Terror Tales of East Anglia

I’m due to start below another of my gradual real-time reviews, turning leitmotifs into a gestalt.

A book I purchased from the publisher:

TERROR TALES OF EAST ANGLIA – edited by Paul Finch

Gray Friar Press 2012

There is no guarantee how long it will take to complete this review, whether days or years.

CAVEAT: Spoilers are not intended but there may be inadvertent ones. You may wish (i) to take that risk and read my review before or during your own reading of the book, or (ii) to wait until you have finished reading it. In either case, I hope it gives a useful or interesting perspective.

All my other real-time reviews since 2008 are linked from here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/

My previous reviews of Gray Friar Press books: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/gray-friar-press-my-real-time-reviews/

As ever, I shall only be reviewing the fiction stories.

Authors included: Paul Meloy, Gary Greenwood, Christopher Harman, Roger Johnson, Simon Bestwick, Steve Duffy, Mark Valentine, Gary Fry, Paul Finch, James Doig, Johnny Mains, Alison Littlewood, Edawrd Pearce, Reggie Oliver. (14 Oct 12 – 2 pm bst)

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Loose – Paul Meloy & Gary Greenwood
“I bring Dan the green beens he ask for.”
The best scene in the story that bit. Hilarious play on beans and beens with green rubbish bins. The rest, for me, is disappointing. A run of the mill story, one about East European immigrants in awkward interface with the English natives’ ‘lazy racism’ as they work in a Suffolk hotel. Some feral curse concerning a ‘wolf strap’ – and  easy swear words that seem tacked on rather than intrinsic. Thinly characterised, but with odd  moments of deft horror passages. Not much point, I feel, in looking for deeper meanings, as is my usual wont, nor in recounting more of the plot. [The print is too small for comfortable reading and, also, I hope I shall not need to continue this service of typo spotting as I read the rest of the book: i.e.  ‘sou chef’ should be ‘sous chef’ on p2; wrong hard return after ‘year-‘ on p4; ‘his slid his legs’ on the same page; who on earth is ‘Steve’ on p6?; and should it be ‘Sprite and ice cubes’ on p7 rather than ‘Spite and ice cubes’?] (14 Oct 12 – 2.55 pm bst)

Deep Water – Christopher Harman
Pages 21 – 31
“‘Towards’ was the operative word.”
I am about halfway through this substantive story, and already I am as much elated by this work as I was disappointed by the previous one in this anthology. This promises to be a landmark reading experience for me, and not only because I am long familiar with Dunwich, Sizewell, Woodbridge and Hambling’s sculpture on the beach at Aldeburgh, and not only because this is, at least partially, a superb classical music story (please see my Classical Horror anthology book I recently published), but also because the prose style, the characterisation etc. are wonderful — please see the police character as an example, and the protagonist himself who first reminds me of that in Reggie Oliver’s great senile dementia story ‘Flowers of the Sea’, here with the circumstances of his Celia going missing amid a whole wonderful Davy Jones’ Locker claustrophobia/ exquisition ambiance (my words, not the story’s necessarily) ….. But not completely like that Reggie Oliver character, because this Harman one has arguably betrayed his wife with another woman? Absolutely wonderful, so far, including the Takemitsu, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold references….. [Also, so far, no typos to report, so hopefully those in the previous story were examples of a one-off aberration.] (14 Oct 12 – 6.25 pm)
Pages 31 – 42
“…as if he were one of the lost souls who gravitated towards seaside resorts.”
The first half’s promise, for me, has been fulfilled. This is quite a tour de force, with prose tendrils so outlandish they seem the sea itself. The ‘policeman’ – called Trench – we know now why his legs were earlier described finnish, and the ‘green beens’ from the previous story at least link here with the greenness of ‘Celia’ in the swimming pool.  This is a story with which every reader needs to make his or her own bespoke rapprochement – no review can prepare you for it.   There are so many examples of turns-of-phrase or turns-of-plot that I could give you but they would still only give very little idea of what sort of experience this story is.  It is Reggie Oliver’s ‘Flowers of the Sea’ taken perhaps to new depths… where the slippery shape of the missing one vanishes and reappears and vanishes again round the corner of aquarium or street or beach, till you wonder if the missing one is you yourself not someone else. A symbol for sea as the growing communal dementia? A ‘mad wife’ as seen by her husband is only mad because she deemed him mad first (thus his perceptions of her were as they were). “Vivaldi was dry, rational until slow pizzicato strings described hard claws tiptoeing across a striated sandy floor. Bach’s contrapuntal lines entwined in his head like smooth tubular growths.” [Meanwhile, I myself attended, as it happens, a live public concert in Clacton-on-Sea last night where my own wife was singing alto in a chorus performing, inter alia, Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ after months of rehearsal]. (14 Oct 12 – 8.10 pm bst)

The Watchman – Roger Johnson
“…somehow the glaziers didn’t quite manage to reproduce the colours. I don’t know: there’s something about mediaeval glass…”
There something paradoxically warm and comfortable about fictionally exploring a country church (here a Suffolk one) despite horrors emerging regarding legends underlying its history. This is a very effective version of such a tale in traditional garb, telling of watchmen, robbers, gargoyles and come-uppance, believably accreted by references and quoted passages. Warm and comfortable maybe, but I did feel a frisson of terror at a simple phrase and what I imagined underlying it in the context. No mean feat of writing. That phrase: “…and began to do certain things.” (15 Oct 12 – 11.10 am bst)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW NOW CONTINUED HERE.

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Peel Back The Sky – Stephen Bacon

I’m due to start below another of my gradual real-time reviews, turning leitmotifs into a gestalt. A paperback book I purchased from the publisher.

PEEL BACK THE SKY – a collection of Stephen Bacon stories

Gray Friar Press 2012

Cover art by Les Edwards

There is no guarantee how long it will take to complete this review, whether days or years.

CAVEAT: Spoilers are not intended but there may be inadvertent ones. You may wish (i) to take that risk and read my review before or during your own reading of the book, or (ii) to wait until you have finished reading it. In either case, I hope it gives a useful or interesting perspective. Also I am the original publisher of three of the stories in this collection (The Toymaker of Bremen, The Devourer of Dreams and Cone Zero) … and, not to forsake the chance of a plug, Stephen Bacon’s story, The Ivory Teat, has more recently been published by me in The First Book of Classical Horror Stories.

My previous reviews of Gray Friar Press books: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/gray-friar-press-my-real-time-reviews/

All my other real-time reviews are linked from here: http://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/

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This book (200 pages) is a neatly scrumptious pocket-sized tome – apparently the first of a series here entitled ‘New Blood 1’ – with my only reservation being the size of the print which, at my age, means peeling each eye as well as the sky!

Last Summer

“It’s strange how a particular sight can remain nostalgic even though tiny changes might have occurred in the intervening years.”

I have read and reviewed this story before [i.e. as quoted from here: <<“Bricks bounce off the side.“ This is an effective evocation of the Miner’s Strike in Sheffield in the mid-Eighties (the bitterness and personal wars between strikers and scabs and their families) in parallel with the present day protagonist’s return to his childhood at that time and in that place, and an unforeseen redemption now seen-to-be-done by exposing its gory results in this story-as-memorial. Meanwhile, I, as reader of it, can imagine the mine structures – resonating, at least for me, with the structure in ‘Easter‘ above. That seems a right comparison to make, bearing in mind the passions and emotions of that time, of that place, with which I, as someone who only watched all this on the news at the time, can now more fully empathise …. paradoxically via the truth and immediacy of fiction when compared to the disputatious facts of history. “…we are standing on the grassy incline of the pit tip, looking down into the colliery.” (16 June 2010 – another 2 hours later).>>] If anything the story has gained even more power in the interim, and now represents the ‘scab, scab, scab’ that needs to be picked or teased free from the book to find out what the rest will reveal. (10 Sep 2012 – 6.30 pm bst)

The Trauma Statement

“I scoured the small print, checked for watermarks, hunted for any address.”

A powerful story emerging from a clever idea, indeed powerful and hauntingly memorable even though the idea at first reminded me of a potential dilemma-type game for a future Big Brother reality TV show… but then, as reader, I dwelt on Big Brother being similar to this story’s ‘insane God’. So, yes, a very telling, naggingly truthful fable of guilt and regret in a 30 year old marriage, a relationship cross-sectioned — in the same way as the previous story, ‘Last Summer’, is cross-sectioned — by Time and Time’s retrocausal conundrums. (10 Sep 12 – 8.20 pm bst)

The Strangled Garden

“In the weeks following these events, reality was almost irrevocably lost.”

There is often something delightfully naive, yet deceptively or scarily meaningful, I’ve noticed about Bacon stories when they are ostensibly plain horror stories — here told to ‘gentlemen’ as a story of Time’s past events concerning a lost dog, a country house and a garden at times called Strangled at others Sunken, as if we are to be strangled by its dug-over memories as well as its vegetation.  The ending is pure creaturified horror of the Bacon sort, radiating back towards an earlier withdrawal of narrative omniscience as if we as readers have agreed to be collusive with the narrator so as to wreak as much suspense paradoxically from the coolly old-fashioned “hysteria coursing through…“- as if absorbed in the spooky stories that the characters themselves earlier shared, for real, through books. An escape through fiction … Or strangled by it? (10 Sep 12 – 9.20 pm bst)

Catch Me If I Fall

“He was determined he wouldn’t be found to be so naive.”

A disarmingly brilliant anecdote – dealing with a married couple in the Autumn of their years (cf: me and my wife!) – their touching gullibility at renewed hope, plus a study in the cruel Art of Gratuitousness as based on games and Chance in life: not a million miles from the dilemma conceit in the Trauma Statement and, dare I say, Big Brother. So much conveyed skilfully in a relatively short simple textual space: authorially self-naive in an extremely creative and touching way. One’s whole past life re-cast retrocausally without realising that retrocausality can only apply in fiction, not here in real life… (11 Sep 12 – 11.50 am bst)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE

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