After loving Lisa Tuttle’s novella My Death last year, I knew I would have to read more of her work. I chose this Valancourt collection mainly becAfter loving Lisa Tuttle’s novella My Death last year, I knew I would have to read more of her work. I chose this Valancourt collection mainly because it’s recent (and, okay, yes, because the cover is nice), although the stories within are drawn from throughout Tuttle’s career.
What I started to notice by the halfway point is that Tuttle writes very female horror. I don’t know if that’s quite the right term; I wouldn’t say 'feminist’ fits – there’s nothing political about many of these stories, the women in them are often subservient – but women’s experiences are very much at the book’s heart. A number focus on motherhood, birth or some proxy for it, and this is frequently combined with a strong theme of body horror: a dead-but-still-growing baby in ‘Born Dead’, inexplicable bleeding in ‘A Birthday’, cancerous pregnancies in ‘My Pathology’. In ‘Replacements’, women begin keeping vampiric animals as pets, while the men in their lives are repulsed to the point of being driven to kill the creatures. Sometimes there’s also a disquieting merging of these themes with sex, most memorably in ‘Food Man’, where a girl storing a mountain of rotting food under her bed is only the start of the weirdness. As with a number of the above, I didn’t quite enjoy this story but I couldn’t stop thinking about its dark, gnarled depths.
So many of these reminded me of Robert Aickman’s stories in that I squirmed my way through them, skimming the most disgusting bits, but am sure I will remember them for much longer than I do the type of stories I merely ‘like’. This is apt, as The Dead Hours of Night contains at least one explicitly Aickman-inspired work: ‘The Book That Finds You’, which I first read in the anthology Aickman’s Heirs. I loved revisiting it: an obscure horror writer, a literary treasure hunt, a cursed manuscript; perfect. ‘Objects in Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear’ exists in a similar vein, simple but extremely effective in its depiction of a couple drawn to a peculiarly elusive house.
My favourite in the book was the earliest story, the dread-filled folk horror ‘Where the Stones Grow’. It’s interesting reading reviews and seeing that others seem to have found this one formulaic – whatever this says about me, I adored it! I felt it had a fantastic atmosphere, with some of the dark magic of Elizabeth Hand’s ‘Near Zennor’. I also loved ‘The Dream Detective’, about a man who meets a boring girl at a party, then can’t stop seeing her in his dreams (great ending in this one). ‘Closet Dreams’, in which a kidnapped girl recalls her impossible escape, is a brilliantly executed concept and truly disturbing.
I really liked the beginning of ‘Vegetable Love’, but felt frustrated by the disappearance of the best element (the woman Hannah meets at the church halfway through. Bottom of my list was ‘Mr Elphinstone’s Hands’, a historical story about a young woman who starts producing ectoplasm; again, it’s pretty disgusting, but in this case the story is dull and much longer than it needs to be. Yet for some other reviewers it seems to have been the highlight of the collection – which just goes to show how personal short stories are. Although a couple here didn’t work for me, I find Tuttle’s short fiction powerful, and her best work unforgettable....more
Ashok and Danielle are old friends/lovers who discover an old film of the deadly 1955 crash at Le Mans (a real event) that shows the horrific aftermatAshok and Danielle are old friends/lovers who discover an old film of the deadly 1955 crash at Le Mans (a real event) that shows the horrific aftermath – and may have captured something even more terrifying along with it. Their plan to sell it to an unscrupulous collector goes awry; it seems the cursed footage has other ideas. This book scratched every itch for me: the lost media trope, a creepy and original haunting, an investigation-based plot, strong characters and narrative voice. It’s a ghost story... but it’s just as much about Ashok’s slightly pathetic infatuation with Danielle. The novella format is perfect for it – long enough to establish the characters properly and flesh out the world in which they exist (I loved the asides implying a near-future backdrop), not so long that any particular aspect is overcomplicated. Doesn’t put a foot wrong. Loved it....more
