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Smoke House & Other Stories
Acclaimed author of the uncanny Matthew G. Rees returns with unusual tales of people in places off the beaten track, and events that by turns and twists are unsettling, shocking and darkly amusing. Step inside Smoke House & Other Stories and explore - among other destinations - a strange backwoods town whose citizens - though they seem not to know it - are on fire… a rotting seaside resort threatened by a small boy’s escalating awareness of its underbelly of sleaze… a remote, snow-cloaked cathedral with windows of oddly compelling stained glass… an ancient English manor with a garden of eerie topiaries whose grim guardian wields a decidedly worrisome pair of shears… and a weird lakeside town 'forgotten in its frost pocket' where peculiar Christmas lights shine every night of the year. These are just some of the settings to which Rees invites readers in his first collection of tales since the much praised Keyhole (2019).
As for the destinies of those that Rees entreats us to meet - among them a young teacher bizarrely detained by a much older member of the profession, a gallery attendant determined to thwart the artist she loathes, a bird-watcher alone - or so he thinks - on a menace-filled marsh, a farmer with an outlandish obsession, and an irascible, fading writer sentenced to finish an unwanted novel in a sinister small town… What shall be their fates? Macabre or merciful? Enter Smoke House & Other Stories and find out.
Most of the stories in this collection - which runs to a total of thirteen tales and one 'flash fiction' story - make their debut. Others have been updated or drawn from sources no longer accessible. Present-day England, Wales, America, Russia and, briefly, France are the settings… in ways that are unfamiliar. For these are - after all - villages and towns that exist in no authorised guidebook or on any official map.
As for the destinies of those that Rees entreats us to meet - among them a young teacher bizarrely detained by a much older member of the profession, a gallery attendant determined to thwart the artist she loathes, a bird-watcher alone - or so he thinks - on a menace-filled marsh, a farmer with an outlandish obsession, and an irascible, fading writer sentenced to finish an unwanted novel in a sinister small town… What shall be their fates? Macabre or merciful? Enter Smoke House & Other Stories and find out.
Most of the stories in this collection - which runs to a total of thirteen tales and one 'flash fiction' story - make their debut. Others have been updated or drawn from sources no longer accessible. Present-day England, Wales, America, Russia and, briefly, France are the settings… in ways that are unfamiliar. For these are - after all - villages and towns that exist in no authorised guidebook or on any official map.
234 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 1, 2022
Rees peddles a brand of absurdism which has nothing to do with either last century's earlier, literary responses to bureaucratic oppression in eastern Europe or the musings of French existentialism; rather it is the sort of mostly droll, sometimes sardonic exercises in imagination for imagination's sake which the canny reader might expect of a UK writer whose work teeters between fantasy and horror.
My main problem with this collection is that the sense of internal logic--a quality of great importance to any kind of especially imaginative fiction--often seems too obvious, and, as a result, many of the stories unfurl with an almost mechanical degree of predictability. Whether it is the victim of "Clippings" experiencing the apparently telepathic wrath of a disgruntled groundskeeper or a lineage of master electricians surnamed Watts--just one example of how smirkingly cute this author tends to be--who wreak their vengeance on an ungrateful, backwater community, the reader can easily catch the impending course of events and read the rest without the dark joy of genuine suspense. "Dead Wood," despite its fairly unique concept of a hit-man who specializes in the covert killing of trees, suffers for similar reasons. Though I would congratulate Rees for having avoided the obviously ecological direction which this tale could have taken, the pantheistically inclined ending does not seem to fare much better.
To be fair, Rees' prose does have an easy elegance about it, so much so that I had initially expected his work to be a contemporary take on Aickman's strange tales; unfortunately, that was too generous of an assumption. Still, some of these stories do exhibit this virtue better than others, especially the descriptions of aesthetic objects in "An Exhibition" and "The Glass." "Thirteen," though its highly original concept doesn't seem to have been explored far enough, opens with these darkly seductive and quietly deranged lines of a Welshman's unusual love for his tractors: "As with those odd, black acres seen always smoking on awkward tracts of angular hills, the perverse insistence that hissed and sparked within the farmer--who was no longer a farmer--could be dampened but never truly put out" (157).
This author certainly can think up interesting concepts and plots, as well as craft a sentence with graceful skill, but this collection seems to lack the sort of elusive, enigmatic atmosphere and thematic depth which tend to separate the merely competent practictioners of imaginative fiction from its true masters.
My main problem with this collection is that the sense of internal logic--a quality of great importance to any kind of especially imaginative fiction--often seems too obvious, and, as a result, many of the stories unfurl with an almost mechanical degree of predictability. Whether it is the victim of "Clippings" experiencing the apparently telepathic wrath of a disgruntled groundskeeper or a lineage of master electricians surnamed Watts--just one example of how smirkingly cute this author tends to be--who wreak their vengeance on an ungrateful, backwater community, the reader can easily catch the impending course of events and read the rest without the dark joy of genuine suspense. "Dead Wood," despite its fairly unique concept of a hit-man who specializes in the covert killing of trees, suffers for similar reasons. Though I would congratulate Rees for having avoided the obviously ecological direction which this tale could have taken, the pantheistically inclined ending does not seem to fare much better.
To be fair, Rees' prose does have an easy elegance about it, so much so that I had initially expected his work to be a contemporary take on Aickman's strange tales; unfortunately, that was too generous of an assumption. Still, some of these stories do exhibit this virtue better than others, especially the descriptions of aesthetic objects in "An Exhibition" and "The Glass." "Thirteen," though its highly original concept doesn't seem to have been explored far enough, opens with these darkly seductive and quietly deranged lines of a Welshman's unusual love for his tractors: "As with those odd, black acres seen always smoking on awkward tracts of angular hills, the perverse insistence that hissed and sparked within the farmer--who was no longer a farmer--could be dampened but never truly put out" (157).
This author certainly can think up interesting concepts and plots, as well as craft a sentence with graceful skill, but this collection seems to lack the sort of elusive, enigmatic atmosphere and thematic depth which tend to separate the merely competent practictioners of imaginative fiction from its true masters.
April 25, 2022
A fantastic dip into the world of this master of short fiction. All the stories present us with a 'what if' and a weird twist, which will delight and surprise. It's got my vote, another great collection from Matthew G Rees.
April 19, 2022
A fine collection of stories which dip into the supernatural, even the macabre, and yet have great entertainment value too. Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews