Why I won't be writing about the lockdown

… in the near future.

I have to add that caveat because you can never say ‘never’ in any aspect of life. Though for the moment I’m firm. This will be the main gist of today’s chat. In addition to that, however, I’ll update you on where we’re at with my forthcoming new novel, ONE EYE OPEN, and, in reflection of our current dark and silent streets – where in the minds of many, violent criminals are running amok – I offer a detailed review and discussion of a crime classic, Michael Connelly’s astonishing Harry Bosch debut, THE BLACK ECHO.

If you’re only here for the Harry Bosch chit-chat, that’s fine. As always, you’ll find it at the lower end of today’s blogpost. Feel free to pop down there straight away and have your say. However, if you’ve got a little more time to spare, here’s the latest on …

One Eye Open

Thus far, my new novel is still in the pipeline for an August release. I’m loving this cover, which for once actually encapsulates a scene from the novel, and I can now reveal the blurb that will appear on the back of the book. 

I won’t say too much more about it at present, except that it’s a free-standing crime thriller set in the leafy southeast of England, where far too many gangsters (both homegrown and otherwise) are getting comfy, and brings in a new set of hardbitten police characters who are determined to bring justice back to the neighbourhood.

But enough from me. Time to let my publishers, Orion, do the talking ...

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will

An electrifying, high-octane thrill ride; the new must-read standalone from a Sunday Times bestseller. You won’t be able to tear yourself away! Dark, gritty and always at the edge of your seat, this unforgettable new outing from master-craftsman, Paul Finch, will appeal to fans of Stuart MacBride, Mari Hannah and Alex Cross.

YOU CAN RUN

A high-speed crash leaves a man and woman clinging to life. Neither of them carries ID. Their car has fake number plates. In their luggage: a huge amount of cash.

Who are they? What are they hiding?

And what were they running from?

YOU CAN HIDE

DS Lynda Hagen, once a brilliant detective, gave it all up to raise her family.

But something about this case reignites a spark in her...

BUT YOU’LL ALWAYS SLEEP WITH...

What begins as an investigation soon becomes an obsession. And it will lead her to a secret so dangerous that soon there will be nowhere left to hide.

ONE EYE OPEN

***

And now, on a gloomier note …

Writing up the lockdown

I’ve recently been fascinated to hear that several editors and agents of my acquaintance have put it online that at present they aren’t interested in lockdown-based novels. Clearly, this suggests that they are being hit with a number of pitches set during this crisis.

On the face of it, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s certainly a strange new experience that we’ve all been plunged into, and I’m not just talking about the sight of animals suddenly feeling free to wander our city streets again (though that in itself is an eye-opener and surely worth a book of some sort).

Last Friday night, I took my daily exercise by walking down into Wigan town centre at around 9.30pm. 

To describe the place as a ‘ghost town’ would be under-selling it. Streets that would normally be throbbing with nightlife were silent and pitch-dark. Out here in the provinces we are used to seeing our shops boarded, our arcades permanently shuttered. But our pubs? Our restaurants? Our fast food vendors? At that time of the week, there’d normally be crowds of revellers on every street-corner. But on this occasion, quite literally, there was no one anywhere. And all the time I was out – all told, for about three hours – perhaps one or two cars passed me by. The eeriness of it was tangible.

But if I thought the streets of the town were strangely bereft, how different it was again whenever I veered through parks and finally headed into the woods near my own home. Now, these places wouldn’t be bouncing even on a normal Friday night, but I was still in Wigan, in the heart of Greater Manchester, and yet, with the ambient noise of distant traffic completely absent, I could have been in the New Forest or the Lake District or the Highlands of Scotland.

It was just me, alone amid acres of deep, shadow-filled thickets, over the top of which arched an early summer night-sky ablaze with constellations I hadn’t seen so clearly for many a long year, if ever. Again though, the blanketing silence was so oppressive that enjoyment remained elusive. The odd twinkle of lamplight from a suburban avenue or someone’s back window might penetrate the lattice of branches and leaves, but it added no comfort because there were no sounds of life to accompany it.

No, I’m not at all surprised that some thriller and horror writers are looking to utilise this strange and unearthly experience we’re all sharing – at least as a background, if not the main story.

One bane of our thriller writer lives in the modern age has been the advent of personal technology. You’re rarely alone (and therefore rarely in danger) these days because you don’t need to find a working payphone to call for help. In fact, most of us don’t just carry around the capability to contact others, but the capability to film crimes as they occur, to photograph suspects and even covertly record suspicious conversations. But it doesn’t feel like that at present. Because no one knows from one minute to the next how effectively the emergency services will be able to respond.

Will our overstretched police force rush out to incidents they may consider to be of lesser importance – such as reports of prowlers, or weird noises in a back alley, or a distant scream that may not necessarily have been a vixen on heat – but which to the average citizen, especially alone at night, might be of serious concern? How quickly can we receive medical help if we need it? Will a doctor or nurse even be able to see you if you’re in a state of shock because you’ve had a bad fright?

All these questions, and others like them, have potentially made the lockdown a prime hunting ground for writers whose main job is to scare their readers.

But I have to say – and this is NOT A CRITICISM of those who are seriously considering this – I’m not among them.

There is no doubt that, however this thing ends, it’s been an event we will all remember for the rest of our lives, with varying degrees of pain and sadness. It’s certainly not something any of us will forget, even if we want to try.

The news media have had a field day of course. This is by far the largest story that any of them have ever covered and probably ever will, and they are determined to milk it for everything they can. All of a sudden, everyone on television is an expert. We’ve had anchor men and women making all kinds of apocalyptic statements like ‘this is the new normal’ or ‘we need to adapt to a new world’.

But you know … they might be correct. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

And that’s one of the most frightening things to me. Are we seriously saying that for the rest of time, or at least the rest of our lives, close social interaction between human beings will not be viable? Frankly, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Will markets, nightclubs, cruise ships and public swimming pools really become things of the past? Do people of a certain age see no future at all where they aren’t confined in their own homes?

It’s certainly the case that there’ll be changes of some sort and that we won’t like them.

I can’t speak for other authors, and would never be so arrogant as to try, but for all these reasons I’m seeing little in the lockdown to get creatively excited about. Partly, it’s because I have to enjoy what I’m writing, even if the subject-matter is traumatic and terrible – in fact usually, the more traumatic and terrible it is, the better I like it. But I write fiction, so when something traumatic and terrible is happening in real life, it’s another matter entirely.

The other thing is that, as I’ve already intimated, we can’t second-guess what the world will be like when the lockdown is over. We’ve already mentioned that there may be significant changes (alternatively, there may be none at all, but at present we’ve no clue). I’m certainly not the only writer I know who is worried that his/her output of fiction thus far may have become irrelevant this last couple of months because it now refers to a different experience of life. Up to very recently, nearly all of us have been writing about a world that had barely heard about the Coronovirus, about societies that couldn’t imagine lockdowns or social distancing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we’ll never get back to normal. But even our health experts can’t predict things with any certainty. So, for this reason as well, I’m finding it very difficult dredging up any enthusiasm to write about this disaster.

Am I saying that, as a writer, I’ll never go there ever?

Most definitely not. If complete normality does return, this calamity might eventually be looked back on as nothing more than an ugly blip in the ongoing progress of all our lives. In that case, it may in due course become the perfect nail on which to hang some dark and dangerous stories. But until that time, as long as COVID-19 remains an ongoing tragedy, with thousands of more people dying each week than we are used to, medical staff worked to the bone, and so many of us trapped in our own homes, or facing unemployment or the collapse of the businesses we’ve worked so hard to build, it’ll remain a no-go area for me.