(3.5) A story with a brilliant hook: a man’s consciousness is suddenly uploaded into his employer’s Slack; he must figure out how to get back to norma(3.5) A story with a brilliant hook: a man’s consciousness is suddenly uploaded into his employer’s Slack; he must figure out how to get back to normal, all while his colleagues believe it’s an elaborate joke. The format – the whole thing is just Slack messages – makes it an incredibly quick and easy read. Sometimes the narrative style doesn’t work as well as it could: the :thumbsup: :eyes: thing got old very fast, and (especially if you use Slack for work yourself) it’s hard not to keep thinking these people would surely, you know, use a chat app that wasn’t fully visible to their bosses for some of these conversations... But really, it’s not the sort of story where that kind of thing matters, and it’s fast-paced and entertaining enough that I could ignore any annoying or implausible bits. It ends up being a pretty perfect mix of funny and horrifying, with an ending that’s really quite moving in its own way. The effect is something like an all-digital version of Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör. It would be great to read an interactive version of this that actually existed within Slack!...more
I was attracted to the idea of this book – a horror novel disguised as a non-fiction book about the many strange incidents surrounding a cursed and/orI was attracted to the idea of this book – a horror novel disguised as a non-fiction book about the many strange incidents surrounding a cursed and/or haunted mountain – but even so, I was surprised by how much I loved it. I had the absolute time of my life reading this: it’s simply so enjoyable, so moreish. When I had it in my hands, I couldn’t stop reading, and when I was away from it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Each section of the book focuses on a different inexplicable event on or around Mynydd Du, literally Black Mountain, through history (the chapters were originally released as ‘episodes’ in individual ebooks). There’s the failure of an ‘executive community’ made up of Futuro-style pod houses; the strange disappearance of a popular uni student; the ‘beast’ that terrorised a mining community – even the tale of a Roman general whose troops meet with a seemingly unbeatable foe. There are multiple layers of storytelling here: journalist Rob Markland sifts through the papers of doomed writer Russell Ware, and later we also get a certain Simon Bestwick jumping into the narrative. And in between the work of these characters, there are various interview transcripts, articles, diary entries, letters, forum posts, etc.
Many books of this type resort to a more conventional approach when it’s time to tie all the threads together, but in Black Mountain the montage-style narrative is sustained to the end. This – along with the thoughtfully written recurrence of various characters – makes the story feel not like a series of discrete segments, more like a rich and cleverly woven tapestry. Had I not already known, I would never have guessed it was originally published episodically. The fact that it seems so complete also really helps its effectiveness as horror. I’ve read/watched so much horror that I rarely find it unnerving anymore, but this gets genuinely creepy at times; after certain scenes, I kept thinking I could see something lurking in the shadows... It’s the book equivalent of a found-footage film in which you can’t help but be persuaded that a real threat lies beneath even the most unlikely of sequences.
Points of comparison for me are John Langan’s The Fisherman, the podcast The Magnus Archives, the film The Empty Man,the Six Stories series and Eliza Clark’s forthcoming Penance. If you like found-footage horror, mixed-media narratives and stories about cursed places, this book is for you. (Don’t be put off by the cover, I know it’s not the best, that’s so often the way with genre fiction published by small presses.) MANY more horror fans should know about Black Mountain....more
I’m really not sure how to rate this. What do you do with a book you actively disliked a lot of the time but couldn’t tear yourself away from? At firsI’m really not sure how to rate this. What do you do with a book you actively disliked a lot of the time but couldn’t tear yourself away from? At first I was just hate-reading it – the narrative voice irritated me from the first. Aaron Decker’s pompous self-importance and weirdly archaic turns of phrase would be bad enough on their own, but then there’s his infuriating habit of repeating his dead wife Allison’s name in practically every single paragraph, even though we know from the beginning that the story is addressed to her; that she is the ‘you’ in this narrative. With the possible exception of the final chapter, this approach just doesn’t work. There’d be no need for Aaron to tell Allison, in detail, what he got her for their last Christmas together (to give just one example) because... she’d know what the gift was. Etc, etc. Then again, who knows what’s going on when a line like ‘I think it’s time we reign this in’ makes it into the finished book? (Yes, I’m complaining about subpar editing yet again.)
