Paul Finch's Blog, page 5

Big fun in prospect as festival season starts

Well, Easter is past and spring is well and truly underway. Hope it’s looking promising for everyone so far (international calamities aside, of course). All I can say is thank Heaven the festival and convention season is almost upon us. Today’s blog therefore, is all about that.
I’ll be telling you where I am as the big events unfold, what I’ll be doing and who I’ll be doing it with. I’ll also be reporting on the current status of my new novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN, which seems to be going down well (and is currently ONLY 99p on Kindle).

In addition, and because my festival schedule, as usual, winds its way across the darker end of the literary spectrum, focussing mainly on crime, thriller and horror fiction, I thought that for today’s review I ought to find a novel that perhaps has a foot in every one of those camps. As such, I settled on Ian McGuire’s extremely dark and chilling THE NORTH WATER.

It’s the sort of novel you might sometimes find on the literary fiction shelf and maybe, for that reason, ignore it. If that’s the case, don’t ignore today’s review. You’ll find it, as usual, in the Thrillers, Chillers section in the lower end of this blogpost. Seriously, no fan of dark fiction can afford to pass this novel by.

Of course, if you’re only here for the Ian McGuire review, that’s absolutely fine. Zoom on down to it straight away. Before then though, you might be interested in …

Let the conventions commence
The literary festival season is one of the joys of the writing life. Literary events, as I like to think of them, can be held at any time and in almost any place, though for the most part they tend to come thicker and faster from mid spring through to late autumn, the majority tending to congregate in the warmest months of the year, which only adds to the holiday atmosphere that often surrounds them.

I’m leery of getting too excited about this year’s agenda, primarily because I don’t want to tempt fate. In 2020 of course, it was all but cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, while last year, with the virus still around, it was really only a shadow of its normal self. This year, thus far, we have what promises to be a full programme, though of course you can’t be too confident.

But if this year’s schedule actually comes to pass, and fingers crossed it will, it promises an awful lot. And I hope to be participating as fully as everyone else.

For the uninitiated, these events, which mostly tend to be held over carefully selected weekends, at specific venues – usually hotels in city centres where there is lots of immediate access to pubs, Indian restaurants and kebab shops – while not exactly centred around book-talk, usually have lots of book stuff going on because they are attended primarily by writers and readers. Invariably, there are panels, workshops, readings from new books, ‘pitch an agent’ sessions, quizzes and the like. Plus, there is almost always a Book Room, where all kinds of new releases, overseas imports and independent publications that you’re unlikely to have read about in the trade press can be had at reasonable prices.

Of course, the centre of all activity tends to be a bar, where the atmosphere ranges from genial to raucous (and everywhere in between) … but never underestimate the importance of this. The whole idea of these events is to bring authors into direct contact with their public. And when I say authors, I mean big names, major international sellers, wordsmiths who you can guarantee would sell the film rights to their laundry list if they actually have one. So, if you’re there, even if you’re just a reader or a fan, you shouldn’t be afraid to doorstop these guys and gals as they hold up the bar or wander the hotel corridors, and chat to them. Because that’s why they’re there. They attend these events specifically to socialise with those who read and enjoy their work.

As I say, these are special occasions. So, if you’ve never popped onto this circuit, even for a day or so, you’re missing a treat.

My schedule
My own involvement this year will, perhaps inevitably, be based around my 2022 publication, NEVER SEEN AGAIN . 
For those unaware (and if you exist, shame on you), it’s an urban thriller built around a cold case kidnapping, and featuring a disgraced investigative reporter who, when he unexpectedly receives a vital clue, goes all out to discover what happened to an heiress abducted over six years earlier, and who might – though it seems incredible – still be alive.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to be attending these functions purely to hawk my latest novel around. That would be a tad unsavoury. But there’ll be plenty copies at most of them, and I’ll be there, with pen in hand, so, you know …

Anyway, the events worth mentioning (thus far, because others may join the list as the weeks roll by), in chronological order, are:

CRIMEFEST, Bristol, May 12-15

One of the major crime-fiction events in the calendar, often one of the earliest in the year and always (to date, at least) held in the grand old city of Bristol. This year, the host venue is the Mercure Bristol Royal.

This is another of my favourite weekends of the year, because the atmosphere is always superb but also very literary. In my experience, this one tends to be colonised by writers, agents, editors and publishers rather than readers, though readers are welcome to attend, and quite a few do. There is often much industry chat, but plenty amber nectar goes down too … it’s a great social occasion, and located right in the heart of one of the most interesting cities in Britain.

I’ll be there, as I say, and am fortunate enough to be participating on a panel on the Saturday afternoon, called TRYING TO FORGET: WHEN THE PAST COMES BACK TO HAUNT YOU, with some serious company, CL Taylor, Alex Dahl and Robert Scragg, while the moderator is the one and only Alison Bruce.

If that doesn’t grab you, there are lots of other interesting events to be had over the weekend, ranging from examinations of crime scene procedures to crime-fighting technology, from spies and assassins to sweet old ladies who also happen to be serial killers. Big names attending include Ann Cleeves, Robert Goddard, Catriona Ward, Sarah Pinborough, Steve Cavanagh and Maxim Jakubowski, among many others.


CHILLERCON, Scarborough, May 26-29


Previously StokerCon and having been cancelled twice already due to the pandemic, ChillerCon, now with its own particular identity, has at last nailed down a slot for itself at the end of May and is already looking like one of the major horror fiction events of the year.
It’s going to be so big in fact that it will straddle two of Scarborough’s grandest and quirkiest hotels, the Royal and the Grand, which conveniently are only a matter of 50 yards apart, and occupy high ground overlooking the roaring surf of the North Sea.

If there’s anyone toying with the idea of attending but perhaps is concerned that horror as a genre is a tad too extreme for their taste, ChillerCon also features much to do with thriller and crime fiction, though it will all be strictly of the darker variety.
For example, check out some of the big names attending: Alexandra Benedict, Mike Carey, Mick Garris, Robert Lloyd Parry, Gillian Redfearn, James Brogden, Ramsey Campbell, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Jones, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, Sarah Pinborough and Catriona Ward.  

Personally, I’ve got quite a bit of involvement at this year’s ChillerCon.

I’m delighted to announce that on the Saturday, May 28, I’ll be a guest on the panel, CRIMINAL MINDS: CRIME/HORROR CROSSOVER, which I’m guessing will do what it says on the tin, investigate the points where the two sub-genres meet and perhaps where they counter each other. It’ll be moderated by a master of ceremonies who’s well-known to all involved in both these fields (and adored by most), though I can’t name him yet, while sitting alongside me will be some serious luminaries of crime and horror (again, their names are embargoed at present, but watch this space).

It should be a fun event, but that won’t be the end of my duties on the Saturday. A little later in the day, 5pm to be precise, in the Cocktail Bar at the Grand Hotel, I’ll be signing and selling copies of my novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN , for a fiver each, all proceeds to go to humanitarian aid for Ukraine. There is obviously only a finite number of copies available, so it will need to be done on a first come first served basis. There will be complimentary drinks too, so you can always just come along for a chat.

MW CRAVEN: IN CONVERSATION WITH PAUL FINCH, Kendal, May 30

Closely following Scarborough, the next day in fact, I’ll be in Kendal in the lovely Lake District, where, in a special event organised by Waterstones in Kendal, held at 7pm at the Waterstones shop in the Westmorland Centre, I’ll be in conversation with MW Craven, a powerhouse crime writer and fellow craggy north-of-Englander, whose Washington Poe series has taken the crime and thriller world by storm in recent years.

His next novel, THE BOTANIST , sees Poe and his innocent civvy sidekick, Tilly Bradshaw, pursue a highly skilled poisoner, while at the same time having to cope with a convincing murder accusation levelled against one of their own colleagues.

Mike and I will be discussing this, along with my own new book, NEVER SEEN AGAIN , in our usual nonchalant manner, plus anything else that comes up, cracking jokes, taking questions from the audience and the like.

If you’d like to get a ticket, just follow the link.

CRIME AT THE OLD COURTS, Wigan, June 11

Speaking of Mike Craven, I’ll also be guesting alongside him at this one-day event in my home town, Wigan. Mike will be celebrating publication of THE BOTANIST , but at the same time the day will focus on British crime writing in general.

I’ll be honest, there’s nothing I enjoy more than getting involved in events like these on home turf. There’s an old saying: ‘You can never be a hero in your hometown’. That’s undoubtedly true, but I feel I’ll have a chance to buck that trend if Wigan’s arts crowd continues its efforts to put their town on the crime-writing map.

This is the latest of several such events, and already it boasts an attractive line-up of guests. Aside from myself and MW Craven, also present will be Malcolm Hollingdrake, RC Bridgestock, Caroline England (left) and Patricia Dixon. Tickets for this one go on sale next week.
The event will run from 12 noon until 6pm in the evening, and will feature authors in conversation, books for sale, book signings, various of the sessions hosted by Caz and Sam from UK Crime Book Club. There’ll also be a licensed bar and refreshments. Again, for tickets and info for this one, follow the link.

THEAKSTON’S OLD PECULIAR CRIME WRITING FESTIVAL, Harrogate, July 21-24

This is one of the biggies, as they say. Even last year, when several regular events were still under cancellation due to Covid, the Harrogate festival – one of the most eagerly awaited and best attended in the annual crime fiction calendar, and now regarded as the largest celebration of the genre in Europe – made a very welcome comeback.
A part of the furniture in the genteel Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate since 2003, this grand occasion doesn’t just host the much-covetted Dagger Awards (as annually decided on and awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association), it presents panels, chats, readings, signing sessions, workshops, TV and radio interviews and the like, most of the action taking part in the historic Old Swan Hotel, and its beautiful and extensive gardens, and, all in all, is a phenomenal opportunity for fans and readers to mingle shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the true grandees of the industry, publishers, editors, agents and of course, the authors themselves.

In fact, after the non-event in 2020 and last year’s somewhat reduced convention, I suspect there’ll be even more of the latter this year than usual. Check out this list of the special guests who’ll be in attendance: Denise Mina, Lynda la Plante, Paula Hawkins, Tess Gerritsen, Michael Connelly, Lucy Foley, Charlie Higson, John Connolly, CL Taylor and Kathy Reichs … and there are likely to be more added to that list as we get closer to July.

For my own part, I’ll be doing my usual thing of propping up the bar, sitting in the sun and happily talking to anyone who feels like saying ‘hello.’

The second half of 2022 is not likely to be event-free, though it’s probably a little early in this uncertain world of ours to talk as though things from August onward are already set in stone. One thing I can definitely announce, though many details are yet to be ironed out on this one, is SFW XIII (the ever-popular – and I mean hugely popular – SCI-FI WEEKENDER) at Great Yarmouth, November 10-13. It’s a full weekend of panels with authors and media guests as well as great evening entertainment, and inevitably will go heavily on the themes of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror.

I’m not sure what my role will be at this one, but I’ll definitely be attending and it’s yet another big event in 2022 that I can’t wait for.

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 NORTH WATER  by Ian McGuire (2016)

Outline
In 1859, Hull, on England’s Humberside coast, is a rough, tough whaling town where many dregs of humanity have washed up simply because there is nowhere else for them to go. One of these is Henry Drax, a loutish, drunken harpooner, who also happens to be a serial rapist and murderer of young boys. Not long after he’s shown up, Drax strikes again, firstly killing a fellow whaler in a pub fight and then attacking another child, raping and brutalising him to death, but feeling no concern that either of these crimes will have consequences as he’ll shortly be aboard the whaling ship, Volunteer, bound for the so-called North Water, the vast stretch of semi-frozen ocean that lies between Greenland and Canada in northern Baffin Bay.

At the same time, a desperado of a different sort arrives, also looking to join the crew of the Volunteer. Patrick Sumner is an Irish-born surgeon recently cashiered out of the British Army for some unspecified offence committed during the Siege of Delhi. Sumner, who came home from India wounded and with a laudanum habit, is here simply because he can’t find paid medical work anywhere else, and has no real idea what he is letting himself in for, having to live and work below decks among whalers, in a part of the world where the temperatures are so low that the sea itself freezes solid.

As if this isn’t going to be problem enough, the voyage of the Volunteer already feels as though it may be ill-fated. Brownlee, the skipper, while superficially efficient, has a reputation for being unlucky. His last vessel, the Percival, was ‘crushed to matchwood by a berg’, a full 18 of his crewmen dying in the process. The owner of the whaling company, Baxter, doesn’t fill Sumner with confidence either, and with good reason. Though only Brownlee is initially aware of it, this whole voyage is an insurance scam. Baxter has fallen on hard times. There are still plenty of whales in the sea, but paraffin is now replacing whale oil, and the whaling industry is dying out in towns like Hull. The shipping boss has thus instructed Brownlee to sink the Volunteer, but only when they are far into the Great White North, where the crew can be rescued by another ship of the fleet, the Hastings, but where there’ll be no possibility of an investigation discovering the truth.

As the voyage gets underway, other villains on board are drawing their own wicked plans. Having searched Sumner’s trunk, Drax and first-mate Cavendish, another reprobate, discover that he is in possession of a valuable ring that he possibly acquired in India. They have no doubt it would bring them a pretty penny if they could get hold of it themselves, but before then they must find a way to dispense with Sumner. Their first attempt to kill him misfires, when, during a sealing expedition on the pack-ice, he falls through a crevasse into the freezing water, and they leave him, only for the Irishman to prove doughtier than they expected, and live long enough to be saved by another crew member.

Debilitated through frostbite, Sumner has no option but to remain on board as the ship heads further into the frozen seas, now catching, killing and stripping down whales, which is a heartless, gruesome process, though in this desperate world the only interest anyone has is how much money they can make from it.

While the crew works, Sumner treats a cabin boy complaining of stomach problems. Giving him a full examination, the doctor discovers that the lad has been anally raped, though he is too frightened to name his attacker. Sumner reports to Brownlee, who, though he’s at heart an immoral man and knee deep in the prospective insurance fraud, is suitably angered by this to commence questioning the crew. Not long afterwards, the same boy goes missing, but is eventually found dead, strangled and stuffed into a barrel. It seems obvious that his rapist is the culprit, and Henry Drax spreads suspicion to a misanthropic ship’s carpenter called McKendrick, whom he claims he regularly saw in the boy’s company.

Convinced that he’s caught the villain, Brownlee throws McKendrick in the brig, but Sumner is less certain. For various reasons, he suspects Drax, though no one else will listen to him. Drax is amused by that, but now recognises the doctor as a potential foe as well as someone he wishes to kill for the purpose of robbery, while Brownlee is too preoccupied by the forthcoming disaster he must somehow manufacture to think this thing through. And all the while, as this incendiary atmosphere brews in the damp, muggy confines of the blood-soaked ship, the Volunteer sails further and further into the constant dark of the Arctic winter, and the perilous climes of the North Water …

Review
Though marketed as historical adventure fiction, The North Water is without doubt one of the darkest novels I’ve ever read. Ian McGuire is classified by many as a practitioner of ‘realist literature’, which, in a nutshell, means describing things the way they are, or were, on a warts and all basis.

So when you picture the grime and squalor below decks on a 19th century commercial whaler, particularly when it’s regularly awash with the blood, blubber and bone of the prey it has so mercilessly harpooned and then protractedly slaughtered, that is precisely what you get here. It is grim stuff, leaving no ugly detail to the imagination. And we are treated to similar when it comes to McGuire’s portrayal of an industrial northern port like Hull in the 1850s, where everything is smoky and grimy, where there is horrible dereliction, where human wrecks occupy the taverns and brothels, where violence happens all the time, where children sell themselves, and where a murderous animal like Henry Drax can blend in so comfortably. Even more affecting, we get similar with the Siege of Delhi, which we see in flashback; here, Britain’s war against the Indian uprising is depicted as a near-apocalypse, neither side showing mercy, multiple innocents caught up in the maelstrom, square-jawed British soldiers unrepentant at the carnage they’ve wreaked.

So yes, while this one is billed as a historical adventure, don’t be getting into The North Water anticipating some Boys’ Own yarn.

The star of the show, for me at least, is Henry Drax. A wolf in human clothing, he’s a predatory killer several decades before Jack the Ripper popularised such a notion. One might argue that such characters aren’t uncommon in scary fiction, but I’d riposte that it’s uncommon they’re as frightening as Henry Drax is. Ian McGuire demonstrates immense skill in his creation of a fictional person who you are literally unnerved by whenever he is on the page.

To start with, there is nothing charismatic or likeable about Drax. He’s not one of these loveable rogues, he’s not someone you ‘understand’ because of his hard background. He’s just a horror, and when you get into his mind, you can see that he’s utterly insane; he doesn’t understand why he rapes and murders, he doesn’t even enjoy it, but he knows that, when he does it, for a brief time at least he’s elevated to godlike status, which in serial killer terms, makes him as close as damn it to the real thing.

But it’s not just that he’s convincingly evil. At no stage, even when this guy is in chains, do you imagine that he’s not going to turn the tables and do something terrible all over again. In fact, as this narrative proceeds, your dread certainty increases that Drax won’t just prove difficult to dispose of, he’ll likely be the last man standing.

In sharp contrast, the hero of the book, Patrick Sumner, is a weak, rather diffident character. Again though, this is Ian McGuire being true to his realist agenda. Sumner is only here because he’s a failure. While he might essentially be on the right side of civilisation, he’s lost everything: his fortune, his reputation, his family, his home, his employability. Though there are quirks in his character even then. His precious ring was loot from the Mutiny, so Sumner made sure he got his share while others were dying. He was then infuriated with himself, not for doing what he did, but for trusting fellow officers who later betrayed him. Much of the time now, he lies in his bunk, drugged, feeling sorry for himself. And isn’t this exactly the way we’d expect one of those pink young men born of the upper classes in the Age of Empire to behave?

Later on in the narrative, when a missionary priest tries to help him, he is sullen and uncommunicative, and he justifies this to himself through his mistrust of religion (even though the religious man is out there providing medicine to the Inuits, while the great intellectual powerhouse of the world, the British Empire, is busy exploiting their homeland).

Ultimately though, we cling to Sumner as one of the few good men in this frozen hell. We have to root for him because, as the odds mount, there is literally no one else to root for.

At the end of the day, we’ve been on adventures in the polar regions before. But I don’t think many that I’ve read have been as visceral as this one. The cold bites you, you can smell the stink of blood and gangrenous flesh, the grime and brutality is all around us, and then, as I say, there is Drax, who stands out as a figure of evil even in this company.

The whole thing is incredibly well-written by Ian McGuire, who has an astonishing eye for the detail of an era now long and thankfully passed. It’s an adventure story, yes, but a bruising, brutal one that you won’t forget for many a year.

At this point in my book reviews I usually indulge myself with some fantasy casting for some imaginary movie or TV adaptation. That is impossible this week because The North Water has already been dramatised by the BBC, with Colin Farrel as Drax, Jack O’Connel as Sumner and the irrepressible Stephen Graham as Brownlee. I haven’t seen the TV series yet, but if it’s half as good as the novel, I’m in for a treat.

Abandoned flats, scary shadows, killer kids

Okay, well this week we’re still on the publicity trail for NEVER SEEN AGAIN. But don’t switch off too soon. Because I’ve got some new and exciting info on that front.

In addition, as a delectable treat (I’m sure you’ll agree), I’ve included a video of me reading a selected extract. It’s not a long piece, but something that I hope will capture the mood and suspense of the book.

On top of all that, on the topic of creepiness, eeriness, the chills to be had in the midst of everyday society and so forth, I’ll also be reviewing and discussing William Trevor’s very disturbing short novel, THE CHILDREN OF DYNMOUTH, which, if you have any appetite at all for truly dark fiction, I suspect you’ll gobble down in one sitting.

If you’re only here for the William Trevor review, no problem. As always, you’ll find it at the bottom end of today’s blogpost in the Thrillers, Chillers section. But before then …

In my own words
NEVER SEEN AGAIN is my latest novel. It was published earlier this month by Orion, and it falls firmly into the urban thriller category. It follows the fortunes of one David Kelman, a washed-up journalist, who, repentant though he is of the rapacious approach he brought to crime reporting in his junior days, now ekes out a lesser living by writing dirty stories about wayward celebrities. And then, suddenly, literally out of the blue, he gets a sniff of a story that could dramatically change his fortunes. Not just because it might well catapult him back into the big time, but because it could save the life of an heiress who was kidnapped six years ago and has long been thought dead, but whom David now knows is still alive and being held somewhere against her will.

The question is, does he do the good citizen thing and get the cops involved? Or does he do what David Kelman always does best, go it alone and bring home the goods entirely off his own bat, hogging all the glory and the kudos in the process. It was this latter method that got him in trouble in the past. But on other occasions it worked spectacularly. Why wouldn’t it work this time?

All right, enough with the sales pitch.

If you like what you’ve heard so far, you might be interested to know that, as of today, NEVER SEEN AGAIN  has hit the ASDA charts today (not sure what number at, but I think 8 or possibly 7), which is something I’m inclined to shout about from the rooftops. It also seems to be hitting the sweet spot with Amazon, as two weeks since publication it can now boast 54 online reviews, the majority of them carrying 5-star ratings.

In the meantime, as promised, here’s a short extract from NEVER SEEN AGAIN , with yours truly in the reading chair. It focusses on a point in the narrative when David Kelman has followed a trail of clues to an abandoned apartment block in a bleak coastal town. Someone related to the investigation committed suicide here. David doesn’t know why, but it’s essential that he finds out ...



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 CHILDREN OF DYNMOUTH  by William Trevor (1976)
Outline
It’s the mid-1970s, and the Dorset town of Dynmouth is typical of the UK’s drab seaside resorts. It’s not a big place, and it isn’t one of those holiday hotspots for the working class like Blackpool or Margate, which are still thriving. The entertainments here have seen better days, there is little for the town’s youngsters to do and, aside from the sandpaper factory, nowhere for them to work when they grow up.

The town looks pretty enough, but it has its fair share of social problems, particularly at Cornerways, the local sink estate. However, there are also issues outside of Dynmouth’s poor quarter. Many local families have split in recent years and there is a general air of dissatisfaction. People don’t want to live here anymore, but they don’t know where else to go. They are distressed by the sight of local yobbos, the so-called ‘Dynmouth hards’, riding around on motorbikes in black leather jackets, but are too apathetic to report them to the police.

