris, the work never became any less readable. Quite the opposite.
Warts and All delivers two classic cases in point.
Against the Skin and The Fertilizer Man were both among the oddest stories I’d ever encountered the first time I read them, and yet both were deeply shocking and unsettling, and they’ve lost none of that power even now. For all these reasons I’ll also be talking a bit more about these two stories later. But in the meantime, no less chillingly strange is Waiting for the Bullet, which takes us into the company of a bunch of English students holidaying in an alternative USA, who opt to visit a ‘shootout site,’ one of several scenes of famous Wild West massacres, where, through some quirk of science, bullets from the nineteenth century still fly …
An even more terrifying fracturing of reality occurs in The Other One, in which a mentally unstable man finds himself living in a squalid flat in the midst of an illusory landscape of imaginary enemies and unreal destruction, where all he knows for certain is that someone or something very dangerous is drawing steadily closer …
But perhaps the strangest and most dislocating of all these more idiosyncratic horror stories is Puppies For Sale, in which an everyday family slowly disintegrates under the assault of an evil supernatural force, resulting in what can only be described as their (or anyone’s) worst nightmare. But is it real or is it all in the tortured father’s mind? …
Perhaps the next step on from stories of this sort are those with a subtext, i.e. meaningful forays into fiction where accomplished and mature authors examine personal, social or even political issues that trouble them. Unsurprisingly, Mark Morris has plenty of these in his locker too.
In Progeny, for example, a child-abuser suffers a long and terrible punishment after he is left paralysed by a stroke. Darker still, in Biters, which is set in a dystopian near-future, a class of schoolchildren attend a special clinic where they are taught parental responsibilities by being placed in charge of zombie babies.
Cleverest of all for me, another tale here that is truly one of Morris’s best, is The Red Door, in which, after a torturous year spent watching her mother die in cancer-induced agony, religiously-inclined Chloe finds herself doubting the existence of a benign God. With her overly devout family unable to help, she drifts about London attending to routine matters, and yet increasingly is distracted by the appearance, seemingly everywhere, of a curious red door …
In fiction terms, it is perhaps only a short step from meaningful to melancholy. So many of the issues that trouble us are often the cause or result of deep emotional sadness, and Mark Morris’s ability to convey this through his writing, without being schmaltzy or self-indulgent, is enviable.
Again, Warts and All hits us with several stories of this ilk, though in none of these cases does the author forget that he’s writing horror.
In Sins Like Scarlet, a dying man travels from Canada to England, suffering both physically and emotionally en route, but bent on surviving the trip so that he can make a terrible confession to his ex-wife …
In Nothing Prepares You, perhaps one of the hardest reads in the book in terms of the raw grief it portrays, we meet Martha, a middle-aged housewife terrified by the prospect of her husband’s mortality. When a new psychological facility offers to put her through the experience of bereavement without her actually losing anyone, she readily accepts. But a truly appalling experience follows …
Then we have The Complicit, one of Morris’s darkest tales to date, in which a disturbed man returns home for the funeral of his last parent, only to find the town of his birth secretive, the family home a soulless shell, and the ghost of the wicked brute who abused him as a child and subsequently died in a savage revenge-slaying, waiting to get his own back …
There are many other stories in Warts and All I could mention, but neither time nor space would allow it, and anyway, it was this particular group of tales that really caught my attention, and in terms of subject matter alone, illustrate the versatility of this author in finer fashion than my words ever could.
I don’t know whether there are plans afoot to bring out any other versions of Warts and All. As it currently stands, a big, chunky hardback (its interior beautifully designed by Michael Smith, its jacket splendidly illustrated by Carl Pugh) is bound to set you back a bit. But I reiterate that the contents here are top-notch, and in terms of Mark Morris’s sweeping body of work, this is one of the most all-inclusive collections I could ever have envisaged.
In short, this is an all-round spectacular, and as good an all-in-one snapshot of one writer’s back catalogue as I could have wished for. There should be a place of honour reserved for this one on the shelf of every discerning dark fiction fan.
And now …
WARTS AND ALL – the movie
Thus far, no film or TV producer has optioned this book yet (not as I’m aware), and in the current horror-free zone of British network TV at least, it seems unlikely. But you never know. And hell, as this part of the review is always the fun part, here are my thoughts just in case someone with loads of cash decides that it simply has to be on the screen.
Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most filmic and most right for adaptation in a compendium horror. Of course, no such horror film can happen without a central thread, and this is where you guys, the audience, come in.
