Falling Over Things

 A few ripples from Falling Over's release into the world:

Firstly, a review over at the Dark Musings site here. I read the reviews on this horror blog anyway, so it was a nice surprise to suddenly see my own name up there. Especially with comments like this:

"It’s a special moment when you read a new author and immediately get the feeling that you’re onto something special and such was the case here. The stories in this collection are evidence of great talent at work, both emotionally and intellectually stimulating."

That's one for the to-be-read-at-my-funeral list. 

Secondly, The Story Behind Falling Over, a piece I wrote about the links, deliberate or otherwise, between the stories in the book is up on the UPCOMING4ME site: you can read it here.

And finally, I'm quoted talking about novellas in this article in Forbes (yes, that Forbes) by Suw Charman-Anderson. Actually, this one hasn't got anything to do with Falling Over really, but I've pretended it has so I can crowbar a bad pun into this blog post's title... 

(Various links to buy Falling Over in paperback and all manner of electronic formats are here.)

Guest Post: Great British Horror

Great British Horror is a new anthology of work by the authors GR Yeates, Michael Bray, Matt Shaw, Craig Saunders, Graeme Reynolds, Willieam Meikle, Ian Woodhead and Iain Rob Wright - all the money raised from this fine volume goes to the homeless charity Centrepoint.

You can buy Great British Horror Volume 1 from Amazon (UK | US)

Today I'm very pleased to feature as a guest post an extract from one of the stories in the book - The Thing Behind The Door by GR Yeates:

It was dirty and quiet inside the Old School.

John was alone there. How he came to be there, he did not know, could not remember. Soiled shapes fluttered and scampered away from the sounds he made. Many had passed through here, tramps and vagrants. He saw their dried excrement everywhere, all of them were gone now, having found somewhere else to go. There was always somewhere else to go, so they said. His life was spun out, leaving him dangling by a single fraying thread. There was nothing left in this world for him, no-one for him to turn to, no home for him to go to. Nowhere but here, this place, where he now stood, on the boundaries, heavy yet empty, brimming over with nothing.

Sullied, grey light streamed in through neglected windows. He passed what was once the boy’s toilets, now it was home to a rich, rotting smell. Gagging, he quickly left it behind. There were tears in his eyes, a tremble to his hands. He reached out into the thin air, out to the Old School, out to what once was.

And he felt nothing.

There should have been understanding here, in this desolate place, for what he had done, it knew him so well after all. In his dreams he had come back here, so many times walking these halls, listening to the soft heartless laughter of the past, hearing his name again and again, seeing their faces in the broken squares of green-wired classroom glass. And yet nothing responded to his being here. He had bared his soul for no purpose. There was only this silence, with voices.

Nothing left but this and shadows gathering.

He ran his fingers through the dirt on desks, scratching his fingernails over woodcuts made by long-gone protractors and pocket knives, reading the runes of lonely adolescent lives. The carved-out memories, exhumed aches and pains. Tracing the juvenile outlines of an urban Ouija.

He was a shaman preparing ritual ground.

He stopped. He could hear footsteps. Not alone, not here, no more, he stood still. Waiting, listening, praying. The footsteps came to an end. Nothing but woodworms crawling and mice lightly scuttling here and there, that’s all, nothing to be afraid of. Nothing here but debris settling comfortably into ruin. He blinked a speck of grit from his eye and the footsteps began again, light but not soft, like bare feet pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, impatient, waiting, gathering into temper.

He followed the sound of those feet.

There were the stairs.

Varnish had eaten away the banisters, leaving them as blight-white limbs, moist and sappy to the touch. The footsteps, they kept on going, pacing, pacing, pacing, relentlessly pacing above. Hairless rat carcasses and extinct spiders were the litter in his way as he climbed, ducking through veils of abandoned webs heavy and low with long-dead vermin and flies. The footsteps, moving quickly, so very quickly, back-forth, back-forth, back-forth, a desperate rhythm increasing, a frustration seeking release, some crescendo. Soon. Were they to meet him, those ferocious feet?

Would Little Spider finally meet Big Spider?

Fearful thoughts passed through him as half-forms. The splinters from the graffiti runes remained buried in the flesh of his fingertips, he could feel them stinging, hot and freezing, cold and burning. The footsteps then stopped. Where? There, at the top of the stairs. He could feel such a shivering growing inside his chest, he hoped that he could bear it as he pushed through the pale clinging tapestries. It was here, something, some part, some piece of his being became lost long ago, somewhere on these very stairs.

