David A. Riley's Blog, page 76
May 6, 2015
Classic Weird now available on kindle
Classic Weird is now available on kindle. A paperback version will follow shortly.
Amazon.co.uk £1.31
Amazon.com $1.98
May 3, 2015
Classic Weird
I have now finished proof reading my selections for the forthcoming collection from Parallel Universe Publications: Classic Weird. The stories in the book, which will soon be available as a paperback and ebook, are:
The Monster-Maker
W. C. Morrow
The Man Who Went Too Far
E. F. Benson
The Interval
Vincent O’Sullivan
The Doll’s Ghost
F. Marion Crawford
The Dead Smile
F. Marion Crawford
The Ghost-Ship
Richard Middleton
The New Catacomb
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost Stradivarius
John Meade Falkner
The House of the Dead Hand
Edith Wharton
A Wicked Voice
Vernon Lee
Phantas
Oliver Onions
The next book after this will be Kitchen Sink Gothic.
May 2, 2015
Their Cramped Dark World reviewed on the Vault of Evil
David A. Riley - Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales
(Parallel Universe, 2015)
Hoody (When Graveyards Yawn, Crowswing Books, 2006)
A Bottle of Spirits (New Writings in Horror & the Supernatural 2, 1972)
No Sense in Being Hungry, She Thought (Peeping Tom #20, 1996)
Now and Forever More (The Second Black Book of Horror, 2008)
Romero's Children (The Seventh Black Book of Horror, 2010)
Swan Song (The Ninth Black Book of Horror, 2012)
The Farmhouse (New Writings in Horror & the Supernatural 1, 1971)
The Last Coach Trip (The Eighth Black Book of Horror, 2011)
The Satyr's Head (The Satyr's Head & Other Tales of Terror, 1975)
Their Cramped Dark World (The Sixth Black Book of Horror, 2010)
A bit cheeky perhaps, as I've not yet got a copy, but I've no hesitation in recommending Their Cramped Dark World. Why? Because, most unusually, I'm already familiar with all bar one of the stories. So, collected from around the board and tarted up ever so slightly, a patchwork instant commentary.
Hoody: "Black Magic Link To Serial Killer. In the wake of a fatal stabbing outside The Red Dragon, Laurence Huxtable, computer artist, grows fearful of the lonesome hoody who has taken to hanging around the car park at Highgate Station and watching his flat. It transpires that the murder victim, Paul Gilligan, was himself a serial killer whose freezer was stocked with the thumbs of his five victims - one of whom was killed after he'd been pronounced dead ....
A Bottle Of Spirits: As revealed to aspiring medium Phyllis Harker. After watching a performance at the Grand Theatre in Clayborn, Rob is so fascinated by the uncanny ability of mind reader Sebastian Preskett that he murders his elderly assistant to create a job vacancy. Rob just HAS to know how the guy gets it right every time so he can steal his act and make loads of cash. Studying him at close hand, Rob is convinced the key to Preskett's powers must lie in the fairground organ and outsize phosphorescent bottle he uses as props. Increasingly worried that Preskett has known all along who murdered his friend, Rob decides it's time to leave. But first, he'll remove the stopper from that weirdly glowing blue bottle if it kills him ....
Now and Forever More: Holidaying at a typically welcoming Cornish coastal village ("You'll be glad to leave 'ere, I s'ppose?"), John and Julie Daniels fall foul of the local inbred degenerates, a bunch of goat-worshipping Satanists presided over by Marsh, the landlord of The Broken Mast. Moral. When in the West Country, never let a native overhear you mention that he's inhospitable, deformed and would benefit from the occasional shower, or he might take offence.
Romero’s Children: Twenty years after the OM (Old Methuselah) eternal youth wonder-drug hit the street, and those who either resisted it's lure or simply were yet to be born now have to live with the consequences - a world full of drooling cannibal zombies. Fortunately, these undead are of the ambling, mindless variety and easily picked off with a shot to the head. Until ...
Stocking up on tinned food supplies from the remnants of a Wal-Mart, ageing loner, Jack, and punky young survivalist, Candice. chance upon Lucy, who can not only talk but seems to have shaken off the effects of the drug. Against his better judgement, Jack brings her home and cleans her up ....
Swan Song: A Black Book Of Horror classic. "Nights In White Satin. Overrated, degenerate trash, just right for a pair of ancient hippies high on drugs." Three elderly Right Wing thugs - retired schoolteacher, Bennett, Pinky Pinkerton, chairman of the Conservative club, and self-made businessmen, Sam Nedwell - make it their business to rid the local park of a pair of decrepit tramps. Bennett and cronies pack their baseball bats, confident this last hurrah will prove the most one-sided confrontation of their brutal campaign versus "undesirables." But the Huntingtons are not the pushovers they seem. Filthy rich ancient hippie philanthropists, Cider Man & Wino woman own a villa on the exclusive Maple Road. Back in the day they ran a refuge for the homeless until it closed amidst rumours of Black Magic and mysterious disappearances ....
