Penny Dreadnought Omnibus! Volume 1 Paperback

The Abominable Gentlemen are the worst people you don't know.

And the first Omnibus of their works is now available as a paperback (UK | US) as well as an ebook (UK | US).

Penny Dreadnought Omnibus! Volume 1 contains all sixteen stories from the first four volumes of Penny Dreadnought, as well as a bonus gallery of alternative cover art. That's four stories apiece from myself, Alan Ryker, Iain Rowan, and Aaron Polson.

It makes the perfect holiday gift for friends and family, especially strange 'Uncle Pete' who you only ever see at occasional family gatherings and who doesn't seem to be allowed near pets, children, or real cutlery.

Enjoy.

Big Bulky Horror Novels for Halloween

Halloween is an odd time of year, when people who never normally watch horror movies or read ghost stories seem to find an excuse to do so. The webpage of a national newspaper might discuss a short story by Robert Aickman, and a respectable broadcaster might devote an hour to an informed discussion of European horror films.

 

I'm probably guilty on this blog of discussing the more obscure aspects of horror fiction, at the expense of commercial books that a wider audience will have heard of. So in tribute to Halloween and the temporary mass celebration of all things scary, I've decided to do a post on my favourite BIG horror best-sellers. These were the kind of books that introduced me to the genre when I was a teenager and it’s unlikely I’d be reading Aickman & Co. if I’d not read the likes of King and Simmons first.

 

I've imposed some strict rules on my selections here: no tricksy post-modernism (sorry, House Of Leaves); no psychological ambiguity (bye bye Turn of The Screw and Hill House); nothing old (stop moaning,  Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde) and no short stories or novellas (adiós just about every weird, under-appreciated book I've ever featured here). Instead, these are the block-busters. The writers of cracking action scenes with unambiguously evil villains. At least three have been made into movies, and the other two should be.

 

I guess it’s obvious from the above that this list would include King, so I thought I might as well start with him. IT is probably my favourites of his horror novels, and it exemplifies the kind of book I'm talking about here: vast, with a sprawling cast of characters, and a ‘big bad’ who has been responsible for decades of fear in the Maine town (of course) of Derry. The story takes place across two timelines – the characters repeat scenes from their childhood as flawed and weaker adults… King’s handling of this, and the creepy effects associated with time repeating itself, are a highlight of the novel and really call into question those people who think he can’t write with any subtlety. (Just because the books I'm talking about here are big bulky blockbusters doesn't mean they’re big bulky dumb blockbusters.)

 

For me, Ghost Story is Straub’s best book by a country mile – forget the singular title, this book should really be called Ghost Stories, containing as it does multiple stories told by a group of old men know as the ‘Chowder Society’. Straub takes the Stephen King approach of using an American small town as a setting for his horrors, and as a microcosm of society as a whole, but this is distinctly his own style. As the story progresses it becomes clear that each of the individual ghosts and monsters are just facets of the real evil; that each of the separate stories being told, are in fact just elements of one story after all.

Probably the most ‘arty’ book in this list, and arguably not horror, being told as it is from the point of view of a monster. But there are bigger monsters in this tale than the vampire doing the talking, and the real horror may be the slow falling away of his humanity… I like this book for it’s lavish set pieces (the whole book is nothing more than a series of set pieces, really) and the darkly luxurious feel of the prose, particularly in its descriptions of night-time New Orleans and Paris. Maybe this was the start of the trend towards Twilight and everything bad associated with that, but here the vampires still have a decadent, almost nihilistic  edge. (Everything else I've read by Rice, including the sequels to this, I've not liked at all.)

 

An absolute whopper of a book, which has a premise that makes it sound like the worst tripe imaginable: ‘mind vampires’ have been controlling human affairs for decades. But this was back when Simmons was at the top of his game (by contrast his last book was one part plot to nine parts Tea Party ranting) and he plays the idea of mind vampires with a completely straight bat. They become almost the ultimate villain, responsible for humanity’s evils both big and small. And like all the best villains they are completely compelling. The odds seem ridiculously stacked against the human heroes and despite the simple good versus evil plot, the book has an air of desperation in places that makes it stand out.

 

The most recent book on the list and yet another one about vampires. I don’t know if Lindqvist has read Interview With The Vampire, but given it’s English-language ubiquity it at least seems likely he might have. One of the minor characters in that book might have been the inspiration for this one – a child vampire. A creature that has lived for centuries but still has the body of a kid. In some ways this is the darkest of the books in this list, with its setting of an 80s Swedish housing estate, and its background themes of addiction and child-abuse. In this setting the child-vampire is only partly horrific, and the tale of her relationship with a lonely schoolboy has a real emotional core, twisted and bleak, but there. The kind of book that gives best-sellers a good name.

Feel free to mention your own big bulky favourite horror novels in the comments...

Fiction & Unreality

Back when I was a student, a girl I knew moved in with her boyfriend.

A few months later she turned up at the door of my shared house one evening, shaking with tears and clutching herself.

"He hit me!" she said.

We ushered her inside, made her cups of tea, put on music we knew she liked. "It just doesn't feel real," she said. "I don't know what to do, I can't even think about it..."

Of course for us outside it seemed real enough, and we knew exactly what she should do: phone the bastard to tell him he was dumped; have some wine and stay the night on our couch, and then tomorrow we'd go round with her to help her collect her things and...

"It just doesn't seem real," she said as we suggested these things to her.

I think a lot of people have had this feeling - when something traumatic happens, it just doesn't seem real. The implications might be so vast, so life-changing that temporarily our brains just don't want to deal with them. This can be a helpful coping mechanism (particularly if it doesn't last long) but it can also leave us with a feeling of dislocation from reality, a shell-shocked inability to understand the world any more.

But conveying this feeling in fiction is tricky, because if the writer just simply and realistically depicts the events that might affect his or her characters in such a way, if doesn't follow that the reader will feel such a dislocation - they are outside events and whilst they might well find the story disturbing or depressing it will likely seem real enough to them. After all, traumatic events happen every day to other people.

And I wonder if that's where the appeal of 'strange stories' comes from - by depicting events that are literally unrealistic do they allow the writer to explore these very real feelings of unreality in a way that realistic fiction, for all its mimetic triumphs, can't?

Review: Gary McMahon's In The Skin

The term 'dark fiction' is often used when describing horror, as if the mere presence of something supernatural is enough to make a story 'dark', regardless of whether the tale has any sense of bleakness to justify the phrase.

However, Gary McMahon's In The Skin is unquestionably dark fiction. Unrelentingly so.

It tells of someone not just disconnected from his family and job, but seemingly from reality itself. The central character is a salesman called Dan, who experiences life as if it is taking place on the other side of a screen; as if reality were covered with cellophane he says at one point. As he flies to New York for work and stays in an anonymous hotel room, his world seems like an early Brett Easton Ellis novel by way of a Radiohead song (not sure if its coincidence or not, but the phrase 'fake plastic trees' is used at one point). It takes a good writer to describe this level of detachment without the reader become detached and uncaring themselves, and it's testament to McMahon's prose that this never happens (in fact I read this through in one breathless sitting).

Dan returns home, and the gaps and inconsistencies in his narrative start to pile up. As he notices a strange creature in his garden at night (can it be human?) and small fingerprints on the windows of his house, the reader starts to wonder - just how unreliable is this unreliable narrator?

And then McMahon builds the story to a climax that truly deserves the description 'dark'. This is a short and tightly focussed novella, terrifyingly bleak and infused with a sense of paranoia that makes for a unique experience.

I have finished The Weird...!

I don’t know if you've ever seen the Man Vs. Food TV program (if not, basically some idiot attempts to eat an 40oz steak or 3ft pizza or something…) but I've just finished reading The Weird, a vast (100+ stories, 750000 words) anthology of weird fiction put together by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

“The publishers believe this is the largest volume of weird fiction ever housed between the covers of one book” the blurb says, as if there’s any doubt…

Just the physical size of the book is somewhat imposing, especially when you see the double-columns of small type inside. I've been reading this on and off since January, and part of the reason it has taken so long is that its pretty much impossible to read this book (in its non-ebook version) on public transport or in bed. It’s just too heavy and unwieldy.

But unlike those huge steaks (I imagine) The Weird doesn't let quantity get in the way of quality. Given the sheer number of selections there’s no way people will love every one, but there’s not a story here that’s anything less that interesting to the horror fiction aficionado. I don’t think any anthology before this one has stories spanning such a range before, whether in time (the oldest story is from 1908; the newest 2010); geography (stories from twenty countries across the globe, some in translation for the first time); or genre (traditional horror rubs shoulders with science-fiction, literary fiction, fantasy and even humour).

Some of the stories I had read before – and it’s always a pleasure to read The Willows or The Hospice again. But many others were brand new to me; of those that I've not read before these were my favourites:

• Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,”
• H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,”
• Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,”
• Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,”
• William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,”
• Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,”
• Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,”
• Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,”
• Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,”
• Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,”
• Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,”
• James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,”
• George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,”
• William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,”
• Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,”
• F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,”
• Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,”
• Lucius Shepard, “Shades,”
• Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,”
• Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,”
• Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,”
• William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,”
• Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,”
• China Mieville, “Details,”
• Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,”
• Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,”
• Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,”
• K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,”

But that’s not to belittle the quality of the others.

In my opinion The Weird sets a new standard for an anthology of ‘weird fiction’ – as well as the stories themselves, the Introductions and Afterwords are thought-provoking, and as if the book itself wasn't enough there’s a whole website called The Weird Fiction review with articles, interviews and fiction by many of the authors.

In short, if you’re a horror fiction fan with a taste for the weirder, more articulate or surreal side of the genre, this is pretty much a must-read.

Review: You Shall Never Know Security by J.R. Hamantaschen

Can you judge a writer on how good his story titles are? Probably not, but let's just play the game for a little bit. Scanning the contents page of J.R. Hamantaschen's début collection You Shall Never Know Security (a nifty title in itself) I see stories called:

Sorrow Has Its Natural End
There Must Be Lights Burning Brighter, Somewhere
There Is A Family of Gnomes Behind My Walls, And I Swear I Won't Disappoint Them Any Longer

Speaking as a writer whose titles often leave me vaguely unsatisfied, the sight leaves me envious and not a little grumpy.

Anyway. The stories in this volume of dark fiction are a varied bunch in terms of outward plot and action: parasites in brains; John Rawls; vaguely Lovecraftian horrors; and ingenious plans to trap rapists all feature. However there is a tone, a philosophical strain of pessimism, common to all the tales here. Too many authors nowadays miss the point that Lovecraft's stories were written because he had a view of the world he wanted to articulate, rather than just a penchant for tentacled thingamabobs that could drive men dotty. Thomas Ligotti similarly has a point to his stories, albeit one we may not want to hear. J.R. Hamantaschen strikes me as the same kind of writer.

If I'm honest, sometimes the 'message' was too jarringly obvious for me - the action and characters occasionally too flimsy constructs for ideas invested in them. And the prose is dense with modifiers and descriptions of internal moods, such that occasionally that style seems to come unmoored from the prosaic need to convey what is going on. But these are not major gripes.

The best stories here are impressive and original; my favourites were: A Lower Power, which told the story of a supernatural relationship which goes horribly sour at the end; Come In Distraction, a story which seems just to be about the chat-up power of a British accent until the horribly disturbing back-story comes to the fore; and the aforementioned There Must Be Lights Burning Brighter, Somewhere a novella of supernatural terror and its aftermath, which I took to be a metaphor for survivor's guilt.

Nice cover, too.

Recommended.

Just a quick note to say that I've been interviewed over at Luca Veste's site in order to talk about my story in Off The Record 2: At The Movies.

Off The Record 2- Interview

Strange Stories #18: Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear by Lisa Tuttle

Strange Story #18: Objects In Dreams May Be Closer Than They Appear
Author: Lisa Tuttle
Anthologised In: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012; House of Fear

I didn’t know why he felt the need to revisit the past like that...

Looking back through the sixteen ‘Strange Stories’ to date I noticed something disturbing the other day – not a single haunted house story…

Let’s rectify that with Lisa Tuttle’s thoroughly haunting Objects in Dreams May be Closer Than They Appear.

The most obvious way to define a haunted house would be to say it’s one that contains a ghost (or ghosts). But that’s a bit boringly literal, and I prefer to think of these stories are being ones where our dwellings, our homes - where we should feel at our safest - turn out to be some kind of trap. Houses are not the same as other things that we buy, and not just because of their price. We buy a certain kind of house because we want a certain kind of life. Because we can imagine a certain kind of life there.

I would have been happy to go on for months, thinks the narrator in this story, driving down to the West Country, looking at properties and imagining what our life might be like in this house or that... 

People talk about finding their ‘dream house’… and the one in Tuttle’s story might be just that. It is first glimpsed by a young couple house hunting – their dream house seen in a glimpse whilst they are driving. But despite hours of trying, and checking with the local estate agent, they can’t find the road, or any road, that leads to it. The house seems to remain like a mirage on the horizon.

There it was, so close it must be just beyond the next curve of the road, yet forever out of our reach. The faint curl of smoke from the chimney inspired another yearning tug...

They don't find a route to that house - to their dream, if you like. And the story is narrated from the vantage point of years later, after the breakup of their relationship in the thoroughly normal, non-dreamlike house that they did end up living in.

Years later they meet up - and Michael (her old husband) has found the house again... and found a route to it.

“You’re not talking about our house,” she says. Outwardly she has her misgivings about going to look for the house - not out of fear, but because she doesn't want to relive the past. But maybe some part of her has been dreaming all these years - "our house" she says.

And they do find a way to their ‘dream house’ from all those years ago, and foolishly enter. The trap springs shut, and it’s an utterly compelling and unnerving one which I won't spoil here. But it is note-perfect, Tuttle managing to make it both incredibly disturbing and a perfect demonstration of how old dreams can curdle and warp.

Next Time: Strange Stories #19:  The Beautiful Stranger by Shirley Jackson

Review: What Gets Left Behind by Mark West

What Gets Left Behind by Mark West is a newly released chapbook from Spectral Press. This is the third West story I've read and possibly the best, although on an even-numbered day I might give that accolade to The Mill - a novella which has some similarities to What Gets Left Behind.

The story is partially set in the 80s and partially in the present; the central character Mike Bergen has returned to the town where he spent his childhood, during which time a serial killer stalked local girls. West's evocation of the 80s is note perfect - not just in the period details like Star Wars t-shirts and Noel Edmonds (and excitingly for this reader East Midlands Today!) but in the recreation of a time when no one had mobile phones and kids played outside at "the Rec" because there was nothing else to do. West is a more realistic writer than someone like Ramsey Campbell (whose realism is shot through with subjectivity) and there is a simplicity and clarity to his prose that's probably hard won. It certainly fits this story.

Like The Mill, What Gets Left Behind's core is as much emotional as horrific; although the horror, when it comes, is gripping and effective. I particularly liked the switches between the two time-frames, a device which reminded me of Stephen King's IT. The sense of history repeating itself, of the past not being over but haunting Mike's present is excellently done.

These chapbooks from Spectral Press always sell out and based on this kind of quality, I can see why.