Also, hardly the book or author’s fault but despite widely being described as such, this is not horror. At all.
BUT THEN. The plot got its hooks into me, and I was sucked in, and in spite of my frustration, I just couldn’t abandon the book without knowing how it would all be resolved.
It’s impossible not to soften towards the story, for all its flaws, when you reach the concluding author’s note. The subtle, haunting notes of grief threaded through the story are elegant and clearly written with tenderness. And there are extremely compelling segments, almost all of them related to Allison’s secret obsession and Aaron’s later investigation of it. However, I remain unconvinced that the author’s overall style/approach is one I could ever truly enjoy.
(4.5) I am so glad to have discovered the imagination and talent of Simon Avery. A Box Full of Darkness is a collection of four short stories, each qu(4.5) I am so glad to have discovered the imagination and talent of Simon Avery. A Box Full of Darkness is a collection of four short stories, each quite different from the others but all filled with both deep strangeness and profound humanity. It opens with the stunning title story, a tale of voids in one’s memory, solitary wandering, the random nature of what we remember most, and a man with a ‘casual atrocity bag’. ‘Violent Men, Lonely Men’ is an epic in a nutshell, a story that tells of a woman’s whole life and the shadow cast over it by a) growing up in a ‘murder house’ and b) more importantly, her volatile father. It’s incredibly hard to pick a favourite from the book, but I think ‘Perfidious Albion’ might have to be it – it’s a lost media story, about a mythic Play for Today, and it’s also about mental illness, grief, a cult-like organisation, real magic and a whole load of other chewy subjects. God, it’s good.
I stumbled over the third story, ‘Lost and Found’: its not so much that I disliked it, rather that I couldn’t get a handle on it for whatever reason; couldn’t figure out what the focus of it was supposed to be, couldn’t reconcile the timeline or make anything about the characters line up properly. As sometimes happens, me and the story just did not gel. If not for that, the book would certainly be an easy five stars for me. Avery’s fiction is compelling as hell, and he’s got a great knack for writing about the vaguely uncanny, the weird-in-the-ordinary, but more than that his work contains a deep understanding of loneliness and the different types of human connection that offer a route out of it. The last time I felt this excited to discover a writer, it was Nina Allan, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.
(4.5) Isn’t it amazing when you buy a book on a whim and it turns out to be exactly the sort of thing you’re always longing to read? This is a collect(4.5) Isn’t it amazing when you buy a book on a whim and it turns out to be exactly the sort of thing you’re always longing to read? This is a collection of linked stories (good) and encompasses a dazzling range of genres that might best be collectively summed up as speculative litfic (even better). It revolves around a man called Prentis O’Rourke: his death, we learn, is significant in that it occurs simultaneously in every possible version of reality. This is all observed and catalogued by a multiple-existence-monitoring agency called The Landry Institute. Some of the stories in Unexpected Places feature versions of Prentis, along with his partner Laura and daughter Carrie. But others focus on characters with only tangential connections to the central figure.
The stories speak the language of science fiction: there’s time travel, synthetic bodies and possible cloning. There’s also a more indefinite strangeness always creeping around the edges: urban ghost stories, deserted places wreathed in mysterious mist... even a potentially immortal dog. At the same time, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe this book chiefly as hugely empathetic literary fiction. Unexpected Places would, I think, particularly appeal to anyone who loved Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child or Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame.
The three-part story ‘Walking to Doggerland’, which forms the backbone of the book, centres on Penny, one of three daughters of the Landry Institute’s founder, and is about what happens when the very different siblings reunite in a house where they used to spend summer holidays. It��s just perfect. Subtly weird and totally unpredictable, but very human. I have said this before about Malcolm Devlin’s writing, but his best stories are full of the sort of details so original I can’t really understand how someone could just make them up. ‘Walking to Doggerland’ is the closest thing to a Nina Allan story that isn’t a Nina Allan story – and that is one of the highest forms of praise I could give.
‘Five Conversations With My Daughter (Who Travels in Time)’, another standout, is narrated by Prentis himself. It takes place in a reality where six-year-old Carrie can, occasionally and momentarily, allow an older version of herself to occupy her body and talk to her father about the future. Again, to my mind this story really plays to the collection’s strengths – it has this pure SF concept at its heart, but its real power lies in a believable and sensitive depiction of family relationships.
That’s also a strength of ‘My Uncle Eff’, in which Laura remembers her eccentric, itinerant uncle and the stories he told her. It’s a story about storytelling, and memory and landscape; it captures precisely the way stories can speak to you as a child, and how you understand them differently from an adult perspective.
‘The New Man’ is straight out of the Alexander Weinstein playbook of character-driven near-future sci-fi. After an accident, a man’s consciousness is placed in a ‘basic model’ synthetic body that looks nothing like his old self; his family struggle to readjust. The fantastic and the ordinary are juxtaposed superbly here.
Meanwhile, ‘The Knowledge’, told in taxi journeys around London – with dark & bloody undercurrents – would slot right into Gary Budden’s London Incognita.‘We Can Walk It Off in the Morning’ follows two friends who are cheating on their respective partners with each other. It’s not a ghost story, but it feels like one. The same characters appear again in ‘Talking to Strangers on Planes’, a story cleverly told backwards – though whether we’re meeting the same versions of Aleyna and Jack, it’s impossible to know.
The Ghost Sequences is an immensely pleasurable collection thanks in large part to its variety. There are stories told through various types of art anThe Ghost Sequences is an immensely pleasurable collection thanks in large part to its variety. There are stories told through various types of art and media: extracts from letters and articles; scenes from movies; an art exhibition. There’s a story told in instructions. There are more traditional ghostly tales that have the ring of local legends to them. There are stories about stage magic, sea monsters, war trauma, a ghost-spotting app, a snuff film, a cursed play. At various points, these narratives reminded me of writers as different as Carmen Maria Machado, Vernon Lee, Nina Allan and Mariana Enríquez.
I love what I often refer to as ‘mixed media’ stories – those purporting to consist of scraps of real-life information, slowly building a full picture – and there are lots of them here. ‘The Secret of Flight’ assembles the story of a family’s entanglement with a mysterious woman through press clippings, letters and dialogue from a play. ‘I Dress My Lover in Yellow’ is an account of two students’ disappearance by way of a ‘lost painting’ they were trying to investigate. The title of ‘Excerpts from a Film (1942–1987)’, about a director and his ill-fated muse, speaks for itself; ‘The Ghost Sequences’ describes an art display in which each exhibit is based on the artist’s own personal ghost story. ‘The Last Sailing of the “Henry Charles Morgan” in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)’ is a particularly ingenious example, telling the story of an unexplained shipwreck as it appears in scenes etched on material like whale baleen and walrus tusk. It uses the language a curator might, so that the narrative is presented in an unnerving factual style.
The two best stories in The Ghost Sequences, however, are two of the most (seemingly) straightforward. Especially outstanding is ‘The Nag Bride’, which follows a woman who returns to her hometown after the death of her best friend’s grandparents. There, she’s reminded of a terrifying story she heard as a child. In ‘The Stories We Tell About Ghosts’, the 12-year-old narrator and his little brother Gen are pulled into an obsession with an app called Ghost Hunt! It’s supposed to be a game, but starts to seem worryingly real, especially to the sensitive and suggestible Gen. Both display a major strength of Wise’s storytelling: her ability to include just enough detail about the characters and their relationships, making them vividly real. These are stories that feel, in the best way, like you’ve already heard them somewhere, maybe at a sleepover or around a campfire.