The Farmhouse: Kendale, near Tavistock. Surrealist Biblical artist Preskett committed suicide here by turning himself into a human torch amid much talk of ritual murder, drugs, and orgies on the hill. Stopping at the deserted house, hikers Melbury and Janet discover a metal box hidden in the wall, inside which they find several books. The one Melbury picks up opens on a quote from Poe's The Conquering Worm.
Later, Janet leaves Melbury asleep in the tent they've erected and returns to the farmhouse for the books. He comes awake with a terrible sense of foreboding, and goes off to find her ...
Perhaps my all-time favourite story.
The Last Coach Trip: It's the Hemer Street Working Mens Club's final day out to the Ripton races and veteran Eddie is taking it as a bereavement. Harold does all he can to cheer up his old friend, but it's no use. Eddie arrives late looking like death, skips the traditional fry up and - to the incredulity of all - hardly touches a drop all day. Any other year, and they'd have to carry him back and forth from the coach. It's only as they're returning home to Edgebottom that Eddie perks up and Harold realises to his horror that these boozy excursions won't be coming to an end after all.
The Satyr's Head: Yorkshire. Student Henry Lamson's world is one of Wimpy bars, pubs, going to watch the Rovers play on a Saturday afternoon, and attending screenings of The Shuttered Room at the film society with his friend Alan Sutcliffe. He's been dating Joan for some time but she's shown no interest in sleeping with him.
Walking home across the Moors one night Henry encounters a filthy, diseased tramp who proves impossible to shake off - the malodorous one even sidles up next to him on the bus. Turns out he wants to sell him a relic for a nominal fee. Despite himself, Henry shells out on the evil looking bauble ... and that's when his nightmares begin, nightmares in which he's visited and raped by the original of the satyr.
When he next catches up the tramp (who is by now pretty much decomposing on his feet), the old boy sneers that the relic chose him because he is the "right sort" and Henry, mortified that he may indeed be a homosexual, books a session with local prostitute Clara Sadwick. But where Henry goes, his incubus goes too ...
A story I detested as a lonesome teenager because it made me feel kind of queasy on the grounds of it's subject matter, but on revisiting it several years later I found it an absolute peach.
Their Cramped Dark World: Fifteen year old's Pete and Lenny spend Halloween in a reputedly haunted house, derelict since the torture-murder of an entire family 25 years ago to the night. It soon becomes worryingly clear to Lenny that the rest of the gang aren't going to show and, what with Pete acting strangely, and the rats scratching from inside the walls, he's all for shifting their Vodka stash elsewhere. Pete won't - can't - hear of it .....
Wizard, 30 Sept. 1939
Read more: http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/6004/david-riley-cramped-dark-world#ixzz3Z1T8J0qy
Hoody (When Graveyards Yawn, Crowswing Books, 2006)
A Bottle of Spirits (New Writings in Horror & the Supernatural 2, 1972)
No Sense in Being Hungry, She Thought (Peeping Tom #20, 1996)
Now and Forever More (The Second Black Book of Horror, 2008)
Romero's Children (The Seventh Black Book of Horror, 2010)
Swan Song (The Ninth Black Book of Horror, 2012)
The Farmhouse (New Writings in Horror & the Supernatural 1, 1971)
The Last Coach Trip (The Eighth Black Book of Horror, 2011)
The Satyr's Head (The Satyr's Head & Other Tales of Terror, 1975)
Their Cramped Dark World (The Sixth Black Book of Horror, 2010)
A bit cheeky perhaps, as I've not yet got a copy, but I've no hesitation in recommending Their Cramped Dark World. Why? Because, most unusually, I'm already familiar with all bar one of the stories. So, collected from around the board and tarted up ever so slightly, a patchwork instant commentary.
Hoody: "Black Magic Link To Serial Killer. In the wake of a fatal stabbing outside The Red Dragon, Laurence Huxtable, computer artist, grows fearful of the lonesome hoody who has taken to hanging around the car park at Highgate Station and watching his flat. It transpires that the murder victim, Paul Gilligan, was himself a serial killer whose freezer was stocked with the thumbs of his five victims - one of whom was killed after he'd been pronounced dead ....
A Bottle Of Spirits: As revealed to aspiring medium Phyllis Harker. After watching a performance at the Grand Theatre in Clayborn, Rob is so fascinated by the uncanny ability of mind reader Sebastian Preskett that he murders his elderly assistant to create a job vacancy. Rob just HAS to know how the guy gets it right every time so he can steal his act and make loads of cash. Studying him at close hand, Rob is convinced the key to Preskett's powers must lie in the fairground organ and outsize phosphorescent bottle he uses as props. Increasingly worried that Preskett has known all along who murdered his friend, Rob decides it's time to leave. But first, he'll remove the stopper from that weirdly glowing blue bottle if it kills him ....
Now and Forever More: Holidaying at a typically welcoming Cornish coastal village ("You'll be glad to leave 'ere, I s'ppose?"), John and Julie Daniels fall foul of the local inbred degenerates, a bunch of goat-worshipping Satanists presided over by Marsh, the landlord of The Broken Mast. Moral. When in the West Country, never let a native overhear you mention that he's inhospitable, deformed and would benefit from the occasional shower, or he might take offence.