But where?

He looked up to the top of the stairs, and there it was.

Waiting in silence, dripping and dead, draining to see, its crawling form, layer upon layer of countless corpse-grey flies caught and struggling in its mass, and within, a silence with voices, and all of them were screaming, screaming and screaming.

…screaming…for…me…

G.R. Yeates is the critically-acclaimed author of The Vetala Cycle – a historical horror series set during WWI that combines vampire folklore with cosmicism. His work has appeared in anthologies published by Dark Continents Publishing, Cutting Block Press & Static Movement.

He was born in Essex, England and was brought up in seaside towns along the South-East coast. He studied English Literature and Media at university before spending a year in China teaching English as a foreign language. He moved to London in 2002 and has lived there for the last decade working in a number of different jobs and training as a singer before self-publishing his debut novel in 2011. You can find out more about G.R. Yeates at http://www.gryeates.co.uk

Review: Pretty Little Dead Things – Gary McMahon

After loving a number of his short stories & novellas, I've been meaning to read one of Gary McMahon’s novels for a stupidly long time now. So when my goody-bag at Edgelit2 contained the second of his Thomas Usher books, Dead Bad Things, I took it as a sign, and purchased the first in the series – Pretty Little Dead Things. And I'm very glad I did.

(Actually, my goody-bag didn't contain Dead Bad Things but I swapped one of the books I did get for it. "It's still a good sign, by anyone's standards")

 

Pretty Little Dead Things is an interesting mixture of horror and crime; Thomas Usher is a man who can see the dead, following the deaths of his wife and daughter fifteen years earlier. He is reluctantly caught up in the murder of three young girls as well as the disappearance of a child. The story is told in the first person and Usher is a complex, compelling character. His powers are more a curse than a blessing, causing him to see hideous and gruesome things without actually being able to influence them. The only ghosts he wants to appear – those of his family – he has never seen and this has left Usher unable to move on, still living in the ‘family’ house on his own hoping they return to haunt it. It's a pretty brutal metaphor for grief and guilt, but no less effective for that.

 

The book is structured like a crime novel, but as it progresses the supernatural elements become more overt and fantastical; there’s some very scary scenes involving the MTs – revenants of delinquent gang members, their hoods now full of nothing but ash. And McMahon isn't the kind of writer to allow his characters easy escapes, or sometimes any escape at all. The tone is downbeat and bleak throughout, and the story moves from deprived housing estates to squalid strip-clubs to anonymous hotel rooms: it’s set in Leeds but it will seem familiar to anyone who knows the UK’s urban landscapes. There’s an oppressive nature to the setting, allowing no sense of escape – even when the action moves to another plane of existence it’s just a twisted version of the same blighted estate Usher has been visiting. Some readers will no doubt find the relentlessly downbeat tone equally oppressive, feel the same lack of escape from the novel’s atmosphere. There’s little light here, little hope. But it’s in this way that the book achieves its unity and totality of effect. There's a certain breathless exhilaration, too, at realising how far the book is prepared to push things; at how bad things can get.

Very hard hitting and one of the most memorable horror novels I've read for a long time. Looks like the goody-bag ruse worked, and I’ll be buying yet more of Gary McMahon’s novels.

Really very pleased by this review of Falling Over on the Amazing Stories website:

"Falling Over is certainly weird fiction in the British tradition of Aickman, subtle, understated, enigmatic... an excellent collection, well-crafted, imaginative and chilling."
Read it the whole thing here.

Review: The Side Effects Of The Medication - Lauren James

Lauren James’s book The Side Effects Of The Medication is one of the strongest short story collections I've read all year, and almost certainly the best from a début author bursting into the party out of nowhere. The stories veer between horror, crime, and even science fiction. The tone is equally varied, James handling black comedy and grim horror with equal aplomb. She even writes a story in the second person that doesn't sound awful.

 

Fences starts the collection and it’s a riveting tale about the fear of our neighbours, and of trespass. Marianne and her husband have their garden invaded by their neighbour's big, black dogs, and put up a fence to stop them returning. But the intrusions, of various kinds, keep occurring... and escalating. As the plural title suggests, there are multiple boundaries erected and being crossed here, not just the physical one that marks off one property from another. The theme of lines being crossed – physical, mental, or ethical – and of boundaries being blurred is central to many of the stories here. As such, Fences is a perfect opening story to the collection, and one of my favourites.

 

Others that especially stood out were:

Cover Yourself – here James mixes science fiction with the kind of ambiguity found in the best weird fiction: although ‘what’ is happening is clear enough, the significance of it to those participating is vague; in fact exactly who is participating is vague. (As is this description, because I don’t want to ruin things for you.) 

 

The Devils is the first of two stories about an exorcist called Reese Campbell, who deals with human created horrors as much as anything supernatural. The lesson being, I guess, that if we believe in devils and demons of any stripe we legitimise evil behaviour in ourselves. Not that this story is that simply black and white, for there is an outside evil here too. The final story in the collection, Full, is also about Campbell, investigating a too-perfect house.

 

Maybe best is The Side Effects Of The Medication - the title story contains the kind of surreal magic realism you might find in someone like David Barthelme’s work. In this story some people’s dreams are physical, fragile things like soap bubbles – these dreams are the ‘side effects’ of the title. And other, dreamless people, pay good money to see the dreams. Again, boundaries are crossed as the personal becomes public and all too visible.

The Side Effects Of The Medication (UK | US)

Distorted Visions

I like to say, in glib self-promotional moments, that the sort of horror that I write is one where the story reflects the psychology of the characters. You can probably find me saying something similar in the About Me section on this very blog. It’s a short hand, really, to say that my stories aren't just about people having their spleen eaten off by zombies, oh no. It's true as far as it goes. But like most marketing speak it’s too simplistic to mean much.

Thinking about it more, I think that what I am trying to say is that a lot of good horror reflects the world-view of the characters (and readers). But like one of those funfair mirrors, what comes back is distorted. Or even broken.

Clichéd example alert: Lovecraft is well known for his ‘cosmic horror’, one of the central ideas of which is that mankind is meaningless to the universe at large. This is a direct challenge to the prevailing Christian view of earlier times, that mankind was essential to Creation, because God. And even 19C atheists seemed to have a very smug, aren't-we-swell view of humanity. Maybe its because that kind of small-r religious view of the life is less prevalent that explains why Lovecraft’s legacy, amongst his more second-rate followers, seems to have been reduced to pop-culture wowing over the cool monsters with funny names. Few seem to grasp that the Outer Gods are scary because they are gods; debased, insane gods who don’t care about us enough even to punish us.

I'm not religious myself, which is probably why I merely admire Lovecraft’s work as one horror author amongst many rather than hero-worshipping him like some in the horror community (oh, and there’s his repellent racism, too). But I have my own views on life and the horror that I most admire is probably that which challenges these views and throws them back at me in distorted ways. Of course, some opinions I hold are too trivial or subjective to be considered here – my contention that Giant Steps by The Boo Radleys is the most underrated album of the 90s is certainly one that’s been challenged, mainly by my mates in the pub, but such ignoramuses disagreeing are hardly going to destroy my entire world view. But how about these statements, all of which I ‘believe’ to certain degrees and with the usual caveats:

That we have free will, to a greater or lesser degree, and therefore at least some influence over our own destinies.

That logic and cause and effect mean that life is relatively stable and sensible, and that we can understand the reasons why.

That although people don’t have a soul they do have a personality that remains largely the same over their lives.

That despite all the setbacks, society is slowly becoming more civilised and tolerant; we are moving away from the jungle.

All these beliefs are pretty fundamental but I can see that a lot of my stories are essentially trying to test these principles to destruction; to attempt to prove them wrong. The doppelgängers and the ghosts; the conspiracies and the inescapable deaths are all suggestive of the fact that what I believe might be as fundamentally wrong as the idea that humanity is at the centre of you universe. That such fundamental truths are little more than smoke and mirrors. And what could be more horrifying than that?

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Over on Martin Cosby's site, you can find a new interview with me, should you be so inclined. Lots of talk about influences and crippling writer insecurity.

I've always found Lauren James to be a very acute and interesting writer about literary horror, and so I was pleased to see the title story from Falling Over discussed in this excellent piece about the theme of 'the double'.