Weary Reverend Quentin Featherston considers it all a sign of the times. Society is changing dramatically, not necessarily for the better in his view, and even though the Easter fête is shortly due to occur, he fears that old traditions are disappearing and that the half-empty church on Sundays indicates people are no longer content with the promise of a happy afterlife. He also worries that he is not the man to deal with this, and that he looks ridiculous cycling about the town in his clerical collar and bicycle clips, trying to counsel people to whom he is irrelevant. He even suspects that his own family think him a fool, his twin daughters constantly playing up, his morose wife, Lavinia, not having fully recovered from a recent miscarriage, unimpressed by his belief in a benevolent God.

For the most part the vicar soldiers on, though there is one problem in Dynmouth that even the Rev. Featherston is flummoxed by. And that is the creepy 15-year-old, Timothy Gedge.

And when I say ‘creepy’, I choose my words carefully.

A strange-looking blond-haired boy from Cornerways, Timothy Gedge is the product of a home that is well and truly broken, his father having abandoned it years ago, his self-interested mother and promiscuous older sister persistently chasing their own pleasures, having completely neglected him during his most formative years. But Gedge is not an archetypal troubled youth. Though he’s in the habit of accosting people and engaging them in meaningless and meandering conversations, and perhaps more worryingly, is an habitual thief who will steal anything regardless of its value (and who in true predator fashion, mainly targets for theft the people involved around the church as they tend to be naïve and trusting), he doesn’t shout or swear or show any violent tendencies. He cross-dresses in private, in clothes he of course has stolen. But while none of these traits are endearing, they are not necessarily unusual.

What is unusual, and disturbing, is Gedge’s favourite hobby, which is following people around the town, learning all there is to know, and then, at some opportune time in the future, blackmailing them. And he’s obsessive when he does this. These people, often chosen at random, become his firm projects and their exploitation his raison d’être, and he won’t be thrown off-track, no matter what happens.

But even this isn’t the creepiest aspect of Timothy Gedge’s behaviour.

While he’s amassed quite a collection of nasty secrets that he knows he’ll be able to use in the future – pub-owner Plant’s affairs with married women in the town, war-hero Commander Abigail’s predeliction for boyscouts, and respectable married couple the Dasses’ heartbreaking fall-out with their neurotic and foolish son – he also has a fascination with death. He attends all the town’s funerals, and if anyone asks him, remarks that the best place for the people of Dynmouth is in coffins. As an extension of this morbidity (and this hints at an even darker side to his character), he plans to enter the Easter fête talent contest (having convinced himself that Hughie Green of Opportunity Knocks fame will be in attendance), where he intends to put on a one-man pantomime based on the ‘Brides in the Bath’ murders. It seems that 1900s wife-slayer, George Joseph Smith, once stayed at Dynmouth, and Gedge wishes to celebrate this by performing comedy routines about his trio of horrific crimes. For this he needs props: a bath for example, the type of suit the murderer wore, a wedding dress for when he’s impersonating the doomed brides. To obtain all these, his blackmail schemes go into overdrive.

But as so often happens with cool and confident villains, Timothy Gedge has finally reached the point where he’s about to overplay his hand …

Review
The first thing to say here is that, even though The Children of Dynmouth is one of the most subtle horror stories I have ever read, I doubt that Irish author William Trevor, widely regarded as one of the best short story writers of his age (and no stranger to the horror and supernatural genres), intended it to be anything of the sort. It’s more a two-pronged character study: both of a declining seaside town in a soulless age and the negative impact it has on the children trapped there, and of the most extreme case of this, Timothy Gedge.

But don’t assume that this is still, at heart, the simple tale of an underrage maniac terrorising a town. It isn’t anything like so straightforward. It’s much more the study of an unloved youngster from a deeply dysfunctional background, whose prurient interests have been allowed to fester, and whose alarming lack of self-awareness has turned him into a car crash just waiting to happen … but it’s also about those he preys upon, and what they should (or maybe must) do in their own defence.

Ultimately, Gedge is a narcissist, and malicious with it. The horrendous mental torture he puts his victims through is not to be sniffed at, nor diminished by sociological explanation. While we might feel sympathy for the youngster he was when all this started, he is already beyond recall, and the issue now is what to do with him. Other children in the town feel that he needs to be exorcised, most of the adults simply wish that he wasn’t there anymore (in other words dead or disappeared; they don’t care which), while the most enlightened character in the book, the Rev. Featherston, is lost for ideas but expects, as do we, that at some point in the not too distant future, Gedge will finish up in prison.

And yet none of these intricate complexities of thought and situation, or any of the book’s very rich character-work, is conveyed to us through simple exposition. Trevor sets the scene with delicious prose, but his descriptive method, while powerful, is succinct. He hits us with occasional introspective moments as various townsfolk try to process their latest experience of Timothy Gedge, regarding him as an irritant, an oddball, a nuisance, but the true depths of the boy’s bizarre villainy, and the nightmarish predicaments he routinely foists onto his neighbours, only really emerge during his unnerving encounters with these other characters, particularly the fast flowing dialogue in which Gedge’s glib tongue, unfunny jokes, disingenuous viewpoints and weird philosophies hit us like machine-gun rounds.

Despite William Trevor’s already unimpeachable reputation, I found all this remarkably well done and completely engrossing. I also found much of it chilling, hence my firm conviction that though a literary novel, The Children of Dynmouth is firmly classifiable as ‘dark fiction’. The scene in which Gedge makes a phone-call attempting to impersonate the female concierge at the local cinema in an effort to lure out 12-year-old half-siblings, Stephen and Kate Fleming (perhaps his most cruelly abused victims) and even though he is quickly rumbled, persists with the charade, unwilling to acknowledge defeat, is suggestive of a true psychopath and genuinely disturbing.

But I reiterate: this isn’t a straightforward thriller.

Towards the end of the book, when the jig is basically up, and we identify the root cause of Timothy Gedge’s behaviour and it’s heartbreakingly sad, it comes as a massive wrench because up until now we’ve hated the boy.

Call this book a thriller if you want, or a mystery, but there’s so much more going on. It’s dark stuff, for sure, by turns distressing and frightening, but also sad and thought-provoking. It would be too easy to write Timothy Gedge off as evil or insane (as so many here do), but he’s also a human being, albeit badly damaged.

He is every inch one of The Children of Dynmouth .

Here we go, I’m now, yet again, going to embarrass myself by trying to cast this tale in advance of some imaginary film or TV production. (If there already has been one, you’ll have to forgive me, as I’m unaware of it at present).

Featherston – Richard E Grant
Gedge – Noah Jupe

Tension grows as publication draws closer

Another totally gratuitous blogpost this week I’m afraid, as this Thursday, March 17, sees publication of my next novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN. For those who think I may be carrying this thing a bit far, that it’s all a tad self-indulgent to keep going on about this, that you’ve heard it all before, yadda yadda … I can only apologise.

The best we authors can usually hope for is to have one of our books published each year (though sometimes two … you never know), so I’m very excited. And anyway, all kinds of things are happening, so it’s not like I’ve nothing new to report.

In keeping with today’s theme, exciting thrillers, I’m also pleased today to offer a detailed review and discussion of the late, great Philip Kerr’s very classy period piece, THE PALE CRIMINAL.

As usual, if the Kerr review is your main interest, you’ll find it at the lower end of today’s post in the Thrillers, Chillers section.

Almost time
Before then, we’re going to talk about the near-imminent publication of NEVER SEEN AGAIN , which, even if I say so myself, is a beautiful thing. Here is a shot of me holding in my hand the very first one off the press.

In addition to that, as you can see topside, an exciting looking blog tour commences today. 
I adore these. For those unfamiliar with the concept, in each case, on each day, a different blogger will offer a review and/or a bit of incisive chit-chat about the title in question (and this time, of course, it happens to be mine). Either way, review or gossip, these book-blogger folks do a sterling job. They really are one of the best methods we have for getting the word out these days. I always appreciate it when I’ve got a new title due, and quality book-persons like these come on board and put in a good word. Many thanks to all those involved.

Not that NEVER SEEN AGAIN hasn’t already passed through the hands of quite a few august individuals. You may have noticed that it’s accrued some great quotes from fellow authors I really rate. 
Check these out.

Exceptional crime writing. Paul Finch continues to raise the bar.
MW Craven
A spine-chilling mystery from the master of suspense.
MJ Arlidge
This might be Finch’s best yet … Grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.
PL Kane
A cracking crime thriller that builds to an action-packed finale. Guaranteed to elevate your heart-rate!
David Jackson
I should also say, and this is the bit where today’s post REALLY gets self-indulgent, that with three days still to go, we now have some very effusive write-ups on NETGALLEY . 
Here are a few choice quotes:

It is so tense that I had to keep putting it down for a breather. *****
Elaine T
The story is paced perfectly, the underlying mystery so carefully threaded throughout the book that it kept me completely engrossed in the story. *****
Jen L
One of the best thrillers I have read in a long time and in my opinion the best book I have read by this author. *****
Peggy B
Gripping and compelling with an engaging storyline and explosive characters. *****
Ariah H
I felt very honoured to read these, as the whole purpose of NETGALLEY is that reviewers participating are required to give a completely honest appraisal. It’s not in their interest to fib for the sake of the author or publisher; they would gain nothing from that. My heartfelt thanks to all, so far and still to come, who have taken a chance on NEVER SEEN AGAIN .

A bit of a bargain
I also hear, by the way, that there is a nice little bargain on the horizon.

Apparently, my stand-alone crime thriller of 2020, ONE EYE OPEN , will be available on Audible for ONLY £3 as part of a special promotion this Wednesday (March 16).
Yes, you read that correctly. ONLY £3.

For those of us who like to receive our fiction while we’re out walking the dog, or working on a treadmill, or driving on the motorway, or even riding an inter-city train, that’s got to be something to consider, yeah?

For those unaware, ONE EYE OPEN features a character who, at the time, was new to my books, DS Lynda Hagen, a former detective now turned road traffic accident investigator (primarily so that she can look after her kids and deal with her neurotic husband), who attends what appears to be a routine smash on the A12 in Essex, only to find a big mystery, which soon leads her down a rabbit hole into a terrifying world of armed robberies and organised crime.

As I say, the Audible version of ONE EYE OPEN , as performed by Louise Brealey, can be yours for the remarkable sum of £3 for one day only, March 16 (no coincidence, I suspect, that this is the day before we launch NEVER SEEN AGAIN ).


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 PALE CRIMINAL  by Philip Kerr (1990)

Outline
Berlin, 1938. Bernie Gunther, a former homicide detective now self-employed as a private eye, is working less than inspiring cases. Though he’s recently enlisted another ex-cop, Bruno Stahlecker, as his assistant, things still aren’t too exciting. They are currently investigating an attempted blackmail against the head of a major publishing company whose homosexual son has been writing indiscreet letters to his lover, a noted scientist called Lanz Kinderman.

It all seems pretty mundane and the two detectives finally break the case when they trace the letters to Klaus Hering, one of Kinderman’s recently dismissed employees. But during the course of this fairly innocuous enquiry, the likeable Stahlecker is shot and killed and a short time later, Hering, the main suspect, found hanged, presumably by his own hand.

Almost immediately afterwards, maybe coincidentally (or maybe not), the disheartened Gunther receives an order to attend Gestapo headquarters, where he meets two people who really existed in history, Arthur Nebe, head of the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo, the Criminal Police Force of Nazi Germany, and more unnervingly, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of Reich Security, a senior SS member and already a figure of terror to many.

However, for the moment, neither Nebe nor Heydrich are concerned with an issue of state; for once it is something a little more mundane, though it is bothering them a great deal. It hasn’t been publicised much, but a serial killer is operating in Berlin, sexually murdering school-age girls, specifically those who fit the Aryan ideal, i.e. pretty, blonde and blue-eyed.

With the force’s current batch of detectives unable to stop the atrocities, and in fact being made a mockery of, Gunther is commanded to reorganise the enquiry and take the role of lead investigator.

Unwilling to voluntarily assist the Nazi authorities, but seeing this cause as worthy (and given little choice in the matter anyway), he is reinstated to the police at the rank of Kriminalkommissar and given a dedicated team of Gestapo officers to work underneath him, including the crude, womanising Becker and the stiff but more-useful-than-expected Korsch.

Assisted (though sometimes hindered as well) by this misaligned bunch, Gunther works his way through a plethora of leads, all of which seem promising at first.

When Joseph Kahn is brought in, a Jewish oddball, who on the face of it at least seems a very likely suspect, an investigating psychiatrist casts doubt on his guilt and in fact Kahn commits suicide in custody, only for the real killer to then strike again.

Another possibility, one that Gunther likes particularly, centres around Gottfried Bautz, an ex-military fanatic with a long track-record of sexual violence, but yet again, Bautz is in custody when the prolific killer claims another victim.

And then the case takes a turn that none of the detectives are comfortable with.

From forensic investigations carried out by skilled pathologist, Hans Illman, it is concluded that all the murder victims to this point have been hung upside down and allowed to drain of blood. The cops purposely withhold this intelligence from the public, only to have their attention drawn to a grotesque cartoon in the widely-read Nazi propaganda periodical, Der Stürmer , depicting ‘German victims of Jewish violence’, all of them young women, all of them ritually strung upside down and allowed to bleed out.

Its publisher, Julius Streicher, a rabid and violent anti-Semite (and again a real historical personality), is a man of gross sexual habits, and despised by almost everyone who knows him as a boor and a brute. So, when a witness statement places a Streicher lookalike close to several of the crime scenes, it feels as if Gunther at last has a viable suspect. However, Julius Streicher also happens to be a senior administrator in Hitler’s government and, as Gauleiter of Franconia, a virtual czar in his home town of Nuremberg, which sits in the very centre of the Nazi heartland …

Review
There are 14 Bernie Gunther novels, of which The Pale Criminal was the second, all written by the late British author, Philip Kerr, though the first three, something of an entity in themselves, were published much earlier than the rest, between 1989 and 1991. Such was their acclaim that in crime-fiction circles even now they are referred to as the ‘Berlin Noir trilogy’.

And that is completely the atmosphere that Philip Kerr sought to create. His pre-war Berlin is a maze of dark and winding backstreets, drinking holes of ill repute and seedy stairways ascending to decayed garrets wherein prostitutes and pornographers can be found. Meanwhile, in Bernie Gunther, Kerr gave us a youngish (going on middle-aged) protagonist, hardened by his previous experiences as a soldier and a cop, with no loved ones to speak of (none of whom are alive), no real talent other than his ability to catch crooks, and an outlook on life that is cynical and wry, but also relaxed. He’s a tough cookie who instinctively believes the worst of people, but he has a grim sense of humour, which manifests in regular and amusing wisecracks.

Like the Chandler-esque heroes on whom he is based, he also has a deep mistrust of authority, so much so that he’s now his own man, still chasing bad guys but mostly independently, as wary of the police and judiciary as he is the underworld.

Of course, in Gunther’s case there is a genuine, full-on reason for this. The civilian police force he joined after being demobbed from the army at the end of World War One is now under the control of the totalitarian Nazi regime. Every day, the freedoms Germans enjoyed during the Weimar Republic are being curtailed, and with Hitler’s constant provocations aimed overseas, the next war doesn’t feel very far off.

It’s ironic, therefore, that in The Pale Criminal, Gunther finds himself with no option but to assist these Swastika-clad bullies in their hunt for a monster of the street-level variety.

And to be frank, I don’t blame Kerr for taking this diversion. Because which purveyor of historical crime fiction could resist the inclusion in their latest novel of such real-life personalities as Heydrich, Himmler and Julius Streicher? And it doesn’t stop there. Much like Chris Petit with his exceptional The Butchers of Berlin (even though that was written 25 years later), Kerr revels in the opportunity to breathe life into some of the great villains of history.

To a degree, this goes exactly the way you’d expect. Top cop Arthur Nebe, for example, who though in later life he was hanged for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was regarded by the Allies as a Holocaust facilitator who would likely have faced prosecution had he lived so long, and in this book he embodies that role, appearing as a classic fence-sitter. Otto Rahn and Karl Weisthor, meanwhile, though SS officers, were also known for their bizarre behaviour and occult obsessions, and in Kerr’s hands this is taken to new extremes, the pair of them portrayed not just as fanatics, but as individuals who are quite patently insane. Meanwhile, Julius Streicher, or ‘Jew-Baiter Number One’ as he liked to term himself, is every inch the ill-mannered cur that he was regarded as during his actual life, while with Himmler, though this book mostly concentrates on his fascination with mysticism and so depicts him in less belligerent form than usual, we still get the feeling that below his calm exterior lies a dangerous madman.

But it is Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague and chairman of the infamous Wannsee Conference, whose presence in this novel I found most intriguing. In real life, of course, Reinhard Heydrich was killed in 1942 by Czech commandos, and at the time considered no loss to humanity due to his irredeemably evil reputation. In Kerr’s version, however, we see a much more reflective character. An arch-controller who we’re in no doubt can authorise violence at the drop of a hat, but a man serious about his role as a government official, someone who doesn’t want war with the Allies and who sees it as his duty to maintain order and stability in the new Germany … even to the extent where he is concerned that pogroms against the Jewish community might damage the economy. In fact, this is the entire reason behind his hiring of Gunther, a proven homicide cop, who is separate from the main police and can be relied upon to bring in this brutal slayer of Aryan daughterhood without the blame being passed to the Jews.

This is certainly not the utterly ruthless and anti-semitic Heydrich that I thought I knew from history, but then The Pale Criminal is set in 1938, and maybe it’s the case that many of these extreme Nazi villains only grew into those roles gradually as absolute power absolutely corrupted them. (It could also be a double-bluff, I suppose, because if Heydrich genuinely was ambivalent to the Jews in his early days, his willingness to annihilate them only a few years later more than hints at a deeply disturbed personality).

But that’s The Pale Criminal and how it relates to history.

What about the story itself?

Well, like all good mysteries, it’s a page-turner. Kerr focusses tightly on the investigation, the twists coming thick and fast, many of the lesser characters simply servicing the plot though they’re all very visible and believable.

Gunther himself makes an appealing hero, though a warning in advance. This book is set in the 1930s and subsequently contains few modern attitudes. Homosexuality was illegal then even in Britain (and viciously punished in Nazi Germany), and that’s on full display here. At the same time, the police use violence routinely, both against people and property. Interrogation of suspects includes lots of roughhouse – and Gunther participates in this as much as the others. He’s also guilty of lusting after almost every woman he meets, including a high-ranking female psychologist and even Hildegard Skeininger, the beautiful but heartbroken mother of one of the child victims … though to be fair to Gunther, he’s never especially ungentlemanly.

Kerr’s writing style is always accessible and there are few complexities in the case, the story bouncing along at a jaunty pace against an ongoing atmosphere of menace provided by the Nazis but studded with occasional and welcome bouts of humour.

I earlier mentioned Chris Petit’s dark masterpiece, The Butchers of Berlin , but the tone here is far lighter than that. In The Pale Criminal , Germany has not yet descended into a fiery wartime Hell. You really get the impression that well within the living memory of almost everyone in the book, this society had once been civilised and democratic, and that many of the officials our main character encounters haven’t yet adjusted from that. Life for many goes on as normal.

All round, this is an excellent and atmospheric thriller. There are no massive surprises, but it’s a fast, compelling read, its authentic historical setting adding much more than lurid background colour.

And now my usual folly. I’m going to imagine The Pale Criminal as a movie or TV show, and cast it right in front of you. I don’t know if anyone’s ever attempted this in real life, but I’d be delighted if they did

Bernie Gunther – Tim Roth
Hildegard Skeininger – Teresa Palmer
Professor Hans Illman – Christoph Waltz
Julius Streicher – Gary Oldman
Arthur Nebe – Philip Jackson
Frau Lange – Emily Watson
Reinhard Heydrich – Hugo Weaving
Becker – Alex Høgh Andersen
Korsch – Tom Felton
Rolf Vogelman – Thomas Gabrielsson
Otto Rahn – Joseph Fiennes
Karl Weisthor – Rhys Ifans
Lanz Kinderman – Bill Nighy

Counting down the days with my top five

I can’t pretend that I’m not getting very excited about the publication of my next novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN, on March 17. So excited in fact that I’ll be focussing primarily on my own writing today (so, sorry about that in advance). In short, I thought today might be the ideal opportunity to look back through my crime thriller output of the last few years, and select what I consider to be my best five novels to date, with a little bit of info attached to each one just to illustrate why and how I came to this conclusion.

It isn’t going to be totally about me, though. On the subject of hard-nosed crime thrillers, particularly those featuring journalists rather than cops (in keeping with  NEVER SEEN AGAIN ), I thought today would also be the perfect time to review and discuss the late, great Mo Hayder’s exceptionally frightening and intriguing mystery, PIG ISLAND.

If you’re only really here to read about that, it’s no problem. You’ll find that review/discussion, as usual, at the lower end of today’s blogpost in the Thrillers, Chillers section.

NEVER SEEN AGAIN
Again as mentioned at the top of this page, and I’m particularly stoked about this, publication of my twelfth crime novel to date, but only my second with Orion Books, is imminent. Anyone who’s interested in this stuff will have noticed a slight change of tone since I went to Orion, though as I keep reiterating to the many readers who continue to get in touch (for which I’m very grateful, by the way), the Heck and Lucy Clayburn series are far from finished – it’s just that my focus of the last few years has been on stand-alone thrillers rather than series.

ONE EYE OPEN  was the first of these, and  NEVER SEEN AGAIN  will follow in that tradition, though all my crime novels are set in the same universe. Throughout them, you’ll spot references to the National Crime Group, the Organised Crime Division, the Serial Crimes Unit, and so on, while characters who have background roles in some will have foreground roles in others etc.

But  NEVER SEEN AGAIN  brings us an entirely new investigator in the shape of David Kelman, and for once he’s not a cop.

A disgraced crime reporter, Kelman’s life has gone to pieces over the last few years. Basically, he blew a confidence, which had catastrophic results; not just for him personally and professionally, but for his newspaper and for the life of a young heiress who’d been kidnapped. Six years have rolled by since then, and David, no longer respected in the industry, can only scratch a living by writing celebrity shockers for the scandal mags. Which macho and married TV personality is currently courting male prostitutes? Which respectable film star has a criminal past that she’d rather forget? And so on.

Until, very unexpectedly, he is offered an opportunity not just to redeem himself, but to save the life of someone he thought long ago murdered. But the problem is that no one trusts him and no one will work with him. So, he’s going to have to do this all on his own, and follow a path that will take him into a dark, dangerous world of racketeering, crooked cops and professional killers.

I’ve often traded on the fact I was a cop before I became a full-time author. But I had another job between the two. I was a journalist working for a range of newspaper titles across the Northwest of England. I want to stress right now that the real me was no more a David Kelman than he was a Mark Heckenburg. In reality, journalism is a responsible job, where the onus is on you to impart the news without prejudice and to get your facts right, rather than to sensationalise every bit of tittle-tattle that comes along in an effort to sell papers.

Okay, I get it that some of our more recent media darlings seem to have forgotten this message. But that was the jist of the role, as I knew it.

But as with police officers, the life and work of a journalist can be very intense and even dangerous. The possibility is always lurking that, if you get something wrong – badly wrong – it could have dire consequences. While the big difference between a cop and a journalist is that, if you’re going to get into the guts of some very bad people, the journo has very little muscle to call on as backup. He/she going to be walking a lonely and high-risk path.

This, in a nutshell, was the thinking behind  NEVER SEEN AGAIN . I’m very proud of it, even if I say so myself, but the proof is only in the eating. So, I am still eagerly awaiting March 17 and to see the first responses from neutrals.

By the way, if there’s anyone who’s really desperate to get their hands on a copy before then, the NetGalley option is open as always. Just go HERE .

And now, as promised …

My favourite five
In chronological order.

STALKERS  (2013)

This was my first crime novel to hit the mass-market, courtesy of Avon at HarperCollins.  STALKERS  introduced my primary cop character, DS Mark Heckenburg. A loner detective working for Scotland Yard’s elite Serial Crimes Unit, Heckenburg, or Heck, a northerner displaced to London to escape a tragic past, which has left him almost friendless in his homeland, is now part of a specialist team that tracks serial offenders, mainly rapists and murderers, across all the police force areas of England and Wales. He is tough and resourceful, an habitual risk-taker and rule-bender, but in many ways he’s quite vulnerable too, not least because of the sexual chemistry he shares with Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper, a by-the-book officer but his former girlfriend when, back in the day, they were detective constables together, though now she’s his boss and someone he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with on most law-enforcement techniques.

In  STALKERS , Heck’s first outing, he pieces together a confusing number of disappearances by uncovering the presence of the Nice Guys, a secretive crime syndicate whose racket, to be blunt, is a rape club. At the behest of high-paying clients, they kidnap named individuals to order and then provide a private location in which they can be sexually attacked and murdered, before undertaking to dispose of all the evidence.

STALKERS  is still one of my best-selling novels, and it produced a lead character who proved to be very popular with my readership (over 260,000 copies sold thus far). Such was its success that it directed me firmly into crime-thriller territory, whereas previously I’d written widely within horror, sci-fi and historical fantasy.

SACRIFICE (2013)

This was the second Mark Heckenburg novel, and to date it remains Heck’s main contribution to the folk horror genre. In it, Heck, Gemma and the rest of SCU go in pursuit of a ‘calendar killer’, an unsub (or group of unsubs) nicknamed the Desecrator, who abducts people at random and sacrifices them in gruesome ways to celebrate ancient folk festivals, many of which have become little more in the 21st century than fun nights out: a drunk burned alive on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, for example; a tramp dressed in a Father Christmas suit and walled into a chimney on Christmas Eve; a pair of young lovers shot through their respective hearts by a single arrow on Valentine’s Day. I think you get the drill.

A horror buff from years back, I was really delighted when the staff at Avon went for this idea. It allowed me to let rip with some truly ghastly murders and to delve deeply into the mysterious rites, some of them quite sinister, that lurk behind many of our most innocent traditions.

Funnily enough, my initial plan was to run this story from late summer, through the autumn and into the winter, but having scoured the calender for meaningful days, it soon became apparent that there were far more to choose from in the spring. The killing spree thus starts at Christmas and extends to May.

There’s quite a high body-count in this one, and I like to think some spectacularly twisted baddies. It remains my favourite Heck novel to date.

STRANGERS  (2016)

This novel first appeared at the request of Avon, who, while they were happy with the Heck novels, were keen to see a parallel series featuring a female protagonist. Although Lucy Clayburn already existed, at least on paper.

Well over a decade earlier, I’d speculatively written a television drama called Dirty Work , centred around a young female police detective in Manchester, who was blue-collar in origin and highly competent but regarded with suspicion by many of her male colleagues because she’d blown the whistle on a bunch of corrupt officers early in her career. The main investigation in Dirty Work was into a series of torture-murders of underworld figures, which, it later transpired, was the response of another cadre of corrupt cops who were looking to cover up past indiscretions and avert the exposure of a significant number of miscarriages of justice.

Miscarriages of justice were big news at the time, the early/mid-1990s, but they weren’t by 2016, when HarperCollins were looking for their own Lucy Clayburn series. The story had to be changed, as did certain aspects of Lucy’s personal circumstances, owing to these having (mysteriously, in my view) appeared on another TV cop show (after Dirty Work had been touted around for quite a while). As such, the Lucy who appeared for the first time in  STRANGERS  was still a junior police detective in Manchester, came from a poor background, was the child of a single mother etc, but now there were additions, and these, for my money, were a huge improvement. She rode a Ducati M900 because she had a Hell’s Angel past, there were still problems with some of her colleagues, this time because she’d made a mistake during her first week in CID, which had seen her DI shot and wounded. But the real complication in her life – though it doesn’t come to the fore in  STRANGERS  until later in the story – is that only long after she’d joined the police did Lucy learn that she was the estranged daughter of Frank McCracken, a major organised crime figure in Northern England.

In  STRANGERS , she gets the chance to redeem herself by going undercover as a streetwalker to try and snare a female serial killer known as Jill the Ripper, a deranged prostitute responsible for the sex murders of a number of her male clients.

Though a dark tale indeed,  STRANGERS  turned the traditonal murder mystery on its head in that men were the targets for a female slayer, and involved lots of research on my part, mainly with policewomen and ex-policewomen friends of mine who had done this very job (i.e. getting into their scanties and going out on the backstreets at night to catch bad uns). Thankfully, all these efforts seemed to pay off, as  STRANGERS  remains one of my most successful novels to date, having made the Sunday Times Top 10.

KISS OF DEATH  (2018)

My latest Heck novel, though there are more coming (trust me). This one takes note of the recent wave of police cuts, and sees the Serial Crimes Unit in grave danger of being disbanded as many of the top brass consider it a luxury. Gemma Piper, in an effort to save her unit, agrees to take on Operation Sledgehammer, the pursuit of the UK’s twenty most dangerous fugitives from justice who are still believed to be in the country. These are mass murderers all, gangsters, hitmen, serial rapists and the like. Heck and his new partner, the spiky but efficient Gail Honeyford, are put on the trail of a bank robber who often kidnaps and murders, but soon find evidence that a much more terrible game is in play.

Many of these men, it seems, are not missing because they are on the run, but because they themselves have been abducted for some nefarious purpose, and straightforward vigilanteism does not seem to be the explanation. In due course, Heck breaks open a conspiracy so horrific that even the Serial Crimes Unit hasn’t seen its like before. And finds it the work of a power so fiendish that even the UK’s worst criminals are little more to it than pawns in chess.

I consider  KISS OF DEATH  to be the most action-packed and violent of the Heck novels, but it’s become more famous since it was published for it’s so-called WTF ending (as I hoped it would at the time), which unfortunately I wasn’t able to follow up straight away because I was in the process of changing publishers.

I can only assure my readers that this story has not ended, that Heck will return, and that the next novel following on from this one is already written and now awaiting its publication slot.

ONE EYE OPEN  (2020)

My first novel for Orion, and one of my favourite pieces of work to date. It starts on a quiet road in Essex, where DS Lynda Hagen, a Serious Collision Investigation officer, enquires into a bizarre road accident in which a cloned car has veered off a highway into the woods for no apparent reason, severely injuring the two people on board, neither of whom are initially identifiable.

Lynda is a former CID officer who once dealt exclusively with crime. She only moved into Traffic because having two kids to raise and a husband struggling to recover from a nervous breakdown necessitated ordinary nine-til-five hours. But she still has well-honed detective instincts, and increasingly starts to suspect that this is no common-garden RTA. She can’t expect at this stage though, that it will lead her into a deadly world of armed robbery, organised crime and an underworld resource deemed so valuable by England’s various vying crime syndicates that they will kill and kill and kill to get their hands on it.

ONE EYE OPEN  took me right out of my comfort zone. It was the first crime novel I’ve written that didn’t also double as an action thriller. It does include a heist and a police pursuit sequence that one reviewer described as ‘the best I’ve ever read’, but it’s much more of a complex mystery, involving unreliable narration and non-linear time zones. Don’t let that put you off, though. It still features moments of what I hope are extreme suspense, even terror, and finally reaches what another reader described as ‘a great ending’.

I feel a bit self-conscious singing my own praises here, but that’s what today’s blog is all about (and you were warned in advance).

Anyway, these are the five crime novels that I consider I’ve done my best work on. Hopefully more will follow, maybe starting with  NEVER SEEN AGAIN , which I reiterate is published on March 17. At the end of the day, of course, only you readers can be the final judges.


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.

PIG ISLAND  by Mo Hayder (2006)

Outline
Joe Oakes is a rough-cut Liverpool-born investigative journalist, who specialises in exposing supernatural hoaxes and bringing charlatans to public ridicule. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn’t pay brilliantly well, and this, along with his self-employed status, is a constant problem for his attractive, middle-class wife, Lexie, who loves her hubby in her own way, but is increasingly tempted to stray towards the good-looking Harley Street doctor for whom she works as a receptionist.

Despite Oakes’s hit-and-miss reputation, he does have one very successful job under his belt. Back in the day, he travelled to the States and blew the gaff on British-born Evangelical faith-healer, Malachi Dove, who was conning people out of millions by performing fake life-saving surgeries ‘through prayer’. But that was in the past. The pickings have been leaner since then. However, very unexpectedly, Oakes gets a chance to revisit this glory when he learns that Dove has not disappeared into complete obscurity.

When mutilated body-parts, identified as having come from pigs, wash up on Scotland’s west coast, suspicion turns towards the small community on the isolated isle of Cuagach, better known as Pig Island. Oakes gets interested when he hears that the small group, who recently set up there as the ‘Psychogenic Healing Ministries’, are a satanic cult, and even more so when he learns that their pastor is one Malachi Dove.

The mystery deepens when shoddy video evidence taken by a tourist on a fishing boat appears to depict a half-human / half-animal hybrid walking on the Pig Island beaches. Local people on shore are convinced that the cult on the island, probably having performed sacrificial ceremonies which afterwards involved disposal of the animal parts, have raised a demonic entity: Pan, or maybe the Devil himself. Oakes is not so sure about that, but very sure that if Malachi Dove is involved, it will need to be investigated.

Rather to his surprise, when he contacts the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, they invite him to the island, saying that they abhor the rumours circulating and that they hope, if he comes for a visit, he will afterwards write about their activities, showing that they are not Satanists, just ordinary people looking for a new, simpler direction in life.

Oakes arrives on the island and at first glance sees only what the community spokesmen describe: friendly villagers, small, cheaply-constructed cabins, a meeting hall, and a chapel built into the rockface of a cliff, though it seems a little odd that this chapel possesses high-level security. What he doesn’t find is Malachi Dove, and when he enquires about this, he is told that the pastor has lost his mind and now lives in seclusion on the other side of the island. Oakes wants to go over there, but is advised not to by the nervous community.

This is a red rag to a bull, and at the first opportunity, the journalist attempts to cross to the other side of Cuagach, only to find that the area where Dove allegedly lives has been barricaded off by a ditch filled with drums of toxic waste and a tall, electrified fence along the top of which pigs’ severed heads have been set as warnings.

Despite these alarming fortifications, he manages to infiltrate Dove’s domain, even entering the exile’s squalid hovel of a house. When he discovers evidence that the madman has been butchering pigs as part of a ritual, having first attempted to exorcise demonic souls into their bodies the way Jesus did with the Gadarene Swine, he thinks he’s seen it all.

But he hasn’t. Oakes doesn’t know it yet, but there is much, much worse to come …

Review
The late great Mo Hayder had a reputation for infusing her thrillers with gruesome detail, often pushing them over the dividing line into the horror genre. This is very much in evidence with Pig Island . However, appearances can be deceptive, because first and foremost this novel is a crime story, albeit a gory and disturbing one.

But you know, you have to admire an author who so fearlessly tackles the sordid realities of life on humanity’s fringes. Forget the half-human creature, forget the rumoured witch-cult, forget the flyblown pig’s head totems on the boundary fence … much of the horror to be found here is of the grimly authentic kind: the squalid interior of the dwelling where an isolated misanthrope has been eking out a solitary, embittered existence; the rundown, needle-strewn housing estate where a police safehouse allows government witnesses to hide in plain sight (and to feel lonely and cut off from the world they knew); the grotesque details of the medical procedures required to repair the body of a young woman who has not just been beaten and sexually assaulted, but also burned; the day-to-day existence of a badly disabled girl who has found herself an object of scorn, fear and twisted sexual desire.

Yes, this is Mo Hayder country for sure. No taboo is too unsettling for her to examine it in unstinting detail.

But does it work as a thriller?

Well, we’re already in the world of hybrids. We have a hybrid creature lurking on Pig Island, and as I say, a hybrid narrative. It starts out with a near-Weird Tales feel, the intrepid journalist venturing to an eerie isle where a monster allegedly roams and the locals worship Satan, but then morphs into something – dare I say it – a little more mundane: a murder mystery filled with taut investigative police detail.

Does that spoil it?

Well, it jars a little on first reading, but all in all, Pig Island remains a very satisfying story, which is filled with tension, suspense and, when necessary, violence, and which ends on a real high note if you enjoy being shaken out of your wits.

It’s a stand-alone, having no connection with Hayder’s successful Jack Caffery series, and so the author clearly felt that she had free rein with the characters in this one, and she uses it very well.

With the exception of honest copper, Danso, nobody is really good in this tale. Even the central character, Oakes, is an antihero rather than a hero: a scruffy, irreverent hardcase who doesn’t believe in anything, but knows his craft and follows his leads doggedly at the expense of everything and everyone else in his life. His married relationship inevitably suffers. Wife Lexie hails from a completely different background, but is self-centred in a different way. She wants a better life, but is not sure that Oakes will provide that, or can even be part of it, and so is gradually edging her way out. There is a bond between them, however, which we see laid bare later in the book in a tear-jerking but also horrifying moment. But again, they are both guilty of deeply selfish behaviour, which makes a nice change when it comes to the good guys.

I can’t say too much about the other characters for fear of giving things away, though Angeline is also an intriguing creation: a seemingly abused and neglected child, so reviled by the narrow minds she is used to on the edges of civilisation that she has no confidence she’ll be accepted by the broader ones at its centre. Of course, still waters run deep, and Hayder does a great job here, giving little away about Angeline’s hidden depths while at the same time hinting that she has a stronger personality than initially appears.

I enjoyed all of that. I also hugely enjoyed the descriptive work. Without overdoing it, in Pig Island , Mo Hayder demonstrates a genius for contrasting the beauty of nature (that wild Scottish coastline with its heaving seas and rugged crags,) with the physical (and spiritual) grime and garbage that accumulates at the edges of an uncaring society.

Perhaps a less appealing part of the book, but important nonetheless in terms of atmosphere, is its air of sleaziness. This isn’t thrown at us in purpose-written dollops; it arises gradually from the text, like a bad smell. And not just from the carnage and perversion on the island, or the dingy pubs, dirty houses and litter-strewn backstreets on the mainland, (though all of this helps), but from the spiritual ugliness of so many of the characters.

The one thing I didn’t especially like is the laddish tone in which so much of this novel is written. Personally, I can do without an authorial voice that is itself littered with f-words. I don’t mind it in the dialogue between characters, but when the writer swears continually as well, it starts to feel a little forced to me (in this case I understand that it’s an attempt to get into the head of streetwise Joe Oakes, though even then it feels like a clumsy device).

But that’s the only black mark I give to Pig Island .

As I say it’s an odd one – horror/murder/suspense – but don’t let that put you off. If you like well-written and uncompromising fiction concerning dark, brutish subject-matter, you’ll be well served here. As you will, of course, if you just like good quality thriller fiction (though fainter hearts might be advised to steer clear).

And now, as always, I’m going to imagine a cast on the off-chance some TV bigshot reads this review and decides to put Pig Island on TV. Just a bit of fun, of course, not that I wouldn’t love to see it done in reality, not least because it would be a monumental challenge

Joe Oakes – Leon Lopez
Lexie Oakes – MyAnna Buring
Angelina – Annalise Nicole Basso
Malachi Dove – Jeffrey Combs (in a guest-star role, adding great horror movie pedigree)
Commander Peter Danso – Ian Grieve
DS Callum Struthers – Robin Laing

Check out my latest: NEVER SEEN AGAIN

I’m really made up today to be able to share this with you all. It’s the finished jacket art for my next novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN, which will be published by Orion on March 17 this year.

Obviously, this new title will be the main subject of my conversation today, but in keeping with the spirit of what I hope you’ll find a very dark thriller, I’ll also be reviewing ANTWERP, a macabre but very cool murder mystery from the pen of Nicholas Royle.

If you’re only here for the Nick Royle review, that’s absolutely fine, as always. You’ll find it, as usual, in the Thrillers, Chillers section at the lower end of today’s post.

First though, why don’t we talk a little bit about …

NEVER SEEN AGAIN
Before I say any more, here’s the official back-cover blurb, which I hope you’ll find interesting.
Jodie Martindale and her boyfriend were kidnapped six years ago. Her boyfriend was found dead the next week. Jodie was never seen again.

Journalist David Kelman, once a hotshot but now washed up, illegally comes into possession of Jodie’s brother's old phone. And on that phone is an unheard voicemail from two weeks ago. The voice is unmistakeably that of Jodie Martindale.
The message begins an obsession for Kelman - which takes him down a rabbit hole of lies, to a dark and deadly truth....
NEVER SEEN AGAIN  is a my brand new stand-alone crime novel, though the eagle-eyed among you may notice one or two characters and institutions from earlier novels (all my thrillers take place in the same universe). Like my last novel, ONE EYE OPEN , it takes place along the Essex/Suffolk borderland, a district where stretches of beautiful countryside intersperse with towns that are not exactly blots on the landscape, but in social terms are a bit of a mess (a sort of microcosm of England itself, you might say).
Here, we follow the fortunes, or misfortunes, of one David Kelman, a former crime reporter for the Essex Examiner, a daily newspaper read county-wide, where, many years ago, after breaking a sensational story about local police corruption, he was instrumental in setting up Crime Beat, an office of investigative journalism, the operatives of which prided themselves on getting deep into the guts of the Essex criminal fraternity, a group that included every kind of malefactor, from gangsters to ex abusers to serial killers.

For a brief time, Crime Beat was the bane of the Essex underworld. And then, from out of the blue, a budding young business tycoon and wealthy heiress, Jodie Martindale, was kidnapped along with her boyfriend. A few days later, the boyfriend was found on a refuse site, hands zip-tied at his back, a bullet in his skull. However, of Jodie there was still no trace.

Energised by the horror of the crime, David Kelman and his associates got on the case, David, as always, attempting to circumnavigate the police enquiry, and on this occasion making a horrific mistake, which had devastating consequences.

When we join the action, six years have passed, Jodie Martindale hasn’t been heard of since and the Essex Examiner is defunct. David Kelman is still an investigative reporter, but now chasing dirty stories – which celeb is secretly sleeping with who, etc – for the gutter press. Former colleagues revile him, the cops mistrust him, and after falling out with him as a direct result of all this, his wife, Karen, left and took his kids with her (though David doesn’t consider himself much of a role model anyway), so now he lives alone, short on cash and minus respect.

And then, one day, while sniffing around the edges of another family tragedy, he finds himself in illegal possession of a battered and barely functioning mobile phone. More important than this is the unanswered voice-message it contains. It was placed there by none other than Jodie Martindale, begging for someone to come and save her … and it was sent only two weeks ago!

Out of nowhere, David Kelman, the once-ace investigator, has a chance to redeem himself. But he knows that simply reporting this precious find won’t be good enough. If he wants to restore his reputation, and maybe do something good for a change, he has to find Jodie herself.