Again, though … this is NOT a criticism of those who are willing to give it a whirl. Everyone is their own person, we are all different, and as I mentioned, there are very understandable reasons why a few of us might be prepared to get stuck in straight away.

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.

THE BLACK ECHO by Michael Connelly (1992)

Outline

Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch is an astute, hard-working detective with a sharp eye and a mean-as-sin attitude, not just with the crims, but even with his fellow cops if they aren’t doing the job properly. On top of that he’s well known in his native Los Angeles, having closed some high profile cases and even seeing some of his exploits fictionalised in a pacy TV show (as a result of which he was able to acquire himself an enviable pad high in the Hollywood hills). He ought to be one of the stars of the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division, but there are more than a few strikes against him.

First of all, he speaks his mind, even to the brass. Secondly, he likes to go it alone, taking chances and following leads even if the rest of the team aren’t up to speed, his personal safety a secondary consideration. Thirdly, and most recently, he uncharacteristically used excessive force in his pursuit of ‘the Dollmaker’, a serial killer whose grotesque, crypto-artistic depredations had the whole city terrified. Having shot the guy dead while he was unarmed, Bosch was bound to come under the microscope, but in the highly politicised world of the LAPD’s higher ranks – where the unashamed jockeying for position is an embarrassing art-form all of its own – it was the perfect opportunity to divest the department of a loose cannon, hence Harry was busted down to Hollywood Homicide, where he would be safely out of the public eye.

Bosch is a professional, though, and gets on with the job, and when sent to check out a body found in a drainage pipe near the Mulholland Dam, he doesn’t share everyone else’s casual assumption that this is just another junkie who’s OD’d, even though the body is that of Billy Meadows, a known heroin addict who has died with a hypo in his arm. Harry doesn’t merely call on his basic detective skills to deduce that Meadows was murdered, he also recognises the victim personally.

A Vietnam vet, Bosch was once part of an infantry unit whose speciality was underground infiltration, pursuing the Viet Cong through their limitless networks of tunnels. Meadows was part of the same outfit, which, given that his corpse was dumped in a tunnel, is surely no coincidence.

This is not a comfortable time for Bosch, evoking memories of the Vietnam War, which he’s never really been able to bury deep enough, but more worrying still, the so-called ‘Black Echo’. This was the coronary-inducing terror the ‘tunnel rats’ used to suffer when crawling on all fours in pursuit of their foes through the midnight labyrinth of the jungle underworld. Its return to the forefront of his memory makes everything a lot harder, not just for Bosch, but for all those in his company.

Inevitably though, he elicits little sympathy from the top floor, Lieutenant Harvey ‘Ninety-Eight’ Pounds supportive but only to a superficial degree, Deputy-Chief Irvin Irving uninterested in anything that doesn’t make him look good and particularly untrusting of a non-team-player like Bosch. The net-result is that two ambitious but highly prejudiced IA officers, Detectives Lewis and Clarke, are put on Bosche’s tail, and even when his enquiry leads him to a 10-month-old bank heist pulled off by a team who tunnelled into the vault, which sees him hooking up with a specialist anti-robbery FBI unit, these bloodhounds won’t give him a minute’s rest.

Even the FBI alliance proves problematic. LA Bureau boss, John Rourke, is okay man-to-man but irritatingly by-the-book where Harry is concerned, while Special Agent Eleanor Wish, whom he’s partnered with, while initially antagonistic to him for his solitary attitude (and habitual chain-smoking!), eventually comes to like him, but remains an enigma (and a beautiful one to boot!), and it doesn’t at all help that Bosch finds himself irresistibly attracted to her.

Needless to say, nothing about this investigation is going to be anything like as straightforward, routine or danger-free as was initially imagined …

Review

It may seem vaguely ridiculous to be reviewing The Black Echo now, when, over the 28 years since its first publication, it’s grown exponentially into a world-famous 21-book series. But in case you were wondering where the whole Harry Bosch saga started, this might be of interest.

To begin with, Bosch is in so many ways the quintessential loner cop, though he wasn’t the first. Even back in 1992, Dirty Harry predated him by over 20 years. But the most interesting thing about the Harry Bosch story is that it’s all set within a convincing LAPD environment. He doesn’t go around remorselessly shooting people anyway, so there was never a chance he’d come to match Harry Callahan’s scorecard, but even if he was inclined to, in this carefully structured, very authentic world he wouldn’t be allowed to get anywhere close to it.

The one or two shootings he is responsible for see all kinds of departmental and disciplinary fallout, and even though one of the victims is a proven serial killer, it complicates Bosch’s life and career no end.

Former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly is quite determined from the outset that his hardboiled hero is going to wend his ‘lone wolf’ path through as realistic a law enforcement world as possible, with all the attendant difficulties that will create. Near enough every unit in the Los Angeles police is thus brought to our attention. Reconstructed in intricate detail, not just in terms of its function, personnel and position in the pyramid of power, but also in terms of how it feels and looks. The stresses and strains between these departments are made crystal clear, while all protocols and procedures are outlined in depth and there is a whole load of cop lingo, including an exhaustive range of abbreviations, which not every reader has appreciated, though again I personally feel that it adds to the novel’s credibility.

It’s pretty much the same with the way Connelly, a native Philadelphian, treats Los Angeles, running us around the city a lot, using real streets and neighbourhoods, and completely catching the mood and atmosphere of this sun-soaked but schizophrenic metropolis. In this regard alone, there is much superb descriptive writing on show, scenic LA sunsets over streets buzzing with disorderly nightlife, high, heat-hazed views of Universal Studios alternating with claustrophobic journeys through a maze-like underworld where junkies sleep amid spent needles and the city’s shit flows in rivers.

So, okay. We’ve thus far got a warts-and-all police guidebook and a picturesque LA travelogue. But does it work as a thriller?

Well, don’t worry. No one’s going to mistake The Black Echo for anything else, or for not being a genuine classic of its kind.

In addition to the realistic backdrop, there is all sorts here that you’d expect to find in any and every fictionalised account of American crime-fighting. For example, no maverick cop would be complete if he didn’t have a terrible family background (orphanned in Bosch’s case, after his prostitute mother was murdered!), if he didn’t give lip to his supervisors, if the top brass didn’t mistrust him and subsequently if there wasn’t a posse of incompetent IA guys constantly trying to find ways to bring him down. We’ve got all that, as well as the high-falutin ambitions of the LAPD upper echelons, who are constantly seeking to outwit each other in their quest to be Mayor. The Feds, meanwhile, as is also often the case, are portrayed as well-resourced but unwelcome interlopers who are never really rated by real cops because they haven’t worked the streets.

It could be argued, and indeed has been, that this is a whole clutch of modern-day cop thriller cliches, which, no matter how well it all hangs together, hits us with nothing new. But none of this spoiled it for me. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if it did spoil it for you, what else were you expecting?

So bureaucratic is the real-world law enforcement machine in the West, especially with prosecutors (the DA’s Office in Bosch, another group of slick individuals who’ve rarely, if ever, been close to the action) now so deeply embedded in it that you can’t imagine there’d be much to get excited about day-to-day. Everything’s a team effort and by the book, the whole thing cloaked in health and safety considerations and politically correct minutiae.

Seriously, guys, where’s the fun in that when you’re looking at fiction?

Bosch himself is a more intriguing character than usual. Yes, he’s the hero, but he’s also pretty spiky. And he really doesn’t suffer fools lightly, not even allowing for junior cops’ inexperience. At times, he’s not even remotely likeable, even aggravating the reader (especially when he cuts so much slack to his partner, Jerry Edgar, who, double-hatting as a real estate man, is mostly more interested in selling houses than in making cases against villains). But again, for me this is a hint of the real. Nobody’s perfect, Bosch least of all.

His background as a Vietnam ‘tunnel rat’, though you know it’s going to play into the story, certainly adds to his character, giving him a grim and fatalistic air, but also a dogged attitude to work, which only complements his street-knowledge and well-honed analytical skills. Detective is one of the most difficult and demanding roles in police-work, but Harry Bosch feels like he was made-to-measure for the part; an outsider, yes, but just the kind of humourless and sharply observant guy you’d want investigating when complex and dangerous scenarios like this one come along. 

All in all, Harry Bosch was, and still is, one of the most compelling characters in police fiction. Yes, he may in some ways be an archetype – hardbitten to the core, deeply misunderstood and completely unconcerned by it – but he’s still one of the best realised and makes for an excellent morally upstanding hero.

It’s difficult to advise this now, the Harry Bosch series being as old and well-established as it is. But if you’re about to start on it, go back first to the pre-high tech world of The Black Echo. It combines action, intelligence and frank, hardcore cop stuff, and though tightly and tautly written, is readable to the nth degree. It’s easily one of the best of its kind. 

There’ll be no amateur casting session for an imaginary movie version this week, as Prime’s Bosch TV series has been running since 2014, cutting and rewriting many narratives to suit a new era, but maintaining the Neo-noir tone and atmosphere all the way through, its star, Titus Welliver (pictured right), inhabiting the lead’s hoary old mantle like a second skin.

(Today’s images come to us as follows: Empty Westminster is courtesy of award-winning photographer, Robert Tinothy, the gloomy cobbled street is from Sai Krishan's blog, The Resplendent Life, the dark wood is by Rosie Fraser,  the abandoned swimming pool by Freistellen).

True terror tales from an island of mystery

We’ve been graced with some pleasing weather throughout most of this lockdown, which in some ways is adding insult to injury, I suppose. We’re now approaching early summer and the time when so many of us would normally be thinking of going away. Maybe abroad, or maybe to some other part of the UK.

One of the great joys of my life is travelling, and yet, like so many of us, I don’t know when I’ll be able to leave my house again. I certainly can’t see there being any real journeys for quite a long time yet. However, we can dream, which is certainly the story behind my TERROR TALES anthologies.

I’ve been editing these now since 2011, and the emphasis has always been the same, each volume focussing on a different corner of the UK (and maybe, in due course, going far beyond these shores). Each time original horror fiction alternates with factual anecdotes, all digging deeply into that district’s scary legends. Much of which, perhaps inevitably, means folk-horror.

On that same subject, I’ll also today, in my usual unsparing detail, be reviewing Adam LG Nevill’s remarkable novel of extreme folk-horror, THE REDDENING.

If you’re only here to read the Adam Nevill review, that’s fine. As always, you’ll find it at the lower end of today’s blogpost.

First, though, if you have a couple of minutes free, perhaps you’ll also be interested in …

The truth behind the terror

The TERROR TALES anthologies – be they TERROR TALES OF LONDON, TERROR TALES OF THE LAKE DISTRICT or TERROR TALES OF CORNWALL, or any of the seven others we have published so far – primarily contain fiction, though it’s always fiction with a sense of place. When I first commissioned these stories, I asked specifically for material that didn’t just happen to be set in the correct geographic area, but fiction that was atmospheric of it and relevant to it, drawing deeply on the local myth, tradition and history.

And the authors have delivered the goods for nearly a decade now, with at least a couple from every volume being selected for inclusion in Year’s Best anthologies. But even though many stars of the horror genre have graced our pages – we’ve published tales from names as varied as Peter James, Helen Grant, Ramsey Campbell, Thana Niveau and Robert Shearman – I don’t think these TERROR TALES books would be quite the same without the local ‘non-fiction’ anecdotes with which I intersperse the stories.

This is an idea I unashamedly pinched from R. Chetwynd-Hayes when he did the TALES OF TERROR books for Fontana way back in the 1970s. Take Welsh Tales of Terror, for example (first pub in 1973). You couldn’t read such classics of Gothic and macabre fiction as Jordan by Glyn Jones, The Cry of Children by John Christopher and The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen, without first encountering the factual chills of Old Ben and The Cyoraeth, which lay in between them.

My ambition has always been to create as full picture of each region as I can, incorporating as much of its mystery and folklore as possible. And the anecdotes, which I write and edit myself, are a particularly satisfying way to add this essential colour and atmosphere. And remember, as outlandish as it may seem, they DO purport to be true. We don’t make stuff up for this section of each book. That is left to the fiction writers. These many small interludes are, or at least one time were, believed to be the reports of real incidents.

And now, on the basis that you probably fancy sampling some proof of the pudding rather than listening to me droning endlessly on, I’ll quit while I’m on top. 

Here, for your complete delectation, are some examples of the true-life (albeit very folkloric) horror that we have published to date in the TERROR TALES series.

FROM THE LADY DOWNS

There is much to interest antiquarians in the far west of Cornwall. Archaeologists and prehistorians abound on the open moors above St Ives, Towednack and Penzance, in particular on the picturesque Lady Downs, where a range of Bronze Age artefacts have been uncovered over the years, and cairns, barrows and ancient stones, some arranged in enigmatic patterns, others standing cold and aloof, hint at the former existence of human settlements whose names and occupants have long passed from memory.

     If there is any place where the formidable power of the faeries could believably manifest it is here. And indeed, the Lady Downs provide the backdrop to one of the eeriest and yet more well attested tales of human/faerie interaction in modern times.

    The whole of southwest England was long known as ‘the Summer Land’, largely in reflection of its benign climate. Cornwall in particular, which sits at a southerly latitude in the heart of the Gulf Stream, is famous for its warm summers and amazingly mild winters; in some areas it even boasts evergreen oak trees. This creates a magical aura, which, in a less educated age, was easy to attribute to the presence of mysterious beings. The pixies (or piskies) are a famous Cornish variant on the more traditional faeries and sprites of homespun mythology, but Cornish legend mentions all kinds of little folk, mainly in those areas where there are barrows, ring-forts and dolmens – like the Lady Downs.

     In the late 18th century, a certain young woman, whose name is given variously as Cherry of Zennor or Jenny Permuen, and whose age was said to be 16, was found wandering on the Downs in a dazed state, with her left eye ‘curious’ – either changed in colour, unable to swivel, or simply and inexplicably blinded. She had apparently gone missing several weeks earlier, having left her home to go looking for work.

     After much coaxing, the girl, who remained in a confused state, told an astonishing story. She claimed that she was on the road from Zennor to Gulval, which took her across the Lady Downs. Halfway over, at a remote crossroads, she met a handsome gentleman dressed in the manner of a country squire. He appeared to know before she even spoke that she was seeking employment, as he promptly told her that he was a recently made widower who was in need of a housekeeper and nanny for his son. The payment he offered was good, so the girl agreed to accompany him. He led her along a series of moorland paths, ever downward, through a network of deep valleys and gullies, until they reached a place where no sunshine penetrated. Here, there was a beautiful house surrounded by handsome gardens, which bloomed magnificently despite the permanent shade.

     The boy she was introduced to was very quiet and polite, and once the girl had commenced her job, seemed happy to be left to his own devices. However, one very important duty of the new nanny’s was to anoint his eyes each morning with a mysterious salve, though his father asserted that on no account was she to use this substance on herself. For long periods each day, the widower and his son would disappear from the house. The girl subsequently found that she didn’t have much to do, and so she became bored and inquisitive. Nothing in the house was out of the ordinary, but she’d long noted that the ointment she used on the boy seemed to make his eyes shine. One particularly tedious afternoon, unable to resist temptation, she applied a dab of it to her own left eye.

     Immediately, the eye began to burn. In agony, she ran outside to a nearby pool, wherein she attempted to wash the ointment away, only to realise that she could now see bizarre things. Firstly, half men/half fish creatures swam below the surface. But then other beings appeared, dancing on all sides of her: men and women who seemed to have adopted hybrid forms, melding their own features into those of animals and insects. Among these terrifying creatures, she spotted her master and his son. The girl fled back to the house, before fainting onto her bed. In the morning, her master, now restored to his normal human shape, informed her that she was dismissed, and offering no explanation why or for what she thought she had seen the day before, he led her away from his home by various, complex paths, finally leaving her dazed and alone on the Lady Downs.

     The weird tale was taken seriously by the girl’s family, who demanded to be introduced to this strange widower. However, try though she may, the girl was unable to find any path leading down into a permanently sunless valley, on one occasion taking a track which she was sure she recognised, only for it to end at an overgrown tumulus. In due course, the story was written off as fantasy. It was proposed that the girl might have been injured in some other way, maybe even had poisoned herself eating berries or other ill-advised fruits of the moor and had dreamed the whole thing. 

     But Cherry or Jenny, whatever her name actually was, maintained to the end of her days that these things had happened, and was often to be found wandering the Lady Downs on moonlit nights, calling for her former employer in a hopeless, despairing voice.

THE BIG GREY MAN

“I was returning to the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the sound of my own footsteps. I heard a ‘crunch’, and then another ‘crunch’ as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own. I listened and heard it again but could see nothing in the mist. I was seized with terror and took to my heels.”

     So spoke Professor Norman Collie in 1925, describing an experience he had near the summit of Scotland’s second highest mountain, Ben Macdui, in 1891. It is an account many climbers today will be familiar with, because the unknown beast of Ben Macdui is still one of the most mysterious and terrifying beings in British mountaineering mythology.

     Ben Macdui itself contributes in no small way to the aura of very genuine fear this oft-told tale creates. Standing 4,295 feet above sea-level on the southern edge of the Cairngorms, it is a remote and lonely peak; it also suffers from extremely severe weather – heavy snow in winter and much mist and fog for the rest of the year. Stories that its high slopes and passes are home to an enormous, aggressive biped have been told for generations.

     The creature was certainly known about in ancient times, when its old Gaelic name was ‘Am Fear Liath Mor’ (literally ‘Big Grey Man’). In the late 18th century, the great Scottish author, James Hogg, described a blood-chilling encounter with what he estimated was a 30 foot-tall giant, whose close details were hidden in frozen vapour, though Hogg said it was dark of aspect, “like a blackamoor”. In 1903, renowned mountaineer Henry Kellas reported something very similar. In 1943, climber Alex Twenion claimed that he shot three times at a colossal shape in the fog as it lurched menacingly towards him. Shortly afterwards, in 1945, a former mountain rescuer, Peter Densham, a man very experienced in the high peaks of the Cairngorms, told friends how he’d fled the mountain in terror when a massive, two-legged form chased after him.

     There always seems to be an overwhelming sense of terror and panic in the presence of this unknown thing, though one or two witnesses have hung around just long enough to get a better look at it. They describe a burly, “crudely-made” humanoid form, somewhere between 12 and 20 feet tall, which is either grey in colour, or covered in short grey fur. Its face has variously been described as “malign”, “inhuman”, “apelike”, or weirder still, “non-existent”.

     Owing to the harshness of the terrain, no major searches have ever been launched on Ben Macdui, but the majority of the sightings centre around the Lairg Ghru Pass, and perhaps not surprisingly, more than a few climbers no longer use that route.

     Theories abound as to what the Big Grey Man could actually be. An optical illusion is one possibility: mountain mist, refracting sunlight, rapidly altering perspectives and so on, with the accompanying panic caused by exhaustion in the presence of this awesome landscape. However, other theorists dismiss this explanation as too pat, pointing to the very solid, very real nature of the phenomenon so many reliable witnesses claim to have experienced. One question raised is could the Big Grey Man be a relict woodwose – a mysterious hominid rumoured to have lived in the very wild parts of Britain during the Middle Ages, and supposedly glimpsed much more recently in the Highlands – in effect, a Scottish Bigfoot?

     The reasons why this must be nonsense are almost as many as those given for why the North American Bigfoot must be nonsense, and yet – as in North America – the reported sightings continue. As usual in these kinds of cases, no real answer will be possible until some carcass or other type of physical evidence is discovered. For as long as it isn’t, scary rumours will persist that an unknown something prowls the desolate slopes and icy ridges of Ben Macdui.

THE GRIMMEST CASTLE IN ALL ENGLAND

The murder of King Edward II in 1327 is one of the grisliest tales in English history. And in the shape of Berkeley Castle, in southern Gloucestershire, it boasts one of the most ominous backdrops imaginable: a lowering structure which so emanates menace that even today it is associated with monsters, witchcraft and evil spirits.    

     Berkeley Castle was built in 1067 by a powerful Norman family, the FitzOsberns. Such strongholds had appeared all over England in the wake of the Norman Conquest, and were rightly viewed by the population as symbols of oppression, but Berkeley Castle was more feared than most as it was constructed on the site where an infamous Saxon witch had once made her home, and stories were soon circulating that the evil lurking within its mighty walls was more to do with the black arts than with the cruelty of foreign despots.

     The story of the Berkeley Witch was already a famous folktale when the Normans arrived in England. It concerned a wealthy Saxon matron who, after living for many years in a fine timbered hall, on the exact spot where the castle would later be built, confessed to her family that her good fortune was the result of a pact with the Devil.      After her funeral, it was reported that the chapel where her coffin was kept was inundated with nightmarish demonic forms, one of which finally broke open the casket and bore the woman’s corpse away on a horse covered with spikes. The corpse was said to have been impaled on these spikes, and witnesses claimed that it screamed in agony. In an associated legend, a supposed monster, a gigantic toad that fed on human flesh – possibly the witch’s familiar – was also believed to inhabit the site and in later decades, after the castle was built, it would reputedly wander through secret passages and spring out on the unwary. And indeed, an immense, unnaturally bloated toad was recovered from a recess in the castle cellars and killed during the reign of Henry VII, (1485-1509).

     Of course, none of these stories are provable, but the one tale of Berkeley horror for which there is much documented evidence concerns the fate of Edward II.

     Son of the famous warrior king, Edward I, who conquered Wales and was also known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, Edward II made enemies on all sides simply because, by comparison, he was very weak. He was supposedly fonder of poetry and sailing than of fighting, which in the early 14th century were not kingly activities. And when he was defeated by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, few of his nobles were surprised, though many were furious as they’d lost friends, relatives and retainers en masse, and more importantly, they’d lost their holdings in Scotland.

     Edward also incurred hostility by showering favours on ambitious but unpopular young courtiers like Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser. There was no proof that Edward was homosexual. He had at least two female partners and fathered five children. But accusations of ‘sexual perversion’ were a useful scandal to spread when one was stirring discontent. His barons’ real gripe was that, despite his many failures, he refused to subject himself to the will of Parliament. When in 1326, Roger Mortimer, a powerful marcher-baron, with the full connivance of his lover, Queen Isabella, Edward’s aggressively opportunistic wife (so aggressive that she was known as the ‘She-Wolf of France’), rose in rebellion and deposed Edward, there was general satisfaction.