Romero’s Children: Twenty years after the OM (Old Methuselah) eternal youth wonder-drug hit the street, and those who either resisted it's lure or simply were yet to be born now have to live with the consequences - a world full of drooling cannibal zombies. Fortunately, these undead are of the ambling, mindless variety and easily picked off with a shot to the head. Until ...
Stocking up on tinned food supplies from the remnants of a Wal-Mart, ageing loner, Jack, and punky young survivalist, Candice. chance upon Lucy, who can not only talk but seems to have shaken off the effects of the drug. Against his better judgement, Jack brings her home and cleans her up ....
Swan Song: A Black Book Of Horror classic. "Nights In White Satin. Overrated, degenerate trash, just right for a pair of ancient hippies high on drugs." Three elderly Right Wing thugs - retired schoolteacher, Bennett, Pinky Pinkerton, chairman of the Conservative club, and self-made businessmen, Sam Nedwell - make it their business to rid the local park of a pair of decrepit tramps. Bennett and cronies pack their baseball bats, confident this last hurrah will prove the most one-sided confrontation of their brutal campaign versus "undesirables." But the Huntingtons are not the pushovers they seem. Filthy rich ancient hippie philanthropists, Cider Man & Wino woman own a villa on the exclusive Maple Road. Back in the day they ran a refuge for the homeless until it closed amidst rumours of Black Magic and mysterious disappearances ....
The Farmhouse: Kendale, near Tavistock. Surrealist Biblical artist Preskett committed suicide here by turning himself into a human torch amid much talk of ritual murder, drugs, and orgies on the hill. Stopping at the deserted house, hikers Melbury and Janet discover a metal box hidden in the wall, inside which they find several books. The one Melbury picks up opens on a quote from Poe's The Conquering Worm.
Later, Janet leaves Melbury asleep in the tent they've erected and returns to the farmhouse for the books. He comes awake with a terrible sense of foreboding, and goes off to find her ...
Perhaps my all-time favourite story.
The Last Coach Trip: It's the Hemer Street Working Mens Club's final day out to the Ripton races and veteran Eddie is taking it as a bereavement. Harold does all he can to cheer up his old friend, but it's no use. Eddie arrives late looking like death, skips the traditional fry up and - to the incredulity of all - hardly touches a drop all day. Any other year, and they'd have to carry him back and forth from the coach. It's only as they're returning home to Edgebottom that Eddie perks up and Harold realises to his horror that these boozy excursions won't be coming to an end after all.
The Satyr's Head: Yorkshire. Student Henry Lamson's world is one of Wimpy bars, pubs, going to watch the Rovers play on a Saturday afternoon, and attending screenings of The Shuttered Room at the film society with his friend Alan Sutcliffe. He's been dating Joan for some time but she's shown no interest in sleeping with him.
Walking home across the Moors one night Henry encounters a filthy, diseased tramp who proves impossible to shake off - the malodorous one even sidles up next to him on the bus. Turns out he wants to sell him a relic for a nominal fee. Despite himself, Henry shells out on the evil looking bauble ... and that's when his nightmares begin, nightmares in which he's visited and raped by the original of the satyr.
When he next catches up the tramp (who is by now pretty much decomposing on his feet), the old boy sneers that the relic chose him because he is the "right sort" and Henry, mortified that he may indeed be a homosexual, books a session with local prostitute Clara Sadwick. But where Henry goes, his incubus goes too ...
A story I detested as a lonesome teenager because it made me feel kind of queasy on the grounds of it's subject matter, but on revisiting it several years later I found it an absolute peach.
Their Cramped Dark World: Fifteen year old's Pete and Lenny spend Halloween in a reputedly haunted house, derelict since the torture-murder of an entire family 25 years ago to the night. It soon becomes worryingly clear to Lenny that the rest of the gang aren't going to show and, what with Pete acting strangely, and the rats scratching from inside the walls, he's all for shifting their Vodka stash elsewhere. Pete won't - can't - hear of it .....
Wizard, 30 Sept. 1939
Read more: http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/6004/david-riley-cramped-dark-world#ixzz3Z1T8J0qy
Series XI and XII of Red Dwarf "Green lighted" by Dave for 2016 and 2017
Great news that series XI and XII of Red Dwarf has been green lighted by Dave for airing in 2016 and 2017. Series X may not have been classic Red Dwarf but it was still worth watching, to me anyway.
Check out this link for the Sci-Fi Bulletin website for more details.
April 29, 2015
May Day Giveaway - Free Kindle Downloads of Things That Go Bump in the Night
Parallel Universe Publications will be giving away free kindle downloads of the bumper ghost anthology Things That Go Bump in the Night on May Day, Friday the 1st of May for two days. Simply click onto amazon.co.uk or amazon.com or whichever amazon site you use to download this book for free.Things That Go Bump in the Night edited by Douglas Draa and David A. Riley is available in trade paperback from Parallel Universe Publications. 365 pages long, this bumper volume contains 19 classic weird stories by Sir Hugh Clifford, Edward Lucas White, William Hope Hodgson, George Allan England, F. Marion Crawford, Frederick Marryat, E. F. Benson, W. C. Morrow, Amyas Northcote, M. P. Shiel, Lord Dunsany, Perceval Landon, Robert E. Howard, G. G. Pendarves, Henry Brereton Marriott Watson, Irvin S. Cobb, Huan Mee, Abraham Merritt, Nictzin Dyalhis, and Edith Wharton.
The Ghoul Sir Hugh Clifford
The House of the Nightmare Edward Lucas White
The Voice in the Night William Hope Hodgson
The Thing from Outside George Allan England
For the Blood is the Life F. Marion Crawford
The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains Frederick Marryat
The Room in the Tower E. F. Benson
His Unconquered Enemy W. C. Morrow
The Late Mrs. Fowke Amyas Northcote
Xélucha M. P. Shiel
A Narrow Escape Lord Dunsany
Thurnley Abbey Perceval Landon
The Black Stone Robert E, Howard
Werewolf of the Sahara G. G. Pendarves
The Devil of the Marsh Henry Brereton Marriott Watson
Fishhead Irvin S. Cobb
The Black Statue Huan Mee
The Pool of the Stone God Abraham Merritt
The Sea-Witch Nictzin Dyalhis
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Edith Wharton
April 27, 2015
Craig Herbertson's collection from Parallel Universe Publications, The Heaven Maker and Other Gruesome Tales, on the BFS website
There's a great review of Craig Herbertson's The Heaven Maker and Other Gruesome Tales on the BFS website.Check the book out on Parallel Universe Publications.
THE HEAVEN MAKER, AND OTHER GRUESOME TALES by Craig Herbertson, Parallel Universe Publications, pb, £11.99.
Reviewed by Stewart Horn
I hadn’t heard of Craig Herbertson before I picked this up, and this collection of twenty dark stories was a pleasant surprise.
The title story is probably the highlight: a grand epic told in a few short chapters about a man trying to rescue his wife from Hell. Reminiscent of Machen’s ‘Great God Pan’ in tone.
Several stories feature Mulholland the occultist, a splendid character who was great fun to spend time with. The best of those was ‘Liebniz’s Last Puzzle’, in which he is one of three academics trying to solve a fiendish puzzle, though none of them are clever enough to think it might not be a good idea. ‘The Anningly Sundial’ was another highlight, riffing on one of M. R. James’s best known stories.
Several stories are based in or around high schools – my favourite of those is ‘New Teacher’. You may have heard a classroom so rowdy it sounds like someone is being murdered.
Another group of stories is very much in the Pan Horror vein. Little nasty revenge tales or outlandish and implausibly horrific situations described with wicked glee. Look out for ‘A Game of Billiards and Soup’.
And there is poetry, a two page joke about Hibernian Football Club and the holy grail, lots of references to malt whisky, and a lovely little Christmas tale to finish off.
Overall, a satisfying read. A well written mix of the literary, the trashy and the darkly humorous. A fine addition to any horror lover’s library.
April 25, 2015
Free Kindle Download of His Own Mad Demons - Sunday 26th April, One Day Only
My collection, His Own Mad Demons: Dark Tales from David A. Riley will be available for free downloads on Amazon kindle for one day only - Sunday the 26th April.Amazon.co.uk (Normally £2.05)
Amazon.com (Normally $3.00)
His Own Mad Demons includes:
The Worst of All Possible Places
Lock In
Their Own Mad Demons
The Fragile Mask on his Face
The True Spirit
These were previously published in Houses on the Borderland edited by David A. Sutton for the BFS, The Black Book of Horror and the Fifth Black Book of Horror edited by Charles Black, Dark Discoveries #15 edited by James Beach, and Back from the Dead edited by Johnny Mains.
April 24, 2015
The Death Tableau by Craig Herbertson
Lovely surprise today with the arrival in the post of an inscribed copy of Craig Herbertson's latest novel, The Death Tableau, published by Black Horse Books. I'm looking forward to reading this as soon as I've finished the pdf of Best British Horror 2015, which Johnny Mains emailed to me to review. 
April 23, 2015
Exploring the Dark, Cramped World of Politically Correct Weird Fiction
Well I'll be damned! I never thought I would see someone review my stories and castigate them for being politically correct ("our PC-adhering author").
While trawling via google for any reviews of my recently published collection, Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales I came across this odd review.
I have taken the liberty of copying and pasting it in its entirety below, which can also be read here.
The BNP’s Red, White, & Blue Rosette of Horror:
Exploring the Dark, Cramped World of Politically Correct Weird FictionJames J. O'Meara
2,073 words
David A. Riley
Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales
Parallel Universe Publications, 2015
I’ve frequently hammered at the notion that “weird fiction,” like its predecessor, Gothic, is an inherently conservative genre, not only in its themes – the persistence of the past, the reality of hierarchy, the inescapability of genetics and destiny – but also in its techniques; in particular, Lovecraft’s method of creating atmosphere and horror by the piling up of careful observation, grows off of his scientific and conservative adherence to facts.[1]
Not everyone likes this, since most “writers” these days are quite happy to function as unquestioning acolytes of the Leftist ideology of the day.[2] The book under review here seems to be one of them, so perhaps a closer look may uncover some interesting memes.