But it isn’t going to be easy. Because David Kelman is now on his own, with no back-up, no resources, and next to no money, and whoever the people are who’ve got her, they are stone cold killers …

Here, for your delectation, are a couple of choice excerpts:

It might be summer, but the pitch darkness was dank and chill. A stench of urine engulfed him; his feet kicked bottles and loose planks. He clicked his phone-light on, but the subterranean gloom only retreated a short distance. Every two yards, he paused to listen, but it was deathly quiet. When he came to a T-junction, the passage on the left ran about ten yards to the foot of a flight of concrete steps with a hint of daylight shimmering down. He ascended warily, reaching a switchback landing, where a single burned spoon lay in one of the corners.
     ‘Great place to spend your final days, Freddie.’
     On the next floor, there were windows, but again they’d been covered by steel hoardings, which allowed in minimal daylight. From here, passageways led off in two different directions. The one in front led to more stairs, but the one on the left travelled a significant distance, passing various battered-open doorways. David waited again, listening.
     He hadn’t planned what he was going to do once he got in here. Probably go from one flat to the next, looking for clues. Most likely, they’d show signs that vagrants had been living in them. Even here, on the landing of the first floor, there were tell-tale signs: crack phials, the occasional used syringe, but if there was anywhere where it was obvious the police had been, that would be the starting point.
     After that, though, it was anyone’s guess what he might glean from this.
     He went along the main corridor, steel-clad windows on his left, broken doorways on his right. There was nothing telling behind any of the latter. Fire-damaged walls, piles of masonry where ceilings had collapsed. His eyes were now attuning, however, and he came to an abrupt standstill when he saw what he thought was a figure waiting at the far end. He advanced again. Slower than before. The figure didn’t move, but the closer David drew, the more distinct it became.
     Whoever it was, they were wearing black. But had they also painted their face white? …

*
HMP Brancaster, or Gull Rock, had terrifying renown. Britain had no death penalty, but most of the inmates there had no hope of release. Not only were they all lifers, in many cases they’d had tariffs imposed, minimum sentences to be served: thirty years, forty years, even fifty, while in several notorious cases no parole date would ever be granted at all. Horror stories had thus spread far and wide about a regime of ultimate punishment, the damned souls trapped there suffering as they did in no other prison in the UK …
     A sharp electronic buzz broke Norm from his reverie. He peered up the towering slab of rivetted steel that was HM Brancaster’s inner gate.
     He huddled deeper into his anorak, not that it was offering great protection against the swirling gusts of rain, and glanced irritably at the heavy cloud cover as another zigzag of lightning split it end-to-end. To think that all the way north from Colchester he’d seen nothing but blue skies and summer sun. How quickly, as he’d neared his destination, all that had changed.
     With a hefty clunk, a single-door section of the gate swung inward.
     Norm stepped through into semi-darkness. Bare brick walls stood to either side; damp paving stones lay under his feet. He pulled back his hood and unzipped his anorak as two unsmiling officers emerged from a side office, checked him over with a portable metal detector and then subjected him to a vigorous body search. He’d already been advised not to bother bringing a notebook or pen, as both would be taken off him. Instead, he’d equipped himself with his Dictaphone, which, despite having told the authorities about it beforehand, the officers regarded with grave suspicion before handing it back without comment.
     One of them withdrew into his office, while the other indicated that Norm should accompany him. They left the gatehouse, passing along a covered corridor, on top of which the rain thundered. Through its high letterbox windows, he saw the glare of moving spotlights.
     ‘This the way prisoners are brought in?’ Norm asked.
     The officer, a tall, angular, lugubrious sort, seemed surprised to have been addressed.
     ‘They come in round the back, by secure transport,’ he said. ‘They only see this side of the prison if they’re being released. And that almost never happens.’
     ‘So, all this stark functionalism …’ Norm tried to sound as if he was being light-hearted. ‘That’s purely for the visitors?’
     ‘Visitors?’ The officer cracked a smile.


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.

ANTWERP   by Nicholas Royle (2004)

Outline
Johnny Vos is an arthouse moviemaker from the US with a deep fascination for the works of Belgian expressionist painter, the late Paul Delvaux. Perhaps inevitably, he isn’t the sort who attracts big funding for his projects, but this doesn’t stop him travelling to Antwerp, where he intends to make a documentary that will be the last word on a mysterious artist whose specialism was the creation of urban dreamscapes populated by naked, somnambulant women.

Vos, who is the kind of filmmaker that we suspect makes plans as he goes along, intends to reconstruct some of these surreal tableaux on celluloid, but in order to find sufficient women who are prepared to pose naked in public, hires prostitutes and exotic dancers from the city’s red light areas. We’re in liberated Belgium, of course, so this doesn’t cause too much of a stir … until two of the women are brutally murdered in apparent ritualistic circumstances, their ravaged corpses left in situ with video tapes of films made by cult Belgian director Harry Kümel (who, like Delvaux, is actually a real person).

Enter Frank Warner, a British film writer who has appeared in other Nick Royle works. Warner arrives in Antwerp with his personable girlfriend, Siân, looking for an opportunity to interview Vos, but finds a country still overshadowed by the crimes of another real-life personality, maniac Marc Dutroux, and reeling from the revelation that a new serial killer is on the prowl. The police are actively on the case in the guise of Detectives Bertin and Dockx but seem less than capable, which implies that Belgian officialdom has not learned a great deal since the Dutroux scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.

Though we readers meet the killer relatively early in the book, we don’t learn his identity but join him as he roams the city’s districts of post-industrial dereliction, particularly around the port area, dementedly planning further atrocities while reminiscing on a childhood from Hell.

While all this is going on, the author dangles several potential suspects in our path.

Vos himself is an obvious one, especially as he makes himself scarce after the police instruct him to stay put, while Harry Kümel, who would have been about 64 when this book was written and still very active, also makes a couple of guest appearances – not exactly as a potential murderer, though his movies are clearly held in some kind of reverence by the miscreant, so he’s a person of interest. Much more suspicious is the amoral diamond merchant and pornographer, Wim De Blieck, whose so-called ‘Last House on the Left’, a backstreet webcam house, has provided several of the sex workers cast by Vos, not to mention the odious Jan Spitzner, a former freakshow exhibit himself, now turned provider of ugly oddities through his own gruesome website, and someone who seems to be particularly besotted with certain of the ‘Last House’ housemates.

Initially, of course, our central protagonist, Frank Warner, is mainly interested in the works of Johnny Vos, though he is intrigued by the seeming connection between the murders and the two filmmakers. However, it takes a turn for the much more personal when Siân, who never really wanted to join Warner on this trip because she regards Vos as a chauvinistic conman, suddenly goes missing.

Warner is left bereft in the foreign city (‘foreign’ in so many ways, he now learns), hampered by unknowable bureaucracy, while the woman he loves – he didn’t realise how much until now! – has quite possibly been abducted by a relentless and deranged killer …

Review
Nicholas Royle first came to my attention back in the early 1990s as the author of countless readable but challenging short stories. Readable because they were so smoothly and beautifully written. Challenging because they were of a strongly surrealist bent, and while they were nominally horror stories, tended to go much, much deeper than that. His tales were also richly textured in terms of time, place and atmosphere, for all of which reasons I’m completely unsurprised that the first novel of Royle’s that I’ve ever read, Antwerp , is so engrossing.

To start with, the novel is well named, because Antwerp itself is a character in this narrative, if not the character. While the majority of the ensemble cast pursue each other at breakneck pace through the intricacies of the murder-mystery plot, the overarching presence, even though not every part of the story is set there, is the totemic titular city, which Royle doesn’t just describe in methodical, street-by-street detail, giving us far more than even the average tour-guide would, he also assesses in terms of its history, its culture, its many social and political upheavals, ultimately viewing it as a microcosm of Belgium overall, a small but compact country, which through the eyes and mouths of the book’s characters, most of whom are native (even Vos is of Belgian descent!) seems to be confused not just about its past, but about its present, and which is divided in terms of language and politics, and constantly seeking to establish a recognisable identity.

These are the author’s views, of course, or at least are the impression he was given after what must have been numerous exhaustive trips to Antwerp, because he writes about it as effortlessly, affectionately and familiarly as the rest of us might write about our home towns.

The Paul Delvaux factor is another indication of Royle’s interest in Belgian culture, the avant-garde painter well-regarded in his homeland. But the pursuit of the elusive Delvaux spirit, by the author and several of the protagonists in Antwerp, also underlines another of the author’s fascinations: the Euro art scene, not least European cinema, which, in an eerie fusion with the erotic horror-fantasies of Delvaux, plays a prominent role throughout this haunting tale.

However, Royle doesn’t immerse us in these interests of his just for the sake of it.

Voyeurism is a key theme throughout, particularly the voyeurism of women by men. And not just in the Delvaux paintings, but in Frank Warner’s endless trampings around the red light quarters of Antwerp (and other towns), wherein sad, scantily-dressed prostitutes tap on the windows to attract his attention, in the existence of the Last House on the Left, whereby men all over the world can watch selected women go about daily routines, which includes undressing and going to the lavatory, and even in the revered films of Harry Kümel, such as 1971’s Daughters of Darkness , a decadent vampire thriller about the modern day depredations of lesbian blood-drinker, Elizabeth Bathory, and Malpertuis , in which a mad genius manipulates his nubile victims through a vast and torturous maze.

Rather nicely, though, and perhaps a tad mischievously, Royle throws us an alternative viewpoint in the persona of Siân, who is unimpressed by all this intellectualisation of what she considers to be nothing more than sordid mysoginy, and doesn’t hesitate to say it.

But Antwerp is not just about its subtext. It is also a serial murder story, and though few of us, even in fiction, are unlikely ever to encounter a killer who wraps his victims in video tape or buries them in rubble with the cassettes of art-horror classics, there is a distinct air of the grimly real about it all. The bleak corners of Antwerp, the derelict shipyards, the burned-out factories, the empty, labyrinthine shells of buildings where business and commerce once thrived (dead zone, Doel, for example, is marvellously realised as one of the last places on Earth!) are ghoulishly reminiscent, to my mind at least, of Northern England during the scourge of the Yorkshire Ripper, and make the perfect hunting ground and deposition site for an urban predator of the 21st century, particularly when his chosen prey, though they might briefly stimulate the male gaze, will never be anything more to most men than a disposable pleasure.

(To Royle’s immense credit, by the way, he ascribes names and faces to many of these poor victims, describing to a degree their torturous everyday experiences so that we at least feel something as life leads them to the lion’s den. In my view, too many serial killer stories lack any kind of compassion for the victims).

Yes, there’s a dark, stark and very scary aura around the murder case itself, the blundering local police juxtaposed with a phantom figure, who is never seen and only heard from whenever his victims are found. The desperation Frank feels as he searches for Siân is painful to experience. The hopelessness of his cause as he scours the wearisome cityscape, mostly just following his nose as a journalist, feels utterly dispiriting.

On top of all this, of course, and without going into too much detail for fear of providing spoilers, Royle shows his horror-writing chops by spicing the whole thing with several taut, nerve-wracking sequences, again relying heavily and successfully on strange and terrible derelict structures, creating an atmosphere of jeopardy and despair.

All round, Antwerp is an excellent and enthralling thriller, quite arty in some of its ambitions, but only in the best kind of way, and though never terrifying, exacting in terms of the stress its complex and chilling storyline puts you through. Strongly recommended for all those with an interest in the darker side of fiction (and the arts).

And now, as usual, on the off-chance that Antwerp gets a sniff of a film or TV deal, I’m going to be ill-advised enough to try and get my casting suggestions in first. Only a bit of fun, of course. Who would listen to me anyway?

Frank – Timothy Innes
Siân – Millie Brady
Johnny Vos – Matthew Lillard
Jan Spitzner – Carel Stuycken
Harry Kümel – Jeroen Krabbé
Wim De Bliek – Walter Baele

Part Two of the festive chiller - STUFFING

Delighted today to present the second installment of my brand new Christmas horror story, STUFFING. Hope you’re enjoying it so far, and exceedingly pleased that you’ve opted to come back for some more. However, before you commence reading, just a quick reminder - this is PART TWO. If you want to start at the beginning, aka PART ONE, and you haven’t done that already, just scroll down to the previous post, which you will find on December 8. (Meanwhile, PART THREE will appear right here on December 23).
One additional thing. Seeing as we’re in short story territory today, I will also be reviewing the latest anthology from Midnight Street, Trevor Denyer’s excellent RAILROAD TALES. From that title, the subject matter probably speaks for itself, but those who know Trevor Denyer know that they won’t just be getting any ordinary antho. You’ll find said review, as usual, at the lower end of today’s post, in the Thrillers, Chillers section.

Before then, though, hope you enjoy ...

STUFFING2Cleghorn hit one light-switch after another as they traversed a succession of tall, drab rooms, most of them unfurnished and connected by spartan passages laid with threadbare carpets. It was warmer than outside at least, though not markedly so, and there was a faint odour of mildew.
     One thing completely notable by its absence was the festive season.
     “You don’t celebrate Christmas anymore, Mr Cleghorn?” Max asked.
     “I had a bellyful of that during the ’70s,” came the curt response.
     “Your Christmas shows are fondly remembered by the Great British public.”
     “Then more fool the Great British public. Though I don’t blame them entirely. Not given the unadulterated shite that passes for British television today.”
     Kerry groaned inwardly. If Cleghorn was one of these nostalgia buffs who firmly believed that TV was always better in the past, then he’d already found common ground with Max, and that was the last thing she wanted. Not that Cleghorn was a particularly warm or welcoming presence. Now that he’d put a few lights on, she could see him properly. As she’d already noted, he didn’t stoop or bend, or walk with an old man’s shuffle, but his age showed in his wizened hands and yellow, cracked fingernails, in his liver-spotted scalp and thin, peevish face. His eyes were rheumy and jaundiced, but seemed alert. His clothing was a suit of scruffy brown Tweed, long unpressed, and underneath that a collar and tie so grubby that it was difficult to tell what colour they were supposed to be.
     In that regard, the past-its-best room he finally led them into fitted him to perfection.
     Kerry presumed it was the lounge, and that it was located at the front of the house, but she could only guess that because though there were two large bay windows, both were screened off by drawn curtains laden with dust. In fact, dust was a common theme. The carpet was so thick with it that in the room’s corners it had curled upward into balls of fluff. It clad the lampshades too and clustered the overhead chandelier with web-like strands. Meanwhile, the furniture, while it wasn’t exactly tatty, was old and worn. Though it comprised one armchair, a sunken sofa, and alongside that, some kind of footrest, an overlarge beanbag or poof, covered with a rather disgusting furry brown material, it didn’t come close to filling the spacious room, but was arranged around a large hearth, which though it was black and sooty, clearly hadn’t been used in a long time. There was no television, Cleghorn’s main form of recreation appearing to reside with newspapers, magazines and periodicals, of which there were great numbers, some on the floor, some scattered on the sofa, some shoved into a rack.
     “Make yourselves at home,” he said, hanging his scarf from a hook above the telephone table, the landline on top of which was so dated that it almost looked Edwardian. “I hope you’re not expecting food and drink?”       “Oh … erm, no, not at all,” Max replied.
     “Because I don’t do that sort of thing. I mean, you can have a drink, obviously. You want tea or coffee, it’s in the kitchen. Likewise, if you want something stronger …” He nodded towards an open drinks cabinet containing a range of bottles. “But I don’t wait on people.”
     “We’re good, thanks.”
     Despite her increasing revulsion for Bernie Cleghorn, Kerry couldn’t help being intrigued by him. To date, Max had held face-to-face interviews with at least fifteen individuals who’d formerly been famous. They’d ranged widely: from a Formula 1 ace who’d lost his nerve, to a TV cookery queen who’d been busted twice for drunken driving, on the last occasion having caused an accident that nearly killed someone; from a soap opera star whose domestic violence had seen three different women divorce him, to a footballer’s WAG and aspiring chat show hostess whom it transpired had once been a working prostitute. And yet in none of these cases had there been a hint of the bitterness she sensed here. Some had been indifferent because they were now living new lives; several had been pleased by the opportunity to put their side of the story. But all had seen lucrative lifestyles crash and burn in an instant, and yet none had been as brusque and uncivil as this fellow.
     That said, in nearly all those other cases, they’d brought about their own misfortune, but the origins of Bernie Cleghorn’s trouble were murkier. Perhaps Max’s interest was understandable. What had happened to end the career of ITV’s ‘Lord of Misrule’?
     The man himself had now poured a large brandy, but true to his word, hadn’t offered anything to his guests. Perched at the far end of the sofa, legs crossed, he appeared to have relaxed, but still watched distrustfully as Max, at the other end, checked the batteries and mic on his Dictaphone, and then laid his notebook on his lap.
     Still wearing her anorak and scarf, Kerry sat on the armchair.
     As usual, Max’s first few questions were what he considered to be ‘groundwork’. In other words, he was laying the base for the real conversation to come. They covered the subject’s childhood in post-war Coventry, a city of rationing, bomb damage and fatherless boys (of whom Cleghorn was one). The impromptu comedy shows he put on for the queues at corner shops. His gradual realisation that he had a gift for it: a child like him, an urchin with short pants and dirty knees, able to make impoverished and bereaved families laugh. His first few gigs on the working man’s club circuit of the late 1950s, usually as the warm-up for better-known, better-paid comedians. His breakthrough on radio in the early 1960s, thanks mainly to Tony Hancock and Hattie Jacques, from where the obvious next step was television, though then, as now, it was less an actual step and more a monumental leap.
     Deciding that Max would be in his element listening to personal remembrances of old-time radio and TV, Kerry decided to take Cleghorn up on his offer and to make a brew. She got up and moved to the door.
     “Those were the glory days,” Cleghorn was saying. “When I was young and energetic. But you had to be energetic back then, just to keep working ...”
     Outside the room, even with the lights on, it was more difficult to find the kitchen than she’d expected. The door wasn’t closed behind her, so she could still hear their host talking, now recalling a summer season he’d done on the Central Pier at Blackpool with Ken Dodd and Frankie Howerd. Again, this would be meat and drink to Max and his podcast’s imaginary audience.       She let them get on with it, but the first corridor she took led her to the front door, which had several strong locks on it, not to mention a heap of unopened junk mail on its mat.
     She headed back, passing the lounge door again.
     “The amazing thing,” she heard Max say, “is that by 1968 you had Crazy House, your own TV show. For a guy in his late twenties, that was phenomenal. I mean … posh kids who’d been at Oxbridge did it. The well-connected Footlights crowd. But you had no such advantages.”
     “You have to find other ways,” came the terse reply.
      Kerry pressed on, turning left and coming to a junction of passages, all with darkened doorways leading off them. It bewildered her. How big was the place?
     At which point she again heard a loud thud.
     Another thud followed and another. Three in rapid succession.
     Almost like someone demanding admittance.
     Slowly, she headed in the direction she thought the sounds had come from, turning a corner and stepping through into the kitchen. Its worktops and most of its shelves were bare. Only a few basic pots and pans hung on the wall. When she spied the kettle, it was mottled with rust and, by the looks of it, non-electrical; it would be too much hassle making tea with that, she decided.
     There was another thud.
     Very loud.
     Quite clearly from the back door.
     Kerry moved towards it, curious. Did Cleghorn live alone? Did he have a partner, or a lodger? Realising that she at least had to look, she drew back the bolts at the top and bottom, turned the key in the middle, and opened the door. The first thing she noticed was that a breeze had picked up, intensifying the cold; it swept shockingly in on her and sent violent ripples through the ranks of decayed weeds in the garden.
     Hands in her armpits, she stepped outside. “Hello?”
     Her voice was lost in the wind. Thanks to the light from the kitchen, she could see that a few minuscule snowflakes were dancing on it.
     “Hello?”
     When something flapped and rustled, she spun right – and spied the polythene at the back of the car port. It was bellying fiercely.
     She retreated inside, closed the door and rammed the top bolt home. She backed away, feeling strangely relieved, only for the door to bang in its frame with abrupt and savage force. It was obviously the wind, but she still jumped, and it hastened her journey back, which was a lot easier as all she needed to do this time was follow Cleghorn’s voice.
     “It was getting on telly that enabled me to recruit Trudy Baker,” she heard him say, though his tone now was muffled. “Remember her?”
     “How could I forget the Saucepot?” Max replied.
     Kerry reached the lounge door. One of them had closed it, or the wind had.
     “She was brilliant, if I’m honest.” Cleghorn again. “Funny, sexy, dead busty of course, but lots of them were back then, weren’t they?”
      Kerry shook her head, wondering if those dollybird comediennes of times past might have adopted a different approach had they been given the opportunity. She opened the door and walked through, and found herself in total darkness.
     “What I really want to talk to you about,” Max’s voice said, “for obvious reasons, is Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing …”
     Startled, Kerry groped the wall on her left, found a switch and hit it. A dim light came on, revealing a room with bare walls and floorboards, empty except for a freestanding wardrobe.
     “Where did the idea of Huckleberry Manor come from?” Max enquired.
     Still puzzled, Kerry glanced around, and spotted what looked like a square glass panel in the upper corner on the left, though some time in the past it had clearly broken and been replaced with something like card or chipboard. Whatever it was, it didn’t block out sound.
     At least she wasn’t going mad.
     “Bing Crosby,” Cleghorn replied. “He’d been doing something similar for years with his Christmas shows.”
     Kerry saw the Crosby link, she supposed, though she was now distracted by the open wardrobe door and the red and sparkly thing hanging out. The Cleghorn Christmas specials had all been broadcast from a fantasy English mansion called Huckleberry Manor, a studio set obviously, all Tudor beams and mullioned windows looking out into fake snow.
     Despite herself, she ventured across the room.
     Each show had lasted two hours, while a succession of celebrity guests visited, all arriving at the grand front door as prospective carol singers.
    She opened the wardrobe, already suspecting what she was going to find.
     It was an amazing coincidence of course, but there was no doubt what she was looking at: red and gold parti-coloured trousers and tunic, a pair of curly-toed red and gold slippers, a jester’s red coxcomb complete with golden bells. The very same jester’s costume that Cleghorn, as Lord of Misrule, had always worn for Christmas Stuffing. But it was one of two sets of clothes hanging there. She looked at the other and gave a wry smile. Not that Bing Crosby would ever have spent his festive shows deriving mucky humour from a French maid whose main contribution was her wiggly walk and ample cleavage. Because that was the second outfit: a short, black dress with white trim, and a ruffled lace bonnet.
     Something else then caught her attention. She pushed the costumes apart and saw writing on the back wall of the wardrobe. At first, she was shocked. Because it was bright crimson and she wondered if it had been applied in blood. In truth it was probably too bright for that.
     Even so, the letters were inscribed jaggedly, almost brutally:
   Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell …                                                                                           Christopher Marlowe

*Kerry stood bewildered.
     She’d studied Marlowe for her A-levels, though that had been a long time ago. The only thing she remembered of his had been Dr Faustus. Not that that was the sort of classical text she’d ever associate with a performer like Bernie Cleghorn.
     A burst of laughter from Max in the next room shook her out of her reverie.
     It surprised her too. Their host was such an embittered presence that it had been difficult believing he could ever have been affable enough to strut his stuff as a comedian. Clearly though, he hadn’t lost the ability to be funny even now. Her gaze then fell on something that proved he had once been very funny. An object on the shelf over the empty fireplace was fluffed with dust, but still recognisable as a rose cast in gold and attached to a plaque. Kerry didn’t need to clean it off to know that it was the much-prized Rose d’Or, or Golden Rose award, which Max told her Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing had won in 1974 for one particular slapstick routine, a decorating sketch performed by Cleghorn and his pet polar bear, which, according to Variety, had “rewritten the rules of TV anarchy”.
     And speaking of that …
     “Buckleberry Bear soon became an essential part of Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing, didn’t he?” Max said.
     “Not just the Christmas shows,” Cleghorn grunted, sounding sour again. “It was only supposed to be in the second one, but it went down so well, it ended up in all the other shows too. Even Crazy House …”
     Kerry let herself out of the room, turned a couple more corners and found the open door to the lounge. As she went back in, Cleghorn, still seated at the far end of the sofa and nursing a large brandy, evidently a refill, greeted her with a strangely hostile smile.
     “Welcome back, my dear. Find anything interesting in the cupboards?”
     She stopped dead. “I’m sorry?”
     “Any skeletons that prove everything you suspect about me? Namely, that I’m a dirty old git who deserved his fall from grace for being sexist, chauvinist, whatever other ‘ist’ you can think of?”
     “I was looking for the kettle,” Kerry replied tartly. “But I’m not sure we’ve got time for tea, judging from the weather.”
     “In which case we’d better get on,” Max said hurriedly.    “I can always sense disapproval,” Cleghorn said to no one in particular. “It’s in the body language.”     Kerry eyed him with distaste as she sat on the armchair.
     “We were talking about Buckleberry Bear,” Max said.
     “Were we?” their host replied. “How unfortunate.”
     “He first appeared on your show at Christmas 1971, if my notes are correct?”
     “Hmm.” Cleghorn became thoughtful. “I’d done one Christmas Stuffing without him. They had me in fancy dress … the Lord of Misrule. Plus we had more celebrity guests than usual. But Granada TV felt we needed something else. Something to connect with the youngsters. I thought the same to be honest. Even though the Cleghorn show was a bit naughty, it wasn’t blue, and research had shown that kids were still watching. They were definitely watching on Christmas Day. So it seemed like a good idea.” He smiled ruefully. “And what do they say the road to hell is paved with?”
     Kerry didn’t bother correcting him that it was ‘good intentions’ rather than ‘good ideas’.
     “Listen!” Suddenly, Cleghorn leaned forward, his expression startlingly intense. “That bloody bear was nothing when I first acquired him! Whatever else you say in your podcast, make sure you mention that … he was nothing!”
     “Erm, okay …” Max was taken aback. “I seem to recall that you first appeared with Buckleberry Bear … that wasn’t his name at the time, of course, on a television advert for a breakfast cereal.”
     “Correct.” Cleghorn shook his head at the folly of his youth. “It was a big success for them. And as I say, I was looking for something extra for the show, so I acquired ownership of him full-time …” The words petered out as he glowered into the past.
     “I understand that different people played him?” Max probed, to no response. “Sometimes, if there was dancing to be done, it was a dancer. Once, when you did an ice skating scene, it was a skater. Of course, their identities were always kept secret.”        Cleghorn swilled more brandy, still saying nothing.      “Because of his size, though, it was mostly a burly stage-hand. Even they’d have to look out through eye-holes in the neck, I suppose. But it wasn’t always difficult for them, was it? Sometimes Buckleberry was only there to be petted by some pretty girl guest. Sometimes, he’d just be clumsy … joining you in violent routines, barroom brawls or sketches in which the set was designed to fall apart. But it usually needed to be someone big and strong. Didn’t he occasionally carry guests off in a burlap sack if they’d offended him?”
     Cleghorn suppressed something that looked like a shudder.
     “It was all in jest, of course,” Max said.
     “You reckon?”
     Even Max was unsure how to respond to that. “Buckleberry getting cross with people became a key part of the comedy, didn’t it?”
     “The comedy?” Cleghorn glanced up at him. “It’s called having an ego, son.”
     “An ego?”
     “You remember he had glowing blue eyes?”
     “Erm, yes.”
     “Well … the original plan was, his eyes would be different colours to show what mood he was in. Most of the time they were blue, because he was happy. They’d flip to violet when Annette came on, because he was supposed to be in love with her. And when he got vexed, they flipped to red. Yeah … I can see you’re nodding as if you remember it. But they soon stopped turning violet, because if there was anyone he loved more than Annette, it was himself. I mean, Jesus … he was a fall-guy, a stage prop. But he didn’t understand that. Not after a while. He thought he was the sodding star.”
     Kerry found herself listening in dull disbelief.
     “But the main problem …” Cleghorn leaned forward again, belligerently, “is illustrated by the fact that even now, you’re clearly more interested in him than me.”
     “I’m …?”
     “Oh, everyone loved him. Yeah, I get that. Course they did. He was loveable. Big, cuddly polar bear. Especially on Christmas Stuffing, when he wore that daft jumper.”
     “Was this …?” Max, who was rarely tongue-tied when it came to his favourite subject, was uncertain how to continue. “Do you mind me asking, Bernie, was this antipathy to Buckleberry Bear always there? Because you wouldn’t have known it. I mean, in 1975 … you and him appeared as the Broker’s Men in Cinderella in the West End. It won all kinds of awards. Twiggy was Cinders, Tommy Steele was Buttons …”
     “And that doesn’t tell you anything?” Cleghorn asked.
     Max couldn’t reply.
     “As early as 1975, we were a double-act!” Cleghorn rubbed at his furrowed brow. “I tried to get him a solo career after that. Licensed him to do Green Cross Code commercials, attend parties in kids’ hospitals.” He shook his head. “Didn’t make any difference. In fact, it made things worse. In 1978, eight years into Stuffing’s domination of the Christmas schedules, this lavish BBC version of Alice in Wonderland was going into production. At the same time, I was one of the biggest stars on telly, especially in the so-called season of goodwill, but when I entered talks to play the Mad Hatter, I got rejected.” He arched a wispy eyebrow. “Rejected! Me! Do you know why?”
     Max shrugged. “Because you were Mr ITV and it would have been incongruous?”
     Cleghorn scowled. “You young cretin!” Despite his age, his voice was a whipcrack. Froth speckled his tight, grey lips. “Because there was no role in it for that sodding bear!”
     A metallic clatter sounded out in the passage. Max and Kerry jumped, but their host reacted only casually, levering himself upright, placing his glass on the telephone table and leaving the room.
     Kerry gave Max a long stare. “So, do we call the mental health services now, or after we get home?”

*     
Hope you’re enjoyed STUFFING so far. If so, a quick reminder that PART THREE will appear right here on December 23. If you are having a good time with this material, perhaps you’ll be interested to know that, to date, I’ve published two collections of festive-themed horror stories in paperback, Audible and on Kindle. They are: IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER and THE CHRISTMAS YOU DESERVE. It’s probably also worth mentioning that my Victorian-era Christmas ghost story / romance, SPARROWHAWK, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the capacity of Best Novella in 2010, and that can still be acquired too.


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.

RAILROAD TALES  edited by Trevor Denyer (2021)

The latest anthology from British independent press powerhouse, Midnight Street, a small publishing company that has been around for quite some time now and tends to focus on contemporary horror, often with an everyday setting but invariably with strange and unsettling realities lurking just beneath the surface.

In Railroad Tales , which is surely something of a companion piece to the last Midnight Street antho, Roads Less Travelled , editor and Midnight Street owner, Trevor Denyer, takes railway lines, railway travel and railway folklore as his overarching themes, asks questions of his readers such as have they ever travelled on an empty train at night, or stood alone on a eerie platform wondering if their connection is ever going to come in, and generally (and very successfully) evokes the whole spooky culture of our railway networks: the isolated stations, the windswept junctions, the abandoned signal boxes, the level crossings where catastrophes have occurred.

Railroad Tales contains 23 stories in that vein, most of them supplied by relatively new or unknown authors, but all of them serving the Midnight Street ethos by creating an eclectic range of subject-matter (though that all important detail that it must be eerie and disturbing is never neglected).

To start with, as you’d probably expect, there is more than a handful of traditional ghostly tales in this collection. Most fans of supernatural fiction will probably be well aware how often railway lines and railway workers have featured in genuinely chilling stories, and not just in the distant past such as with Charles Dickens’ The Signal-Man (1866) or Perceval Landon’s Railhead (1908). Modern master of the genre, Ramsey Campbell, contributed to the canon in 1973 with his nightmarish The Companion, and many others have done the same since.

Continuing this tradition of hitting us with something genuinely and unambiguously frightening, Railroad Tales gives us, among other stories, The Hoosac Tunnel Legacy by Norm Vigeant, in which a rickety old cargo train breaks down in a New England mountain tunnel on a little-used track in the dead of winter, the two-man crew, one of them an addict, having no choice but to solve the problem on their own … only to then find that they aren’t alone in the icy darkness.

Similarly scarifying is Caboose by Andrew Hook. In this one, a businesswoman acquires an old railway carriage, intent on turning it into a modern diner. However, at this early stage, she knows nothing about the Edwardian-era passengers who perished inside it due to a disastrous fire.

Then we have The Pier Station by George Jacobs, which takes us to a quiet seaside village where, though the railway no longer runs here, a curious young antiquarian finds an old conductor’s badge and is then haunted nightly by a mysterious ghost train.

Ballyshannon Junction by Jim Mountfield, meanwhile, is an out-and-out ghost story though with serious undercurrents, which could easily make an episode in a spooky British TV anthology (were such programmes ever made these days). It’s one of the best in the book, though, so I’ll leave the synopsis for this until a little later on.

It’s the same thing with The Number Nine by James E Coplin. This might be the best story in the entire book, at least for me. This one would make a movie, never mind an episode of TV. Again, it’s such a treat that I’ll leave its outline until a little later on.

From the in-yer-face ghostly now to stories of a more introspective, perhaps slightly deeper ilk, because Railroad Tales has got several of these too.

The first one to mention has got to be Sparrow’s Flight by Nancy Brewka-Clark, which is set in London several years after the events of Oliver Twist have ended. In this unusual tale, Oliver, now a man of business, is convinced that he sees Nancy’s ghost at a busy London railway station. He follows her onto a train, only to discover that it  it isn’t some run-of-the-mill rail service.

Meanwhile, in the sad and thought-provoking tale,  The Anniversary , by David Penn, a widow is drawn back by an inexplicable vision to the exact spot on the station platform where her worn-out husband killed himself, while another quite affecting story is Harberry Close by CM Saunders, though I’ll talk a little more about that one later too.

Of course, whatever its basic schematic, no horror anthology would be doing its job if it didn’t hit us with at least a few dollops of psychological terror. And Railroad Tales doesn’t disappoint on that front either.

In Where the Train Stops by Susan York, a disturbed woman undergoes a series of psychiatric regressions, a train journey into her past, to get to the root of her night terrors, and uncovers a ghastly experience.

Equally mysterious, and another strong contender for best story in the book, in The Samovar by AJ Lewis, a man tortured by his past agrees to deliver an important package from Moscow to Vladivostok, but finds the journey lonely and difficult, especially as the demons pursuing him are never far behind.

Though perhaps the most overtly psychological tale in this volume is provided by Gary Couzens with Short Platform . In this one, a drunken secretary is marooned overnight at an unmanned railway station. Exhausted and lonely, she regresses back through her unhappy life.

From the scary uncertainties of psychological horror, it’s probably not too much of a leap to the world of the strange and surreal, and Railroad Tales offers several particularly good examples of this.

First up, we have Across the Vale by Catherine Pugh, which is set in an alternative Britain, where two women ride an armoured train north to Edinburgh. To get there, however, they must first cross the dreaded ‘Vale’.

Then we have Steven Pirie’s Not All Trains Crash , in which we turn this entire subgenre on its head by meeting the ghosts created during a frightful multi-fatality railway accident, and feel their fear and pain as they are forced to move on when their decayed relic of a line is finally torn up.

Lastly in this particular category, we have an effective monster story in The Tracks , by Michael Gore, though once again I’m not going to elaborate on this one at this stage, as I want to talk a bit more about it later on.

There are other stories in this collection, of course, but those you’ll need to experience for yourself. Suffice to say that all the tales in this book stand up for themselves and make a significant impact on the reader. Midnight Street have done it again, producing a very neat and contemporary horror anthology, featuring a host of interesting voices and adding a whole glut of chilling new fiction to the ‘scary railway’ pantheon.

And now …

RAILROAD TALES – the movie.

Thus far, no film or TV producer has optioned this book yet (not as I’m aware), and in the current horror-free zone of British TV at least, it seems unlikely. But you never know. And hell, as this part of the review is always the fun part, here are my thoughts just in case someone with loads of cash decides that it simply has to be on the screen.

Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most filmic and most right for adaptation in a compendium horror. Of course, no such horror film can happen without a central thread, and this is where you guys, the audience, come in. Just accept that four strangers have been thrown together in unusual circumstances that require them to relate spooky stories. It could easily be something along the lines of Dr Terrors House of Horrors, a group of passengers cooped up together in a distinctly suburban train, but finding themselves travelling endlessly through a terrifying night, or perhaps they’re all marooned in one of those soulless middle-of-nowhere waiting rooms as their connections fail to arrive and the winter mists come down outside, as in The Ghost Train. The choice is, as always, yours.

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

The Number Nine (by James E Coplin): A free-riding hobo is menaced on a night-time freight train by the ghost of a guard once famous for his use of homicidal violence …

The Hobo – Zach Gilford
Henry Hart – Dave Bautista

Harberry Close (by CM Saunders): A tired office-worker catches the wrong train and is ferried out to a strangely deserted railway station, where he immediately notices signs of brutal violence…

Tim – Timothee Chalamet

The Tracks (by Michael Gore): An outcast girl, ugly and overweight, gets an opportunity to avenge herself on her tormentors when she learns that a weird monster, the product of a curse, lives near a remote railway line and dines on rail-kill …

Clarice – Jada Harris

Ballyshannon Junction (by Jim Mountfield): In Ulster of the 1980s, a peripheral IRA figure turns informer for a local police chief, and then flees a posse of vengeful gunmen. Frightened and conscience-stricken, he arrives at derelict Ballyshannon Junction, where the many ghosts he encounters seem strangely familiar…

Marty – Ruairi O’Connor

Presenting a new festive chiller: STUFFING

Anyone who regularly reads this blog will hopefully be aware that each December I try to celebrate the Christmas ghost story tradition by posting a festive horror story of my own. In most cases they are brand new, but in all cases they are completely free-to-read.
And this year is no exception. Despite what has clearly been a tough twelve months for everyone for all kinds of reasons, the business of scaring people to death still goes on for us thriller/horror writers, in which spirit I’m delighted to say that, having been determined to come up with an entirely new Christmas terror tale this year, the result - STUFFING - is now here. You can commence reading it right now, as I’ll be posting it in three installments, starting today, and I reiterate that it’s entirely FREE. 
Hopefully it will chill your blood as surely as any frosty morning or raging snowstorm.

In addition, I should add that while we’re on the subject today of spooky stories, I’ll also be reviewing Brit horror star Mark Morris’s remarkable semi-biographical collection of his best stories, WARTS AND ALL. You’ll find that, as usual, in the Thrillers, Chillers section, at the lower end of today’s blog.

Before then, I trust you will stick around long enough to enjoy PART 1 of STUFFING.

(PART 2 will appear right here next week, Thursday December 16, and PART 3, the final installment, on Thursday December 23).

Hope you all enjoy, and best wishes for the season …

STUFFING1Hello, and welcome to Forgotten Heroes, the monthly podcast that takes a deep dive into the popular culture of Britain’s yesteryear, specialising in informal but hopefully informative discussion with people once famous for all kinds of different reasons though now united by an untimely return to anonymity and irrelevance. We focus mainly on their finest moments, but if possible learn about their lesser ones too: the scandals, the gossip, the court cases, maybe even the incidents that terminated their once glittering careers. No subject is out of bounds in Forgotten Heroes; we never shy from asking the awkward questions.     As always, the show is brought to you by myself, Max Jervis, ably assisted by my lovely sidekick, Kerry Brannigan, and broadcast on Saturday, December 25. And yes of course, that’s an important date by any standards, which we don’t intend to let slip by. For this reason, today’s show is a festive special, the subject of which is that Spirit of Christmas Comedy himself, the one and only Bernie Cleghorn … who we were able to catch up with at his home in the East Midlands yesterday. Those of you who are longer in the tooth, will no doubt remember the stitches Bernie used to have us in on Christmas Day evenings long, long ago, while those who are shorter will have heard fond recollections of his rollickingly funny annual TV romp, Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing.
     If you haven’t, why not? The great man dominated the festive schedule for over ten years, each time commanding audiences of twenty-five million plus.
     But if you’re genuinely new to this master of old-time comedy, this ultimate ‘Lord of Misrule’, as he soon became known, never fear. You’re going to learn everything there is to know about him, warts and all, over the next two hours …

***
When they came out of the railway station, the town, which had a name they’d never heard of until they’d looked it up on Wikipedia, was dressed for the season, and yet was strangely bereft of atmosphere. That was possibly because no snow had fallen yet, though the air was frigid, and the mid-afternoon sky much darker and greyer than it had a right to be even in late December. Most likely it was because the place, like so many other provincial towns in 21st century Britain, had seen better times. Glowing Father Christmases, angels with carol sheets and penguins in cute scarfs and bob-caps adorned every lamppost. Festive lights zigzagged overhead, shimmering translucently as rainbow colours pulsed through them. But even on the main street, many of the shopfronts were boarded, or their windows empty, grubby and pasted with ‘To Let’ notices. Though it was Christmas Eve, it was still a shopping day, the last one before the holiday, and yet the pavements were deserted, only rags of litter skipping on the ice-edged wind.
     “Bit woe-begotten,” Kerry commented.
     “Not especially merry,” Max agreed.
     They walked a short distance, passing under the brick arch of a railway bridge, before locating a taxi rank. A single car sat there, its engine chugging, its exhaust pluming.
      “The address I’ve got,” Max said through the driver’s window, “is 15, Hockton Mill Lane. I’m not sure which part of town that’s in …?”
     The driver, fiftyish, jowly and bearded, and wearing a flat cap under a Parka hood, gave a near imperceptible nod towards the rear of his vehicle. It was reasonably warm in the back, though Max and Kerry huddled together as the car swung from the pavement, cutting into the sparse flow of traffic.
     They drove for several minutes, passing on either side a succession of walled-off mills. It was a grotty scene, with working streetlamps that were intermittent at best. After that, they passed a park, the tall shape of a Christmas tree spangled with fairy lights standing far out in the darkened heart of it, then entered a residential district, more coloured lights visible behind half-curtained windows. Still, there was hardly anyone around.           Diverting from the main road, they passed a school, and then took a narrower lane downhill into a valley. The road descended slowly but steadily, trees enclosing it from either side. Occasionally, on the left, they passed entrances to what looked like more industrial sites, though the only buildings they glimpsed amid the leafless branches were unlit and seemingly derelict. This continued for a few more miles, Max sensing that they were now at the edge of the small town and heading out into the sticks, which was no surprise really. The object of today’s exercise was famous for his reclusive nature.
     He caught the driver watching him through his rear-view mirror. The driver averted his gaze back to the wooded lane.
     “You’ve probably realised we’re going to see Bernie Cleghorn,” Max said chattily. “I mean from the address. I run a podcast, you see … about VIPs whose time has gone, and Bernie’s agreed to give me an interview. First time he’ll have spoken in public since the 1980s.”
     The driver said nothing at first, finally grunting: “Who’s that then, mate?”
     “Bernie Cleghorn? The TV personality?”
     Again almost imperceptibly, the driver shrugged.
     Max felt vaguely irritable. It would have been understandable if the guy had been a recent arrival here, an immigrant maybe, but everything about him bespoke local, including his East Midlands accent.
     “Probably before my time,” the driver muttered.
     Kerry nudged Max discreetly, as if to say: “I keep telling you this”.
     As always, Max was frustrated. She’d been on at him for several days that this whole podcast hobby of his was too expensive, that this particular venture was too near Christmas, that they had other things to do, that no one would care. She clearly had no clue what an achievement it had been securing this interview. And it wasn’t as if Bernie Cleghorn had been as much a nobody as some of the others he’d travelled out to speak to. Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing had held ITV’s prime time Christmas Day slot for eleven years on the bounce. Eleven years! These days, there were massive online squabbles about which show should or shouldn’t be awarded that honour even for one year, and none of the winners ever seemed to satisfy. Even Dr Who, one of network television’s most expensively produced programmes, had failed to nail itself immovably to the Christmas Day schedule, and yet Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing, which, by comparison, had virtually been thrown together, had reigned at the top of that bill, unchallenged, for over a decade.
      And yet this guy didn’t remember it? Seriously?
     “Surely there’s been something about Bernie in the press?” Max persisted. “Some local journo must have written a feature on him? The great comedian who now lives here in retirement? Has he never snipped a ribbon? Never turned on a Christmas light?”
     “Sorry, mate.”
     “Maybe he just wants a quiet life,” Kerry said, attempting to be helpful. “How many of us would want to be pestered all the time about things we’d done decades ago?”
     “You must remember Buckleberry Bear?” Max said, sitting forward.
     “Max, he doesn’t.” Kerry patted his hand. “I told you. Hardly anyone does.”
     “Buckleberry Bear?” the driver said unexpectedly. “That rings a bell.” He frowned. “Great big white thing, wasn’t it? Twice the height of a normal bloke. Whopping big teeth.”
     “That’s right,” Max nodded.
     “Think I remember. I was only a kid, of course. Didn’t it do TV adverts and stuff?”
     “Sometimes.”
     “Wore a Christmas jumper?”
     “On the Christmas show, yeah.” Max sat further forward. “Cleghorn’s Christmas Stuffing.”
     The driver shook his head. “Something about that thing I didn’t like. Don’t know what. Didn’t its eyes go red when it got angry?”
     “That was only a gimmick. A joke.”
     The driver drove on. “Well, it didn’t make me laugh.”

*
“I thought he was worth a fortune,” Kerry said, as the taxi dwindled into the gloom.     “Supposedly he is.” Max looked through the dead vegetation twined around the rusted bars of the gate.
     The house sat at the other end of a patchy, leaf-strewn lawn. It was a sizeable structure, probably containing several reception rooms downstairs, maybe five or six bedrooms up. It looked Victorian, all dark industrial-age brick, turrets, garrets, teetering chimney stacks. There was even a weather-cock on its topmost spire, though that was unlikely to turn much due to the tall trees on three sides and the fact the house was deep in the river valley.
     “Bernie Cleghorn made a stack of money in his time,” Max said, noting with puzzlement the moss on the house’s brickwork, the nests cluttering its eaves. “He was one of the most famous TV comics of the 1970s. Yeah, he was a creature of his time … he was saucy and sexist, but they all were back then, weren’t they? But it wasn’t just the Christmas show. That’s mainly what he’s remembered for now, but he had his ordinary show too, Cleghorn’s Crazy House, and there were twelve episodes of that each year. I suppose …” he shrugged, “I suppose financial problems could tie in with why he suddenly vanished from the public eye.”
     “You mean he wasted it all?” Kerry said.     “He was never extravagant, as I recall. Bit eccentric maybe. This place would probably be worth a few bob if he spruced it up.”
     “Or blew it up,” she replied, “and built something completely different.”
     It was hard to argue. Thanks to their not having seen another house for several miles, this one’s aura would have been bleak regardless of its condition.
     “Bernie’s main trouble was that he fell behind the times,” Max said, finding an old bell-push on the left side gatepost. It was only just visible through hanging tendrils of ivy, but when he depressed it, there was no discernible sound. “Do you know what I mean?”
     “What? Oh … erm, yeah, sure.”
     The intense cold was distracting, but Kerry tried to focus. She was only forty, so she didn’t even remember the 1970s. She’d seen snippets of Bernie Cleghorn’s old shows, and had read about him, but all it amounted to really were fleeting images in her mind’s eye: of a television celebrity famous for his ginger ‘Coco the Clown’ hair, his comic songs and sketches, Annette, the sexy French maid who was often on screen with him (whom he referred to as ‘the Saucepot’), and that big horrible polar bear thing the taxi guy had mentioned.
     “I mean, it wasn’t particularly risqué,” Max said. “But then, in the 1980s, the alternative comedians turned up, and TV comedy was ruined for evermore.”
     “Ruined?”
     “Kerry, they weren’t that good, okay? So they hated Margaret Thatcher. Wow! Who didn’t in public? But that was about the only thing they had in common with TV executives. And when she’d gone and they suddenly weren’t students anymore and had mortgages to pay, they had to step up and earn their keep properly. Some of them even ended up being funny. But Bernie Cleghorn could still have performed them under the table.”
     Kerry knew better than to argue. Max was set in his views. He was only five years older than she was, so he barely remembered the 1970s either. But pop culture of the past was his one fascination in life. Anything he hadn’t experienced himself, he’d studied in detail.
     With a clunk, the gate opened an inch.
     At first, Kerry thought it had happened automatically, perhaps someone watching from the house with a button at their fingertips. But then she realised that Max had tried the gate with his hand. There was still no sign of actual life.
     “We sure there’s anyone even here?” she asked.
     “This was the address on his letter.” Max pushed the gate all the way open. “Suppose I could have got the date wrong.”
     “You’re not serious!” She followed him onto the leaf-cluttered drive. “We’ve come all this way, and …”
     “Relax, I’m joking.”
     “Hah hah!”
     “You didn’t have to come.” Max strolled along the drive towards the house. “I said that all along.”
     “Someone has to discipline you. I know what would happen. You’d get yakking with this guy and all of a sudden you’d end up missing the last train, and not having you around until sometime late on Christmas Day would be the point at which this obsession of yours starts getting inconvenient …”
     Max barely listened as he approached the main building. Its grubby front door was colourless and scabby, an unruly veil of ivy straggling down over the top of it. A heap of autumn leaves had blown against the step. As front doors went, this one had the distinct look of an entrance no one used anymore. It was no surprise when the bellpush, which again gave off no audible sound, plus several loud knocks, brought no response.
     “Great.” Kerry huddled into her anorak. One glance upward showed a sky so grey it was almost purple. “So what do we do?”
     “We can’t leave now even if we wanted to.” Max glanced round at her. “I mean, we didn’t ask that taxi driver to come back for us later on, did we? And I’d be amazed if you can get a phone signal down in a valley like this.”
     Kerry looked sufficiently concerned by that to fish her phone out, walk away a few yards and pull a mitten off so that she could prod several numbers.
     “Crap!” she said. “Not even a single bar … and now it’s getting dark.”
     Equally unsuccessful with his own phone, Max slid it back into his overcoat pocket. “All the more reason to talk to Mr Cleghorn. With any luck he’ll have a landline.”
     It seemed pointless knocking again, so, somewhat reluctantly on Kerry’s part, they headed round to the right side of the house. The driveway ended at the entrance to an old car-port, nothing more in truth than a lean-to roof made from wood and plastic, and underneath it a large, dark, heavy vehicle, an old-fashioned automobile, the sort you normally only saw on black and white movies. It was half-buried under boxes, rags and other junk.
     Just to get past the vehicle would have been difficult, as more clutter was stacked to either side of it. At the back was a hanging sheet of polythene turned green and opaque with age.
     “We sure this is a good idea?” Kerry wondered.
     “Our options are kind of limited.” Max stepped forward, trying to sidle past. “We might as well look. A house this size, there could be all sorts going on at the back and you wouldn’t know from the front.” But then he halted, bent down to the nearside bodywork and wiped away the dust coating a tarnished insignia. “Good God. This is an old Humber … a Pullman, if I’m not mistaken.” He straightened up with a minor sense of vindication. “Told you he’d once been successful.”
     “Once being the key-word.”
     “At least if the car’s here, that must mean Cleghorn is too.”
     “You don’t think he still drives this, do you, Max? Look at the state of it.”
     Max had no answer for that. For the first time he felt a pang of unease. He’d been overjoyed to receive the invitation from the one-time comedy legend. So many just ignored his approaches. His enthusiasm had still been bubbling when they’d set off from St Pancras that morning, but finally, perhaps inevitably, it was starting to wane. Because anyone with money who let their grand old house go to rack and ruin like this, not to mention who owned a classic car and basically mothballed it, didn’t even attempt to resell it … well, something had to be wrong.
     Doggedly, he pressed on, pushing past the polythene, which lifted easily enough. Kerry followed, and the rear of the property lay before them.
     What looked as if it had once been an expansive garden was now a jungle of shoulder-high weeds, all brown and frosty in the deepening gloom. Again, there was no sign of life from the house, no light from any of its windows.
     “Christ almighty.” Max couldn’t conceal his disappointment.
     “Sorry, babes …” Kerry made an effort to sound conciliatory. “But you know, Cleghorn wouldn’t be the first of these guys to come to an ignominious end. Look at Benny Hill, Kenneth Williams.”
     Max knew all that of course. He’d once explained to her that it was part of his fascination with entertainers of earlier eras, particularly comedians, that so many of them led strange, miserable lives when they were out of the limelight. But that didn’t mean the guy wouldn’t still be interesting. Far from it. So long as he’d remembered they were coming and hadn’t gone away somewhere for the holiday season.
     “Perhaps we should head back?” she said. “I know it’s a long walk, but at some point we’ll get a signal and then we can call a taxi.”
     Before Max could reply, they heard a loud, hollow thud. He leaned forward, staring across the garden, eyes narrowing on an upright angular shape at the far end of it. Though partly concealed by the desiccated foliage, it looked like an outhouse of some sort.
     Another thud sounded, distinctly from that direction.
     “What the devil?” Max pushed forward into the dead vegetation.
     “Max, what’re you doing?” Kerry followed.
     “I think there’s someone …” he said. “I don’t believe this …”
     Forty yards further on, the weeds came to an end and they were confronted by a garden shed. It was in a dilapidated state, visibly rotted, though sturdy enough to remain standing. A padlock hung on its front door, while in addition to that, somewhat bizarrely, what appeared to be lengthy strands of barbed wire had been wrapped tightly around it. There was a single window at the front, but when they tried to look through, it was so scabrous with filth that nothing inside was visible.
     “Check out the wire,” Max said. “How weird is that?”
     “Max …” Kerry felt distinctly nervous. “Whatever this is, whatever we thought we heard … it’s nothing to do with us. We shouldn’t even be back here.”
     He tested the padlock.
     “What’re you doing?” she hissed.
     “More rust than steel,” he mumbled. “Wouldn’t take much.”
     A rustle of movement sounded inside. He jerked back to the window.
     “Max!”
     “Still can’t see anything.”
     “Because there’s nothing to see.”
     He gave her a look. “We have to open it up, Kerry. Suppose it’s Bernie himself? He’s an old fella these days. Eighty-odd. He could have got himself stuck.”
     “Max … that’s ridiculous.”
     The next look he gave her was disconcertingly stern. “And if we walk away, and he dies?”
     She couldn’t respond. He nodded and, locating one end of the wire, carefully and gingerly worked it loose from the knot in the middle.
     “Max, I …” It was nonsensical, she thought. No one got stuck in a shed by accident, not when barbed wire had been used to hitch it closed. Though if that was what had happened here, who would have done it? Why?      She watched in stiff silence as Max sidled to the left, inch by inch pulling the wire loose from the general entanglement, finally vanishing around the back of the structure. When he reappeared around the other side, the wire loops had noticeably slackened. When he reappeared a second time, they hung limp and loose.
     “I can’t believe you did that,” she breathed.
     “You heard the same thing I did …”
     “Excuse me!” a harsh voice cut in. “What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”
     Max dropped the wire and jumped around. Kerry spun too, just as they were bathed in bright torchlight. They stood gaping, blinking.
     Behind the light, a tall but spindly figure was just about visible.
     “Oh, erm …” Max stuttered. “Mr Cleghorn, is it?”
     “Who’s asking?” The voice remained harsh, the tone highly suspicious.
     Awkwardly, Max introduced himself and Kerry and reminded the householder that they’d had a visit booked for this afternoon. Even more awkwardly, he then tried to explain what had happened with the shed. All through, the only sign of movement from the figure behind the light was the smoky breath leaking out of it. After Max had finished, and after some lengthy appraisal, the torch clicked off and they were able to see their host more clearly. There was no doubt that it was Bernie Cleghorn. Age hadn’t shrivelled him much; he was more of a beanpole than the athletic specimen Max remembered from his knockabout days, while the tufts of red hair behind his ears had long gone, replaced by lifeless white strands, but he stood upright and unbowed, and had met this intrusion onto his property with an air of robust challenge. What he thought of them was anyone’s guess, but it was probably safe to say that with Max’s tubby physique and scraggy grey beard, and Kerry’s glasses and long auburn hair (also running to grey), they didn’t look much like vandals or burglars.
     Despite that, Cleghorn seemed unimpressed.
     “Twenty yards further on back there is the River Soar,” he said. “It’s part-frozen at present, but the ice isn’t thick. The river runs fast and deep at this time of year. The ice keeps breaking and what you heard are chunks of it clunking together. It happens every time we have a cold snap.”
     “I see. Okay, well …” Max shrugged. “Easy mistake to make, I suppose.”
     “So you’re here to interview me?” The ex-comedian didn’t sound enthused.
     “That’s what we agreed, if you remember.”
     “You’ll have to forgive me. My short-term memory isn’t what it was.” Cleghorn didn’t sound as if he was really asking for forgiveness. “I’ve been out for my afternoon stroll. Sorry you were kept waiting.” Likewise, he didn’t sound especially sorry. “You’d better come inside. Apparently, we’re expecting snow.”
     He led them back through the leafage, across a small patio and into the house via a back door. Just before entering, Kerry glanced round towards the shed, now lost from view as the afternoon turned to dusk. Maybe the wind had rattled that flimsy old structure. More likely, there were rats in it. But if those thuds had signified ice breaking on a river, she was Annette the Saucepot.
To be continued (December 16) …
***
If you have enjoyed this first part of STUFFING, please feel free to check in for the next installment - which you’ll find free-to-read right here on December 16. But you might also be interested to know that, to date, I have also published two collections of original Christmas-themed horror and ghost stories in ebook, paperback and Audible: IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER and THE CHRISTMAS YOU DESERVE.

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

WARTS AND ALL   by Mark Morris (2020)

A phenomenally comprehensive collection of short and medium-length stories from one of British horror’s most hard-working, productive and popular authors.

Mark Morris, at least as famous these days for being an editor as he is a writer, is still only mid-way through a career that already spans three decades, and is showing no sign of slowing down. What’s more, from his earliest days, he’s produced dark fiction of such high standard (and we’re talking novels here and scripts, as well as short stories and novellas), that he’s been a regular fixture in the mass-market, his shorter works frequently winning selection for Year’s Best anthologies.

And now, PS Publishing have done that record proud in this huge and beautifully produced hardback retrospective, which for the present time at least has got to be your one-stop shop for Mark Morris at his best.

Before we look at the individual contents, here is the publishers’ official blurb:

Mark Morris describes himself as one of the UK’s most stubborn horror writers. His first novel Toady was published thirty years ago during the genre’s last great boom period. Back then publishers were falling over themselves to find and publish as many exciting new horror writers as they could. It was an exciting time but eventually over-saturation of the market became horror’s downfall. Faced with too much choice, the horror-reading public became more selective, and the majority of horror books lost money. As a result of this advances were slashed, contracts cancelled, and many fledgling careers were nipped in the bud.

Some writers, though, kept going. They stuck doggedly to their guns, or they adapted or changed, as the market demanded. Mark Morris was one of those writers. As the horror market shrank he looked for new outlets, new markets. He wrote tie-in novels, movie novelisations, audio dramas.

But through it all, he never stopped writing horror.

Warts and All is testament to his dedication to the genre. Collected here are thirty stories, arranged in chronological order, which map a course through three decades of horror writing. The stories herein vary wildly in tone and mood, in theme and content, but all have a thread of darkness running through them. They show how versatile the horror genre can be, and how wide are its parameters …

It’s always a joy when you’re able to delve deeply into a writer’s career, especially a writer with so varied an output as Mark Morris, through the medium of a single volume. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here.

While Warts and All doesn’t contain every single short story that Morris has ever written, PS Publishing have gone out of their way to include as wide a selection as possible, incorporating 30 pieces of work, the earliest dating to 1990, the most recent, an entirely original piece, dating to 2019.

And one glimpse of these simmering contents is all you’ll need to understand just how thoroughly diverse Mark Morris’s material can be. That said, it invariably dances to the theme of horror. Whether that be psychological horror, intense physical horror, horror of the supernatural, horror of the surreal, it doesn’t matter; horror fandom has always been Mark Morris’s target audience, and he’s never let it down. He certainly doesn’t in this book.

The other constant in Warts and All is the sheer quality of the writing. I mentioned earlier that Mark Morris hit the big time relatively early in his career (his first mass-market horror novel, Toady , was published when he was only 26!), and that’s because his prose work has never been less than superbly efficient: crisp, concise, easily accessible, his characters vivid, his locations photographically real, his concepts gut-churning. Even his earliest fictional forays read like the handiwork of a seasoned pro.

On a personal note, one of the things I’ve always liked most about Mark Morris’s stories is the lack of snobbery. Morris has always been on the money when it comes to whatever the latest fad in horror happens to be; never to my knowledge has he ever hit his readership with anything that could be termed out-of-date or old-fashioned. But he’s well-read enough in his own right to know there is a vast range of horror subgenres out there, some of which, through no fault of their own, slip out of the public eye from time to time. And yet this has never stopped him trying his hand at each and every one of them.

For example, it’s quite plain from Warts and All that an ultra-strong influence was exerted on this author, probably in his formative years, by the Pan and Fontana horror stories series, which were often notorious for painting a picture of post-war Britain as a grimy, seedy place where veins of perverse nastiness lurked beneath every veneer of wafer-thin respectability.

There are several examples of that style here, most impressively of all in the thrillingly horrible Salad Days , where a businessman is abducted by an OAP with a grudge against him from long ago. Taken back to an everyday townhouse, he at first thinks he can reason with his kidnapper. The old guy even promises that he won’t hurt him. But something else may …

More chilling (and more Pan-esque) yet is Essence , in which an elderly couple are secretly a pair of career serial killers. Hidden behind their genial appearance and apparent all-round decency, they have raped and murdered dozens of girls. Their secret is an MO that is completely foolproof. Or so they think …

Also set deceptively in the depths of genteel suburbia is Green , which for me has long been one of Mark Morris’s strongest and most terrifying stories, but because it’s just so damn good, I’ll revisit this one later and won’t say too much about the synopsis here.

Perhaps the most horrible story in the entire book, though, and definitely a tale that would have found a home for itself in the Fontana series, is the oldest one here reprinted, the titular Warts and All , which sees 15-year-old Jason and his mother, Beth, struggling valiantly but unable to save their declining Yorkshire farm. At the same time, both they, their animals and their entire property, it seems, are succumbing to an unknown disease that is slowly covering them all in revolting growths …

At the other end of the horror spectrum, meanwhile, Morris also dips his toe into the traditionalist supernatural pond, hitting us with a bunch of tales leaning towards the Jamesian school and even, in a couple of cases, towards folk horror and rural mystery.

A good example comes in Down to Earth , in which a young couple move to a house on the edge of the countryside. The husband views it as a lot of work but probably worth it. The wife, however, rather oddly, becomes inordinately interested in the overgrown jungle that is the house’s back garden …

Also set in a world of domestic-bliss-that-might-have-been is Coming Home , in which Jane and Gerry, happily married, recently installed in a new house, and expecting their first child, seemingly have everything to live for. Except that Christmas is approaching and Jane feels too tired to face it. What’s more, she is increasingly troubled by strange sounds in their new home, a grotesque smell and a weird voice on the phone …

Still in the world of the uncanny, an entirely different kind of supernatural threat can be found in We Who Sing Beneath the Ground , in which a dedicated teacher, concerned for an absent pupil, makes an unofficial call at the kid’s home, a ramshackle farm on a weather-beaten Cornish headland. The place is a dump, but neglect and mess are not the only problems here. There’s something much, much worse …

Also set in Cornwall is one of Morris’s very best ghost stories, Fallen Boys , which again I’m going to talk about a little more later on, so suffice to say here that it was rightly hailed as one of the best spooky stories of 2010.

Of course, no one could have learned any aspect of their spec fiction writing trade in the 1990s and not been exposed to the surrealist school, wherein weirdness became as prominent a feature as suspense, though in the hands of an expert like Mark Morris, the work never became any less readable. Quite the opposite.

Warts and All delivers two classic cases in point.

Against the Skin and The Fertilizer Man were both among the oddest stories I’d ever encountered the first time I read them, and yet both were deeply shocking and unsettling, and they’ve lost none of that power even now. For all these reasons I’ll also be talking a bit more about these two stories later. But in the meantime, no less chillingly strange is Waiting for the Bullet , which takes us into the company of a bunch of English students holidaying in an alternative USA, who opt to visit a ‘shootout site,’ one of several scenes of famous Wild West massacres, where, through some quirk of science, bullets from the nineteenth century still fly …

An even more terrifying fracturing of reality occurs in The Other One , in which a mentally unstable man finds himself living in a squalid flat in the midst of an illusory landscape of imaginary enemies and unreal destruction, where all he knows for certain is that someone or something very dangerous is drawing steadily closer …

But perhaps the strangest and most dislocating of all these more idiosyncratic horror stories is Puppies For Sale , in which an everyday family slowly disintegrates under the assault of an evil supernatural force, resulting in what can only be described as their (or anyone’s) worst nightmare. But is it real or is it all in the tortured father’s mind? …

Perhaps the next step on from stories of this sort are those with a subtext, i.e. meaningful forays into fiction where accomplished and mature authors examine personal, social or even political issues that trouble them. Unsurprisingly, Mark Morris has plenty of these in his locker too.

In Progeny , for example, a child-abuser suffers a long and terrible punishment after he is left paralysed by a stroke. Darker still, in Biters , which is set in a dystopian near-future, a class of schoolchildren attend a special clinic where they are taught parental responsibilities by being placed in charge of zombie babies.

Cleverest of all for me, another tale here that is truly one of Morris’s best, is The Red Door , in which, after a torturous year spent watching her mother die in cancer-induced agony, religiously-inclined Chloe finds herself doubting the existence of a benign God. With her overly devout family unable to help, she drifts about London attending to routine matters, and yet increasingly is distracted by the appearance, seemingly everywhere, of a curious red door …

In fiction terms, it is perhaps only a short step from meaningful to melancholy. So many of the issues that trouble us are often the cause or result of deep emotional sadness, and Mark Morris’s ability to convey this through his writing, without being schmaltzy or self-indulgent, is enviable.

Again, Warts and All hits us with several stories of this ilk, though in none of these cases does the author forget that he’s writing horror.

In Sins Like Scarlet , a dying man travels from Canada to England, suffering both physically and emotionally en route, but bent on surviving the trip so that he can make a terrible confession to his ex-wife …

In Nothing Prepares You , perhaps one of the hardest reads in the book in terms of the raw grief it portrays, we meet Martha, a middle-aged housewife terrified by the prospect of her husband’s mortality. When a new psychological facility offers to put her through the experience of bereavement without her actually losing anyone, she readily accepts. But a truly appalling experience follows …

Then we have The Complicit , one of Morris’s darkest tales to date, in which a disturbed man returns home for the funeral of his last parent, only to find the town of his birth secretive, the family home a soulless shell, and the ghost of the wicked brute who abused him as a child and subsequently died in a savage revenge-slaying, waiting to get his own back …

There are many other stories in Warts and All I could mention, but neither time nor space would allow it, and anyway, it was this particular group of tales that really caught my attention, and in terms of subject matter alone, illustrate the versatility of this author in finer fashion than my words ever could.

I don’t know whether there are plans afoot to bring out any other versions of Warts and All . As it currently stands, a big, chunky hardback (its interior beautifully designed by Michael Smith, its jacket splendidly illustrated by Carl Pugh) is bound to set you back a bit. But I reiterate that the contents here are top-notch, and in terms of Mark Morris’s sweeping body of work, this is one of the most all-inclusive collections I could ever have envisaged.

In short, this is an all-round spectacular, and as good an all-in-one snapshot of one writer’s back catalogue as I could have wished for. There should be a place of honour reserved for this one on the shelf of every discerning dark fiction fan.

And now …

WARTS AND ALL – the movie

Thus far, no film or TV producer has optioned this book yet (not as I’m aware), and in the current horror-free zone of British network TV at least, it seems unlikely. But you never know. And hell, as this part of the review is always the fun part, here are my thoughts just in case someone with loads of cash decides that it simply has to be on the screen.

Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most filmic and most right for adaptation in a compendium horror. Of course, no such horror film can happen without a central thread, and this is where you guys, the audience, come in. 
Just accept that four strangers have been thrown together in unusual circumstances that require them to relate spooky stories. It could be that they’re all trapped in a cellar by a broken lift and are awaiting rescue (a la Vault of Horror ), or perhaps they’re all connected to various items available in a seaside trinket shop (as in From Beyond the Grave ).
Without further messing about, here are the stories and the casts I would choose:

Green: A middle-class blowhard is stung by a mysterious plant and develops a sudden and increasingly violent aversion to the colour green, a bizarre mental condition, which his unfortunate family must face alone as a bitterly cold Christmas approaches …

Bob – Philip Glenister
Hilary – Vicky McClure
Claire – Suranne Jones

The Fertilizer Man: Old Tosho loves his allotment, but hates the local yobs who continually steal his vegetables. He defends the plot as best he can, but cannot be there all the time. Then he is approached by a fertilizer salesman, who guarantees that with his new special compound, everything will grow a lot more quickly. The question is, what will grow? …

Tosho – Phil Davis
Deakin – Joe Cole

Fallen Boys: A school party is escorted down a Cornish tin mine where a famous tragedy once played out. But there are stresses and strains within the group, dangerous ones that are likely to cause serious and even life-threatening problems. On top of that, there are grim forces at work down here. Never let it be said that history doesn’t repeat itself …

Tess – Simona Brown

Against the Skin: Hard-drinking poacher, Lee, attempts a late-night pickup, fails and then finds himself on the wrong bus home. Very drunk, he ends up in a part of town he doesn’t know, in an old depot he doesn’t recognise. Lee has slept through the journey and is now the only person on the bus, but that doesn’t mean he is in this place alone …

Lee – Joe Gilgun

NEVER SEEN AGAIN is starting to feel real

I’m chuffed to bits to be able to share this with you today. It ’s  a first visual of my upcoming novel, NEVER SEEN AGAIN, a crime-thriller due for publication on March 22 next year.
Now okay, this is the bookproof that will shortly be going out to reviewers, not the book itself, but hey, it ’s still exciting. And if you ’re starting to think that I ’m sounding like an inordinately happy man, that ’s  because it’s been over a year since my last novel came out but now at last the production wheels are turning again.
Also today, on the subject of action/crime novels with a place close to my heart, I’ll be reviewing and discussing David Gilman’s epic thriller,  THE ENGLISHMAN . If you’re looking for a winter read, this would be a particularly good choice as it takes you all the way from the dank, chilly London backstreets to the blizzard-swept forests of central Russia. And trust me, it’s every bit as tough as it sounds.

If you’re only here for the David Gilman review, that’s perfectly okay. Just zoom on down today’s post. You’ll find the relevant item, as always, at the lower end in the Thrillers, Chillers section.

But don’t be too hasty. First, why don’t we talk a little about ...
NEVER SEEN AGAIN
So, yes ... it’s almost here, my new crime novel. The bookproofs are going out, while anyone interested in getting hold of a digital proof from  NETGALLEY  needs only follow the link and register.  
With regard to the book itself, there are obvious limits on how much I can say about it at this stage, but I’ll tell you as much as I can. First off, there are several questions I’m already being asked about it:
1) Is this a Mark Heckenburg novel by any chance? (Or, as a couple have also asked, does it feature Lucy Clayburn?).

2) If not, why not?

3) And if not, when are we actually going to see further investigations by these other two characters?

The answers, in this order, are: 1 No (and No). 2 Because I have to have some variation of themes and characters in my writing. 3 Very soon (so please don’t worry).

But today, we’re going to chat about  NEVER SEEN AGAIN  (the finished version of which, by the way, is also available for pre-order right NOW ).
So, what is it about?, you ask.
Well, here is the current proof's brief but to-the-point back-cover blurb:
Jodie Martindale’s disappearance remains a mystery, unsolved to this day. 
David Kelman covered the story. But he made a huge mistake, which cost someone their life.
Six years later, he has new evidence: a message from Jodie - sent two weeks ago ...
As you may have deduced, this new novel doesn’t involve a police investigation. Or at least it doesn’t centre on one. The reason for this is simple. I thought it would be an interesting experiment (maybe for just this one book, maybe for more, who knows?) to step away from the hi-tech world of modern law enforcement, where every conceivable kind of gadget and database is at the hero’s fingertips, and strip things down to their basics: pit a solitary character, who has nothing going for him but his wits and experience, into a tense struggle with a nameless but colossal opponent.

It might be fun, I felt, to devise a fiendish plot and then throw an ordinary bloke into it, an everyman who has no police powers or training, no intelligence services to draw upon, no access to firearms units, no firearms training in his own right, and perhaps most important of all, no experience even of unarmed combat outside the normal rough-and-tumble of everyday life.

But how would such an individual get on?

Well …

First of all, he’d have to be highly driven.

In direct response to that, I’m not going to say anymore about the plot of  NEVER SEEN AGAIN , but I don’t think I’ve ever written about a character who is more personally driven than David Kelman in this book – so that’s one box ticked.

Secondly, he’d have to have at least a bit of nous. You could not just walk off the street and investigate a professional abduction with any realistic hope of making headway.

So in addition to David being bonded to this case at his emotional core, he has one other advantage over many of us in that he used to be a crime reporter, which means that he knows the underworld reasonably well, even if (unlike Heck, for example), he can’t be bullish when he gets in there, and can’t call on an army to back him up.

Perhaps a more interesting question, though … and one that I really sought to tackle when writing this novel, was: where does an average Joe stand in terms of morality when a prospect like this comes along? I mean, okay, anyone who considers themselves an upstanding citizen would want to help break a serious criminal case if they got the chance. But where do you stand ethically if you obtain a piece of vital evidence and decide to use it for your own investigation rather than hand it to the experts?

Superficially, that’s going to make you an offender in your own right … isn’t it?

Well, as I’ve said, I’m not going to divulge any essential plot points for  NEVER SEEN AGAIN  today, but suffice to say that, even though David Kelman has strong and worthy reasons for wanting to crack this case himself, it’s a moral grey area even here.

It’s a real conundrum, but it’s also part of a much bigger question.

After I finished as a police officer I became a journalist, and remained in that role for a decade. So, I have more than a bit of personal interest in this. And one thing that’s always annoyed (but also bewildered) me is how unflatteringly journalists have often been portrayed in contemporary entertainment. 
From Rita Skeeter, the on-the-make hack of  Harry Potter  fame, to the tabloid guys on  Spitting Image , who were literally depicted as pigs, it’s a profession that creatives have many times invited us to regard with (at best) suspicion and (at worst) loathing and derision. And yet billions of people all over the world watch the news and read it, and that news is provided by these self-same journalists. In addition to that, there have been numerous cases where brave and intrepid news teams have made a significant dent in criminal activity.

Most famously of all perhaps, from 1972 to 1974,  Washington Post  reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated the burglary at the Democratic National Committee HQ in the Watergate Building in DC, and wrote sensational news stories as the case unfolded, indicating that knowledge of the break-in and attempts to cover it up led all the way into the upper reaches of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and the White House, ultimately leading to the resignation of US President, Richard Nixon.

Equally impressively, in 2002 the  Boston Globe  broke the news that countless crimes of a serious sexual nature had been committed inside the Catholic Church in the United States, which led to many criminal prosecutions and lawsuits and for the first time ever, turned an international spotlight on the whole shameful affair.

We have British examples too. In 1997 the  Daily Mail  took the gamble of naming the five white men suspected of brutally killing black teenager Stephen Lawrence, none of whom at this stage had been convicted, labelling them ‘murderers’ and challenging the group to sue them if they weren’t, which roused public fury against the accused and led to severe criticism of the police for botching the investigation.

Okay, I’m not saying the press are all angels. Very far from it. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much research to produce an equally eye-catching list of occasions when journalists have behaved shockingly badly, using extremely underhand methods to get stories.

It’s swings and roundabouts. Even in my own experience, there were some journalists who would sell their souls to get the goods, but at the same time there were others who, purely on a point of principle, would not run stories that were damaging or intrusive to individuals if they felt it was not in the public interest.

Yes, there are definitely two sides to this much-maligned industry, but sometimes the dividing line between the two might be a tad blurry. And  NEVER SEEN AGAIN , I suppose, was my first big opportunity to examine this issue closely.

Now, all right … it’s a crime-thriller, not a polemic on the subject of journalistic integrity. I’m not claiming the latter and never would. But this twilight zone between the acceptable and unacceptable in terms of news gathering and reporting has long bugged me, and is a matter that is particularly relevant in the modern age, so I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy sticking my nose into it.

But don’t worry. No matter how serious I might consider the subtext, I’d never let that get in the way of what I hope are my novels’ usual traits of thrills, spills and intrigue. There is a dark and disturbing puzzle at the heart of  NEVER SEEN AGAIN , which simply has to be solved – and it isn’t the sort of puzzle you can get to the bottom of sitting in an armchair with a laptop on your knee. 
Our characters have to get out there, stepping into the firing line as they pursue and are, on occasion, themselves pursued by the mad, bad and dangerous to know, and in the process they take in a range of locations. 
Everywhere from the tip of Cornwall in the depths of a sun-soaked summer to the dangerous backstreets of a run-down resort town in Kent, from the green fields and cow-filled meadows of Constable Country to the ultra high-security prison, Gull Rock, the final destination of the UK’s most thoroughly wicked.

I’ll say no more about it, other than to reiterate that I’m especially excited about this one. I can’t wait to reconnect with my readers, and to hit you all with what I hope will be my usual mix of eerie mystery and hardboiled action.

As I say,  NEVER SEEN AGAIN  is published next March, but available for pre-order right  NOW . Again though, if you can’t wait that long and would like to get hold of an electronic proof, all you need do is register on NETGALLEY and pre-order. It isn’t live yet, but it won’t be long.


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 ENGLISHMAN   by David Gilman (2020)

Outline
In 2013, airborne companies from the French Foreign Legion attack Al-Qaeda bases dug into the mountains of Mali in West Africa. It’s a ferocious battle, which sees the terrorists destroyed. But along the way, paratrooper Dan Raglan, an Englishman – but only one of many non-French nationals in the Legion – is wounded both physically and mentally.

Many years later, in London, Jeremy Carter, a successful banker, is car-jacked by Russian gunmen, who kill his driver and take him hostage, though his adopted son, Steven, manages to escape. A whirlwind of events follows, the Metropolitan Police swinging into action but, having deduced that this is not a terrorist incident, opting to keep the investigation in-house.

MI6, however, are not so easily fobbed off. Ultra-cool section boss, Maguire, is convinced that Carter has not been abducted because he’s a wealthy banker but because he’s an undercover intelligence officer who’s been working several highly classified missions focussed on the Russian state. Maguire is content to let the police believe they are dealing with organised crime – in fact, in some ways it is organised crime, Russian spy chiefs having learned that using gangsters to carry out their hits means they have more deniability – but to maintain his low profile, he officially keeps his own people out of it while unofficially putting into play a single secret asset from outside the fold.

This asset is ‘the Englishman’, ex-Legionnaire Dan Raglan, now living in a rural enclave in central France with other retired members of his regiment. Raglan wouldn’t otherwise take the job, but when the request is delivered to him by junior MI6 operative, Abash ‘Abbie’ Khalsa, and he hears that Jeremy Carter and his family, old friends, are involved, he knows that he must participate.

Raglan is a complex character. A battle-scarred veteran who is now a man of peace, he has never really questioned the role he played in many clandestine wars, but he’s still haunted by that day in Mali, when he had no option but to kill a child terrorist. Even his knowledge that the Carters are the victims of the London attack might not have been adequate to bring him back fully into action, but when he learns that young Steven, twelve years old, is still lost somewhere in the city, also with a target on his back, there is no chance that he won’t respond.

With the assistance of Abbie, a spook so low in the pecking order that no one will even notice she’s absent from her desk, Raglan searches the capital. Thanks to protocols Carter put in place in the event of his family ever being targetted, the young boy, Steven, has survived. Though he is mentally devastated by what happened, the knowledge he possesses assists in the investigation massively.

It isn’t long before Raglan uncovers the presence of someone he knows of old, a Russian ex-special forces soldier turned lethal assassin, Yegor ‘JD’ Kutznetzov, who evidently is here in London with his gang of handpicked killers not just to kidnap Jeremy Carter, but to extract every ounce of information from him they can. That will mean prolonged, brutal torture, and hardened though he is to the dark side of international espionage, even Carter will be hard-put to withstand this for long.

At least Raglan is no longer alone in the hunt. Alongside the spirited but inexperienced Abbie, he is also assisted by Major Elena Sorokina, a senior Moscow police detective, who has arrived in London because JD murdered four Russian cops. She is a cold, gorgeous presence, but she knows her stuff and is almost feral when it comes to combat.

The enlarged band continue the pursuit of their elusive enemy, and increasingly make ground. But they are unaware at this stage that the trail won’t just take them back and forth across the city, through one blazing shootout after another, but into Europe, and finally into Russia, specifically to a gulag hellhole in the frozen wilderness of the Ural Mountains, the end of the line for Russia’s worst criminals, a place of the damned that is infamously impossible to break out of …

Review
Though it’s been marketed as a Cold War-type thriller of the Len Deighton / John le Carré school,  The Englishman , in my opinion at least, owes more to Lee Child or Tom Clancy. Our main protagonist here is highly intelligent and expertly trained, but he’s a roughneck too, who can smash down doors with a single kick and won’t hesitate to pull the trigger on any number of opponents.

All that said, he isn’t 007. As I intimated earlier, Raglan is a realistically complex character.

Like Bond, he was orphaned as a child and taken in by a caring foster family. Also like Bond, this still meant that he had a dysfunctional childhood, which as an adult made him an ideal candidate for a career in the world of cloaks and daggers. But unlike Bond, in Raglan’s case this was the commando arm of the French Foreign Legion, a notoriously tough training regime and a combat force that would send him into action time and again, often in wars that were never even declared.

As such, he has run a gauntlet of battlefront ordeals. This has left him older and wiser than his years, with contacts across the secretive military world and a wealth of frontline knowledge, an experience gleaned from theatres as varied as deserts, jungles and bullet-riddled inner city backstreets. But Raglan has suffered too. He has a dark inner self and difficulties forming meaningful relationships. His only real friends are fellow ex-Legionnaires, most of whom live like he does: off the grid. When he goes back into action, he slips into it effortlessly, as though that is now his real purpose and trying to live like a civilian a waste of time.

If Dan Raglan isn’t tailor-made to be the focal point of a whole series of novels to follow, then I’ve never encountered another character who is (and indeed, this very week I’ve learned that a timely sequel, Betrayal , is scheduled for publication in January). But do you root for him? Do you feel his pain? Do you shudder with genuine horror at the unimaginably difficult mission this novel confronts him with?

I’m not sure that Raglan is ultra-sympathetic. He’s too hard and too adept at what he does to ever be considered vulnerable. But there is sufficient depth here for him to be interesting. There is certainly much more to him than the average Hollywood action man, easily enough to keep you hooked even in the unlikely event the skilfully-choreographed action scenes don’t.

The other characters may lean a little towards stock: Maguire the MI6 chief who, while ostensibly affable, is not entirely trustworthy; Abbie the feisty, spirited underling with lots of guts but so much to learn; Sorokina a wintry Russian beauty of the classical sort. But that said, it all works. Everyone involved has enough about them to make  The Englishman  an intense and immersive experience.

It helps, of course, that David Gilman writes with such authority. Formerly a creator of historical novels, he’s also an ex-soldier who knows his military procedures, his weapons and combat strategies, while his battle-scenes, most of which are up close and personal in the confined spaces of urban dereliction or the cramped, frozen forests of the Russian taiga, are fast, brutal affairs, in which you feel every gut-thumping impact of bullet striking body, every bone-crunching punch, kick or karate chop. Yes, there are deaths aplenty in  The Englishman , so be warned: some of them are protracted and gruesome (Gilman certainly makes you realise what it would take to kill someone hand-to-hand, and what kind of person you’d need to be, and it’s not edifying).

This is a full-on thriller all-round, so even when we aren’t involved in physical confrontation, the pace is unrelenting, a subliminal clock ticking as the good guys race from one vital clue to the next, the tension cranking up constantly through awareness that at any moment our heroes could stray into the crosshairs of a bunch of antagonists who are genuinely among the worst of the worst.

The plot in some ways might not ring true. It’s an incredible assignment that Raglan finishes up undertaking. To call it ‘daunting’ would be an understatement even for the toughest undercover agent. But when it’s as speedy and exhilarating a read as The Englishman , I’m not sure that matters. I should point out, though, that David Gilman is not just an action writer. As a wordsmith in general, his talent is prodigious, his prose descriptive but never fulsome, and easily accessible. He carries you through this huge story with deceptive ease, remaining clear and concise at all times.

It may not be the most original concept, but for those who enjoy their international thrillers, The Englishman is as good as any of the rest and better than most. First-rate fun.

And now my usual folly as I attempt to cast this beast in the event that a film or TV company gets interested and drops me a line to ask my opinion. (Obviously the latter won’t happen, but I’d be surprised if the former doesn’t; this one is made for the big screen).

Dan Raglan – Michael Fassbender
Major Elena Sorokina – Yuliya Snigir
Yegor ‘JD’ Kutznetzov - Danila Kozlovsky
Abash Khalsa – Hazel Keech
Jeremy Carter – Mark Strong
Maguire – Owen Teale
Yefimov – Konstantin Lavronenko

Mist and terror in the Lowlands. Out now

Well, I’m delighted to say that TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS is available RIGHT NOW as either an ebook or a paperback. In other words, it is now published and just waiting for you to go and get it.
This constitutes the 13th volume to date in the TERROR TALES series, and once again it’s been a huge labour of love by all concerned.

I offer my sincerest thanks not just to the writers, who have really gone above and beyond in their efforts to produce some bone-chilling fiction of the Southern Scottish variety, but to my artist friend and colleague, Neil Williams, who yet again has perfectly captured the mood of the anthology with his jacket art, and of course, to TELOS PUBLISHING for producing such a beautiful book.

I’m even more delighted that it’s out in time for Halloween, and I aim to celebrate on today’s blogpost by talking a little bit more about it, and by throwing you a few choice snippets from some of its contents. Before any of that, though, I also intend today to review and discuss another new book that would be an excellent buy for Halloween because it’s ghostly as hell and because, seeing that it’s set in the beautiful Perthshire countryside (not quite the Scottish Lowlands, but very near) it sits nicely in today’s column. That book is Helen Grant’s exceptionally spooky TOO NEAR THE DEAD.

If you’re only here for the Helen Grant review, that’s perfectly fine as always. Just hurry on down to the Thrillers, Chillers section, which, as usual, is located towards the lower end of today’s post.

However, if you’ve got a bit more time on your hands. Why not first check out …

More Terror Tales
I’m not going to say too much about this new one because I assume most people who read this blog will now be very familiar with the TERROR TALES series, the titles it contains, what we’ve been trying to do with it etc. 
Suffice to say that,  TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS  was always going to be an exciting project. 
I edited TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS way back in 2015, and approached that one with high excitement because the Highlands and Islands, for all kinds of obvious reasons, are a natural environment for spooky stories. I knew we were going to have great fun with it, and we did, none of the writers letting us down.

In comparison, pulling a ghost and horror anthology out of the Scottish Lowlands might superficially have seemed like more of a challenge. But not a bit of it. Okay, it’s gentle rather than grand, it boasts hills rather than mountains, but even some basic research will reveal that, purely in folklore terms, the Lowlands is equally as dramatic a landscape as the Highlands, and historically is as blood-soaked and brutal a realm as you could find anywhere.

This was the place where most of Scotland’s battles with England were fought, but also where civil strife took its bitter course, and where reiver clans raided and feuded. As such, the landscape is studded with castles, towers, gibbets and other relics of war and violence, while the ghosts that haunt it are a veritable who’s who of Scottish notables, everyone from the Black Douglas (beheaded in 1463) to Lord Darnley, husband to Mary, Queen of Scots (strangled in 1567). The Lowlands were also immortalised by a range of poets and rural balladeers, who painted it as lovely but mysterious, spinning vivid tales of witches, warlocks, brownies and selkies. Even the great cities of this region once harboured evil reputations, Edinburgh (or ‘Auld Reekie’), formerly a filthy slum notorious for plague and atrocity, Glasgow renowned for its bad old days of sectarianism and organised crime.

But, enough chit-chat from me. I want you to read the book, after all, not learn all there is to know from today’s blogpost. The main thing is that  TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS  has now been published, and is available as an ebook or paperback. Just follow the links. If you do, I can confidently predict that you won’t be disappointed.

But just in case you need a little more persuasion, here, as promised, are three short but juicy extracts:

It paused and turned to face me, as if we were playing a dreadful game. I saw the frozen features of a mask. The papier-mache was painted red, with blue and yellow swirls running up and down it. It had huge white eyes with round staring holes to see through, and it must have been a trick of the firelight, because for a second I thought that behind those eyeholes there was real fire …
The Strathantine ImpsSteve Duffy
He tied up all the men of fighting age and made them watch their babies being thrown on the fires that were now raging. His brigands raped the women, the girls, even the young men. The elders were dragged to the anvil and their ankles and knees and elbows were smashed with the smithy’s hammer until they could only crawl like worms …
The Moss-Trooper MW Craven
Whatever was heading towards them was large. An image rose up in Meg’s mind, one she’d seen in a picture book: a wizened woman with sparse, lanky hair, grey skin and a grin that showed a mouth full of metal teeth …
The Ringlet Stones Charlotte Bond

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.

