Eric Nash's Blog, page 6

Too Late Now

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Inspired in part, by the downgrading of exam grades in British schools this week, Too Late Now was written as a way of venting my anger and frustration at the stupidity of Mankind.

Probably because of the urgency I felt, prose did not seem the correct medium and so I chose poetry. To me a poem should, whatever its subject, pack a punch.

After it has rested, I may look at the poem again and rework it, hopefully make improvements. However, it felt right to share with you this raw version.

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Three O’s at eight o’clock each night

echo about the red brick walls

with the ghost of a love that comes

haunting with a buried hand squeezed tight.

Reviewed: Haverscroft

I’ve been strapped to a chair and had my eyelids pinned open while a demonic hand turned the pages of Haverscroft by S A Harris. I had no choice other than to be riveted by this book.

For me, it’s the uncertainty of the characters’ motives stacking up the tension amid an onslaught of supernatural events that makes Haverscroft a real page-turner. The story feels dense but the uncomplicated writing has a clarity that dissipates this making it a very satisfying read. I was able to visualise well the believable characters to the extent where I even felt reassured by the presence of Riley, the yappy little dog!

A great, modern ghost story.

Reviewed: Doggerland

Ben Smith is a poet and “a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, specialising in environmental literature and focusing particularly on oceans, climate change and the ‘Anthropocene’.” The idea of a wordsmith who knows his subject promises a great read, and I think Smith delivers this in Doggerland.

Set sometime in the future, Smith uses Dogger Bank wind farms (that are currently under construction) to deftly amplify the characters’ isolation. He then layers this with a sense of desolation: “Now, the dust in the room was the old man’s too – all tangled up with his own. If he thought about it, he could imagine them both swirling around, caught by the air con’s mechanical breeze, dragged through its vents and grilles, through all the rig’s pipework and out into the air. He could almost feel the real wind carrying them up over the fields, over the cushion of turbulence and out to the open water, the featureless sea, where all noise and trace of the farm diminished. But he tried not to think about it too much. All the dust got caught in the filters.”

Smith’s descriptions are as rich and evocative as an oil painting by JMW Turner, despite the brevity of the text. And the simple dialogue feels very real – the times when the old man speaks, I could picture him standing before me.

There is also an underlying threat running through the novel. Catastrophic changes that have occurred in the past can easily happen again. And maybe they already have. “For a hundred thousand years the water waited, locked up as crystal, sheet and shelf. All was immobile, but for the slow formation of arc and icicle, which was the water remembering the waves it used to be and the waves it would become again. The only sound was the crackle of frozen mud and ice rind, which was the water, down to its very molecules, repeating its mantra: solidity is nothing but an interruption to continuous flow, an obstacle to be overcome, an imbalance to be rectified.”

Along with the environmental aspect, exploring who we are and where we belong are also constant themes. And while the book is eerie and sad and frightening, it also highlights the human traits of stubbornness, ingenuity, and love, therefore suggesting hope.

 

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Reviewed: The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories (ed. Michael Newton)

This is a book with a TOC to be proud of:

Elizabeth Gaskell: The Old Nurse’s Story

Fitz-James O’Brien: What Was It?

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain

Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Cold Embrace

Amelia B. Edwards: The North Mail

Charles Dickens: No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man

Sheridan Le Fanu: Green Tea

Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House

Robert Louis Stevenson: Thrawn Janet

Margaret Oliphant: The Open Door

Rudyard Kipling: At the End of the Passage

Lafcadio Hearn: Nightmare-Touch

W. W. Jacobs: The Monkey’s Paw

Mary Wilkins Freeman: The Wind in the Rose-Bush

M. R. James: ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’

Ambrose Bierce: The Moonlit Road

Henry James: The Jolly Corner

Mary Austin: The Readjustment

Edith Wharton: Afterward

I generally pay little attention to the author’s gender, but in this collection, I thought, many of the stories written by the male authors had a faint pomposity, which lent the upper hand to the female writers who just got on with the job of telling a creepy tale. Hence my personal favourites were The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Open Door by Margaret Oliphant, and The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary Wilkins Freeman. All three stories were chilling and concise.

Overall, this is an excellent collection of classic ghost stories written in the Victorian era. One for lovers of the supernatural tale and also a perfect introduction to the genre.