Since I don’t make a habit of frequenting the vast precincts of weird magazines and websites, confining my attention to a few favorites like Lovecraft or Ligotti, I knew not David A. Riley, discovering this book only when he turned up in my habitual Amazon search for “Lovecraft and free.” His publishers were right to add “Lovecraft” to his descriptors, as there are certainly a lot of Lovecraft tropes here; tentacles with sucker mouths turn up frequently, along with decaying villages with unwholesome, indeed decaying, inhabitants, books that one shouldn’t read, soapstone carvings leading to loathsome metamorphoses, etc.
The stories themselves are serviceable, making for a pleasant way to pass the time. Riley even allows himself an occasional sly bit of humor:
Scorn and cynicism, sourness and disdain, these were Eddie’s usual moods, not some loopy-doopy hippy bliss as if he’d swallowed a happy pill and won first prize in the National Lottery. Harold knew then that his friend must have suffered a breakdown.Mostly, though, we’ve seen all this before, and reading the stories straight through only emphasizes the familiarity of the plots and themes.
About halfway through, though, a new theme, at least new to me, began to emerge. “Swan Song” presents us with the unattractive figure of one Bennett, a retired (forcibly and early, it would appear) teacher. Divorced (check; what modern woman would want him?), living alone in a shabby flat (check again), he wanders about complaining about the modern world, where you can’t call a spade a spade thanks to all this “PC crap.” Like those damned dirty bums (“homeless”? Bah!) over there.[3] When Bennett discovers they are not merely dirty hippies, but actually filthy rich dirty hippies, and far form being homeless, live in a nearby mansion that an oldie like him can appreciate but which they have selfishly allowed to fall into a Grey Gardens state of decay, Bennett goes ballistic.
He heads off to the pub, where he knows there’s at least two old buggers who will allow him to speak his narrow little mind and find his anti-immigrant sallies to be the dernier cri in witty political observation: two more fat, blotchy faced losers, drinking beer and spewing not-yet dead white male venom.
As always in such fiction – though almost never in real life – the boys have been conducting their own secret vigilante society, doling out violent retribution to whoever for whatever reason violate their crabbed little norms. The filthy rich hippies will get their comeuppance, mates.
Anyone who’s read Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print”[4] knows what’s going to happen,[5] but Riley does, I admit, add a new twist. In Campbell’s story the dirty old man, a gym teacher this time, seeking yet more sadistic porn, reads the wrong book and meets his Lovecraftian end. Here, Riley goes being(sic) (beyond?) using The Olde Conservative as a stock figure of evil and suggests that such creatures are peculiarly drawn to monsters, being so monstrous themselves.
One of the amigos gets his head eaten – Bennett, of course, like all non-Leftists, cares not a whit:
Having little empathy, even for his friend, was not bothered by what had happened to Pinky. He was just one less person he could share his time with at the pub. Beyond that he knew he would barely miss him.Bennett kills the hippie-monsters and then, in a crowning moment of scumbaggery, abandons his other friend to the monstrous thing in the house. In an admittedly nice twist at the end (with the perhaps unintentionally hilarious line “Bennett, you bastard, open this fucking door!”) Bennett and Sam become the new scaly-skinned monsters. And here, Riley delivers his smug little masterstroke:
“We can continue just like before, only better, stronger” [Sam suggests]. “Those old hippies were hard for them to work with,” Sam said. “They had to be pushed and threatened, forced to kill. It went against their principles, you see. The soft old bastards. Damn near starved these creatures to death . . . It’ll be easer with us. We don’t mind killing, do we? We love it, in fact.” Sam grinned.Perhaps Cthulhu should give himself a break and hang out at BNP and UKIP meetings. Maybe he already does.
If you think I’m forcing that identification, well, I’m not. A later story (the longest, actually a novella), “The Satyr’s Head,” makes it explicit. It’s the usual “don’t buy a damnably eldritch satyr statue from a filthy, visibly decaying old bum” story, but when we enter a pub the really sinister stuff starts:
“You can be a Scottish nationalist or a Welch nationalist and no one says anything abbot it, but as soon as you say you’re a British nationalist everyone starts call out ‘Fascist!’”[6]Yes, it’s the red, white and blue rosette of E-vil: the local BNP candidate.
When the filthy bum turns up dead in an alley, the BNP is quick to try to exploit the mystery:
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it wasn’t something all these Asians have been bringing into the country. There’s been an increase in TB already, and that was almost unheard do fa few years ago.”“Still working hard, I see,” Lamson said, nodding at the red, white and blue National Front rosette on the man’s jacket.“No rest for the wicked. Someone’s got to do the devil’s work,” the man joked as the other two smiled in appreciation of his joke. [I guess the reader is supposed to smile too]“So far there’s been no mention in the press, though the local rag – Billy’s Weekly Liar – isn’t acting out of character there, especially with the elections coming up.”Of course, the newspapers would never cover up disease or crime among immigrants, now would they? This is England!
