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Broad Moor
‘A strange, haunting story with a deceptively unruffled and austere surface. Alison Moore’s is one of the most singularly original imaginations at work now’ Neel Mukherjee
12 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2019
70 people want to read
About the author
Alison Moore
94 books111 followers Born in Manchester in 1971, Alison Moore lives next but one to a sheep field in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border, with her husband Dan and son Arthur.
She is a member of Nottingham Writers’ Studio and an honorary lecturer in the School of English at Nottingham University.
In 2012 her novel The Lighthouse, the unsettling tale of a middle-aged man who embarks on a contemplative German walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage – only to find himself more alienated than ever, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
She is a member of Nottingham Writers’ Studio and an honorary lecturer in the School of English at Nottingham University.
In 2012 her novel The Lighthouse, the unsettling tale of a middle-aged man who embarks on a contemplative German walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage – only to find himself more alienated than ever, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 26, 2019
This obscure short story stays with the reader long after the final word, the rolling images of the sweeping countryside and the haunting unknown leaving lasting impressions from an undoubtedly skilled writer. However much I tried to erase those feelings of nervousness and remove myself from the claustrophobic yet expansive setting, I failed. Moore had me hooked on her writing, her ability to slowly and beautifully weave a tantalising story together, and her cruel (but excitingly effective) way of shutting me down when I thought I understood it all.
Drew is a hopeless and helpless narrator, who takes one too many wrong turns after leading a stressed and busy lifestyle. The story shows the reader the errors the mind can make when otherwise occupied, the things that it can overlook, the events that it can leads us into if left to its own devices. Drew feels she has a connection to her comatose twin sister and Moore plays wonderfully with the idea of twin attachment, as both sisters seemingly share the same naivety, each mirroring events that place them in vulnerable, trusting positions. The wonderful images of them sharing a childhood over classic musical numbers is a fantastic memory that Drew harks back to – but for the sisters, a memory is exactly what it shall remain.
Music returns throughout the piece, entering and exiting as the story ebbs and flows. It juxtaposes with the eerie quietness we associate with the countryside – Drew’s radio cutting in and out is a clever event from Moore that places both narrator and reader in a state of limbo, both connected and distant from the real world to which she should be heading. However much we scream at the page for Drew to turn around, rethink, do the right thing and stop for a moment, she doesn’t listen. It has the makings of a classic, gut-wrenching thriller that leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but to our delight.
Whatever is happening in that haunting part of the country, Moore sets the scene exquisitely and has the perfect pace to match. This story feels complete – not too much is shown, but I was given enough background into Drew’s life and her sister’s incident that over just a few short pages, I was invested in their both their outcomes. While it was obvious from the start that this isn’t going to end well for either character – Moore begins with Drew veering from her strict traffic directions – it isn’t quite clear just what is going to happen/has happened. The reader is bought to the edge of their seat, and is then left to piece together the rest for themselves. Storytelling at its finest, complete with alluring language that leaves you windswept and dreaming of waves.
Drew is a hopeless and helpless narrator, who takes one too many wrong turns after leading a stressed and busy lifestyle. The story shows the reader the errors the mind can make when otherwise occupied, the things that it can overlook, the events that it can leads us into if left to its own devices. Drew feels she has a connection to her comatose twin sister and Moore plays wonderfully with the idea of twin attachment, as both sisters seemingly share the same naivety, each mirroring events that place them in vulnerable, trusting positions. The wonderful images of them sharing a childhood over classic musical numbers is a fantastic memory that Drew harks back to – but for the sisters, a memory is exactly what it shall remain.
Music returns throughout the piece, entering and exiting as the story ebbs and flows. It juxtaposes with the eerie quietness we associate with the countryside – Drew’s radio cutting in and out is a clever event from Moore that places both narrator and reader in a state of limbo, both connected and distant from the real world to which she should be heading. However much we scream at the page for Drew to turn around, rethink, do the right thing and stop for a moment, she doesn’t listen. It has the makings of a classic, gut-wrenching thriller that leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but to our delight.
Whatever is happening in that haunting part of the country, Moore sets the scene exquisitely and has the perfect pace to match. This story feels complete – not too much is shown, but I was given enough background into Drew’s life and her sister’s incident that over just a few short pages, I was invested in their both their outcomes. While it was obvious from the start that this isn’t going to end well for either character – Moore begins with Drew veering from her strict traffic directions – it isn’t quite clear just what is going to happen/has happened. The reader is bought to the edge of their seat, and is then left to piece together the rest for themselves. Storytelling at its finest, complete with alluring language that leaves you windswept and dreaming of waves.