     But this was not to last.

     Edward’s eldest son, also called Edward, was a minor, and his mother, Isabella, and her lover, Mortimer, intended to rule England from behind his throne, which was not widely popular. This made it problematic for them that the older Edward was still alive, even though he had officially abdicated. As long as he lived, even in custody, the former king could be the rallying point for a counter-revolt.

     It was unthinkable that one of royal blood should be murdered, so Isabella and Mortimer opted to bring about Edward’s demise by ‘natural means’. He was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle, and put in the custody of two extremely brutal gaolers, Gurney and Maltravers, who were charged with literally mistreating him to death.

     Edward was enclosed in an odious cell, which only a metal grille separated from the castle’s main cesspit. The stench was said to be suffocating, but to make matters worse, Gurney and Maltravers also piled rotting animal carcasses in the pit. Edward lingered for months amid these foul humours, weeping and begging for release. In addition to this torture of the senses, he was given only decayed food to eat and stagnant ditchwater to drink. But somehow he survived. Mortimer, becoming increasingly uneasy as opposition to his haughty rule grew, finally ordered the two gaolers to do their worst. Edward had to die, by any means, so long as there were no telltale marks left on his body. The wicked duo thus stripped their captive naked, and one held him down on his bed while the other inserted a metal funnel into his anus. A red-hot poker was then thrust through the funnel, burning out his innards.

     The grotesque act was said to have lasted for minutes on end, and Edward’s shrieks could be heard in the countryside beyond the castle walls.

     Initially the plan was successful. Edward’s unblemished body received a royal burial at Gloucester Cathedral, but still there was resentment towards the new government. When in 1330, the young Edward turned eighteen and was crowned Edward III, he immediately had the conspirators arrested for the murder of his father. Roger Mortimer was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, a process which in the Middle Ages was no less gruesome than it sounds, while Isabella was imprisoned for life at Castle Rising in Suffolk, where she finally died shrieking with insane laughter.

     This laughter is still reportedly heard on dark winter nights at Rising, just as the unfortunate Edward II’s appalling screams can be heard ringing though the gloomy passages of Berkeley Castle. 

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.

THE REDDENING 

by Adam LG Nevill (2019)

Outline

The area around Divilmouth on the South Devon coast is one of exceptional beauty. But at the same time, it’s rugged and stormswept. Not only that, it’s hemmed to the sea’s edge by towering cliffs and wild, expansive moorland, all of which means that it’s more likely to attract extreme sportsmen than everyday tourists. One such is paraglider Matt Hull, a sturdy outdoorsman who comes to enjoy his five minutes of fame when he takes to the air off a high point near the fishing village of Brickburgh, only to witness a minor landslide and the subsequent exposure of a fissure in the rock face. When he investigates the fissure, it leads through to a previously unknown cave system, though almost immediately there is something not entirely wholesome about this find.

Perhaps it’s to do with the countless human bones that scatter the dank interior.

Not far away meanwhile, in one of the most terrifying early scenes in a novel that I can remember, coastal walkers and campers, Shelly and Greg, pitch their tent in a remote spot and are immediately assailed by a weird flock of horned black sheep, their fleeces ragged and matted with dung. If that isn’t bad enough, the shepherds then turn up. Quite a few of them. Naked, armed with brute weapons and painted bright red from head to foot.

We now move ahead two years to a time when Brickburgh has become famous. The local caves are still being excavated, but large sections have been opened to the public and a mini museum has sprung up. Quite simply, the site is deemed the most remarkable archaeological find of many decades, and the local tourist trade has received a massive and timely boost. But again, there is something vaguely unedifying about all this. The network of caverns that Matt Hull discovered once contained a fully functioning Stone Age community that was previously unknown in the fossil record, but which occupied the site for several centuries, maybe even millennia, and left behind uncountable trace evidence of their lifestyle and beliefs. But there are oddities too, along with quite a few nasties. Whoever this particular tribe were, not only did they indulge in ritual human sacrifice on a colossal scale, (the numbers of carved-up bones and skulls would have put the Aztecs to shame), they apparently practised cannibalism. There are even clues that they did diabolical things with the remains of their victims, turning them into jewellery, drinking vessels and the like, the kind of thing only normally associated with degenerate societies, and something never encountered previously in explorations of Britain’s prehistoric past.  

One person who’s distinctly unimpressed is local lifestyle journalist, Katrine, or Kat, who, formerly a topnotch London reporter, has escaped a traumatic domestic past and sought refuge in this quieter corner of the country. Though the frivolous material she produces doesn’t satisfy her, the exciting if gruesome archaeological find is something she’s also struggling to consider a positive. Infinitely more intrigued, though, is her energetic and much younger boyfriend, Steve, a digital marketer by profession, though he contributes freelance articles to the press and dreams of making it as a big-name newshound.

Further north in Walsall, meanwhile, single mum, Helene, is trying to cope with the fallout of a family suicide. Her younger brother, Lincoln, a troubled kid and one-time addict, seemed to find a new lease of life when he got interested in the ‘Sounds of the Earth’, seeking and recording primitive natural music in deep caves and gorges, only to then, for no known reason, take his own life during a trip to the West Country (though his body was never found). Helene listens to his ‘SonicGeo’ tapes and is bewildered to hear bizarre chatterings, grunts, growls and even what sounds like guttural chanting, all supposedly recorded in caves down in Devon.

She follows his meandering route but gains no satisfaction, especially when it leads her to the ramshackle Redstone Cross Farm on the moors over Brickburgh, the weird occupants of which give her an ultra hostile reception and even threaten to set a pack of ridiculously savage guard dogs on her.

Kat, meanwhile, still seeking a new angle on the excavation, doesn’t think she believes in the so-called Brickburgh Curse, whereby those living close to the caves suffer nightmares and depression (even though she lives only seven miles away and has exactly these symptoms!), until she interviews Matt Hull again and finds him a shadow of his former robust self. Hull no longer paraglides but tells Kat that this is because he was threatened by the ‘red folk’, a group of unknown oddballs, painted red, whom he says he saw attacking and killing a couple of campers two years ago. Even though he tries to link this with other disappearances and so-called suicides in the area, Kat is unconvinced there is a story as Matt is rambling as if he’s had a severe breakdown.

Steve, on the other hand, wonders if it means there is something in the rumours that cannabis plantations are operating on the nearby hills and thinks he can sniff a scoop. When the twosome meet Helene at a village fair, and she tells them about her ugly encounter at Redstone Cross Farm, Kat connects this to the non-story that is Tony Willows, a 1970s folk-rocker who, after several well-publicised drugs-related incidents, and a brief jail term, adopted a reclusive lifestyle up there with his long-term partner, Jessica Usher. But Steve is certain that this is the location of one of the much-rurmoured cannabis factories, and as Kat won’t help him (because she sees him as all enthusiasm and little else), opts to break the case on his own.

Despite her stern advice, he journeys up there solo, and finds Redstone Cross Farm every bit the rundown rural dump that Helen described. He finds other things too, things he could never have conceived of in his maddest dreams. Crazy things, abominable things. And by his mere presence opens a Pandora’s Box that will go on to engulf the entire district in a wave of cult horror that becomes mind-boggling in its viciousness …   

Review

One thing you can always be sure of with an Adam Nevill horror story is that it will be frightening. And this is guaranteed. Nevill does not do vanilla scarefare, and yet he doesn’t rely on gaudy displays of carnage to cow his readers either. I mean, there is carnage in The Reddening, and lots of it, but that’s not by any means the whole thing.

Nevill’s real skill is his ability to inject seemingly mundane situations with an otherwordly sense of abject dread. Without going over the top in terms of gore, but relying more on suggestion and off-kilter imagery – a vivid dream of jackal-headed figures in smoke, apelike mouths sucking on human bones, a lost hiker stumbling to an isolated farmhouse only to find its occupants painted red – he seems effortlessly able to make his audience, hardened to horror though it usually is, really, really glad that they aren’t in the same predicament as his protagonists.

He completely achieves this in The Reddening. But in several ways.

Firstly, in the gradually drip-fed idea (there are no intrusive dollops of expo here) that a barbaric cult could exist unseen just beneath the surface of modern Britain, even in so quaint a corner of the country as South Devon. That, despite genteel appearances, you can’t trust anyone. That your next door neighbour might mow his lawn and walk his dog, but that he might still kill and eat people come nightfall. This is nothing new in the paranoid horror/thriller fiction of our current age, but in The Reddening the author ramps it up dramatically, deepening the violence and derangement of these secret enemies of society, intensifying their beliefs, and in so doing creating a whole new universe of secret mysticism and pagan brutality, and tackling it from archaeological and scholarly angles as well as via myth and rumour, which lends it plausibility and an air of impending threat that is almost tangible.

Secondly, in his timely targetting of the folk-horror vibe. The revival of interest in that age-old subgenre shows no sign of slackening, and The Reddening rides that wave to its fullest extent. Even though the rituals and totems here are mostly invented and owe nothing to any known antiquity, Nevill delves back convincingly into forgotten ages when the gods and the land were one, when belief in and obedience to local lore was paramount, when life and society were controlled by the changing seasons and the many ceremonies enacted to keep things beneficial (no matter how costly they might be in terms of sacrifice). But don’t be thinking that The Reddening is just another story of village witchcraft. There is sorcery of a sort, but the latent powers here owe to forces older and more primal than Christianity or the Celts, and way, way more terrifying.

On top of all this, Nevill successfully depicts folklore as it is seen through the prism of the modern world. None of it is initially taken too seriously. It almost seems silly and even sad, with eccentric loners like Lincoln seeking meaning from those ‘sounds of the Earth’ that he’s recorded, while the presence of 1970s folk-rockers (now turned into scuzzy relics of another bygone era), harks back nicely to the first wave of interest in ancient rural beliefs, the presence behind their hippie façade of extensive drug use raising questions not just about how quickly and easily the idealism of those early counterculture movements was hijacked, but how easily it still is.

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly than any of this, Nevill hits us where it hurts in terms of his monster terror, which, as always, is second to none. This author has long believed that showing less is more. In his 2011 novel, The Ritual, for example, the heroes of the tale were pursued through a deep and trackless forest by an appalling something that, though we barely glimpsed it, played on all our deepest imaginings and thus was so utterly nightmarish that by the end, if we’d seen it in full even on the final page, it would inevitably have disappointed, enabling him to maintain the knife-edge terror right to the last paragraph. Likewise, in his short story, Where Angels Come In, another of the most frightening things I’ve ever read, as the central character is again beset by ghastly hybrid things whose bizarre appearance the author only hints at rather than describes in detail, the result is nerve-shredding.

And it’s exactly the same in The Reddening, the main antagonists of which we hear and smell and cast fleeting glances at, or see in crude relief on ancient cave walls, but mainly which we run from with minds reeling, the horror and shrieks of their victims ringing in our ears. There is more to it even than this, though, because in The Reddening the monstrosities to which the red folk are enthralled are not even completely real; at least, they don’t belong in our plane of existence. These are true deities, utterly inhuman and unknowable progenitors (or maybe products!) of a complex, multi-generational belief system, and so irreversibly and violently hostile to all but their acolytes, (and even to their acolytes, if we’re truthful) that all notions of Satan, Cronos or Loki are rendered impotent by comparison.

So, Nevill hits us with a three-pronged attack, barely giving us a moment to reflect once we get into the action, and that isn’t even taking into account his several cleverly-constructed and again, intensely frightening set-pieces: a desperate battle with the open water, a dirty rundown farm in the middle of nowhere, so odious to look at and so full of squalid degenerates that the house in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre offers hearty welcome in comparison. And then, after all that, there is a whole series of abductions, murders and dismemberments, which pluck at the worst of our innate knowledge of cult fanatics, serial killers, rapists and cannibals. This is full-on horror, and all of it coming headlong at a bunch of heroes who are total everymen.

Or perhaps that should be everywomen.

In an age when female characters in thrillers and horror stories are gaining centre-stage more than ever before, often taking on the mantle of supercop or even superhero, it makes a refreshing change to see the two stars of this gruesome saga as ordinary women with common-garden problems. Both have love issues and personal hang-ups. Helen is juggling single parenthood with trying to look out for her errant, drug-addled brother, while Kat feels that she’s let herself go both physically and professionally, the ace reporter she once was still vaguely ambitious but now overly cynical, and confined to writing stuff that’s only of marginal interest. Neither of them has ever experienced anything that will prep them for the horrors to come, which is why they will suffer so harrowingly and believably.

In some ways it’s almost demoralising to find our fictional heroes as frightened of the unfolding terrors as we ourselves would be, to see them thinking only of running for their lives rather than fighting … until the fight becomes unavoidable, of course, and then, when it does occur – whoa! Nevill doesn’t hold back in his depiction of just how painful and debilitating one heavy punch can be, or in showing what it really means to hit someone in the head with a blunt instrument, or in his argument that even the most sophisticated persons have homicidal apes lurking just underneath. All of which adds subliminally to the devil’s brew that is The Reddening, because it makes it seem grittily real, and serves to remind us how swiftly an ordinary, civilised (and secular!) society might wilt in the face of a ferocious, committed (and ultra-zealous!) foe. You’d probably win in the end, but at what cost? And would you even recognise yourself afterwards?

Adam Nevill enjoys a long-standing reputation for purveying strangely disturbing horror. And The Reddening is another chapter in that story. It’s a tense and engrossing thrill-ride, at times so frightening that it’s genuinely disorienting. It draws deeply on a well of eldritch evil that most us civilised folk hope was never actually there, but which we still find fascinating and horrifying. Even if you skirt around the edges of this worrying horror novel, its dark magnetism will drag you in. The power of The Reddening goes deep.

This is one I would dearly love to see adapted for film or TV, though only an 18 certificate would work in this case if the full impact of the novel was to be replicated on screen. Given that The Ritual made it, that may not be so vain a hope, and thus I must get my own casting demands in quickly. Here we go …

Katrine – Vicky McClure

Helene – Sophie Cookson

Matt Hull – Paul Anderson

Tony Willows – Oliver Tobias

Jessica Usher – Rita Tushingham

Finn Willows – Richard Brake

Nana Willows – Lysette Anthony

Detective Lewis – Eddie Marsan

No despair yet; top books coming your way

Well, these are difficult times indeed, and even if it was appropriate to strike my usual cheery note, I think, being honest, that I’d struggle to do it convincingly. Like most of you, I imagine, I’m currently confined to my house. I mean, I’m a self-employed writer anyway, so working from home is hardly onerous, but having only limited access to the great outdoors, especially as the nice weather is now starting to show itself, is a new and bewildering experience.

Of course, things are much worse for some people in that they’re ill or bereaved (or both); this is certainly a crisis the like of which we haven’t faced in a hundred years. But I’m not going to dwell too much on that at present. The rest of us have a duty, I think, to try and keep things going if we can.

Hence today’s blog, in which, for reasons I’ll shortly be outlining, I’ll be discussing horror anthologies (two in particular: AFTER SUNDOWN, edited by Mark Morris, and more imminently, published tomorrow in fact, the ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2, edited by Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards. In that same vein, I’ll offering a detailed review of the original ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS, again as edited by Coleborn and Edwards. You’ll find that review in the usual place at the lower end of today’s blogpost (with my normal bit of fantasy film-making tagged on at the end of it).

Before that though, here’s some relevant information …

Cancellations

For all that I’m trying to be positive, today’s blog, perhaps inevitably, is a kind of damage limitation exercise. Because as recently as early last January, I was boasting about the exciting programme of events that lay ahead in 2020 … and yet now, as you can probably guess, it’s been totally decimated.

Three major events that I was looking forward to – CRIMEFEST in Bristol, STOKERCON in Scarborough, and the THEAKSTON CRIME WRITING FESTIVAL in Harrogate – have all been either cancelled or postponed (more info about what will ultimately happen with these, if there is any, when I get it), and it’s difficult imagining that other events will not go the same way soon, certainly those scheduled to occur in the next two or three months.

CRIMEFEST and HARROGATE were primarily fun things from my perspective, opportunities to hook up with lots of friends and fellow thriller writers, air my views on a couple of panels and basically have a riotous time. But STOKERCON had more of the working day about it in that, as one of the guests, I was due to participate in the launches of two new horror anthologies that I am fortunate enough to have stories included in.

Of course, a whole array of wonderful new novels, anthologies and collections would have been published during that great event on the Yorkshire coast, each at their own special launch party, which would have been attended by hundreds of horror fans who now, sadly, are watching the year go by through their front windows. But on a more positive note, many if not most of those titles will still be launched, only now online.

New titles

Among them are the two books I’m so honoured to feature in – the ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2 and AFTER SUNDOWN.

Today therefore, I’m pleased to present the artwork and back-cover blurb for the first of these two new anthologies, and the full (and very mouthwatering) tables of contents for both of them. Seriously guys, check out some of the authors who’ve here been recruited:

ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2 

ed. by Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards

Published by Alchemy Press. Available from this Thursday (April 16).

Strange stories and weird tales and all of the creeping horrors in between. 

Horrors 2 features seventeen fabulous writers, including Sarah Ash, Paul Finch, John Grant, Nancy Kilpatrick, Garry Kilworth, Samantha Lee … to lead you on a spine-tingling tour from seaside towns to grimy cities, to the lonely and secret places, from the fourteenth precinct to Namibia … and so many places in between.

Table of Contents

Henrietta Street – Gail-Nina Anderson

I Left My Fair Homeland – Sarah Ash

I Remember Everything – Debbie Bennett

Digging in the Dirt – Mike Chinn

What Did You See? – Paul Finch

Every Bad Thing – Sharon Gosling

The Loneliest Place – John Grant

The Primordial Light – John Howard

Black Nore – Tim Jeffreys

Footprints in the Snow – Eyglo Karlsdottir

Promises – Nancy Kilpatrick

Lirpaloof Island – Garry Kilworth

The Secret Place – Samantha Lee

Beneath Namibian Sands – Pauline Morgan

The Hate Whisperer – Thana Niveau

Hydrophobia – John Llewellyn Probert

We Do Like to Be Beside – Peter Sutton

AFTER SUNDOWN 

ed. by Mark Morris

Published by Flame Tree Press. Published in October but available for pre-order now

Table of Contents

Butterfly Island – CJ Tudor

Research – Tim Lebbon

Swanskin – Alison Littlewood

That’s the Spirit – Sarah Lotz

Gave – Michael Bailey

Wherever You Look – Ramsey Campbell

Same Time Next Year – Angela Slatter

Mine Seven – Elana Gomel

It Doesn’t Feel Right – Michael Marshall Smith

Creeping Ivy – Laura Purcell

Last Rites for the Fourth World – Rick Cross

We All Come Home – Simon Bestwick

The Importance of Oral Hygiene – Robert Shearman

Bokeh – Thana Niveau

Murder Board – Grady Hendrix

Alice’s Rebellion – John Langan

The Mirror House – Jonathan Robbins Leon

The Naughty Step – Stephen Volk

A Hotel in Germany – Catriona Ward

Branch Line – Paul Finch

So, there you are, short story and horror buffs. There’s no reason to despair yet.

The year 2020 won’t exactly be business as usual, but a lot of industry people are still hard at it, despite being isolated at home, and doing their damnedest to keep bringing you the very best in dark and thrilling fiction.

So, keep reading. And if you’re a writer, keep writing. But more important than any of this, do all those sensible things and stay safe.

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.

ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS ed. by Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards (2018)

A glowing example of the sort of horror anthology we can hopefully expect to see more of in the future. Alchemy are part of the independent press, but you wouldn’t know it from the quality of this latest eye-catching product.

With the major publishing houses seemingly completely uninterested now in putting out collections of short horror fiction, many names from the small press have stepped into the gap. But most of them, Alchemy evidently included, are now well aware that the old-fashioned method of producing ragmag lookalikes in blotchy ink, stapled together unevenly and filled with text that hasn’t even been checked for spelling or literals will simply not do anymore. Hence this very, very fine opening installment in what is intended to be a brand-new annual series.

But Alchemy haven’t stopped simply at creating a beautiful-looking book; they’ve also exercised intense quality control re. its contents because there are some expertly crafted stories in here, from voices both old and new, and each one of them original to this publication.

Rather than simply hit you with a succession of brief short story outlines, I’ll initially let the publishers give you their own official blurb, which drops strong hints about the shocks and shivers to come. And then we’ll discuss them in a little more depth.

Twenty-five tales of horror and the weird, stories that encapsulate the dark, the desolate and the downright creepy. Stories that will send that quiver of anticipation and dread down your spine and stay with you long after the lights have gone out.

Who is Len Binn, a comedian or something worse? What secrets are locked away in Le Trénébreuse? The deadline for what? Who are the little people, the garbage men, the peelers?

What lies behind the masks? And what horrors are found down along the backroads?

With stories by Ramsey Campbell, Storm Constantine, Stephen Laws, Samantha Lee, Stan Nicholls, Tony Richards and many, many others ...

The independent press, both in the UK and the US, has long been the secret hope of horror anthology fans, with fewer and fewer of these types of books coming from mainstream publishing houses. But whereas in the past, the small press was often a byword for low production standards, these days nothing could be further from the truth.

That said, Alchemy, a UK-based outfit run by the editors of this particular tome, Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards, have been trading for some time on the understanding that they only ever bring books out with a high-spec finish. So, I’m absolutely delighted to see that their long-awaited horror anthology series is now at last rolling.

And on a first reading, the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors has been well worth the wait, both looking and feeling amazing. In appearance alone, with a stunning cover by Coleborn himself, it would grace any shelf of classic collections. The big question, though – the only question to many – is how does it read?

Well, like all bunches of stories, there will be some that appeal and some to pass over, and of course it’s all subjective, so for every reader it will be different. However, I personally was very enthused by this anthology as a whole.

My first impression was that it does what I expected in that it cleaves closely to the kitchen sink. I don’t mean that in any detrimental way; I mean that many of its tales concern ordinary people and occur in everyday situations common to working/middle class life. So, we’ve not got much here in the style of MR James’ Edwardian ghost epics or Pan Horror-type essays in extreme ghoulishness. All the contributions to the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors are a tad more surreal than that anyway (and by that I don’t mean experimental), but many also have a strong aura of work-a-day Britain, and could easily happen in your own town, maybe in the next street to yours.