Our doomed protagonist is advised to pay him no mind:
“I wouldn’t’ take much notice of Reynolds. The man’s a clown.”It’s a bit of a tease, though; along the lines of “Swan Song,” I had expected this theme to develop, with Lawson transforming into the ultimate monster, a BNP candidate, or some monstrous new party, using the eponymous head as its symbol. Instead, Lawson’s transformation is “a thousand times more savage and more terrifying”; like Buffalo Bill, he turns out to be some kinda repressed homo:
He only wished that his relationship with Joan, which had been going out with now for three months, wasn’t so peculiarly Platonic. Whether his was his fault or hers, he did not know.[He wondered} if the dream wasn’t connect in some way with his unsatisfactory relations hip with Joan. But the two things were at such extremes in his mind that he could not connect hem with anything other than shame.There was no way in which he could deny to himself the perverted aspects [the dream] presented to him. But was he perverted as well?Yes, friend Lawson is definitely what Maj. “Bat” Guano would call a “deviated prevert.” The dream, in this case, is the usual precognitive “you’ll become a monster” dream, but with some decidedly curious aspects: the satyr is some kind of shemale, with twelve teats and an erect penis, and keeps jumping on his back.
How could he possibly make any kind of headway with Joan, he told himself, with such a foul obscenity as that thing troubling him.In the end, gazing at the statute, it seem to be “gloating at the way in which it had triumphed over everything else in the flat, including (or especially) the framed photo of Joan.”
The whole tale seems to be some kind of homosexual allegory; the filthy tramp that “spots” him as one of them, the head (of the statute) which he gives Lamson, the signs of his transformation including some “dark sores around his mouth” like some kind of AIDS related malady, etc.
Even the title story has a moment where the victim to be muses that he’s been tricked into staying overnight in a spooky house because his friend is “secretly queer.”[7]
But how could our PC-adhering author possibly suggest there being something occult, perverted, ultimately monstrous, about homosexuals? There might be something more subtle intended here, but the PC crowd is not big on subtlety, at least when it come to whoever their current pets are. Mr. Riley would be advised to tread carefully; one wonders if the BNP bashing is laid on so thick so as to establish his credentials as a good-thnker?[8]
As I’ve said before, Leftism being a pure abstract notion, ungoverned by tradition or even “common sense.” It unrolls with unstoppable logic (as in “the wrong side of history”) from vaguely “sure, why not” ideas to delirious nuttiness, leaving its most loyal supporters in one generation, appearing as benighted fools or enemies of the people to the next.[9] Vigorous union rep and supporter of the New Deal becomes grouchy bigot Archie Bunker.
As someone said recently, the Right tries to make converts, but the Left just want victims. Mr. Riley had better watch out; he may wake up one morning, like K, to find himself on trial; dumped in the waste bin of history with real monsters, like H. P. Lovecraft.[10]
Notes [1] As Steve Sailer has pointed out, conservativism is a matter of noticing things, which PC is designed to prevent. See the essays on Lovecraft published collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014), especially the title essay and the review of Graham Harmon’s Weird Realism.
[2] See my “Reflections on the H. P. Lovecraft Award,” here.
[3] Their filthy and diseased forms are described lovingly enough to clue the reader in that these are more than just another pair of dirty hippies.
[4] In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, ed. August Derleth (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1969).
[5] In fact, it’s an inversion of a story that really embarrasses Lovecraft’s modern fans, “The High House in the Mist,” where the 3 burglars are dirty immigrants.
[6] “But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!” Trevor Lynch, reviewing The Dark Knight, notes that “In a ‘free’ society we can’t suppress dangerous truths altogether. So we have to be immunized against them. That’s why Hollywood lets dangerous truths appear on screen, but only in the mouths of monsters: Derek Vinyard in American History X, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York , Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, etc.” — here and in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
[7] Dolarhyde: “Do you imply I’m queer?” Loundes (tied up in a chair): “Oh, God no!”—Manhunter /Red Dragon. Does “Lamson” suggest Silence of the Lambs?
[8] There’s also an odd little passage where our satyr-in-transition muses: “There was a smell of fish and chips and the pungent aroma of curry as they passed a takeaway, but even this failed to make him feel at home on the street. He felt foreign and lost, alienated to the things and places which had previously seemed so familiar to him.” Is the longing for familiarity a sign of his evil? And, notice the equation of fish and chips to curry, as signifiers of the Truly British.
[9] Conversely, from the perspective of today, such polar figures as George Orwell and Eveylyn Waugh can appear as The Same Man (The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House, 2008).
[10] In this respect, it’s interesting to see what Riley, or his publishers, have chosen for a cover illustration: Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son .
While trawling via google for any reviews of my recently published collection, Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales I came across this odd review.
I have taken the liberty of copying and pasting it in its entirety below, which can also be read here.
The BNP’s Red, White, & Blue Rosette of Horror:
Exploring the Dark, Cramped World of Politically Correct Weird FictionJames J. O'Meara
2,073 words
David A. Riley
Their Cramped Dark World and Other Tales
Parallel Universe Publications, 2015
I’ve frequently hammered at the notion that “weird fiction,” like its predecessor, Gothic, is an inherently conservative genre, not only in its themes – the persistence of the past, the reality of hierarchy, the inescapability of genetics and destiny – but also in its techniques; in particular, Lovecraft’s method of creating atmosphere and horror by the piling up of careful observation, grows off of his scientific and conservative adherence to facts.[1]
Not everyone likes this, since most “writers” these days are quite happy to function as unquestioning acolytes of the Leftist ideology of the day.[2] The book under review here seems to be one of them, so perhaps a closer look may uncover some interesting memes.
Since I don’t make a habit of frequenting the vast precincts of weird magazines and websites, confining my attention to a few favorites like Lovecraft or Ligotti, I knew not David A. Riley, discovering this book only when he turned up in my habitual Amazon search for “Lovecraft and free.” His publishers were right to add “Lovecraft” to his descriptors, as there are certainly a lot of Lovecraft tropes here; tentacles with sucker mouths turn up frequently, along with decaying villages with unwholesome, indeed decaying, inhabitants, books that one shouldn’t read, soapstone carvings leading to loathsome metamorphoses, etc.
The stories themselves are serviceable, making for a pleasant way to pass the time. Riley even allows himself an occasional sly bit of humor:
Scorn and cynicism, sourness and disdain, these were Eddie’s usual moods, not some loopy-doopy hippy bliss as if he’d swallowed a happy pill and won first prize in the National Lottery. Harold knew then that his friend must have suffered a breakdown.Mostly, though, we’ve seen all this before, and reading the stories straight through only emphasizes the familiarity of the plots and themes.
About halfway through, though, a new theme, at least new to me, began to emerge. “Swan Song” presents us with the unattractive figure of one Bennett, a retired (forcibly and early, it would appear) teacher. Divorced (check; what modern woman would want him?), living alone in a shabby flat (check again), he wanders about complaining about the modern world, where you can’t call a spade a spade thanks to all this “PC crap.” Like those damned dirty bums (“homeless”? Bah!) over there.[3] When Bennett discovers they are not merely dirty hippies, but actually filthy rich dirty hippies, and far form being homeless, live in a nearby mansion that an oldie like him can appreciate but which they have selfishly allowed to fall into a Grey Gardens state of decay, Bennett goes ballistic.
He heads off to the pub, where he knows there’s at least two old buggers who will allow him to speak his narrow little mind and find his anti-immigrant sallies to be the dernier cri in witty political observation: two more fat, blotchy faced losers, drinking beer and spewing not-yet dead white male venom.
As always in such fiction – though almost never in real life – the boys have been conducting their own secret vigilante society, doling out violent retribution to whoever for whatever reason violate their crabbed little norms. The filthy rich hippies will get their comeuppance, mates.
Anyone who’s read Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print”[4] knows what’s going to happen,[5] but Riley does, I admit, add a new twist. In Campbell’s story the dirty old man, a gym teacher this time, seeking yet more sadistic porn, reads the wrong book and meets his Lovecraftian end. Here, Riley goes being(sic) (beyond?) using The Olde Conservative as a stock figure of evil and suggests that such creatures are peculiarly drawn to monsters, being so monstrous themselves.
One of the amigos gets his head eaten – Bennett, of course, like all non-Leftists, cares not a whit:
Having little empathy, even for his friend, was not bothered by what had happened to Pinky. He was just one less person he could share his time with at the pub. Beyond that he knew he would barely miss him.Bennett kills the hippie-monsters and then, in a crowning moment of scumbaggery, abandons his other friend to the monstrous thing in the house. In an admittedly nice twist at the end (with the perhaps unintentionally hilarious line “Bennett, you bastard, open this fucking door!”) Bennett and Sam become the new scaly-skinned monsters. And here, Riley delivers his smug little masterstroke:
“We can continue just like before, only better, stronger” [Sam suggests]. “Those old hippies were hard for them to work with,” Sam said. “They had to be pushed and threatened, forced to kill. It went against their principles, you see. The soft old bastards. Damn near starved these creatures to death . . . It’ll be easer with us. We don’t mind killing, do we? We love it, in fact.” Sam grinned.Perhaps Cthulhu should give himself a break and hang out at BNP and UKIP meetings. Maybe he already does.
If you think I’m forcing that identification, well, I’m not. A later story (the longest, actually a novella), “The Satyr’s Head,” makes it explicit. It’s the usual “don’t buy a damnably eldritch satyr statue from a filthy, visibly decaying old bum” story, but when we enter a pub the really sinister stuff starts:
“You can be a Scottish nationalist or a Welch nationalist and no one says anything abbot it, but as soon as you say you’re a British nationalist everyone starts call out ‘Fascist!’”[6]Yes, it’s the red, white and blue rosette of E-vil: the local BNP candidate.
When the filthy bum turns up dead in an alley, the BNP is quick to try to exploit the mystery:
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it wasn’t something all these Asians have been bringing into the country. There’s been an increase in TB already, and that was almost unheard do fa few years ago.”“Still working hard, I see,” Lamson said, nodding at the red, white and blue National Front rosette on the man’s jacket.“No rest for the wicked. Someone’s got to do the devil’s work,” the man joked as the other two smiled in appreciation of his joke. [I guess the reader is supposed to smile too]“So far there’s been no mention in the press, though the local rag – Billy’s Weekly Liar – isn’t acting out of character there, especially with the elections coming up.”Of course, the newspapers would never cover up disease or crime among immigrants, now would they? This is England!