July 5, 2019
Joint review: The Violet Eye by Mike Fox, The Message by Philippa Holloway, Broad Moor by Alison Moore and Jutland by Lucie McKnight Hardy
Broad Moor displays Alison Moore's characteristic knack for the strange and unsettling. The narrator, Drew, is on her way to a spa weekend with friends – one of the only hints of modernity in a story that, otherwise, might be taking place at any time between the mid-20th century and today. Indeed, as the story progresses there's a sense that Drew is travelling backwards through time. On the radio is a direct signifier of the unheimlich: 'a song that was very familiar but which she could not place'. The mysterious doubling of names (Broad Moor, Broad and Mere, not to mention the author's surname!) only adds to the uncanny effect.
Drew's directions advise a specific route: the second turning to Mere, not the first turning to Mere via Broad. But she's in need of petrol and ends up taking the first turning anyway. She finds the endless road studded with what might seem like horror cliches: no phone signal; faulty phone boxes; a weird figure who keeps reappearing. She hits and kills a bird with her car; she hears the sounds of seagulls crying out. There's something else in the background, too: Drew is thinking about her twin sister Kerry, who's been in a coma for several months. As the story reaches its climax, Drew and Kerry's histories seem to somehow converge, and Drew finds herself at the mercy of a stranger who is either actually connected to, or evokes thoughts of, her twin's accident.
TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
Broad Moor displays Alison Moore's characteristic knack for the strange and unsettling. The narrator, Drew, is on her way to a spa weekend with friends – one of the only hints of modernity in a story that, otherwise, might be taking place at any time between the mid-20th century and today. Indeed, as the story progresses there's a sense that Drew is travelling backwards through time. On the radio is a direct signifier of the unheimlich: 'a song that was very familiar but which she could not place'. The mysterious doubling of names (Broad Moor, Broad and Mere, not to mention the author's surname!) only adds to the uncanny effect.
Drew's directions advise a specific route: the second turning to Mere, not the first turning to Mere via Broad. But she's in need of petrol and ends up taking the first turning anyway. She finds the endless road studded with what might seem like horror cliches: no phone signal; faulty phone boxes; a weird figure who keeps reappearing. She hits and kills a bird with her car; she hears the sounds of seagulls crying out. There's something else in the background, too: Drew is thinking about her twin sister Kerry, who's been in a coma for several months. As the story reaches its climax, Drew and Kerry's histories seem to somehow converge, and Drew finds herself at the mercy of a stranger who is either actually connected to, or evokes thoughts of, her twin's accident.
TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
January 14, 2021
“— helmetless, pressed close to this stranger, whose bulky cross-body bag dug uncomfortably into Drew’s leg —“
…bag, dug, leg, this is the story of Drew a woman whose twin sister is in a coma in hospital after a difficult sapphic affair, and a mother with dementia, both who depend on her visits, and Drew is drawn off on an inferred Norfolk spa holiday with friends, but nor are one’s folk more than just inferred when out of sight if not out of mind. Out of signal, out of petroleum, lost. Another difficult sapphic engagement? Or a squashed or comatose garden bird representative of what? Lost or unfertilised eggs, cold or warm? The gulls are inferred, meanwhile. The guilts, too. Drew’s drawn out guilts. Facebook comments, notwithstanding. The whore of North Sea’s cross-body enticement. And a dyke that leads to Horsey Mere, one of the Norfolk Broads. Who knows how such intriguingly implicit stories draw us to inferences true and false alike?
…bag, dug, leg, this is the story of Drew a woman whose twin sister is in a coma in hospital after a difficult sapphic affair, and a mother with dementia, both who depend on her visits, and Drew is drawn off on an inferred Norfolk spa holiday with friends, but nor are one’s folk more than just inferred when out of sight if not out of mind. Out of signal, out of petroleum, lost. Another difficult sapphic engagement? Or a squashed or comatose garden bird representative of what? Lost or unfertilised eggs, cold or warm? The gulls are inferred, meanwhile. The guilts, too. Drew’s drawn out guilts. Facebook comments, notwithstanding. The whore of North Sea’s cross-body enticement. And a dyke that leads to Horsey Mere, one of the Norfolk Broads. Who knows how such intriguingly implicit stories draw us to inferences true and false alike?
September 30, 2020
This review was originally published in Black Static magazine July 2019 alongside Alison Moore's "Broad Moor" (both included below):
Any honest parent would admit two polarizing sensations once a child is born. The first is the complex realization that you are responsible for keeping it alive, for its forever happiness, and the second is the guilt that wonders what if it had never been born, what might have been achieved if the push of evolution hadn’t – with inexorable force – impositioned a reality which can never return to the freedom you once had.
