Invariably, on this blog at least, that means appreciation
of the dark side.
Yes. It’s cooler and duller now, and the nights are growing
longer, the chill of winter looming. It’s the time for bonfires, conkers and,
most important of all, ghost stories. For this reason, I’m going to be talking
a bit today about SEASON OF MIST, the autumnal ghost/horror/serial killer
novella of mine, which was published this time last year, and in that same vein
– the flipside of Merrie England – we’ll be reviewing and discussing
BEST BRITISH HORROR 2018, as edited by Johnny Mains.
If you’re only here to read today’s book review, that’s
fine. Feel free to zoom on down to the lower end of the blog. As usual, you’ll
find it in the THRILLERS, CHILLERS section. But if you’ve got a bit more time
first, there are a couple of other minor things.
Riding high
First of all, ONE EYE OPEN has been my main novel release
this year. Regular readers will probably know that it was published in August.
Well … the good news is that, despite a very crammed September, which saw such
mega-tomes as Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, Margaret Atwood’s The
Testaments and Robert Harris’s V2, all published, along with hundreds and
hundreds of others, ONE EYE OPEN is still riding high in the charts. It reached
something of a watermark last week when it arrived at #66 in the Kindle
Top 100. (Okay, that’s not #1, but when you consider all the millions and millions
of other e-titles out there, I can hardly complain). So, I’d like to take this opportunity to
thank everyone who’s so far bought a copy along with those who are planning to
but haven’t done it quite yet (don’t worry, there’s still time).
While we authors tend not to be affected by reviews, either
good or bad (we can’t afford to be – it’s only ever one person’s opinion), we
cannot fail to be hugely gratified when we see our books rocket up the charts.
If nothing else, that means word of mouth is spreading that lots of people like
what we’ve written. It’s never less than lovely to know that your work is
hitting the spot widely.
So, thanks again to everyone who has purchased ONE EYE OPEN.
I hope you are finding it a rewarding experience. And now, the not insignificant matter of …
The mist
My novella, SEASON OF MIST, was published this time last
year in paperback, on Kindle and on Audible, where it was narrated by the actor
Greg Patmore, who put a voice to it that I could not have hoped for in my
wildest dreams.
Thus, last year, it suddenly seemed very sensible to dig
SEASON OF MIST up and bring it out again as a stand-alone item. Which is
exactly what I did.
This particular novella had always been intended as a
celebration of the autumn, particularly the British autumn, which can easily
adopt a Sleepy Hollow-esque appearance - flame-red leaves on the trees,
low-lying mist, and fiery jack-o-lanterns watching malevolently from doorsteps
– but which has some unique attributes of its own: a deep, dank chill in the
fungus-riddled depths of the woods, early winter fog and frost, fireworks
exploding overhead, treacle, toffee apples.
The actual story is set during the autumn of 1974, and
follows a bunch of 12 and 13-year-olds, whose happy preparations for Halloween
and Bonfire Night, and then afterwards, Christmas, are massively disrupted when
a series of child-murders occurs in their Lancashire town, the victims all
beaten savagely to death.
While parents make frantic efforts to keep everyone indoors,
the youngsters won’t be harnessed. This is their favourite time of year, after
all, and they are eager to get out at every opportunity to find the killer
themselves. The only difference is that, while the police are searching for a
maniac, the youngsters know better, and they blame the felonies on Red Clogs,
an infamous child-murdering demon supposedly escaped from one of the derelict
collieries in the town.
By the way, despite the ages of the main protagonists, SEASON OF MIST is NOT a children’s or YA book, so please be warned about that.
From the outset, it was always intended to be a combination
of crime-thriller and horror story, the pre-DNA era hunt for a serial killer
continually overlapping with the folklore and mysticism of Northwest England
during its heyday of soot and grime.
From reviews like these …
… took me back to my childhood in Lancashire …
… a wonderfully creepy coming-of-age story …
… really enjoyed the urban legend that ran through it …
… I like to think I succeeded, but as I mentioned before,
these are no more than individual opinions. I wonder what yours might be?
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 (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … 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.
Contrary to popular opinion, short horror fiction is in a
healthy state these days. Okay, it may not appear very regularly from
mass-market publishers, and in fact is scattered widely across the independent
presses both here in the UK and the US and now even further afield. There is
literally a vast number of practitioners. Of varying skill, admittedly, though
a lot of them are very good indeed, and their work would sit comfortably back
in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Pan and Fontana horror series ruled the
supermarkets and railway forecourts (in fact, some of them are superior to many
of that era’s routinely gruesome offerings, written with much greater care and
imagination).
Of course, the quickest way to find these new stars of
short-form scarefare is through the plethora of now annual Year’s Best
anthologies. Unfortunately, by the nature of the beast, these books can only
ever scratch the surface of what’s out there more widely. But whenever you get
hold of them, they are still worth studying in detail because invariably their
editors have done an awful lot of wide-ranging research before compiling their
final tables of contents.