TOO NEAR THE DEAD  by Helen Grant (2021)

Outline
Fenella ‘Fen’ Munro is a freelance copywriter from London. In all ways, a modern, educated, independent-minded woman. Though at the commencement of this short but progressively more frightening novel, we meet her trapped in a truly terrifying nightmare. She thinks she has just woken up, only to find herself dressed in an oppressively old-fashioned wedding gown and immured inside a solid, body-length box, which, as it’s lined with satin, is quite clearly a coffin. When she actually does wake up, and finds herself safely alive in Barr Dubh, her new house in the Perthshire countryside, which she has recently bought with her author fiancé, James Sinclair, she is badly shaken up by the vividness of the dream, but pushes the whole thing to the back of her mind as she has lots of other things to be getting on with.

James is currently in Madrid, on a promotional tour for his latest novel, leaving Fen to do the heavy lifting back at home. She isn’t too concerned. They have only recently moved in, and life is good. Her job, especially now that she’s gone freelance, doesn’t entirely satisfy her, but it was through the publishing business that she first met the handsome, courteous and very talented James, so she has no complaints.

A couple of times while awaiting his return, she thinks she spies someone in a lavender gown walking along the edge of the nearby woodland, but aside from that the house is nicely secluded and the surrounding countryside peaceful and quiet. Fen is at last starting to think that she’s living the dream.

Not that one or two minor clouds don’t soon appear on the horizon.

For example, she makes friends with Seonaid McBryde, who runs the local wedding shop, but then, quite unintentionally, seems to upset the woman by suggesting that she wouldn’t mind a lavender wedding dress. Only by way of terse explanation, does Seonaid reply that lavender is considered an unlucky colour in this part of Scotland. Despite that, Fen thinks it was an over-the-top reaction, though later on she sees the same thing again when a folk band providing live music in a nearby pub are given the cold shoulder by a whole crowd of locals because they dare to sing a song called Lavender Lady.

From here on, odd and discomforting events become more noticeable, slowly souring Fen’s experience of her exciting new home and life.

When James returns from Spain, for instance, even though it is late at night, she thinks she sees someone standing in the garden, watching the house, though when the two of them investigate, there is no one there. Then, Fen’s best friend and former work colleague, Belle, arrives to stay for a few days, and though the threesome get on famously (Belle considering James to be a real catch), the guest soon becomes uncomfortable in the house. Finally, she confesses to Fen that she woke up in the middle of her second night there, and found herself in a completely different building: a much older, gaunter residence with a colder, less friendly atmosphere, and when she tried to walk around it, she got lost among its countless shabby rooms and passages, only to then hear someone hammering relentlessly on the front door, demanding to be admitted with what sounded like real and even dangerous anger.

Fen tries to dismiss this as another bad dream, but Belle, who claims to have a sensitivity to these things, insists that there’s something wrong with Barr Dubh … if not the house itself, the ground it is built upon.

Once Belle has returned to London, Fen, disappointed by her friend’s reaction, continues to have nightmares of her own. On one occasion, very distressingly, it’s a pair of unsmiling men trying to manhandle her paralysed body into a coffin; on another, two Victorian-era domestic staff, who discover her corpse as she lies dead in a bed and a bedroom that are not her own.

James, who’s writing another book, is understanding though not as helpful as he might be. And now we learn that Fen’s own past is not as trauma-free as her initial appearance might suggest. She’s hidden it well from almost everyone who knows her, but Fen had a very dysfunctional childhood in the home of two brutally strict parents, the memories of which haunt her deeply. So, the obvious next concern is whether the nightmares could be products of her own disturbed imagination?

However, Fen then meets a local historian, who doesn’t know anything about Barr Dubh, which is a relatively new house, but wonders if it occupies the same spot as Barr Buidhe, a much older, much more Gothic building, which was so thoroughly demolished that not a scrap of it remains today … except, supposedly, for a ruined chapel and overgrown graveyard, both of which may still exist in an untended corner of the grounds. Despite the two of them striking up a rapport, even this pleasant individual makes a quick exit when Fen enquires why the colour lavender seems to have evil connotations in this neighbourhood, though not without offering a brief explanation that in these parts it’s regarded as the colour of mourning.

Increasingly uneasy about the house she’s moved to (because her nightmares are not just getting worse, they seem incredibly real, almost as if she is peering into actual history, and on more and more occasions she suspects that someone – or something – is lurking outside at night), Fen becomes strangely convinced that if she can prove Barr Dubh occupies the same site as the much older structure, some answers will be provided.

But that may mean exploring the encircling woods to see if the ruined chapel and graveyard are still standing. Specifically, she now realises, the part of the woods where on her first few days here, she sighted that mysterious figure in lavender …

Review
Helen Grant is another of those well-kept secrets when it comes to ghostly fiction. With a thoroughly deserved reputation as an award-winning author of children’s and YA mysteries – The Glass Demon , The Vanishing of Katharina Linden and Silent Saturday , to name several – the ghost stories she aims at the adult market are perhaps less well-known, primarily because they have mostly been shorter than novel-length and largely published by the independent press.

However, all that may shortly change.

Grant’s supernatural horror novel, Ghost , which was written squarely for mature readers, won considerable acclaim in 2018, not just for its scares but for its believable multi-layered characters and the depth and complexity of their relationship. And now it looks as though Grant has done it again, only this time even more forcefully, with her second full-length novel for the adult market, Too Near the Dead , which yet again pits ordinary but troubled people against forces from beyond that are anything but benign.

That’s probably the thing that strikes you first about Too Near the Dead : there is a real flavour of MR James. Though few of the obvious ‘Jamesian’ tropes are present (there are no learned clergymen here!), Grant demonstrates real literary skill in conjuring an atmosphere of utter dread and the threat of something truly terrible lurking just beyond our perception, and in ways so subtle that you don’t notice them at the time. Okay, the nightmare sequences I’ve referred to in the outline above are gut-thumpingly scary, but they are only nightmares. It’s through the waking experiences of Fen Munro, as she tries to go about her lovely new life and yet, drip by drip, disturbing weirdness intrudes, that we increasingly sense the approaching horror.

Such is the skill with which this is pulled off that you are well into the book, totally engrossed, before you’ve really noticed it.

It helps, of course, that Too Near the Dead is a mystery as well as a traditional ghost story. That’s another Jamesian box ticked, our brave but isolated protagonist increasingly seeking to answer questions from long ago, certain this will be the only way to save herself, but suspecting that there will be more and more of a price to pay for such intrusive enquiry. And all of this only intensifies the book’s pace, the pages flying by as the intrigued reader rushes on, determined to learn as much as possible.

While all this may sound as though it’s a tale exclusively in the vein of past masters of the genre (I’ve already mentioned MR James, but there are hints of Wakefield, Le Fanu and others too), the setting is Britain (and Scotland specifically) in the 2020s. Our main characters are London sophisticates, but the locals they encounter are not bumpkins. Yes, there is a degree of superstition in the area, particularly around the colour lavender, but overall the occupants of the district are modern enough to be embarrassed about this and not to want to talk about it.

On top of that, subtlety remains the order of play. Fen’s initial enquiries into the history of Barr Dubh and whatever building was there before it, do not immediately uncover horrific historical detail. In Too Near the Dead , the distant past is buried and forgotten. Barr Dubh itself is a new-build with no skeletons in any of its own cupboards. It’s distinctly not the case that local taxis won’t drive there after dusk, or anything so melodramatic. In this respect, Too Near the Dead is neatly separated from the main body of the new wave of powerfully-written ‘Gothic romance,’ which is usually set in Victorian or Edwardian times and often has much to do with lunatic asylums and locked upper rooms.

But for all that, one of the most potent aspects of Helen Grant’s new novel is its grasp on the emotional pain of its characters. Even in her shorter fiction, the author rarely gives us tales in which individuals have suffered unfeasible torments in their lives. She mostly writes about real people with everyday hang-ups, though hang-ups that nevertheless are a source of ongoing anguish. And Too Near the Dead is no exception. We don’t learn anything very quickly about Fenella Munro’s early life; it’s almost as though she’s overcome it, put it out of her mind. But gradually, as the narrative unfolds, we start to realise that it’s still there to an extent, a period of teenage suffering, which, while it’s no longer so acute that it bothers her minute-by-minute, manifests itself strongly (if indefinably) when she starts to have doubts about husband James’s private affairs, and therefore subconsciously about the entire viability of her too-good-to-be-true new life.

For me, it’s this psychological subtext that really elevates Too Near the Dead . You could even go as far as to say that the real antagonist in this novel is not so much a revenant from the tragic past but Fen’s desperate fear that, ultimately, happiness will never be hers (a metaphor which the revenant nicely underlines at the book’s big climax)

Superficially a classy chiller of the old school, Too Near the Dead is actually a clever and very contemporary story, dealing with non-extraordinary people, who, despite their work-a-day exteriors, are just as likely to be trapped in the throes of personal hauntings as any of their more visibly harrowed fictional counterparts. Add the lush but succinct descriptive work, Helen Grant completely capturing the green hills, quiet glens and verdant woods of the lower Highlands, and you have an exceptional piece of writing that works on every level.

And now, yet again, I’m going to cast this beast. I’d love to see it adapted for the screen, perhaps in the Ghost Story for Christmas slot. But until that happens, you’re going to have to rely on your (and Helen Grant’s) imagination. Here are the actors I would choose.

Fen – Michelle Ryan
James – Matt Smith Belle – Rebecca Hall

Terror descends on the Scottish Lowlands

Okay, so what do we all think about this?

And don’t bother putting your answers on a postcard. As you probably realise, TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS is the latest installment in the TERROR TALES series, and one I’ve been particularly excited about for quite some time for reasons that I’ll go into below … along with the table of contents of course, the back-cover blurb and anything else necessary to send you straight to the TELOS website, where the book, which will be published on October 22 this year, is already AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER.

On a not dissimilar subject today – i.e. rural ghost stories, folk horror and tales of dread drawn from all corners of this sceptred isle – I’ll be offering a detailed review and discussion of GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND, Vol 1 in the hugely popular anthology series, GREAT BRITISH HORROR, as edited by Steve J Shaw.

If you’re only here for the GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND chit-chat, by all means shoot down to the lower end of today’s blogpost and the Thrillers, Chillers section, where I post all my book reviews. On this occasion, though, I recommend you stick around a little while at least. If you’re not familiar with the TERROR TALES books but you enjoy GREAT BRITISH HORROR … well, I mean, come on! How different in tone do you think they’re really going to be?

Still here?

Okay, cool. Let’s get on with …

TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS
The TERROR TALES series has been running since 2011, as many of you are hopefully aware. For those who aren’t, we publish annually, each year featuring a different corner of the British Isles and mining it thoroughly both for horror fiction and horror non-fiction, the ‘true’ anecdotes always interspersing with the stories, one or two of which will usually be lesser-know classics, though the vast majority are original works by some of the best names in the business.

If you don’t believe that latter boast, just check out the back-cover blurb and the Table of Contents below:
The Scottish Lowlands. Gentle hills, dreamy woods, romantic ballads, heroic songs. But dark castles tell tales of torture and woe, of reiver cruelty and the madness of kings. While the shades of slain armies still battle in the mist, witch-hunters ride and the bone-fires blaze ...

The Moss-Trooper by MW Craven
Bastions of Dread
The Strathantine Imps by Steve Duffy
Spirits of Palace and Tomb
Gie Me Something ta Eat Afore I Dee by John Alfred Taylor
Glasgow’s Dancing Corpse
Land of the Foreigner by Tracy Fahey
The Bloodiest of Ends
Proud Lady in a Cage by Fred Urquhart
The Ghost Road
Drumglass Chapel by Reggie Oliver
The Devil in the Dark City
Two Shakes of a Dead Lamb’s Tail by Anna Taborksa
I’ll Be in Scotland Before YouThe Ringlet Stones by Charlotte Bond
The Real Mr HydeCoulter’s Candy by Johnny Mains
Dishes Served Cold
Echoes from the Past by Graham Smith
The Murder Dolls
Herders by Willie Meikle
The Vampire of Annandale
Birds of Prey by SJI Holliday
The Selkirk Undead
The Clearance by Paul M. Feeney
The Overtoun Bridge Mystery
The Fourth Presence by SA Rennie

The Lowlands of Scotland was always going to be an exciting call, because it ticks so many of the Terror Tales boxes. 

Though you might, on first thinking about it, assume that the Scottish Highlands would be the more dramatic backdrop for a collection of chilling tales, and indeed we did TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS back in 2015, you have to remember that while the Highlands is undoubtedly wreathed in Celtic folklore, the Lowlands were much more embroiled in the brutal mainstream politics of the British Isles.

Thus, more slaughters and other atrocities took place there, and not just as the Scots saw off foreign invaders like the Romans, the Norse and the English, but because there were civil wars as well. If you’ve never heard about the Covenanters, or the Jacobites, or if you thought the English Civil War was confined only to England, well you should find this volume informative as well as entertaining. Some of the region’s darkest, bloodiest days stemmed from brother turning upon brother.

That said, with so many pitiless massacres in its past, the Lowlands’ ghost lore is absolutely rife. You can parachute into Southern Scotland just about anywhere, onto the roof of a castle or church, an open stretch of moor, a defensive wall, a tower, even on top of a tenement in Glasgow or a terraced house in the old West Bow district of Edinburgh, and you’ll disturb its dead occupants as surely as those that are living. Likewise, tales of diabolism run rampant throughout the region’s mythology. This too was a realm where witchcraft was both practised and persecuted, while the sprites and goblins associated with the braes and cairns of this strange and lovely land were almost unique in their wickedness.

And when it comes to evil beings, we aren’t just discussing those of the supernatural variety. From Bluidy Mackenzie to Bible John, the Scottish Lowlands has produced an array of fiendish villains, real-life bogeymen, the mere mention of whose names casts long and eerie shadows.

Many of them will appear here, in this book, in one form or another. But that’s enough from me for now. If you really want do drill deep into TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH LOWLANDS , you know what you need to do.

As I say, it’s out on October 22, and available for pre-order on the TELOS PUBLISHING  website right now.

 

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.
GREAT BRITISH HORROR 1: GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND
edited by Steve J Shaw (2016)

Black Shuck Books is one of the most exciting publishers of homegrown horror to have emerged onto the British scene in the last few years. The Great British Horror series is only one of several that owner, publisher and senior commissioning editor, Steve J Shaw, currently has underway, but it’s already proving to be hugely productive. Five titles have been launched under the banner to date in both paperback and hardback, and this one, Green and Pleasant Land, was the first.

Before digging into it story by story, let’s allow the publishers themselves to make an introduction. Here is the back cover blurb:

Great British Horror 1 is the first in an annual series showcasing the best in modern British horror. Every year, the series will feature ten British authors, plus one international guest contributor, telling tales of this sceptred isle.

The 2016 edition, Green and Pleasant Land, features eleven original stories of small town, rural and folk horror from eleven authors at the very top of their game.

I suppose it’s easily possible these days to conflate folk-horror fiction with all things British. Okay, people still dispute what actually constitutes folk-horror, even now, a decade after it suddenly reappeared and elbowed out some space for itself in what was already a much pigeon-holed market. But if you consider that in its most basic sense, it involves witchcraft, remote rural locations, stone circles and ancient cults, you won’t go far wrong.

After all, the three horror movies (all British of course) that celeb horror aficionado Mark Gatiss originally nominated as the unholy trinity from which folk-horror was born – Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man – are all exactly that. But, judging from his editorial decisions on show here, Black Shuck head honcho, Steve J Shaw, might give you an argument that traditional British horror isn’t solely drawn from folklore, and in fact that the ‘British horror’ label could also be attached to several other very identifiable subgenres.

Traditional ghost stories, for example, are still a staple of it, and have been for a long time. MR James, EF Benson and even Charles Dickens got out into the British back-country and told chilling supernatural tales decades before the term folk-horror was coined. Visionaries like Arthur Machen added strangeness to the mix. In later years, the 1960s and 1970s, the Pan Horror anthologies became notorious for the violence and sleaziness of their stories, many of which focussed on madness and murder rather than ghosts and goblins but invariably took place in mundane and yet recognisably British locations.

Around the same time, the Amicus portmanteau movies, while drawing so much inspiration (and sometimes a whole lot more) from American horror comics, were almost entirely located in the UK and thoroughly flavoured by British culture. On top of that, this was the age of Hammer, who, though they set almost everything they did in the past and in semi-mythical central European locations, produced the majority of their films on the same sets in and around Bray Studios in Berkshire, using familiar all-British casts, and could not have been more British in tone.

All of these influences, and others, are on show in the Great British Horror series, though perhaps it was always going to be inevitable that Volume 1, Green and Pleasant Land, in which the emphasis lies on the British countryside, was going to lean most strongly towards folklore.

Like all the other volumes that would follow in this series (to date), Green and Pleasant Land contains eleven stories, ten written by British authors, one extra contribution sourced from overseas.

The folk-horror stories themselves are an eclectic mix.

For example, very traditionally, in Rich Hawkins’s Meat for the Field, a young man tortured by guilt decides that he can no longer stand the human sacrifices committed by the cult that dominates his poor rural village, and resolves to do something about it. It’s an interesting twist on the secretive village witchcraft tale that we’ve become so used to on film and TV in that it’s an insider confronting the evil rather than an outsider, but all the comforting tropes are there.

In contrast, VE Leslie’s Hermaness has a gentler tone, but leans towards the psychological. It focusses on a young couple who, despite their crumbling relationship, go on holiday to Shetland. While there, Brian dismisses Nell’s knowledge of the local seabirds and her fascination for the mythology of the region, showing much more interest in a sexy American tourist. And then the mysterious fog comes down …

There are even darker forces at work in the three other folk-horror contributions.

Ray Cluley’s The Castellmarch Man takes us on a round-trip of ancient sites, many of them in Wales, and delves deeply into Arthurian legend, but as this is the strongest story in the collection in my opinion, I’ll save the synopsis for this one until later; just trust me, it’s ultra-creepy. Another powerful folk-tale is AK Benedict’s Misericord, in which an academic and her fiancé visit a marshland church, which for centuries has somehow withstood the local floodwaters. According to the vicar, this is down to the power of prayer. But could it be something else?

But perhaps the most folk-horrorish (is there such a phrase?) story here is Jasper Bark’s complex but compelling Scottish Highlands novella, Quiet Places. There are many ideas and concepts wrapped up in this one, so it’s no surprise that it runs to 70 plus pages (I understand that a new, revised and lengthier version has since been released as a stand-alone), but none of them are wasted. More about this one later too.

But as I said, Green and Pleasant Land doesn’t lurk solely in the realms of folk-horror.

We get more than a dollop of Machenesque weirdness (with some extra nasty stuff added) from Laura Mauro in Strange as Angels, though this is another strong entry, so I’ll be talking a little more about this one later too, while the aforementioned Pan Horror series would not have turned its nose up at Adam Millard’s sad and ultimately horrifying She Waits on the Upland (more about this one later as well), or David Moody’s Ostrich, in which a pleasant country cottage becomes a prison when it dawns on a middle-aged housewife that all her controlling husband wants her to do is keep the place spick and span. Inevitably, she soon reaches breaking point …

Less pulpy in tone and in some ways more relevant to the here and now – this one certainly enshrines the darker side of England’s green and pleasant land! – the ever-reliable James Everington hits us with A Glimpse of Red, the story of a foreign woman living in Britain under Witness Protection, but going slowly mad on the streets of an English market town that seems hopelessly alien to her.

Less ‘real world’ and in fact a whole lot more bizarre, we should also mention two unearthly tales that simply take possession of the word ‘horror’ and run with it like mad.

In Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Mr Denning Sings, we centre on an eager churchgoer, who loves singing hymns during services at his local country church. But one week, the celebration is repeatedly disrupted by an ugly coughing sound, which no one else in the congregation seems to hear, though that doesn’t stop the hideous entity causing it to finally materialise. Even eerier, we have Blue Eyes by Barbie Wilde, in which a homeless alcoholic discovers the corpse of a beautiful woman in the woods, and returns to it repeatedly to use it as his personal sex toy. But how dead is this woman? And is she even a woman?

All round, Green and Pleasant Land is an excellent start to the Great British Horror series. As I say, it’s a diverse but entertaining mix of dark fiction, richly flavoursome of the British countryside but not hidebound by the more typical conventions of ‘rural horror’. More important still (to me at least), all the stories selected are of the highest quality, expertly written and paced, and in many cases, deeply unsettling. It gets my strongest recommendation.

And now …

GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND – the movie

I doubt that any film maker has optioned this book yet, or even that it’s ever likely to happen, but as this part of the review is always the fun part, here are my opinions just in case some major player decides to put it on the screen.

Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most filmic and most right for adaptation in a portmanteau 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 either relate spooky stories or listen to them. An eerie village pub might suffice in this case, or a bus stop out on lonely moorland, or even an endlessly winding woodland path as a bunch of progressively less-cheery hillwalkers tramp sturdily along it.

Without further waffle, here are the stories and the (very expensive) casts I would choose:

The Castellmarch Man (by Ray Cluley): Charley and Lynsey enjoy ‘geo-caching’ around the UK, visiting ancient or sacred sites and leaving evidence of their visits in specially provided boxes. On a trip to rural Wales, however, they meet the mysterious and scary ‘Castellmarch Man’, and their lives will never be the same again … 

Charley – Andrew Scott
Lynsey – Jodie Turner-Smith

He Waits on the Upland (by Adam Millard): Embittered old farmer, Graham, is struggling on many fronts. His wife, Jenny, is slowly succumbing to dementia, and he is convinced that his rude and coarse neighbour’s pack of dangerous dogs are damaging his sheep. One night, he decides to take firm action …

Graham – Brian Cox
Jenny – Gemma Jones

Strange as Angels (by Laura Mauro): Two recovering drug addicts discover a small winged creature, which they christen an ‘angel’. They feed it meat and it grows, but when Frankie, the girl, starts to become overly fond of it, Jimmy, the boy, is increasingly jealous …

Frankie – Anya Taylor-Joy
Jimmy – Jack O‘Connell

Quiet Places (by Jasper Bark): A mysterious feline beast stalks a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, holding the local laird, David, enthralled by its mere presence. But his spirited lover, Sally, is determined to free him whatever it takes, despite the warnings of local librarian, Jane…

Sally – Natalie Dormer
David – David Tennant
Jane – Kelly Macdonald