It is these two feelings – the want and the need – which dominate “Jutland”. Ana is a writer – a once good writer – whose words have evaporated since the arrival of the baby. She has an older child, Isaac, but he doesn’t speak, and neither much do Ana and her husband, Eric, who trip around each other in an unspoken malaise during their journey to – and early days in – a rented house in Jutland. Eric is a painter and he needs the light. Ana also seeks the creative spark. But it’s easier for Eric, for it is Ana’s role as mother to carry the burden of the child.
The name Jutland is derived from the Jutes – an ancient Germanic people – but the impression of this peninsula is that it juts out to sea, is somehow separated from the remainder of Northern Europe, as thought it extends for something just out of reach. Unlike Jutland, Ana’s baby is assigned no name. To name is to acknowledge, and her baby cannot be acknowledged, not if Ana is going to find her way back into writing.
She carries it in a sling, strapped across the front of her body. A dilemma: She thinks that if she is blown over her brain will have to make a split-second decision about whether to put her hands out to break her fall and protect herself, or keep her arms around the baby and stop it from being damaged. Those two aforementioned sensations encapsulated in a nutshell. And damaged is such a strange word. Most writers would use hurt, but McKnight Hardy has rendered Ana’s baby as an object, keeping the reader at a distance. Do we root for Ana as a writer or as a mother? Is it possible to be both?
McKnight Hardy reveals this simple story through insinuation over action. It isn’t only her husband and mute son who are uncertain, but those she meets in Jutland too: the boy who seems to (fore)shadow them, the bearded man dismissive of her identity. This is absolutely a writer’s story, easily identifiable for this reader. Whilst the ending is expected, it isn’t the ending which matters but the story which continues beyond the page. The story that Ana cannot write, but which has been written for her.
If Ana is lost, then so is Drew, in Alison Moore’s “Broad Moor”. As legions of horror fans shout a collective No!, Drew ignores explicit instructions not to take the short cut to the village of Mere via Broad. What follows is a story of misdirection, not so much as in the signposting, but through Drew’s subtle dissonance which resonates from her absence in her twin sister’s life during an unspecified act of violence and also an absence from her mother who has dementia (in itself an absence). During a journey which can only be considered an indulgence, Drew repeatedly faces metaphors of absence and guilt, oscillating between the chaos of her family situation and the almost mythical destination of the spa retreat where she will be greeted and loved by her friends.
Drew’s point of departure – hell – and her destination – heaven – (my inference) are connected through the winding road which takes her from moorland to cliff edge and back again; the landscape inhabiting a reality built on shifting sand, the place name evoking – it must be assumed, deliberately – Broadmoor, the high security psychiatric hospital. The landscape appears to mirror Drew’s state of mind, her gradual acceptance of the uncanny: At the top of an incline, Drew got her first glimpse of the sea: a flat line of blue-grey in the distance, which, as she drove on, slipped out of view before reappearing, closer than before. Drew’s almost dreamlike acknowledgement that things might not quite be right is suggestive of a lack of capacity. Is she – in fact – dreaming? Or is she her twin, comatose, imagining this journey?
A female moped rider gives directions, reappears, offers comfort. In a horror story we expect malicious intent. Has she been mapped from Drew’s sister’s violent girlfriend? Is this a portent that what has happened to one twin will happen to another? Yet “Broad Moor” refuses to adhere to expectations, it moves back and forth, like the soughing of the sea. The story is packed with inference, intimation, intrigue: open to several readings. The ending, surely horrific, might equally be not so. As the moped rider unpacks her bag Moore allows ambiguity to hang on the meaning of the contents. Wire cutters or a biscuit tin? You choose.
It has become Nightjar’s intention for paired books to speak to each other, and this is evident in both the seagull covers and the themes of dislocation present in these stories. Familiar roles – of parenthood, of offspring, of siblings – are not as clear cut as society would have us believe. It doesn’t take much to veer from the path. In these stories, the sea is but a cliff edge away from the land. And both writers are firmly in the driving seat.
This year Nightjar Press reaches its tenth year in publishing. Both “Jutland” and “Broad Moor” are worthy additions to their landscape.
Any honest parent would admit two polarizing sensations once a child is born. The first is the complex realization that you are responsible for keeping it alive, for its forever happiness, and the second is the guilt that wonders what if it had never been born, what might have been achieved if the push of evolution hadn’t – with inexorable force – impositioned a reality which can never return to the freedom you once had.