On which subject, step forward editor, Johnny
Mains, a man whose knowledge of short horror fiction is surpassed only by his
love for that genre and his tireless efforts to bring the very best authors,
both old and new, to the attention of the broader public. One of Mains’s most
heartfelt quests has been to establish a regular Best British Horror series.
Through no fault of his own, and despite valiant efforts, this hasn’t yet
become a reality, though he hasn’t given up so far and has brought several such
titles out already.
This latest one, Best British Horror 2018, from NewCon
Press, clearly shows what the world is currently missing.
Mains certainly has an eclectic taste in horror, which is a
good thing, I suppose, when you’re working on a Year’s Best volume, and it’s
amply illustrated in this one, the stories ranging far across the chiller
spectrum in terms of their subject-matter.
To start with, fans of traditional Gothic horror will be
more than satisfied.
Mains’s choices hit this note repeatedly (though not solely).
Reggie Oliver, a big favourite in the genre for his ability to elicit genuine
terror with the most gentlemanly prose, hits us twice in this anthology, but
most impressively with the unnerving Love and Death, which concerns a
mysteriously captivating and highly dangerous work of art, while Daniel
McGachey, whose reputation in the world of ‘Jamesian’ horror is growing fast,
contributes Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling, the story of a magnificent but malevolent old
clock, which, whenever it chimes, bodes well for no one (much more about this
one and Love and Death later). Then there is Mark Morris’s flat-out horrifying
We Who Sing Beneath the Ground, in which Stacy, a young teacher, relocates to
Cornwall, but becomes so concerned when one of her pupils at the village school is
strangely absent that she makes an ill-advised trip to the remote and dilapidated farm
where he lives …
Morris’s soon-to-be-classic Cornish chiller links us nicely
into the next subgenre touched on by Mains, which is surely ‘Monsters’. Not
everyone goes for this kind of in-yer-face horror. Some readers consider
themselves too grown-up or are convinced there should be no place for physical
aberrations in modern age scare fiction, when warped psychology is known to be
the root of so much fear and despair and Man himself has been exposed as the
worst offender in terms of basic cruelty. But as Best British Horror 2018
shows, when done properly, and dare I say it – subtly – there can always be
room for tales of nature gone mad.
For example, check out VH Leslie’s Shell Baby, in which
something truly awful comes out of the Hebridean Sea (more about this one
later), or Laura Mauro’s Sun Dogs, in which young Sadie, the child of misguided
survivalists, now lives alone on the edge of the Nevada desert, but then takes
in a ragged stranger, June, to whom she is immediately attracted even though June’s arrival seems to coincide with a recent spate of fatal
animal attacks.
A different corner of creepy fiction fast-growing in terms
of popularity, in fact blooming exponentially at present, is folk-horror. If
you discount the Mark Morris story (which sort of fits that bill), Johnny Mains
only selects one very folky story on this occasion, but it is more than
satisfying, one of the best in the book in my view (not to mention most
disturbing), and is probably the first story of this bunch that you may want to
read twice just to make sure you haven’t missed any of its nuances. In a
nutshell, in Claire Dean’s very clever The Unwish, a dysfunctional family
return to their favourite holiday cottage out in the countryside, but sibling rivals,
Amy and Sara, don’t get on, Amy’s new boyfriend is late arriving, while Amy
herself is increasingly convinced that one time when they were here, even
though no one else seems to remember it, she had a little sister …
Of course, no collection of horror stories can possibly exist
in modern times without taking a couple of trips at least into the darker
recesses of the human mind. Psychological horror is always a challenge to write
effectively, authors who prefer it often seeking to unsettle their readers
rather than petrify them, though when it’s done successfully, be prepared to be
blown out of your comfort zone in a big way.
Three coldly effective examples from Best British Horror
2018 do exactly this.
Ray Cluley gives us In the Light of St Ives, in which
eccentric artist, Claire, sets fire to her house in Cornwall, and is badly
burned in the process, her older sister, Emily, investigating but unsure
whether Claire’s incredible revelations about the light and colour in the house
betray an unhinged mind or something much more sinister. Cate Gardner,
meanwhile, who can always be relied on to pick at the rawest of nerves, adds
Fragments of a Broken Doll, in which we meet demented OAP, Trill, who lives in
a slum tenement close to a prison. When a convicted murderer escapes, he hides
in her house, constantly protesting his innocence. But the real question is how
innocent is Trill?
After that, we have Dispossession, which comes to us from a
true master and long-term exponent of the understated psychological chiller,
Nicholas Royle. In this one, a disturbed man seeks sanctuary in a new flat, but
can’t escape the influence of his old one or the endless memories of his own
haunted past. This is another that you might want to read twice just in case
you miss something, but even if you don’t, it will still affect you in that
intangibly macabre way that Nick Royle stories seem to specialise in.