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Reviewed: Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic is alive with mansions and cemeteries, forests and mist, hauntings and rot; it swims in the murk of politics and ethics; it courts mad passion. As for monsters, the human antagonists dwelling on the pages of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel are some of the vilest I’ve met. Fortunately, the author also introduces us to Noemí Taboada, a smart and headstrong protagonist, to help us tackle them, and it is difficult to imagine anyone better suited for the job.

Set in 1950’s Mexico, Noemí ventures through a forest and up the side of a mountain to a family mansion that looms “like a great, quiet gargoyle.” A house which Noemí describes as “the abandoned shell of a snail”. This is High Place, where Noemí’s cousin has requested our heroine presence. And it is here that Moreno-Garcia steadily reveals the horrors that the cousin has married into, the force at the heart of the once-powerful Doyle family. So begins our exploration into the side of the human psyche hidden by shadow. Will Noemí survive? Will we ever be the same?

The novel was a joy to read because it was, not so much an example, but more a celebration of Gothic horror and the genre’s classic literature. If you haven’t read the genre before then I recommend Mexican Gothic as your starting point.

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Reviewed: The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires

In this, his fifth novel, Hendrix promises blood. He delivers it, too.

Set in the American state of North Carolina in the early 90’s, the story centres around a group of housewives, their book club, and what happens when a good-looking stranger moves to the neighbourhood. It reminded me of the 80’s classic, Fright Night, interbred with the more sinister Stepford Wives. A rollercoaster of a read. It’ll have your heart stopping one moment, then leaping into your throat the next; you’ll forget to breathe and you’ll laugh out loud; you’ll be saddened by the unfairness of it all.

Hendrix spends plenty of pages developing the characters in an easy-to-read and humorous style that has the danger of misleading the reader, allowing them to feel safe. But these women are angry, and there’s a lot to be angry about, including the vampire. The monster – and yes, there is one – highlights, rather than is, the actual horror. The book, for example, shows how stark racial inequality can be. But the most chilling part in the whole book comes halfway in and has nothing to do with the supernatural or Good vs Evil, and everything to do with gender roles.

As well as angry, the characters are strong, they become heroes, and in 2020 that’s exactly what we need.

Oh, watch out for the cockroach scene. It’ll make you wince.

Reviewed: House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is a brick of a book. Inside is text within text, typed and printed, inverted or spiraling, upside down and downside up. With the initial flick through the many pages comes the knowledge that one has to be committed to read it (perhaps in both senses of the word). The novel is about a house, or it’s about a movie, maybe it’s about the academic work documenting the movie about the house. Oh, and there are two narrators, Zampanò and Johnny Truant, who are mad as cheese. Have I put you off yet? Don’t be. House of Leaves is a great read!

Peter Beaumont, of the Observer, sums HoL up when he says the book is “at once a genuinely scary chiller, a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read”. Danielewski’s use of footnotes, appendices, and citations from academic work already in existence, along with quotes from well-known people about the movie itself, reinforces the idea that both the movie and the house exist. This of course then leads the reader to question whether what they have in their hands is just fiction; in this case particularly, it’s a disturbing notion. In addition, the roles of the two narrators complement each other in a similar way as teacher and student. Zampanò’s scholarly yet wholly readable approach, which slowly uncovers more and more about the house, contrasts with the initial light relief of Truant’s viewpoint.

For me, the novel is a modern-day haunted house story, though there are no ghosts between the pages. It opens with the line: ‘This is not for you.’ A warning, and of course, a lure. Danielewski makes the impossible credible by diverting and exploring topics and details most novels would either ignore or lose in an edit. He drops in perfectly timed one-liners or even single words that are so exquisitely gut-twisting that all one can do is smile. The word, house, appears differently to all the other text in the book, like it’s been written on an old typewriter that’s had the arms for those five letters damaged. The effect is a little cheesy at first, but over time it turns into something quite unsettling.

The combination of all this, and much more, makes Danielewski’s debut novel a skilful experiment in unease. But maybe, as the book says, ‘this is not for you.’

The Woodwose And His May Queen

It’s Spring and the wild man has come out to play!

[image error] ©B Anne Adriaens (https://www.flickr.com/photos/b-anne-adriaens/albums)

Featured in the April issue of Terror Tract, The Woodwose And His May Queen is the horrific tale of Gabriel’s return to the woods where memories aren’t the only thing waiting for him.

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B086Z7RC7B

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086Z7RC7B

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