Against the Skin and The Fertilizer Man were both among the oddest stories I’d ever encountered the first time I read them, and yet both were deeply shocking and unsettling, and they’ve lost none of that power even now. For all these reasons I’ll also be talking a bit more about these two stories later. But in the meantime, no less chillingly strange is Waiting for the Bullet, which takes us into the company of a bunch of English students holidaying in an alternative USA, who opt to visit a ‘shootout site,’ one of several scenes of famous Wild West massacres, where, through some quirk of science, bullets from the nineteenth century still fly …
An even more terrifying fracturing of reality occurs in The Other One, in which a mentally unstable man finds himself living in a squalid flat in the midst of an illusory landscape of imaginary enemies and unreal destruction, where all he knows for certain is that someone or something very dangerous is drawing steadily closer …
But perhaps the strangest and most dislocating of all these more idiosyncratic horror stories is Puppies For Sale, in which an everyday family slowly disintegrates under the assault of an evil supernatural force, resulting in what can only be described as their (or anyone’s) worst nightmare. But is it real or is it all in the tortured father’s mind? …
Perhaps the next step on from stories of this sort are those with a subtext, i.e. meaningful forays into fiction where accomplished and mature authors examine personal, social or even political issues that trouble them. Unsurprisingly, Mark Morris has plenty of these in his locker too.
In Progeny, for example, a child-abuser suffers a long and terrible punishment after he is left paralysed by a stroke. Darker still, in Biters, which is set in a dystopian near-future, a class of schoolchildren attend a special clinic where they are taught parental responsibilities by being placed in charge of zombie babies.
Cleverest of all for me, another tale here that is truly one of Morris’s best, is The Red Door, in which, after a torturous year spent watching her mother die in cancer-induced agony, religiously-inclined Chloe finds herself doubting the existence of a benign God. With her overly devout family unable to help, she drifts about London attending to routine matters, and yet increasingly is distracted by the appearance, seemingly everywhere, of a curious red door …
In fiction terms, it is perhaps only a short step from meaningful to melancholy. So many of the issues that trouble us are often the cause or result of deep emotional sadness, and Mark Morris’s ability to convey this through his writing, without being schmaltzy or self-indulgent, is enviable.
Again, Warts and All hits us with several stories of this ilk, though in none of these cases does the author forget that he’s writing horror.
In Sins Like Scarlet, a dying man travels from Canada to England, suffering both physically and emotionally en route, but bent on surviving the trip so that he can make a terrible confession to his ex-wife …
In Nothing Prepares You, perhaps one of the hardest reads in the book in terms of the raw grief it portrays, we meet Martha, a middle-aged housewife terrified by the prospect of her husband’s mortality. When a new psychological facility offers to put her through the experience of bereavement without her actually losing anyone, she readily accepts. But a truly appalling experience follows …
Then we have The Complicit, one of Morris’s darkest tales to date, in which a disturbed man returns home for the funeral of his last parent, only to find the town of his birth secretive, the family home a soulless shell, and the ghost of the wicked brute who abused him as a child and subsequently died in a savage revenge-slaying, waiting to get his own back …
There are many other stories in Warts and All I could mention, but neither time nor space would allow it, and anyway, it was this particular group of tales that really caught my attention, and in terms of subject matter alone, illustrate the versatility of this author in finer fashion than my words ever could.
I don’t know whether there are plans afoot to bring out any other versions of Warts and All. As it currently stands, a big, chunky hardback (its interior beautifully designed by Michael Smith, its jacket splendidly illustrated by Carl Pugh) is bound to set you back a bit. But I reiterate that the contents here are top-notch, and in terms of Mark Morris’s sweeping body of work, this is one of the most all-inclusive collections I could ever have envisaged.
In short, this is an all-round spectacular, and as good an all-in-one snapshot of one writer’s back catalogue as I could have wished for. There should be a place of honour reserved for this one on the shelf of every discerning dark fiction fan.
And now …
WARTS AND ALL – the movie
Thus far, no film or TV producer has optioned this book yet (not as I’m aware), and in the current horror-free zone of British network TV at least, it seems unlikely. But you never know. And hell, as this part of the review is always the fun part, here are my thoughts just in case someone with loads of cash decides that it simply has to be on the screen.
Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most filmic and most right for adaptation in a compendium horror. Of course, no such horror film can happen without a central thread, and this is where you guys, the audience, come in.
Without further messing about, here are the stories and the casts I would choose:
Green: A middle-class blowhard is stung by a mysterious plant and develops a sudden and increasingly violent aversion to the colour green, a bizarre mental condition, which his unfortunate family must face alone as a bitterly cold Christmas approaches …
Bob – Philip Glenister
Hilary – Vicky McClure
Claire – Suranne Jones
The Fertilizer Man: Old Tosho loves his allotment, but hates the local yobs who continually steal his vegetables. He defends the plot as best he can, but cannot be there all the time. Then he is approached by a fertilizer salesman, who guarantees that with his new special compound, everything will grow a lot more quickly. The question is, what will grow? …
Tosho – Phil Davis
Deakin – Joe Cole
Fallen Boys: A school party is escorted down a Cornish tin mine where a famous tragedy once played out. But there are stresses and strains within the group, dangerous ones that are likely to cause serious and even life-threatening problems. On top of that, there are grim forces at work down here. Never let it be said that history doesn’t repeat itself …
Tess – Simona Brown
Against the Skin: Hard-drinking poacher, Lee, attempts a late-night pickup, fails and then finds himself on the wrong bus home. Very drunk, he ends up in a part of town he doesn’t know, in an old depot he doesn’t recognise. Lee has slept through the journey and is now the only person on the bus, but that doesn’t mean he is in this place alone …
Lee – Joe Gilgun
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