There are 16 stories in this book – perhaps a few too many? – and it has its weak moments. A few, e.g. ‘Crossing’, lean too far towards the whimsical and cutesy for my tastes. ‘Harvest Song, Gathering Song’ is about an Arctic military expedition and magical honey; while that might sound good, the combination of convoluted plot + far too many characters turns into a bit of a mess. But for every slight misstep there’s a brilliant idea, like ‘In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same’, which deals with the existential horror of being part of a crime-fighting detective squad – the TV-cartoon type where everyone is confined to an archetype and the ending always takes the same form.
All in all, it’s a collection well worth reading. The best stories in here have buckets of atmosphere and already feel like classics in the making.
Three women – Margot, early 70s, a professor; Ivy, early 40s, a wealthy philanthropist; and Summer, a twentysomething drama student – watch a performaThree women – Margot, early 70s, a professor; Ivy, early 40s, a wealthy philanthropist; and Summer, a twentysomething drama student – watch a performance of the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days in a Melbourne theatre. They each contemplate their own lives as well as (particularly in Summer’s case) the devastating bushfires blazing outside. The book is cleverly structured in three sections to match the acts of the play, with conversations during the interval, when the characters encounter one another, rendered as a script.
I found it uneven, mainly because Margot is a much more interesting character than the other two. There’s so much that’s fascinating about her ruminations, so much I wanted to explore further: her lifelong ambivalence about motherhood; unwelcome nudges towards retirement from her boss; the problem of her husband’s incipient dementia, which has turned him occasionally violent. Meanwhile, I can remember very little about Ivy without referring back to the book. And I’m afraid almost nothing about Summer worked for me – she’s totally unconvincing and her ‘climate anxiety’ is so clumsily rendered that it repeatedly made me cringe. (To be fair, after reading Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun, any other novel that attempts to approach this topic is automatically on the back foot; it feels pointless that anyone else should even try.) I would have preferred The Performance had it focused primarily on Margot; by including two other main characters, the story spreads its many themes far too thinly, and its treatment of most of them ends up feeling superficial.
(4.5) The first thing I want to say about this is that it has a much stronger supernatural element than I expected, and if I’d known that I would, pro(4.5) The first thing I want to say about this is that it has a much stronger supernatural element than I expected, and if I’d known that I would, probably, have found and read it much earlier (I don’t feel like the blurb makes it clear at all!) The second thing is that I absolutely loved it. Build Your House Around My Body – an inappropriately twee title, if you ask me – is a wide-ranging novel of love, hate, family legacy and folklore that reminded me of Ghostwritten and The Kingdoms. It’s loosely organised around the disappearance of a young Vietnamese woman, Winnie, from Saigon in 2011, but flicks back and forth between different times and places, alighting on a group of linked characters who include Winnie’s boyfriend and his brother, but also a ghost extermination crew in the 1980s, a pair of French settlers in the 1940s, etc. Kupersmith has that gift of being able to swiftly breathe life into each and every character, and in particular I adored her empathetic portrait of lonely, displaced Winnie and her misadventures at Achievement! International Language Academy. This is a story that’s equally strong on character and plot; suggestions of magic/horror and unexpected connections make it endlessly exciting and surprising. It’s pretty long, but I would have been more than happy to keep reading about this world. One of those books I will be recommending to people in real life as well as online – Violet Kupersmith has a new fan in me.
I can’t remember the last time I read something that so thoroughly lived up to the label ‘unputdownable’. I know The Appeal has been a bestseller (I mI can’t remember the last time I read something that so thoroughly lived up to the label ‘unputdownable’. I know The Appeal has been a bestseller (I mean, the cover says so!) and now I’ve looked through reviews etc I’ve seen references to hype, so I’m not sure why it had passed me by until now: I picked it up from a table in Waterstones because I needed something to distract me from anxiety and thought a mystery would be a good bet. And on that front, IT DELIVERED. Once I started reading, I was powerless to tear myself away. The narrative is inventive: it’s told mainly in emails, with annotations and occasional interjections from two law students who are working on a murder case. The plot is addictive: the emails start off describing a local amateur theatre production, then an appeal to help a child with cancer, and the voices bring each character brilliantly to life. I’m tempted to feel smug that I guessed two things correctly from the start, but of course this is the point/intention of a narrative so cleverly laced with clues: you’ll figure out some things, then want to keep reading to find out whether you’re right, and be surprised by something else along the way. Thankfully, my lateness in finding out about this book means that I’ve happened to read it at exactly the point the author has a new one out, so it was straight on to The Twyford Code for me!
White on White is the kind of novel I felt I should be reading outside a café on a summer evening. It reminded me of Katie Kitamura’s writing and JhumWhite on White is the kind of novel I felt I should be reading outside a café on a summer evening. It reminded me of Katie Kitamura’s writing and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts. It’s a short, reflective book about art and the sense of self, following a student whose tentative friendship with her landlady curdles over the course of a summer researching Medieval nudes in an unnamed (European?) city. Beautiful, elegantly written, if a little ephemeral....more
‘To get to Hell,’ he says in a low voice, ‘they take you through America. There is a door behind a door.’
Olga, happily settled in the USA, receives a ‘To get to Hell,’ he says in a low voice, ‘they take you through America. There is a door behind a door.’
Olga, happily settled in the USA, receives a phone call from a man she hasn’t seen for many years: Nikolai, who went to prison as a teenager for stabbing a woman in the Soviet housing block where he and Olga both grew up. This is the starting point for a story told in fragments, one that switches perspective and moves beyond the possibilities of reality, one in which death means displacement rather than a definite end. Sex and violence are entwined in the piercing sentences of A Door Behind a Door, written with the dreamlike lucidity characteristic of Moskovich’s work. Despite all that, this may be the most conventional novel she’s written thus far, with its dysfunctional families and loop-like structure: its experimental touches are anchored by moments of both the banal and the tragic.
I received an advance review copy of A Door Behind a Door from the publisher, Influx Press.
I was excited to find out about this standalone Ragnar Jónasson novel – his ultra-isolated Icelandic settings make for perfect winter reading. In thisI was excited to find out about this standalone Ragnar Jónasson novel – his ultra-isolated Icelandic settings make for perfect winter reading. In this case, the story, which involves a young teacher moving to a tiny coastal town (population: 10), also contains tantalising suggestions of ghostly goings-on: the teacher, Una, finds her accommodation seemingly haunted.
Jónasson certainly seems to have a thing about drippy protagonists – Una doesn’t have much more of a backbone than Ari Thór, the milquetoast ‘hero’ of the Dark Iceland series. Nonetheless, I found the setting of Skálar agreeably creepy and convincingly portrayed. Between the cold winter nights and the unwelcoming locals, this often felt like exactly the sort of story I enjoy curling up with in the strange days between Christmas and New Year.
The Girl Who Died is one of those books wherein the main narrative is occasionally interrupted by seemingly unrelated sections written from a different perspective and in a different timeframe. I don’t mind this as a narrative device, and I was happy to go along with these interjections, assuming everything would ultimately come together. However, I certainly expected there to be more of a payoff than there was – I thought these past sections would at least relate to the protagonist rather than a random side character.
The damp-squib conclusion made this an average read, overall, for me. I think it would’ve been more effective if it had committed to the horror elements of the plot rather than leaning more towards mystery.
(3.5) Alison Moore’s latest document of unease centres on Lieloh, a tiny island off the English coast. Two parallel plotlines play out on the island: (3.5) Alison Moore’s latest document of unease centres on Lieloh, a tiny island off the English coast. Two parallel plotlines play out on the island: in the 1990s, amateur painter Sandra attends an artists’ retreat there; and in the present day, a writer named Carol stays in the same house alone as she tries to finish writing a novel. Sandra’s narrative dominates, and it can be quite difficult to read: the other artists treat her terribly – but, equally, Sandra herself is small-minded and hard to warm to. What kept me reading was the compelling sense of disquietude and impending disaster – a mood Moore excels at creating. And the endings, Sandra’s in particular, are just right.
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