Psychological horror is often twinned closely with the sort
of surreal, fantastical horror that at one time used to be called ‘slipstream’
(especially when it busted the boundaries between genres). I was never the
biggest fan, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t recognise the talent so regularly
on show, and that is certainly the case with Georgina Bruce’s The Book of
Dreems, which introduces us to Kate, who might be a real person, but might also
be an android, a doll, a so-called ‘dreemy peep’. Kate herself isn’t sure. But
she knows one thing: Fraser, the man who controls her, bosses her, fixes her glitches
and then purposely breaks her again, is a tyrant who needs to be stopped. It’s
a strange one for sure, an ugly nightmare of a story, but so engrossing that
you’ll read it right to the end.
Of course, whereas horror was once seen as second rate pulp,
as the naughty child of adult fiction, the bad boy who lots of people liked but
wouldn’t admit to it, the reality has always been that dark tales can inform as
well as entertain. Sometimes these are difficult roads to take because we don’t
always like facing the sad realities of our lives, or the messed-up world we
have contributed to creating. Yes, stories like these can be gloomy avenues,
but they can be instructive too, even if garish and gory.
The two most serious stories in Best British Horror 2018, aren’t
especially gory (or garish, for that matter), but they are grim explorations of
human frailty and are thus of high value.
In James Everington’s twisty The Affair, retired middle-aged
couple, Neil and Lynda, are haunted by two dopplegangers: younger, more
energised versions of themselves, whose youth and virility are a torturous
reminder of all they have lost. Then we have The Lies We Tell by Charlotte
Bond, in which self-centred realtor, Cathy, lies constantly to her children,
who she doesn’t care for anymore, and to her husband, Vikram, who doesn’t yet
know about the affair she is having. Someone knows, however. Someone who has
been keeping a careful tally of every untruth that Cathy has ever uttered …
So, there we have it. That is Best British Horror 2018. I
haven’t mentioned all the stories in this book; I don’t want to spoil
everything for you. Suffice to say that this is an ambitious collection of very
varied tales, put together with care and loving attention. No doubt there were
many other stories published in 2018 that could have been included, but there
has to be a cut-off point somewhere, and editor, Johnny Mains, has done us all
a great service here in trying to cast as wide a scope as possible on the work
being done by Brit horror authors in contemporary times. This is an outstanding
collection, which all true fans will delight in.
And now, after all that, we have …
BEST BRITISH HORROR 2018 – the movie
Okay, no film maker has optioned this book yet (as far as
I’m aware). However, this
part of the review is always the fun part, so I’m going to crack on with it
anyway. As such, here are my thoughts in anticipation of someone loaded with
cash deciding that this lovely little book should immediately 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. Just accept that four strangers have been thrown
together in unusual circumstances that require them to relate spooky stories.
It could be that they are nervous offerings made by prospective new members to
the merciless Club of the Damned (a la Supernatural, right) or maybe are related to
us in the form of atmospheric fireside readings (a la Spine Chillers) – but
basically, it’s up to you.
Without further messing about, here are the stories and the
casts I would choose (though, timewise, a couple may need updating if they are
to work in this context):
Love and Death (by Reggie Oliver): In Victorian London,
Martin Isaacs, an unsuccessful artist, is commissioned to recover a missing work
of genius, Love and Death, as painted by Basil Hallward, his former mentor, who
has now disappeared. But the painting, a classical image in the Renaissance
style, is deceptively beautiful. In reality, it destroys all that it touches …
Isaacs – Jordan Patrick Smith
Hallward – Michael Sheen
Shell Baby (by VH Leslie): Tired of life, lonely Elspeth
rents an isolated cottage in the Orkneys. She seeks complete isolation, but
still yearns for the daughter she never had. On the first night, a weird
experience while swimming sees her befriend an unusual baby sea creature.
Delighted, Elspeth nurtures it, mothers it even, but it grows at an alarming
rate, along with its voracious appetite …
Elspeth – Naomie Harris
Tools of the Trade (by Paul Finch – sorry, guys, but I’m
never going to miss a chance to put my own stuff on film): A journalist and
amateur medium search a derelict Lancashire hotel, which they believe houses
the original knives used in the Jack the Ripper murders. They envisage wealth,
but in the process awaken an ancient evil …
Adam Croaker – Robert James Collier
Dick Wetherby – Richard E Grant
Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling (by Daniel McGachey): Just after WWI, an
antiques expert is consulted by the agent of a deceased millionaire and hears the
chilling tale of a malevolent timepiece, the Awakening Clock, which, whenever
it chimes the mysterious 13th hour, brings all manner of darkness upon its
owner …
Lawrence – Martin Freeman
Fosdyke – Martin Jarvis
Hinchcliffe – Will Poulter
Shorehouse – Burn Gorman
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