Joseph and I have agreed that we will rarely, if ever, write book reviews for Horror Reanimated. We’ll leave such back breaking labour to Mathew. From my point of view, the decision is because I would feel uncomfortable writing reviews of books whose authors I might meet up with at a convention or on a panel in the not too distant future. I’m just cowardly that way! That said, I have felt compelled to tap out a little piece about a book I have just finished. Put simply, it is possibly the best children’s ghost story I have ever read. Actually, let’s not be mealy-mouthed: it is one of the best children’s stories I have ever read full stop.
I’ve been reading quite a bit of YA (Young Adult) fiction over the past few months. I’ve gobbled down all of Darren Shan’s Demonata series (great fun and bloody scary in places – check out the family torture scene in Lord Loss. Reads like Saw for kids!); Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five saga (Book One – Ravens Gate – reminded me a lot of that brilliant BBC Children’s TV series Century Falls crossed with Dennis Wheatley); Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon the Cutpurse and FE Higgins’ The Black Book of Secrets. All of these have shown the remarkable imagination and skill on display in modern children’s fiction. By far the best of the crop, however, has been Breathe: a ghost story by Cliff McNish.
Briefly, Breathe is about Jack, a young asthmatic boy grieving over the death of his father. Hoping to help her son come to terms with the loss, Jack’s mother moves them to an old house full of memories. Jack is what is known in the dark fiction trade as a touch-know: someone who can pick up on the vibrations of the past by touch. As Jack and his mother arrive at the house they are watched by the ghost children who have been trapped here for years. Soon Jack will encounter their captor – a tortured figure known only as the Ghost Mother.
This is creepy stuff. McNish has written one of the purest ghost stories I have ever read. In a sense, this is MR James for kids – spellbinding, ethereal, with a pitch-black tone. There really has been nothing like it for years. In those YA novels I mentioned earlier, the horror of demons and Lovecraftian gods is fantastical but, in a sense, tangible. What Jack encounters in Breathe is a menace made all the more frightening by the fact that it can’t really be seen or touched. Also impressive is the fact that, by turns, we find ourselves sympathising with, and then abhorring, the villain of the piece. One moment she is tugging at our heartstrings, the next we are terrified by her inhumanity. Such complex characterisation in a children’s book is a rare and wonderful thing.
I’m not going to say much more. I don’t want to spoil this for you. But, oh, the Ghost Mother’s kiss! And the horror of the Nightmare Passage! Breathe is not only a cracking story, with brilliantly inventive and realised fantasy concepts, but a book that has real heart. Buy it and enjoy.
November 24th, 2008
Another twist on the zombie genre – a neurological pandemic has swept the United Kingdom, but those with the infection don’t die immediately, becoming increasingly incoherent, unstable and violent. The infection mutated, went airborne and the government’s so-called vaccine only slowed down the symptoms. The result: the infectious period was extended and the disease spread unnoticed and the virus wiped out most of the misinformed population. Six months later, and the landscape is littered with wandering psychopaths and scavenging survivors.
The Dead Outside has an overwhelming air of purposefully half-explained menace: the virus might still be airborne; touching the afflicted in any way might result in infection; the turned victims are after blood and attracted by noise, so living a quiet life becomes vital to survival. So what better place to be than in the Scottish borders? Sparsely populated, lots of space and plenty to eat if you find a suitably isolated farm and can grow your own. Which is exactly what Daniel does after his wife and child are infected. But he wakes up the next morning to find April peering down the barrel of a shotgun at him. Braehead is her family’s farm and she doesn’t exactly welcome strangers, not even healthy ones.
The two put up with each other as they struggle to survive; but there’s more to April than meets the eye. Why does she spend nights outside the safety of the farmhouse on her own, why does she shoot every infected person on sight, burying them in the woods around the farm, and why hasn’t she been infected by all this contact? When a third survivor stumbles onto the farm, this fragile and untrusting dynamic is threatened.
The Dead Outside shares the same main problem as The Zombie Diaries – a lack of turned plague victims, (in fact, if it were not for the differences in the disease and infected, these two films might almost be companion pieces), but Director Kerry Anne Mullaney’s choice of Dumfries and Galloway as a location tempers this accusation in two ways – naturally, there are less people here, and most impressively, the bleakness of the countryside is captured in the blues and blacks of the eerie dusk/night exterior shots, (when most of the action occurs). The area’s wet and dreary weather conditions, shown through deceptively simple, lingering shots of the farmyard, the surrounding fields and woods, and farm buildings going to ruin as nature reclaims them, more than makes up for the too-few, (but effectively savage), encounters with the infected.
Mullaney has crafted a rough-edged independent Post Apocalyptic gem: the dialogue is economical; the acting is convincing; the farmhouse’s rooms clogged full of a lifetime’s clutter constrict and suffocate those hiding within, eventually forcing them outside to face the truths behind April’s attachment to Braehead Farm.
The Dead Outside is a nervous and personal snapshot of the apocalypse, as the characters subtly probe each
other’s motivations in an unforgiving, and tense environment. A is for Apocalypse, and Ambiguity, but also for Atmosphere and The Dead Outside literally drips with it.
Shot in two weeks, on a micro-budget, (the makers wouldn’t divulge the amount in their Frightfest Q&A session, due to the fact they’re trying to sell the film at the moment), The Dead Outside is a stylishly dark mood piece, and if The Zombie Diaries can do well in the straight-to-DVD market, The Dead Outside surely will, and deservedly so, as it is a prime example of thoughtful, twisted story-telling and aspirational independent film-making.
Hopefully we’ll be seeing The Dead Outside in cinemas or on DVD before too long. Check out the official trailer here.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[Mathew's book reviews can also be found at Bookgeeks, and his film reviews at Quiet Earth. This review republished with permission of Quiet Earth. Original review here.]
November 7th, 2008
October can’t come around quick enough sometimes.
Stephen Jones‘ 19th annual selection of some of the most accessible and harrowing genre fiction out there is the foremost reason for me, (as is the onset of what will hopefully be a glorious autumn, a time when we lovers of the spook can anticipate those long nights settling in again…)
2007 was a fruitful year in horror, as Jones’ painstaking dissection of all-that-is-dark related activity shows. Personally I would like to see more of his comment and opinion in this introductory section, which is a relatively comprehensive list of books, comics, television, DVD, film, stage, merchandise and other related genre releases, (although Jones does comment on much of the genre television in the US and the UK). It would, of course, be impossible for Jones to keep track of everything published over the course of twelve months, but this section is a very useful primer for the fan who might have missed something along the way.
Jones does give us some insight into the trials and tribulations the committee, of which he was a member, experienced whilst organising the 2007 World Horror Convention, which was held outside the US for the first time, much to the chagrin of some horror fans and aspiring writers, who voiced their disgruntled opinions on some of the many online forums, available to anyone these days. Hence the boundaries between being a professional writer, genuinely aspiring and ill-considered wannabe is a grey area in some people’s minds, according to Jones, who argues that a well-managed Convention with invited professional speakers and writers’ contributions as part of a structured schedule is a good thing for the genre, and preferable to a loose free-for-all of wild and woolly opinions and debatable writing quality from those who have few, if any, publishing credentials, which would be to the detriment of all.
Within The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Jones has collected some truly intriguing and spooky stories from such diverse sources as the World Horror Convention’s Souvenir Book, Travellers in Darkness; Peter Crowther’s consistently challenging Postscripts magazine; The Ghost Story Society‘s high-quality At Ease with the Dead anthology; Tartarus Press‘ equally good collection, Strange Tales Volume 11; as well as a Gothic Press chapbook, Estronomicon‘s online and print Halloween special, and Comma Press‘ Phobic: Modern Horror Stories anthology, among others.
The Things He Said, Michael Marshall Smith‘s extreme survivalist take on the aftermath of what must have been a zombie apocalypse is sparingly eloquent and backwoods-bitingly effective. Steve Erikson‘s This Rich Evil Sound evokes a sad atmosphere of the implications of age and isolation across the unspoilt snow-shrouded landscape of a National Park. Man, You Gotta See This! by Tony Richards is at first a simple story of paintings imbued with hypnotic qualities, but it gradually pushes the reader along the path to the beginnings of a bizarre apocalypse; as does Christopher Harman’s eerie Behind the Clouds: In Front of the Sun, wherein a shady antiques dealer buys a globe with something inside it, something that scratches to get out…
Mark Samuels‘ A Gentleman from Mexico takes us to the shadowy community that is Mexico City’s Distrito Federal, a place where a holidaying editor is introduced to a writer with a style and manner very much like a certain H.P. Lovecraft. Such introductions always have a price. Calico Black, Calico Blue by Joel Knight is a very, very dark urban tale set in two adjoining flats with two very, very different occupants. Loss, by the enigmatic Tom Piccirilli, is about a haunted building where the occupants are as equally troubled by their distant flirtations with fame as they are by the evil that is spreading around the corridors of their apartment block. Tim Pratt‘s From Around Here is an inventive tale of a neighbourhood blighted by an insidious and hidden evil, and a little-known, travelling God who is the only one who can see it, and wants to get rid of it, as he /she/it is considering settling down there.
13 O’Clock by Mike O’Driscoll, (a columnist for Black Static), and The Fisherman by David A. Sutton bring us seaside chills, of the spiritual kind in the first instance, and something like guilt, rotten and swimming in the surf, in the second, as does The Admiral’s House by Marc Lecard – a bit of both in fact.
The Church on the Island by Simon Kurt Unsworth, from At Ease with the Dead, demonstrates the ghost story at its most sublime, as a tourist cannot deny her instinct to explore, whilst the same urge betrays the arguing friends in Simon Strantzas‘ The Other Village. Reggie Oliver‘s The Children of Monte Rosa, is a more traditional tourist tale of the supernatural, descriptive of the period, and, (not necessarily a bad thing), a little predictable for that detail.
Ghostly themes are continued in a very different style with Joe R. Lansdale‘s awesome round-the-campfire take on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Deadman’s Road. You guessed it, a haunted road and some folks have to follow it after midnight;but this road’s not cursed with a headless rider and horse from hell, rather a bee-stung redneck with a vicious vendetta. Another ghost story, this time from Nicholas Royle, the last two lines from Lancashire, detailing a family’s encounter with a childless couple, actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Tight Wrappers by Conrad Williams is a stand-out too, a ghost and possibly a monster tale, he lends London a darkness like no other writer at the moment. Joel Lane, a regular fiction contributor to Black Static, gives us another spectrally damp atmosphere in the ambiguous revenge short of Still Water.
The volume finishes on a particularly enjoyable, though not necessarily horrific note, with Kim Newman‘s Cold Snap, a short story extracted from The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, the sequel collection to The Man from the Diogenes Club. Here, the members of the Diogenes Club, ‘a cover for a body charged with handling delicate and often supernatural matters of state,’ get together in the summer of 1976 to battle The Cold, the strange intelligence that is, well, cold, and threatening to chill the entire planet, once it freezes Somerset that is. Newman’s Diogenes stories are a wonderfully amusing and densely-referenced mixture of a retro X-Files, the League of Extraordinary Gentleman and Life on Mars, and I urge you to purchase the two afore-mentioned collections.
Authors whose contributions can almost always be guaranteed, and hence need not be reviewed, include Christopher Fowler, Ramsey Campbell, Gary McMahon, Glen Hirschberg and Joe Hill. The only story I couldn’t bring myself to read is Neil Gaiman‘s The Witch’s Headstone, as this is apparently chapter four of the forthcoming and hugely anticipated, (on my part), The Graveyard Book, and I don’t want to dilute the anticipation, or the actual read, so this is definitely not a negative.
I cannot recommend The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror highly enough as, despite my having read possibly 50% of the stories in their original places of publication, there is enough dripping dark stuff here, in the form of ghost stories, weird tales and menacingly fantastic fables, to satisfy the appetite of the fattest and hungriest horror geek.
Roll on next October, my stomach’s always rumbling.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[Mathew's book reviews can also be found at Bookgeeks, and his film reviews at Quiet Earth].
October 14th, 2008