Our doomed protagonist is advised to pay him no mind:
“I wouldn’t’ take much notice of Reynolds. The man’s a clown.”It’s a bit of a tease, though; along the lines of “Swan Song,” I had expected this theme to develop, with Lawson transforming into the ultimate monster, a BNP candidate, or some monstrous new party, using the eponymous head as its symbol. Instead, Lawson’s transformation is “a thousand times more savage and more terrifying”; like Buffalo Bill, he turns out to be some kinda repressed homo:
He only wished that his relationship with Joan, which had been going out with now for three months, wasn’t so peculiarly Platonic. Whether his was his fault or hers, he did not know.[He wondered} if the dream wasn’t connect in some way with his unsatisfactory relations hip with Joan. But the two things were at such extremes in his mind that he could not connect hem with anything other than shame.There was no way in which he could deny to himself the perverted aspects [the dream] presented to him. But was he perverted as well?Yes, friend Lawson is definitely what Maj. “Bat” Guano would call a “deviated prevert.” The dream, in this case, is the usual precognitive “you’ll become a monster” dream, but with some decidedly curious aspects: the satyr is some kind of shemale, with twelve teats and an erect penis, and keeps jumping on his back.
How could he possibly make any kind of headway with Joan, he told himself, with such a foul obscenity as that thing troubling him.In the end, gazing at the statute, it seem to be “gloating at the way in which it had triumphed over everything else in the flat, including (or especially) the framed photo of Joan.”
The whole tale seems to be some kind of homosexual allegory; the filthy tramp that “spots” him as one of them, the head (of the statute) which he gives Lamson, the signs of his transformation including some “dark sores around his mouth” like some kind of AIDS related malady, etc.
Even the title story has a moment where the victim to be muses that he’s been tricked into staying overnight in a spooky house because his friend is “secretly queer.”[7]
But how could our PC-adhering author possibly suggest there being something occult, perverted, ultimately monstrous, about homosexuals? There might be something more subtle intended here, but the PC crowd is not big on subtlety, at least when it come to whoever their current pets are. Mr. Riley would be advised to tread carefully; one wonders if the BNP bashing is laid on so thick so as to establish his credentials as a good-thnker?[8]
As I’ve said before, Leftism being a pure abstract notion, ungoverned by tradition or even “common sense.” It unrolls with unstoppable logic (as in “the wrong side of history”) from vaguely “sure, why not” ideas to delirious nuttiness, leaving its most loyal supporters in one generation, appearing as benighted fools or enemies of the people to the next.[9] Vigorous union rep and supporter of the New Deal becomes grouchy bigot Archie Bunker.
As someone said recently, the Right tries to make converts, but the Left just want victims. Mr. Riley had better watch out; he may wake up one morning, like K, to find himself on trial; dumped in the waste bin of history with real monsters, like H. P. Lovecraft.[10]
Notes [1] As Steve Sailer has pointed out, conservativism is a matter of noticing things, which PC is designed to prevent. See the essays on Lovecraft published collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014), especially the title essay and the review of Graham Harmon’s Weird Realism.
[2] See my “Reflections on the H. P. Lovecraft Award,” here.
[3] Their filthy and diseased forms are described lovingly enough to clue the reader in that these are more than just another pair of dirty hippies.
[4] In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, ed. August Derleth (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1969).
[5] In fact, it’s an inversion of a story that really embarrasses Lovecraft’s modern fans, “The High House in the Mist,” where the 3 burglars are dirty immigrants.
[6] “But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!” Trevor Lynch, reviewing The Dark Knight, notes that “In a ‘free’ society we can’t suppress dangerous truths altogether. So we have to be immunized against them. That’s why Hollywood lets dangerous truths appear on screen, but only in the mouths of monsters: Derek Vinyard in American History X, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York , Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, etc.” — here and in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
[7] Dolarhyde: “Do you imply I’m queer?” Loundes (tied up in a chair): “Oh, God no!”—Manhunter /Red Dragon. Does “Lamson” suggest Silence of the Lambs?
[8] There’s also an odd little passage where our satyr-in-transition muses: “There was a smell of fish and chips and the pungent aroma of curry as they passed a takeaway, but even this failed to make him feel at home on the street. He felt foreign and lost, alienated to the things and places which had previously seemed so familiar to him.” Is the longing for familiarity a sign of his evil? And, notice the equation of fish and chips to curry, as signifiers of the Truly British.
[9] Conversely, from the perspective of today, such polar figures as George Orwell and Eveylyn Waugh can appear as The Same Man (The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House, 2008).
[10] In this respect, it’s interesting to see what Riley, or his publishers, have chosen for a cover illustration: Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son .
April 21, 2015
Will anyone figure out that this is a repackaged first collection?
Will Anyone Figure Out that this is a Repackaged First Collection? by Johnny Mains is what it says - and more - with an additional two, much more recent stories since With Deepest Sympathy was first published as a limited edition hardback. trade paperback:
Amazon.co.uk (£6.72)
Amazon.com ($9.99)
ebook:
Amazon.co.uk (£2.05)
Amazon.com ($3.00)