For example, in Some Kind of a Laugh, the ever-reliable Ramsey Campbell introduces us to underpaid waiter, Bernard, who is permanently frustrated by the fact that people confuse him with Lancashire comic, Len Binn. Things get worse, though, when Binn literally dies on stage right in front of him, and Bernard now finds himself adopting more and more of the deceased comedian’s mannerisms. 

Then we have Keris McDonald’s Remember, in which blue-collar tough guy, Mike, is furious when dogs start going missing from the kennels where he works. It’s November 5, so the poor animals are in a state of terror anyway. But Mike opts to keep watch all night, and hopefully catch the thief. He’s unaware that, even though this is a crumby corner of a typical industrial town, he’s about to encounter an ancient and chilling mystery.

The mundane also clashes with the bizarre in Stephen Laws’ superb Get Worse Soon, much of which is set in a thrift store (more about this one shortly), and especially so in Cate Gardner’s The Fullness of Her Belly, in which we meet Ella, a mental outpatient who can only satisfy her constant craving to be pregnant by making cushion babies and stuffing them up her dress. Fellow patients consider this a harmless eccentricity until she one day tells them that the ‘babies’ she’s discarded have now taken over her house and killed her friend.

Not that editors, Coleborn and Edwards, have gone looking solely for glum situations set in Broken Britain. It would be untrue to say that there isn’t also a touch of the exotic in the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors.

For instance, Mike Chinn’s Her Favourite Place has an undersea location (more about that one soon), while Too Late by the recently deceased and already much-missed John Grant is set in central Spain (more about this one soon, as well). Peter Sutton’s Masks, meanwhile, takes us to one of the most far-away places of all, a desert island, where castaways reduced to the level of beasts survive by occasionally donning animal masks and reluctantly hunting one of their own, only for a kind of salvation to arrive in the form of another ship, also wrecked, its unsuspecting survivors swimming desperately for shore.

If that latter story hints at savagery, I would say again that we’re not dealing with Pan Horror-type bloodletting in this book. There is little to no sadism here for its own sake. It happens, but it’s mostly off the page. But then these are horror stories, and there is no shortage of stuff in the Alchemy Book of Horrors to be disturbed about.

For instance, in Phil Sloman’s The Girl with Three Eyes, a disturbed college student is gradually drawn to violence by her obsession with a fellow student whom she is convinced is using a hidden third eye to manipulate all those around her. In Ray Cluley’s extraordinary Bluey, which is set in an urban comprehensive school, there is extreme and graphic brutality, though it’s all done very differently from the norm; despite that, it’s a dark story, this one (again, more about it later).

Many modern horror authors tend by nature to eschew extreme gruesomeness and instead are students of what might be called ‘the strange’. And there is much of that on show here too. I should point out that strange horror stories are not always my favourite, especially if the only thing about them is their strangeness, but combine that with mystery, suspense and the macabre, and you’ll often have a winner. And once again, we find that in the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors.

In this vein, Storm Constantine’s La Trénébreuse takes us deep into rural France, where a young couple attend the palatial home of an old pal. They find it a sprawling country estate, dreamy and mysterious, but who is the female entity said nightly to roam the grounds on the back of a lion?

If that doesn’t sound strange and spooky enough for you, try out James Brogden’s The Trade Up, wherein Charlie, a worn out suburbanite, is heading home late after a conference only to be menaced on the motorway by an apparent doppleganger driving exactly the same make and model of car as his own.

Or how about Stan Nicholls’ Deadline, in which a young woman, April, struggles to balance single motherhood with her writing career, at which point, completely inexplicably, familiar fixtures in her disorderly life start, one by one, to disappear?

Ultimately, of course, the test of any horror anthology is whether or not it scares you, and this is the point where so many of the ones I’ve read over the years have come unstuck. I’ll be honest and admit that it’s now been a long while since I read any antho containing more than one or two stories that really gave me the heebie jeebies, but I’m glad to report that the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors does not let us down in this regard.

Again, I wouldn’t say that we’re looking at extreme terror here – you are unlikely to lose sleep – but this book contains some excellent stories, the mere concepts behind which, let alone the skilled execution of them, will easily be enough to give you the shudders.

In Gary McMahon’s very traditional Guising, a respectable widow is increasingly frightened, not just because she lives alone on a suburban housing estate that is dark and quiet at night, but because as Halloween approaches, she repeatedly sees a strange figure draped in bubble-wrap standing at the end of her street. That one’s a bone-chiller, though it’s run close by Adrian Cole’s Broken Billy, in which we meet Bran, who, out on his remote farm, uses Wiccan magic to animate his collection of scarecrows with a weird kind of half-life. He originally gathered them from other farms to fix them, but now they’ve become his friends … he thought. Because when Tracey enters his life, everything changes, one scarecrow in particular, Broken Billy, taking a strong dislike to the new situation.

For all that – and scarecrows are perennial figures of evil to me – possibly the scariest tale in the book is Gail Nina-Anderson’s An Eye for a Plastic Eyeball, which sees oddment collector, Scott, persuaded by the mysterious Miss Stonecraft to visit the house of an old teacher, now dying in a hospice but with a lifetime of scientific curiosities to her name. He finds the eerie house a treasure trove of the arcane, but there is something about it he doesn’t quite like, and with very good reason.

All round, the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors is an admirable way for one of the busiest independent presses in the game to kickstart what hopefully will be a long-running series of horror anthologies. I found it a fast and suitably unnerving read. Here’s hoping there are many more to come.

And now …

ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS – the movie.

Just a bit of fun, this part. No film maker has optioned this book yet (as far as I’m aware), but here are my thoughts on how they should proceed, if they do.

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 cinematic 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, which require them to relate spooky stories. 

It could be that they are trapped in a cellar by a broken lift and are awaiting rescue (a la Vault of Horror). Or maybe they first appear as comic-book characters, as read about by young Billy in an eerily quiet town (an English version of  Creepshow, anyone?), but basically, it’s up to you.

Without further messing about, here are the stories and the casts I would choose:

Bluey (by Ray Cluley): Struggling teacher, Shaun, attempts to teach his unruly class about inclusivity by cutting Bluey, the lifesize effigy of a human being, out of a piece of blue card and having them damage and insult it. Over the next few days, however, as Shaun progressively loses control, the tortured shape of Bluey becomes a haunting presence in his classroom …

Shaun – Russell Tovey

Her Favourite Place (by Mike Chinn): Married couple Clarrie and Lois have spent weeks on a deep-sea farm, monitoring a crop of genetically modified kelp. But all is not well. The women, whose relationship is abusive anyway, are slowly going stir-crazy. Outside the capsule meanwhile, an unusual swarm of white growths is starting to blight the crop …

Clarrie – Claire Foy

Lois – Samantha Bond

Get Worse Soon (by Stephen Laws): Misanthrope Colin buys everything from the local Quidstore, but when he one day acquires a set of ‘Get Worse Soon’ letters and jokingly sends them to people he dislikes, and those people die, the shop denies ever having stocked such an item. Colin is furious and opts to send a letter to the Quidstore manager to prove his point, but mix-ups happen …

Colin – Michael Sheen

Too Late (by John Grant): Griff and Heidi take a holiday in a villa in central Spain, hoping to repair their failing marriage. But it isn’t working. Lovely Heidi is cool and indifferent to Griff despite all his attempts at romance. Increasingly, however, Griff becomes fascinated by the villa across the valley and the woman who often sunbathes naked and who looks eerily like Heidi …

Griff – Richard Armitage

Heidi – Carice van Houten