It is these two feelings – the want and the need – which dominate “Jutland”. Ana is a writer – a once good writer – whose words have evaporated since the arrival of the baby. She has an older child, Isaac, but he doesn’t speak, and neither much do Ana and her husband, Eric, who trip around each other in an unspoken malaise during their journey to – and early days in – a rented house in Jutland. Eric is a painter and he needs the light. Ana also seeks the creative spark. But it’s easier for Eric, for it is Ana’s role as mother to carry the burden of the child.
The name Jutland is derived from the Jutes – an ancient Germanic people – but the impression of this peninsula is that it juts out to sea, is somehow separated from the remainder of Northern Europe, as thought it extends for something just out of reach. Unlike Jutland, Ana’s baby is assigned no name. To name is to acknowledge, and her baby cannot be acknowledged, not if Ana is going to find her way back into writing.
She carries it in a sling, strapped across the front of her body. A dilemma: She thinks that if she is blown over her brain will have to make a split-second decision about whether to put her hands out to break her fall and protect herself, or keep her arms around the baby and stop it from being damaged. Those two aforementioned sensations encapsulated in a nutshell. And damaged is such a strange word. Most writers would use hurt, but McKnight Hardy has rendered Ana’s baby as an object, keeping the reader at a distance. Do we root for Ana as a writer or as a mother? Is it possible to be both?
McKnight Hardy reveals this simple story through insinuation over action. It isn’t only her husband and mute son who are uncertain, but those she meets in Jutland too: the boy who seems to (fore)shadow them, the bearded man dismissive of her identity. This is absolutely a writer’s story, easily identifiable for this reader. Whilst the ending is expected, it isn’t the ending which matters but the story which continues beyond the page. The story that Ana cannot write, but which has been written for her.
If Ana is lost, then so is Drew, in Alison Moore’s “Broad Moor”. As legions of horror fans shout a collective No!, Drew ignores explicit instructions not to take the short cut to the village of Mere via Broad. What follows is a story of misdirection, not so much as in the signposting, but through Drew’s subtle dissonance which resonates from her absence in her twin sister’s life during an unspecified act of violence and also an absence from her mother who has dementia (in itself an absence). During a journey which can only be considered an indulgence, Drew repeatedly faces metaphors of absence and guilt, oscillating between the chaos of her family situation and the almost mythical destination of the spa retreat where she will be greeted and loved by her friends.
Drew’s point of departure – hell – and her destination – heaven – (my inference) are connected through the winding road which takes her from moorland to cliff edge and back again; the landscape inhabiting a reality built on shifting sand, the place name evoking – it must be assumed, deliberately – Broadmoor, the high security psychiatric hospital. The landscape appears to mirror Drew’s state of mind, her gradual acceptance of the uncanny: At the top of an incline, Drew got her first glimpse of the sea: a flat line of blue-grey in the distance, which, as she drove on, slipped out of view before reappearing, closer than before. Drew’s almost dreamlike acknowledgement that things might not quite be right is suggestive of a lack of capacity. Is she – in fact – dreaming? Or is she her twin, comatose, imagining this journey?
A female moped rider gives directions, reappears, offers comfort. In a horror story we expect malicious intent. Has she been mapped from Drew’s sister’s violent girlfriend? Is this a portent that what has happened to one twin will happen to another? Yet “Broad Moor” refuses to adhere to expectations, it moves back and forth, like the soughing of the sea. The story is packed with inference, intimation, intrigue: open to several readings. The ending, surely horrific, might equally be not so. As the moped rider unpacks her bag Moore allows ambiguity to hang on the meaning of the contents. Wire cutters or a biscuit tin? You choose.
It has become Nightjar’s intention for paired books to speak to each other, and this is evident in both the seagull covers and the themes of dislocation present in these stories. Familiar roles – of parenthood, of offspring, of siblings – are not as clear cut as society would have us believe. It doesn’t take much to veer from the path. In these stories, the sea is but a cliff edge away from the land. And both writers are firmly in the driving seat.
This year Nightjar Press reaches its tenth year in publishing. Both “Jutland” and “Broad Moor” are worthy additions to their landscape.
May 28, 2019
Rich with symbolism and ambiguity, ‘Broad Moor’ is a chilling tale of psychological torment, set against the melancholic backdrop of a secluded coastal landscape. Wordplay is used to suspenseful and enigmatic effect. A story that turns over in your mind long after finishing it.
September 21, 2020
Quietly disturbing and leaves your imagination running...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews