Review - Oaths and Offerings ed by Nathaniel Spain

Oaths and Offerings 

Edited by Nathaniel Spain
Carnyx Press, 4 June 2026
Available as: PB, 127pp 

Source: Advance cop
ISBN(PB): 9781919453200

I'm grateful to Carnyx for sending me a an advance e-copy of Oaths and Offerings to consider for review.

Oaths and Offerings is the launch anthology from new press Carnyx who are devoted to the writers and stories of Northern England - a noble venture. It’s an impressive and handsome volume printed on good quality paper and with stories to match! Described as “an anthology of folklore”, this collection showcases eight new stories, all with their roots in folklore but reflecting the various forms in which it occurs. So there are stories with a contemporary setting (Away with the Fairies, Charcoal Nils), those which are more straight folktale-inflected (Awd Goggle, The  Monster of no Seeming) and there is even the Jamesian (Cups and Rings). 

We see the difficulty faced by a newcomer from abroad settling in a rural community, the problems of redeveloping an old mining site, the troubles of a shepherd girl and the dangers of obliterating tradition - as well as the mutability of tradition! They're all extremely good examples of their forms, reflecting the diversity and breadth of Northern England and taken together, this is a very strong collection which should I think set Carnyx off to a cracking start.

The first story, Awd Goggle by Steven French, tells a tale handed down from the narrator's grandma about how, as  a girl, she saw industrialisation meet its match when an ancient, revered tree is torn down. The indirect narration introduces a sense of timelessness in the events (while hanging on to the essentials) a sense heightened by its being in Yorkshire dialect.

Of Mineral, of Bone by Emma J Lannie draws on the rich mining heritage of the North. Whether in the copper mines of Alderley Edge, the salt mines of Cheshire or the coalfields, mining has always been a superstitious trade. A dangerous business, it sought to know and placate whatever spirits or beings dwelt in the depths, able to cause catastrophe and take lives. We see such rituals in this story. But what happens when the miners leave and the mines are abandoned? There is a legacy - mineral-laden waters that can pose a hazard. A solution seems to have been found here, but Lannie leaves the reader uneasy that there may be aspects that engineers and builders haven't considered. A truly creepy, menacing story.

Modern Britain has a truly diverse range of food traditions, much of it derived from abroad and unfortunately subject to the same tedious culture wars as other aspects of life (periodic social media arguments erupt over the proper statues of chicken tikka masala, for example). In Away With the Fairies by Mae Tang, we see an incomer, Zhenyi, pushing back against her ignorant neighbour and seeking to respect local lore and tradition in new and bold ways. This one really made me smile and I think while short, is a microcosm of a larger truth, showing how tradition is not fixed but is the brilliant result of human effort and bargaining with real, active powers. 

Mother of God by Sophie Parkes makes a similar point, contrasting the busloads of tourists coming to see the quaint folk customs in a village with the hard lives of the residents. A couple of girls, left on their own by parents out at work, add their own spin to the packaged tradition on display for the visitors. This is the only story (I think) without a dash of  overt supernatural (though possibly I'm wrong about that).

Charcoal Nils by Emma Sprakarn is very much a folk tale, though a modern one. Set in Scandinavia this is the one of only two stories that doesn't take place in Northern England, though the atmosphere - the cold, the mountains - is one with the rest of the book, as is the sense of being a little at the margins. And also the theme of the ancient in the modern, in a story of revenge and the failure of the modern world with its invented rules to take account of what is real.

Cups and Rings by Victoria Stewart, set in Scotland, looks at those enigmatic Pictish markings mainly found on upland stones (presumably because these are less likely to have been disturbed). Nobody knows what they mean, what they were for or the particulars of who made them but here we see two different attempts at interpretation set, perhaps, a hundred years apart. And we see what becomes of the investigators. I called this one "Jamesian" above, and it has that sense of obliqueness, of time folding away - and also, perhaps, a message that sometimes it's better to leave well alone.

The Monster of No Seeming by Sophie Reck Pointon is perhaps, of the stories here, the most obviously a folk tale, taking a young girl, Isla, set to guard the sheep, on a quest to rescue her sister Netta. In the best spirit of folklore, impossible tasks have to be carried out and the quest results in learning and growth. Punctuated by occasional remarks and exchanges from the narrator, The Monster sets up both a distance from its subject (this all seems to have happened long, long ago) and a closeness (the two settings are perhaps very intertwined).

good-dark-night (Suzannah Evans Furnass) is set in a community of the future, finding its own rituals to control a harsh environment. In a world of global heating and environmental catastrophe, that means yearning for and seeking to bring back the good, dark nights.

So, this set of stories interrogate the nature of tradition - how it can be changed, and when it’s best respected; its relationship to landscape and the use of the landscape; the place of people - individuals families, the long-settled and the newcomer, in that landscaper; and much more besides.

An impressive start to the Carnyx list, and I’ll be eager to see what comes next. 

For more information about Oaths and Offerings, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Normal Rules Don't Apply by Kate Atkinson

Normal Rules Don't Apply: Short Stories
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 24 August 2023
Available as: HB, 2400pp, e, audio   
Source: Advance copy, audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9780857529183

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance e-copy of Normal Rules Don't Apply to consider for review. I also listened to the book on audio.

The warning "Normal rules don't apply" is given in Spellbound, one of the more obviously fairytale-like of the stories in this book, but it could well apply to any of them. Talking dogs (and horses), a virgin birth (not, as I'm afraid it's described, an Immaculate Conception...), an observant ghost, a catastrophe that strikes anybody (and anything) caught outside when it comes - these stories are filled with the fantastical, the unlikely and the menacing.

They're also filled with the down to earth, the familiar and even the touching. Take Franklin, for example, a character who appears in three or four of the stories. Despite the limited space available, Atkinson gives a vivid picture of his rackety life - his mother, notorious for her role in a sex scandal; his absent father and flailing career history (until he gets lucky and lands a job with hit soap Greenacres - which also features in several of the takes). Franklin is a channel to the mysterious, encountering said talking horse (and dog), a deeply strange family, and finally an escapee from another story - but he is himself as normal, as ordinary, as anyone else would be trying to live down a minor celebrity of a parent. 

Like other characters here, Franklin doesn't invite the weird, it just happens to him and he has to cope with it - just as later in the book, Pamela, an undistinguished former teacher faced with an extraordinary event, grits her teeth and tells herself it's her time to shine. I liked Pamela, feeling she very much approaches life as, I hope, I would. Or take Mandy, that observant ghost, who uses her apparent ability post-death to perceive what's still going on to track down the facts behind her death. In the course of this Mandy tells her life story, which is shrewdly set out, very ordinary, but truly fascinating. (Mandy gets her happy ending, and even the company of a dog - there are many of them in this book!)

And sometimes, the weird just... wanders in. As you read this collection you'll spot, perhaps, situations and individuals you've already seen. Connections will spark and you'll know - sometimes with delight, sometimes with horror - what is going to happen next (perhaps). It's emphatically not one story but themes recur, alternate paths may be being explored and unlikely links are made. The atmosphere is at times something like Atkinson's Life After Life and A God in Ruins, though without quite the same space for exploration and development of characters.

There is an explanation, sort of, for the coincidences and links, lending a distinctly metaphysical touch to the book. It adds its own charm but the rest of the stories still very much stand in their own terms, every one of them. My favourite would, though, I think be Existential Marginalisation, a rather dark take on Toy Story.

The stories are all great fun, and if, as I did, you read the excellent audiobook version narrated by Paterson Joseph, I think you'll agree that it's just a perfect listening experience.

For more information about Normal Rules Don't Apply, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett

A Stroke of the Pen (The Lost Stories)
Terry Pratchett
Doubleday, 10 October 2023
Available as: HB, 220pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857529633

I'm grateful to Milly at Doubleday for sending me an advance copy of A Stroke of the Pen to consider for review. I've been so eager to share this review, but barred by solemn and strict prohibitions form doing so before now.

As you can imagine I was delighted to see these stories had been discovered - the background to that, set out here, is truly intriguing: nobody knew about most of them as they were written and published, under different names, in newspapers before Sir Terry was widely known. The stories only came to light when Pat and Jan Harkin were asked to track down a potential serial, The Quest for the Keys, which is also given in full here. As well as finding all of Quest, Pat and Jan located another 18 stories besides.

The resulting collection is a glorious, if bittersweet, read - surely this must be the last posthumous Pratchett collection, even if one or two more pieces may emerge? Being home alone for an evening, I sat down and read them all without pause, savouring not just the Pratchettness of them all but also the overall effect of the collection. Yes, there is the occasional foreshadowing of something Sir Terry would return to later. As a child of the 70s, though, I also spotted a certain taste of that decade, for example the thinly disguised celebrities referenced in "How Scrooge Saw the Spectral Light..." or the industrial relations problems described in "The New Father Christmas".

If you can sense a theme here, yes, given their origin in newspapers, it's perhaps not surprising that a number of these stories have a Christmas theme, affectionately playing with the absurdities of the season. I did think that at the back of them one might see the ghost of Hogfather or perhaps even of Death, as an anthropomorphic projection finds itself needled out of its accustomed role. Maybe. I wouldn't insist on it - though I'd also point at "Mr Brown's Holiday Accident" which plays games with the nature of reality - creating a well developed and twisty example of SF as well as a very funny story.

Being funny is not unusual in this collection. While Neil Gaiman writes in the Introduction that Pratchett here "is not a humorist, not yet" there is certainly a sense of fun here, a willingness to send things up, with "The Quest for the Key", the longest and most developed story, already taking on the satirising of fantasy that later developed in Discworld. There is also a bit of a shared world going on, with the town of Blackburn recurring as a location for the bizarre. Not everything takes place there, though, these stories are varied, from a parody of a Gold Rush Western ("The Real Wild West") to a sort of Close Encounters spin-off ("The Blackberry Thing") to time-travel, dragons and ghosts.

Overall, the impression is of a writer whose mind is seething with ideas, busily selecting from them to fill the (scanty) room allowed for a newspaper story, salting them with puns and allusions, hinting at a complex world behind the whole, and having a great deal of fun in the process.

Much, in fact, like the later writer, apart, perhaps, from that need to get the whole thing down in 500 words...

In short, read this, it'll make you happy. (It might also make a good Christmas present...)

For more information about A Stroke of the Pen, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Flowering by Alison Littlewood

The Flowering
Alison Littlewood
Black Shuck Books, 24 November 2022
Available as: PB, 148pp audio, e  
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781913038960

The Flowering is a collection of six short stories from Alison Littlewood, unconnected in setting or character but linked in that they are all horrors set in historical times - there's a whiff of Dickens in places, a dash of MR James perhaps, but overall, an eerie sensibility that is all Littlewood's own.

In the first tale, The Zoetrope, we get a bit of that Jamesian "pleasing terror" as the instrument of the title becomes both the means by which an injustice is brought to light and the tool by which it might be avenged. Exploring the constraints suffered by women in a deeply patriarchal society, the new-fangled gadget perhaps also foreshadows how the tables might be turned.

The Marvellous Talking Machine also centres on a device, albeit one with more of the magical and less of the technological about it. The machine of the title is a travelling exhibit at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, a real setting, and again, we see - in a kind of historical Black Mirror way - how an attempt at a transformative technology, long before the days of Siri and Alexa, might go awry.

Meet Me at the Frost Fair has a classic opening, a ghost story being told in the snug sitting-room of a gentleman's club on a foggy London evening. Looking back at memories of strange events some decades back, the narrator might have been wiser not to call to mind things that may, after all, not be wholly done with...

The Ballad Box takes us to the hardscrabble world of Dickensian London where balladeers eke a living from the imagined deeds and fake last words of the celebrity criminals carried out to dance the Tyburn Jig. An atmosphere of sudden death, cynical exploitation and guilt pervades this story. You'll never feel quite the same passing Seven Dials again.

The Winter Tree also has its share of guilt and also shows how class, sex and convention blend to press cruel fates on, especially, women. With a delicate blend of the supernatural and of human cruelty, the effect is subtle and builds in this haunting story.

The Flowering has some similar elements, but also uses a horticultural setting as both an extended metaphor and, indeed, a new language, telling a story of love, betrayal and revenge.

These stories are perfect for a dark winter's evening with the fire lit and the TV firmly off. But you may choose to leave the lamps lit afterwards.

For more information about The Flowering, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Three Pint Problems by Melvyn Small

Three Pint Problems (The Accidental Detective Book 3)
Melvyn Small
Indipenned, 11 November 2022
Available as: PB, 341pp, e
Source: Purchased
ISBN(PB): 9798840296523

Ever since Conan Doyle stopped writing Sherlock Holmes stories (in fact, probably before...) the character has been reworked, imitated, reinvented, referenced and pastiched. Melvyn Small's take is a pleasingly different example of this - a Holmes of the North East, in fact Middlesboro, firmly living in the 21st century (one of the stories includes a sizeable part for BBC Local Radio). This is a version of Holmes that gets us away from gaslights, Hansoms, cobblestones and deerstalkers. 

(Sort of. Small does pack in a fair few references to the originals, just to prove he knows what he's about - 'Sherlock ever investigated a case that included some sort of hound? I dunno, maybe one terrorising a bunch of posh twats...'; a mention of a horse running in the 'Beryl Coronet'; the 'Baker Street Kitchen' is a cafe and 'The Twisted Lip' a pub, and of course there are namechecks for DI Barry Lestrade and even Col Sebastian Moran - who Holmes was lucky to escape from alive. Indeed the title of the first story is a reference canonical Holmes himself drops in the course of A Scandal in Bohemia (the context being the universal human tendency, in case of fire, to save the most precious thing - a point relevant to this story). There are many more references which I won't spoil - you can have fun hunting them out yourself!)

Three Pint Problems contains four different stories, in order The Darlington Substitution, Murder on the Teesside Princess, The Devil's Advocate and The Riverside Thriller.

The Darlington Substitution isn't, at least not apparently, a case of murder or theft but - like many of the originals - more of a puzzle. I won't spoil the story by saying just what has happened, but it's an oddity, a surprise, that sets Holmes' antennae twitching. But he lacks data and, as ever, John Watson isn't best placed to supply them. Indeed, being preoccupied with selling copies of his memoirs, he doesn't pay a great deal of attention to Holmes's concerns. (The sections detailing signings in bleak branches of WH Smith are written with feeling!)

The story is just the right length for a Holmes case: a novella/ long-short-story is to my mind ideal to introduce a mystery, show how baffling it is, let Holmes do his thing and then wrap everything up. If Small is a little mysterious about precisely how Holmes draws his conclusions, that may be forgiven, Conan Doyle often did the same, but we get a broad hint that detecting is easier in the days of social media so one might imagine he's a skilled at IT, and there are hints at hacker abilities. All this is I think fully line with how the original Holmes was written, a bit of a geek, up with all the latest technology and none too fastidious how he used it.

Murder on the Teesside Princess is more of a locked room mystery, Holmes on the scene when a night to remember aboard a floating restaurant turns bad. A complication is that Holmes has just been arrested, Lestrade having come aboard for the purpose, after an altercation with another passenger. That signals a darker side of Holmes I think - indeed it's becoming clear that he's sometimes on the wrong side of the law. That made me think of how fun the Conan Doyle stories Holmes and Watson get away with so much because of what these days we'd describe as their privilege. No such latitude exists in Small's version, and it's very lucky for Holmes that he's able - without apparent effort - to solve a fiendish crime, alive with misdirection and concealment, handing Lestrade his villain on a plate, and the earlier unpleasantness does, indeed, fade away.

It was in the course of reading this story that I started noticing an elegiac note to Watson't narration, a foreshadowing of Holmes' death something I trust won't be arriving too soon as I've just discovered this series!

The Devil's Advocate continues the darker vein of these stories by giving us Holmes' account of his jury service some decades earlier (bit naughty of him to talk outside the jury room). It's a mastery demonstration of Holmes' methods, but also of the morality behind them. The greatest revelations, in the end, are not "how" but "why". We see Holmes' earlier life depicted in a way that was actually rather moving. That depiction did, though, show that Holmes has his own agendas and that he if far form infallible. 

The final story, The Riverside Thriller, is rather lighter in tone, Holmes getting his teeth into a knotty problem against the clock. There has been a murder at the football stadium and the match is due to begin. Can our hero crack the case before kick-off? An ingenious mystery here, classic Holmes, and great fun.

I loved this version of Holmes. Once you become used to the central characters, and especially to them NOT addressing each other in the slightly stuffy manner of the originals, the stories rattle along. There is some neat writing in places "...hoping I could transform his change of mood into a change of mind..." and use of (I think) real locations in and around Darlington and Middlesborough which slightly passed me by, not knowing the area (but then I don't know Victorian London either?)

All in all an engaging idea, well realised, providing a refreshingly different angle on the Great Detective.

For more information, see the Indipenned website here. You can buy the book on Amazon here.

#Review - Boys, Beasts and Men by Sam J Miller

Boys, Beasts and Men
Sam J Miller
Tachyon, 14 June 2022
Available as: PB, 330pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781616963729

I'm grateful to Tachyon for an advance e-copy of Boys, Beasts and Men to consider for review.

Boys, Beasts and Men contains fourteen of Miller's short stories, linked into a meta-narrative by brief linking sections which seem to follow an encounter and exchange between two men ('I follow him out of the bar with no idea what kind of tale I'm stepping into'). Some of the stories arise more or less directly from what the two are doing or saying, while others make more sense in hindsight. The nature of the exchange itself, though, only slowly becomes clear and I don't want to spoil it.

The stories themselves are vibrant and wide-ranging. While they almost always have an element of fantasy either in the detail or, I think, in being set in slightly alternate universes, this often isn't the main point. For example, in the first, Allosaurus Burgers, the eponymous dinosaur turns up in a remote US town, catalysing a range of reactions from religious concern to conspiracy theories, but the story follows a boy and explores his relationship with his mother, sister and absent father. There's no justification for the Allosaurus itself but its presence seems to say something about what is erased, absent or forbidden to be spoken about in Matt's life.

The second story, 57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides, perhaps turns more strongly on its fantasy premise - no, you'll have to read it to find what it is - as well as introducing one of the main themes of the collection, the lives of gay men and boys in society. It's allusively written, those 57 reasons being given as a numbered list, which gradually develops into a narrative, exploring both the narrator's longings and failings (he lets down a friend badly) and the way he is treated. It also touches on another theme of the collection, alternatives and roads not taken - several stories here take actual historical episodes and add different features to them: supernatural disturbances, different outcomes.  The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History, for example, describes the Stonewall raid from numerous perspectives ('June 1969: The wet Manhattan air was like sick breath coming out of our collective throat') but steers the story into something strange, different, a kind of actualisation, I think, of collective rage and resistance to create a phenomenon that baffles everyone. That theme is recapitulated in Angel, Monster, Man, a story told in three parts - and of course echoing the title of the collection - where again, desire, rage and frustration seem to enable the physical manifestation of something that then takes a life if its own as the New York gay community of the 1970s and 80s is struck by the virus.

Death and loss feature here often. In Conspicuous Plumage a young man is absent, not spoken of due to the way that he died. It takes a voyage of rediscovery and reimagining to bring him back to mind. The  loss and regret are sometimes more, sometimes less, fantastical - more, for example, in Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart which riffs on the events off the film King Kong, bringing New York together in regret and repugnance at a shattering loss: a token perhaps of how we can be, and a story with a promise of something better arising. 

And the loss isn't always due to a death. In Shucked, it's much more subtle than that - a chance encounter by two American tourists in a bar with an older man ('One of the burdens of being with a boy as beautiful as Teen') leads to... doubts... about the reality of their own relationship and about identity. In The Beasts We Want To Be, a really creepy little story set in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution where strange conditioning techniques to engineer human souls vie with eerie religious artefacts, it's all about the strange sense of unreality even as survivors find consoling relationships amongst the bloodshed. In Calved, a tender story turning on a father's relationship with his son in a nearly post-apocalyptic world, we see the catastrophe coming - a catastrophe stoked by misunderstanding and an inability, or refusal, to be emotionally honest - but can't do anything about it. 

Relationships - whether between father and son, mother and daughter, lovers, or strangers - are often exquisitely twisted in this collection, not always completely messed up but ramified, vibrating even when seeking to unknot themselves. A sober churchgoing woman seeks out forbidden drugs to open the doors of perception, understand what her son is and hold out a hand to him. Absence undoes those relationships: 'while he was away, Hugh became someone else' or creates spaces in which they can be rebuilt or seen differently. And always, there is that framing story, providing some insights about where all this is going - though tantalisingly incomplete ones.

I simply loved this collection. While dark at times, it's never completely bleak, presenting moments of hope and, as I have said, resistance and weaving a seductive web around the reader.

For more information about Boys, Beasts and Men, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Someone in Time (ed Jonathan Strahan)

Someone in Time
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Solaris, 12 May 2022
Available as: PB, 416pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781786185099

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Someone in Time to consider for review.

This is a collection of stories of time-crossed lovers, by some major names in contemporary SFF - there are stories here by Alix E. Harrow, Carrie Vaughn, Catherynne M. Valente, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Klages, Jeffrey Ford, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Margo Lanagan, Nina Allan, Rowan Coleman, Sam J. Miller, Sameem Siddiqui, Sarah Gailey, Seanan McGuire, Theodora Goss and Zen Cho.

As with any such collection, part of the fun was reading pieces by authors I hadn't encountered before, as well as recognising the styles and approach of some I was more familiar with, and seeing how those addressed the overall theme of the anthology. Blending time travel and romance sounds straightforward, but it's not just a matter of two time travellers (or a time traveller and a citizen of the past or future) falling for one another, is it? With the possibilities of forbidden knowledge from another timeline, or of losing a lover in the multiverse, or, with whole futures at stake, having to do the Right Thing, there is much to explore.

Among my favourites were Allan's story The Lichens, in which future time-adventurer Joe (Josephine) falls for Helen, a woman living at the time of Culloden. It has a sense familiar in her writings of taking part in a wider universe with various mysteries alluded to but left unresolved. I enjoyed Joe's and Helen's delicate dance around each other, expressed by each separately in the idioms of their own times which combine to create a narrative with emotional depth. 

Or there's Sam J Miller's Unabashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse, which is a story of a lost love, a young man who's lost his just-met boyfriend and sees through a whole life all the ways that things could have gone differently. More, he inhabits a myriad of possible worlds of regret and self-blame - a vivid way to bring to life those times when the multiverse tips and it's impossible inability to fix it. This reminded me of themes in Miller's forthcoming collection Boys, Beasts and Men. 

And in Ellen Klages' Time Gypsy, there's a glimpse of California in the bad old days as time travel enables a moment heroine to travel back to the 50s to unravel an issue of scientific attribution. It's so vividly imagined - both the casual sexism and homophobia, and the human connections that route around it. I simply love Klages' writing.

But really, all of the stories here are excellent. In Alix E Harrow's Roadside Attraction, I loved the idea that a working time "machine" - actually, a sandstone obelisk in a remote rural community in the US - could become one of those local attractions that brings in a trickle of tourists and has an extensively stocked gift shop. Such is the fate of the object here, which attracts Floyd Butler - heart not really broken by Candace Stillwater - to seek out adventure. The presence of time travel is almost incidental, simply providing a means of escape as Butler runs into increasing levels of danger rather than face what his heart is telling him. A beatifully imagined story, all the more so for the balance between the personal and the cosmic.

In a slightly different conception of time travel,  Zen Cho's The Past Life Reconstruction Service imagines a service that can immerse the subject in their own previous incarnations. It's time travel, but then again, it's not. Setting the scene, perhaps, for self-discovery rather than messing with the timeline (an issue many of the stories here have to navigate) we see Rui, a brilliant film director who is stymied creatively after the poor reception of his most recent film, distract himself by exploring past iterations of himself, taking in different genders, different periods of history, and even different species - in one iteration, he has the life of a cow. Each time, a perplexing presence appears - can that be telling him something?

Seanan McGuire's First Aid takes Taylor back in time for research purposes. It's a strictly one-way trip, intended to immerse the subject in her era so that she can bury notes for the future, and the prep is extreme - including surgery to help her blend in with the folk of Elizabethan England. You can't prepare for every eventuality, though, and surgery can't anticipate matters of the heart. This was a sweet story juxtaposing the grim near-future financial necessity which drives Taylor to do what she does and the possibility of fining something - someone - that can redeem her from it.

Moving from time exploration to the "Time Police" idea which had to feature here, Sarah Gailey's I Remember Satellites features a young woman being sent back for a "short straw" operation. You'll recognise the setting, though the names have been changed. It's a sacrificial assignment to change the the past - or, perhaps, prevent it being changed, but the reality of what's going on is less important than the dilemma here: the pull of love against duty as two young women, far away from home, weigh their passion against world-changing consequences.

The Golden Hour, by Jeffrey Ford, introduces its time traveller in the first sentence. Our narrator's encounter with him is slightly beguiling, allusive, taking place in a quiet town that seems to be nowhere in particular or perhaps, everywhere at once. It's a story of quite observation and the working out of a puzzle, whose nature isn't actually revealed until almost the end. 

Also among my favourites here, Elizabeth Hand's Kronia takes this sense of wonder, of having no firm ground, even further. It's a story that, read closely, seems to contradict itself, presenting alternatives and crossings over, enhanced by being written in the second person and therefore posing the question, is this being told to the Other or is it somehow hypothetical? Sometimes I thought it was one, sometimes the other, but the sense of possibility seems very apt for the story of a romance, or a potential one.

If I had to name an absolute favourite in this book it might well be Bergamot and Vetiver by Latanya Lakshminarayan. This none has it all. There is a hopeless quest for a lost love, a burning injustice to be resolved and a massive, irredeemable tragedy. We see a traveller from the - a - future visit a past, a past which, unknowing, she is bound to affect. Positing the advanced technology and knowledge advantage of the future as a potential source of exploitation, Bergamot and Vetiver is I think the story here that seems to question the whole ethical basis of time travel, not just point up its potential unintended consequences.

Catherynne M Valente's  The Difference Between Love and Time is very difficult to sum up. Of all the stories here, it's perhaps the most distinct, introducing us to "THE SPACE/ TIME CONTINUUM" as a character ('It is, as you have probably always expected, non-linear, non-anthropic, non-Euclidean, and wholly non-sensical'). It is also dangerous to fall in love with, or dangerous not to fall in love with, depending - in this surreal, Cubist painting of a narrative, all truths are true and all untruths as well, the beginning is the middle and the end, the beginning. 

Romance: Historical by Rowan Coleman was always going to delight me, because it's a story about a bookshop. Beth, a young assistant who wants nothing more than to disappear into the bookshelves, finds that something else got there first. You'll find no time machines or paradoxes here (well, not exactly any paradoxes) but instead rather a sweet romance, the more so for being clearly, hopelessly, doomed. Really enjoyable.

The Place of All the Souls by Margo Lanagan takes us both to a near future bless with longevity but perhaps cursed by infertility, and a Victorian past, linked by time travel, and is one of the few stories here that examines infidelity and jealousy as a daughter learns some truths about her mother. It rather splendidly illustrates the theme of love finding its way, as does Timed Obsolescence by Sameem Siddiqui which imagines a future where one can employ a time-traveller to go back and record a Significant Moment featuring an ancestor. But where there are employees there will be office romances, whether the employees are desk bound or ferreting back through the timelines.

In A Letter to Merlin, Theadora Goss gives us the real background to The Matter of Britain as a dying woman form the future endlessly revisits one corner of history - or mythology - seeking to change the timeline. But that aspect is actually almost incidental, what really impressed me here was what is only hinted at, an interior view of the whole fantastical tale of Arthur, Guinevere and Merlin which would make a cracking novel, I think. 

Carrie Vaughan's Dead Poets features one of the most inventive methods of time travel I can recall, although in a sense it's of a piece with several stories in this book that portray it as a mental exercise, rather than the creation of elaborate physics. That's in keeping with the theme of the story: 'The study of literature is the process of continually falling in love with dead people'. And how. The protagonist here follows her heart and in return, receives a wholly unexpected insight into one of the darkest love stories of history. Creepy, beautiful and entrancing, this one is simply glorious.

So - time travel as accident, as profession, as mental exercise; alternate timelines precious and to be preserved (until forbidden love says otherwise) or the subjects of manipulation and exploitation, love both attained and deferred, its object gloriously present or lost in a myriad of dimensions, realities and alternatives - they're all here, and much more. A collection that will get the pulse racing in place, or evoke a sigh in others. But always fun, readable and heartfelt.

For more information about Someone in Time, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Four more Nightjars! Bat Walk, Spoon, On Mirrors, and Return

Bat Walk
Shirley Stephenson
Nightjar Press, November 2021
Available as: PB, 20pp
Source: Annual subscription
ISBN: 9781907341588

Bat Walk is the story of a woman and her boyfriend who are taking part in just that - a nature walk, held once a year in a remote Northern country, which is an opportunity to observe bats. The story, told in the second person present and therefore subject to a distancing effect, describes events leading up to the trip and then what happens on the night of the walk itself. 

The narrator is preoccupied by her father's illness and her attempts to check up on him back at home and in hospital. Her concerns about being out of phone coverage and unable, when she does get through, to get any update, add a sense of tension and an air of being out of contact. She's already suffering bad dreams and these, combined with a suspicion that not all is well with the boyfriend, set us up for things to go wrong at any moment. 

It's clear that the narrator is far from 100% onboard with the bat project, and really seems to have little in common with her boyfriend, but that fact seems to shrink in importance as the bat walk itself morphs into something folk-horror adjacent at the end of the story. Just what is going on? Stephenson refuses to make it clear, rather leaving things on a delicious note of uncertainty.

Spoon

Robert Stone

Nightjar Press, December 2021

Available as: PB, 16pp

Source: Annual subscription

ISBN: 9781907341656

Oh there are so many dangling mysteries in Spoon. Where shall I begin? 

The story is told by an unnamed narrator who shares his mother's home. He has recently returned with only a small bag of possessions. He has no job. Perhaps he ought to find one. Has he been abroad? In prison? Travelling? We don't know, though there is a sense of some significant past event, something to be regretted.

Rather than explaining this, the narrator spends a lot of time telling us about his observations of animal life in the house and garden: welcome - bees, spiders - and unwelcome - rats, which he attempts to eradicate. (The squeamish may not care for this part.) It's almost as though the close observation of the other creatures that share the space is an effort to avoid something - or, just possibly, the opposite, a way of conveying some truth without being able to state it plainly.

In a few pages, the story covers lots of ground, beginning by evoking the normality of family life, with shrewd nods to the ways things work over time, the tray of tea things that stays in its place for decades, the items nobody ever thinks to replace, the sense of familiarity with all the little noises of the house (water pipes, floorboards). Then is begins to inject notes of doubt. Those noises are so familiar that variations immediately stand out: scurrying in the attic or a poorly functioning boiler provoke dis-ease. The familiar may still be, or point to, the weird.

All this, blended together, gradually loosens the reader's sense of what is real, what is being dreamed and what might simply be an untrue, so there's a sense the story may go anywhere... as indeed it does.

A deeply unsettling, yet fascinating story.

On Mirrors
Ben Tufnell
Nightjar Press, November 2021
Available as: PB, 14pp
Source: Annual subscription
ISBN: 9781907341601

Like many of us, I've spent most of the past two years working from home over a screen and become more familiar than I'd like with my own face. I've noticed the weirdness that results when a different screen options shows both mirror image and camera view at the same time - are those faces behaving themselves?

Tufnell's eerie little story explores this disquiet, though he stays away from modern tech (I think the story is set pre Internet, with the analogue camera still in everyday use) and the weirdness induced by a mirror - which allows for a fine description of the time-worn, spotted artefact and also an investigation of its history and origins.

Tension builds as this history unfolds and as the true nature of the narrator's situation becomes clear. Eventually he takes drastic action to resolve things, but - in a twist of cosmic horror - I suspected that what he did "won't hold up the weather".

Return

David Frankel

Nightjar Press, November 2021

Available as: PB, 13pp

Source: Annual subscription

ISBN: 9781907341595

A young man (impliedly, though it is never confirmed) returns to his home after an absence. He hasn't sent a message ahead, so nobody is expecting him, and he just walks into the house. Where is everybody? The absence of his family grows from being a bit odd, to strange, to the defining feature of the books. And there are strangenesses besides.

Frankel's story packs into a few pages an entire account of what went wrong and presumably what led to the narrator's absence. It's done layer by layer, with the reader's level of concern rising steadily until it consumes one's understanding of the story and suddenly shows everything in a very different light. The unease bleeds over from a curiosity about what happened then, to a doubt about what is happening in the now of the story, a concern over how what we see can coexist with what we seem to being shown - and about what will happen next.

The realisation of how this is going to play out comes suddenly,  with various explains, from the supernatural to the religious to the psychological still available - the choice between them perhaps for the reader.

This is edge-of-your-seat, tense stuff, transporting the reader to an unfamiliar and very uneasy place.

#Review - The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu

The Tangleroot Palace & Other Stories
Marjorie Liu
Titan Books, 5 April 2022
Available as: PB, 239pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781789099621

I'm grateful to Titan for an advance copy of The Tangleroot Palace to consider for review.

The Tangleroot Palace contains seven stories, each with a short afterword giving context. While, there are I think, all squarely fantasy - and some are set in this world - they are all, in various ways, also fairytale-adjacent. Woods feature prominently, as does magic, and figures who might, as you hurry by, take for witches. Monsters abound, whether powerful magicians, scary creatures or dangerous men, and it's often a young woman who must understand what's needed and face down the threat.

In the first story, Sympathy for the Bones, Clora is apprenticed to 'old Ruth', both of them living in a remote, rural district of the US, perhaps in the first half of the 20th century. They are wise women, helping out with the problems and concerns of their community, and with a particular talent for dealing with troublesome men. But, as gradually becomes clear, Cora isn't happy herself and is considering using her magic for more personal ends. I found great sense of place in this story, and space and time given to credible human emotions even in a world of strange and dark possibilities.

The Briar and the Rose is set in a fantasy world and is (as the title suggests) a take on Sleeping Beauty which addresses and responds to the more problematic aspects of that story - the lack of agency of Beauty herself and her abuse while enchantedly asleep. The Duellist is a magnificent character, a female mercenary and a woman of colour hired to guard courtesan Carmela (so, perhaps a hint of the vampire?) Also featuring is Rose, with whom the Duellist (also called Briar, but only on a Sunday) develops a deep and bewitching romantic bond. No princes need apply!

The Light and the Fury takes place in an alternate, steampunk nineteenth century China where Xing, a proto superhero, battles against the machinations of the wicked British, against treason and familial disloyalty. I loved this story, an incredible mashup of genres and history but also a tale with righteous fury at its heart and a heroine who has, herself, plenty of heart.

The Last Dignity of Man also plays with ideas of superheroes, but also alternate science and power. Alexander Lutheran's scientific enterprise both echoes and contradicts his nickname of "Lex Luthor". There are no superheroes, but might there be villains? An intriguing take on destiny and the beguiling of self-image, this was a fun story that kept me guessing to the end.

Where the Heart Lives is a prequel to Liu's Dirk & Steele paranormal romance/ detective series, presenting an origin for the agency and introducing Lucy as she arrives at Miss Lindsay's house, fleeing her abusive father in a similar setting to that of Sympathy for the Bones. Her arrival catalyses change in the woods and the freeing of a captive but most of all, it requires Lucy herself to grow up very quickly. With tendrils reaching back into ancient myth, Where the Heart Lives balances many elements and was fun to read.

After the Blood is a story with a rather post-apocalyptic film, with the world overrun by monsters - I was reminded of zombie or werewolf fantasy, with scattered outposts holding out against the monsters. But these are monsters that see to focus only on some, and against whom those few have, it seems, means of defence. Complicated by changes in the world that have led to widespread religious prejudices, this was a nicely different "us against the monsters" take.

Tangleroot Palace itself, the final story in the book, is novella length. It's perhaps a more out-and-out fairy tale with a king (whose kingdom is threatened), a princess (facing unwelcome marriage to a barbarian chief) and a Quest. Initially Sally sets out looking for a way to avoid said marriage, but her journey develops into a formative experience with her learning both about her kingdom and her people - but also about the peculiar threat that dwells in Tangleroot Forest. With notes of heroism, sacrifice and the discovery that all is not it seems this was a satisfying and fun story.

Overall this is a very strong group of stories in which repeated themes are explored and, sometimes, similar situations and figures are examined form contradictory perspectives. It's one of those collections where each story adds something to a whole, a wider sense developing of a way of looking at the world.

For more information about The Tangleroot Palace, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Music of the Night

Music of the Night

Edited by Martin Edwards for the Crime Writers' Association

Flame Tree Press, 22 February 2022

Available as: HB, PB, 320pp

Source: Advance digital copy

ISBN(HB): 9781787587359 

I have a soft spot for themed anthologies and was delighted to have the chance both to read and to review Music of the Night, and to join in the book's blogtour - I'm grateful to the publisher and to Anne Cater for the opportunity.

For me, the themed anthology is a chance to see how a range of authors tackle a subject. As here, there is always great variety - some will use the theme as a jumping off point, others will plan it into the warp and weft of their story. Still others will find a clever angle, a direction to go off in. No approach is right: no approach is wrong. But together, we get a broader picture. And seeing a number of stories together like this is a great way to get tips for new (to me) authors to follow up on - whether for contributing a rattling good story, for introducing serial characters I'd like to hear more about, or indeed, for the ingenuity of the way they've tackled the brief. (Or managed not to).

So, twenty five stories in this book, some of which I enjoyed better than others but each with something to say and so varied that, I think, everyone will find something here. If you want an intriguing mystery with a great premise, you will go for Alison Joseph's A Sharp Thorn, in which Emma Collett is surprised to receive a telephone call from a Cornish care home where a dying man wishes to see her. Just who is Robert Sinclair, and how does he know so much about her? The answer takes her into her past, and an unsuspected crime that centres on a vintage harpsichord. Or perhaps Brian Price's The Scent of an Ending - one of the stories here that takes music as a more incidental feature, introduced at the beginning as a troubled Keith relaxes with a favourite album, this is a perfect miniature detective story, challenging the police to solve what is basically a locked room mystery. (I LOVE a locked room mystery). Satisfying with a number of strands left open - I wasn't sure that they got the right perpetrator in the end.

For stories that integrate music into the narrative really well there's Cath Staincliffe's Mix Tape. It's one of the shortest of these stories and perhaps the one where music is most effectively used. Mix Tape actually tells its story of crime through the titles of the songs on the eponymous tape. And it is bitter, it is pointed and it is succinct. Another great example would be Kate Ellis's Not a Note which takes us to 1950s Manchester where teenage Hester is chafing as her mother tries to make her fulfil the mother's lost dreams of musical stardom. Interspersed by accounts of violent robberies, and revolving around the Coronation, there are hints here of a society under strain, of hidden histories and suppressed desires. Very atmospheric and, in Hester's rejection of a musical career, a confident inversion of the central motif of this volume. Effective and absorbing.

Music wouldn't get far without a whole industry behind it - not just the creators themselves but the world of specialist journalists, lawyers, managers, publishers and backstage hustling. But it's not always a pretty scene, as Maxim Jakubowski makes clear in Waiting for Cornelia. Jakubowski powerfully evoking the atmosphere of the business - his narrator is a seasoned journalist and author (Jakubowski cleverly blends that identity with his own history) who stumbles on an odd connection between the deaths of a series of high-profile artists. Where, though, can he take that information? Why, a fictionalised account... but however coy he is in naming names, it seems that doing so might draw the wrong sort of attention. This story also, like others here, explores the borders between crime and outright horror, and does so especially well. The business of music is also explored by Paul Charles in The Ghosts of Peace, set in the trendy Camden music scene, and turning on the history and rivalries of a band. The twists and turns of commercial reality in the music business creates plenty of scope for jealousy and even for murder, but motive isn't enough. Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy here needs to unpick just how the crime was committed. An ingenious and intriguing crime story - and a great introduction to DI Kennedy. 

As I mentioned above, several of the stories here showcase the writers' recurring characters, none of these more intriguing to me than Requiem in which Leo McNeir gives us his Marnie and Ralph, off for a few days on Ralph's canal boat with some good food, good music and a shower large enough for two... their idyll is interrupted when they stumble across the aftermath of a murder. No gore, no overt detection but a definite sense that the two may have spotted something that the authorities missed. I think I'm going to have to read more about Marnie and Ralph.

I've picked out some choice stories above, but really all of these are well worth a read - let me try and persuade you!

In Be Prepared by Abi Silver, three girls at that awkward age between childhood and adolescence attend their annual Scout/ Guide camp. In the early 80s, there is perhaps a greater tolerance for inappropriate behaviour than there would be now and the unnamed narrator witnesses events which seem foreboding from the start - the question being, just when will the blow fall?

Andrew Taylor's Wrong Notes visits the town of Lydmouth in July 1956, where the local paper is a big deal, and their new cub reporter, Roderick, wants to make an impression when he's sent to cover a concert at a girls' school. Reflecting the attitudes of the age it is set in, this is an uncomfortable read in places but a pitch-perfect (unlike the school piano!) mystery in miniature.

The Melody of Murder by Antony M. Brown goes to 1980s London, as the Falklands war rages. The Met confronts a series of artistically-staged murders inspired by album covers. Turning on the sometimes close relationship between art and crime, this story captured, for me, the atmosphere of the times.

Love Me or Leave Me by Art Taylor is another story which often seems about to cross over into outright horror. Garrett is haunted by a sequence of notes which gradually unsettle and even consume him. Counterpointed by hints of something troubling in his early life, this one ends on a genuinely disturbing note suggesting something unresolved - but about to be, and not in a good way.

Catherine Aird's The Last Green Bottle features a telephone tip-off that leads to a bizarre chase across England's green and pleasant land (this could easily be Midsomer) in pursuit of a resolution to a cold case. With the song "ten Green Bottles' providing hints and clues, DI Sloan and his sidekick DC Crosby still have their work cut out to establish what actually happened and whether, indeed, a crime was committed.

Grimmer in setting and theme is Chris Simms' Taxi.  A serial killer in preying on young women in Manchester's clubs and bars. Told from both the murderer's, and other, perspectives, this builds up to a tense climax, orchestrated to the killer's favourite music. 

In Some Other Dracula by Christine Poulson the "Music" is the original music of the night, referred to by the Count in Dracula and suitable as, again, this book teeters on the brink of horror with crime visiting a posh Cambridge party at Hallowe'en.  Some nifty detective work will sort out what's real though - won't it?

Violin – CE by David Stuart Davies is written as a dialogue, exploring the intensity of passion and possessiveness that a fan may develop towards a creator or performer. Scanty in detail, it's nevertheless chilling and raises questions about authenticity, perception and obsession. Well done, and rather scary.

Dea Parkin's The Sound and the Fury opens as a woman takes to the motorway on some desperate errand, following her state of mind, again accompanied by suitable music, whose increasingly troubling lyrics hint at what might be to come when she arrives. This ever more ominous story packs a real punch in its endgame.

A Vulture Sang in Berkeley Square by Jason Monaghan explores the squalor and contrasts of postwar London, getting behind the nostalgic fictions and the collective amnesia over the war years and  comparing two men who came out of those years very differently. But are they really so unalike? Bonding when a certain song (no, not that one) is sung in Berkeley Square, there is a hint of menace in the air, reminding me of Margary Allingham's tales at their most sulphurous.

L.C. Tyler's His Greatest Hit takes the musical theme seriously both in form - it's organised loosely according to the structure of a pop sing, with chorus, verses and bridges - and content, delving into the darker side of the music business and exploring events of several decades before, revealing a sharp little tale of ambition and manipulation. 

The Crazy Cries of Love by Martin Edwards is CREEPY as Gordon eavesdrops on his young neighbours, taking advantage of the thin walls in their poorly-subdivided house. Listening both to their enthusiastic lovemaking and their arguments, he muses on his own life - one which has left him pretty much in solitude. Edwards cleverly builds up our picture of Gordon - but then something happens which transforms the reader's viewpoint - and then be turns EVERYTHING upside down, all over again. 

In The Watch Room, Neil Daws gives us all the makings of a classic, haunting folk ballad - the story of two brothers who are rivals for the same woman - though that isn't the musical hook for the story, rather the "in" is that one of the brothers is a skilled fiddle player. But I prefer the Ballard as background! With its setting in a lighthouse, a wild, brooding coast, and the isolation of the two men, you really have all you need for a tragedy.

Paul Gitsham's  No More 'I Love You's' is a story featuring his DCI Warren. As I've said, one of the treats for me in this volume is seeing authors show off their recurring characters. This can be difficult in a short story, but Gitsham constructs here an excellent example, showing the team working together to investigate the suicide of the wife of a prominent businessman, a close friend of the Chief Constable. Almost the only source of friction is the music of Annie Lennox and Eurythmics... which, in the end, supplies the vital clue to close the case. A gem of a detective story.

The title of Peter Lovesey's And the Band Played On refers to a song which the unnamed narrator's grandfather keeps singing. Grandad turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh out of Wormwood Scrubs, and as his past and history unspool we're treated to an account that read to me like something out of Orwell's "Decline of the English Murder" - a tale of dance-halls, gangsters and burials in the woods. It's perhaps stretching the timeline a bit for that world to be within memory of the characters here, but I forgave Lovesey this for the sake of his empathetic and thrilling story.

It was great to see that Ragnar Jónasson had a story in this volume. His 4x3 is a simple story, a very simple little story 'to be read while listening to 4'33" by John Cage'. That piece will certainly put the reader in the right frame of mind for the situation in which the protagonist ends up.

In A Death in Four Parts by Shawn Reilly Simmons, washed up composer Mendoza is desperately trying to recapture the fire of his early career, while fending off kind neighbours who bring him soup and annoying ones who complain about the noise. Then - and I won't say how - he is writing again. But there will be a cost.

In the final story here, Bombay Blues by Vaseem Khan, which is one of my favourites, we travel to India three years after Independence. In Bombay, Persis, the country's first and only (so far) woman DI investigates a perplexing death in the city's flourishing jazz scene. A clever and twisted tale, negotiating not only the facts behind the crime but the social conditions too. Great fun, great atmosphere and yet another story where the messy and unglamorous details of the music business feature.

You can buy Music of the Night from your local bookshop, or online from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, Waterstones or Amazon. For more information about Music of the Night, see the stops on the blogtour posters below and also the publisher's website here.

#Review - Three Nightjars on the First: The Periphery by Cliff McNish, Static by Justine Bothwick and A Few Alterations by Jordan Harrison-Twist

Three more Nightjar Press chapbooks for your delectation. These are, again, books I received in December and as ever, I'd strongly recommend a Nightjar Press subscription which sends you books regularly and provides signed, numbered copies.

Cover for "The Periphery" by 
Cliff McNish. An abstract image
with a yellow background overlain 
by sworls, speckles and splurges of 
black, red and blue.
Photo by Nicholas Royle.

The Periphery
Cliff McNish
Nightjar Press, December 2021
Available as: PB, 15pp
Source: Subscription
ISBN: 9781907341663

I found Cliff McNish's The Periphery truly disturbing, but I had to think hard about why. Opening with the cryptic 'We began to prefer the periphery' the book describes how the unnamed narrator, their wife, children, pets - and the rest of the world - do just that: living on the edges, consuming dregs, looking away, interacting less, committing less. Beginning as a very close-up, very personal and small scale story, its bounds widen and widen until a sort of slow motion apocalypse is occurring. I was reminded of that Arthur C Clarke story with its ending 'overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out...' except that here the effect seems to be internal, a kind of universal ennui in which humanity is one, but only one, participant. And I found that a really, really difficult idea.

Having considered why I reacted like that, I think it's partly a product of the past eighteen months on-off lockdown, premature opening up, new catastrophe, lockdown again, cycle. The passive life that our narrator finds has an attraction to it simply because it is, clearly, bounded: the common perception of everyone in this book is that this WILL be the end of all things, Sam, and like Frodo and his friend, all is done, all is finished, there is literally nothing to worry about any more. It's a very tempting attitude but at the same time, a very scary one, underlined by the fact nobody here steps out of line, nobody resists. A sort of vision of perfection perhaps but an aside, deal perception.

I think The Periphery will haunt me.

Cover for "Static" by
Justine Bothwick. Against a
background of grass rests a long
piece of wood or stone, a hole
resembling an eye. Photo by 
Nicholas Royle.

Static

Justine Bothwick

Nightjar Press, November 2021

Available as: PB, 12pp

Source: Subscription

ISBN: 9781907341502

Static plays some twisty games with its readers' expectations. On a beach in, I think, Greece, a young German man working as a paddle board instructor trespasses one one summer's day. Or does he? Work asserts his right to be there and the public nature of the beach but still, Efrosini manages to persuade him of some guilt, some kind of crossing the line, perhaps because he had picked up and was going to remove a chunk of fossilised wood. Still she is friendly and invites him in for lunch.

Unknown to Effie, Wolf is being urged on by voices in his head which wish to make the encounter something erotic. Maybe he wants that too? Maybe she does? The writing is I think doing several different things here and Wolf's relationship with that voice (which I suspect is a newish thing to him) is only one of them. We may be in fairytale country, the domain of horror, or witnessing some kind of breakdown. 

The uncertainty itself is delicious, the story perfectly balances between common sense and the fantastical. 

Cover for "A Few Alterations"
by Jordan Harrison-Twist.
Two full-face, passport style
photographs of a man in a 
jacket and sweater.

A Few Alterations

Jordan Harrison-Twist

Nightjar Press, November 2021

Available as: PB, 11pp

Source: Subscription

ISBN: 9781907341618

A Few Alterations is short but Jordan Harrison-Twist fills it with so much and sets up questions that meant I had to read it over several times. At one level, the sense of dis-ease points to something being off from the start - but at another, all the accumulating detail of the narrator's relationship with 'Zürn's tailor shop', their knowledge of dressing and style, the process - which is going on in the story - of obtaining something from the shop, all of that is so spot on that it simply seems like the kind of minutiae that makes up a life. 

I was reminded of the film Phantom Thread, one of my recent favourites. I think both pieces use to their advantage the fact that the worlds of respectively tailoring and dressmaking are present in the background of many of our lives but unknown to most in detail. So many metaphors, allusions and jokes ('So far, with this one, sew good') that add to the richness of the prose and the sense that a great deal is going on which we don't, quite, grasp.

I know that some readers will like to be in command of all the detail, know exactly what's happening and work a story out as though it was a series of puzzles. If that's you, A Few Alterations may not quite be your fit. But if you are comfortable in this style of story, I think it'll suit you very well.

For more information about The Periphery, Static and A Few Alterations and to buy the books or take out a subscription, see the Nightjar Press website at https://nightjarpress.weebly.com

#Review - Three Nightjars on the First: English Heritage by M John Harrison, Middleton Sands by Claire Dean and A Visit to the Bonesetter by Christopher Burns

Happy New Year and welcome back to Blue Book Balloon! 

I hope that the holiday period was all that you would have wished it to be, and that 2022 will be a good year for us all. 

I took an (unplanned) break from reviewing and blogging over most of December - not for any particular reason but just general stuff happening. So, no retrospective on 2021, and no looking forward to the coming year, which I'd like to start with something a little different - reviews of three Nightjar Press chapbooks. 

I received several of these in December as part of my yearly subscription. This is something I'd strongly recommend for anyone who likes a good supply of well-written short stories in beautifully presented editions (it would also make a great present for a reader, it's not too late for that - liturgically, we are still in the Christmas period until Epiphany on 6 January). You can buy them as one-offs, but as a bonus, the subscription editions are numbered and signed.

I have more Nightjars waiting to be read and reviewed, but to start the year off well, here are my thoughts on English Heritage by M John Harrison, Middleton Sands by Claire Dean and A Visit to the Bonesetter by Christopher Burns.

Cover for "English Heritage" by 
M John Harrison. A field of
wildflowers, seen in closeup
(photo by Nicholas Royle)

English Heritage

M John Harrison
Nightjar Press, December 2021
Available as: PB, 16pp

Source: Subscription
ISBN: 9781907341632

English Heritage is a story freighted with allusion and mystery. At some point during the Covid epidemic, Amory, Owen and Max visit her aunt's holiday home near Padstow for a few days away. While we're told that the aunt is ninety three years old ('and still going strong') and a barrister, we are told little about Amory, Owen's or Max's lives beyond that. Amory and Owen seem to be together - we are told what happened when they first visited Max in Shropshire, and they (not the three) have arguments. Amory is the most prominent on the three, although that might just be because it's her aunt's house they are in. 

The story is fearfully intense, often light on detail except for small incidents - flying a kite, making a visit to a nearby stately home. I came away from it thinking I knew a great deal more than was actually said, especially about Amory, but also considering what wasn't said. 

Who the nocturnal and troubling visitor was who opened the garage and used the loo (or didn't). Why Amory thought she lost her car. What was going on between Amory and Max - we get only hints of this but there's a sense of the whole stay being orchestrated around some problem in their relationship with Max there either to witness events or to prevent an explosion. Or just to wake at 3am as he seems to each night.

It's unclear what the 'English Heritage ' of the title refers to. Country houses such as the one the three visits? Their legacy of 'sugar and slavery'? A way of dealing with emotional crises off the page, as it were, as Amory and Owen seem to do here?

All in all, a tantalising story that feels much bigger inside than it looks from without.

Cover for "Middleton Sands"
by Claire Dean. A purple lilac 
tree in closeup (photo by
Nicholas Royle).

Middleton Sands

Claire Dean

Nightjar Press, November 2021
Available as: PB, 12pp

Source: Subscription
ISBN: 9781907341649

If English Heritage has notes of the weird but is placed firmly in our present, Middleton Sands steps a little further away into a near future with some differences. There have clearly been ecological losses to this world in which Ted and his band of enthusiasts set out every Thursday morning onto the sands. Dean is cryptic at first about what they are doing - metal detecting? Digging out lugworms? - and I won't say exactly what it is, but it is linked to that loss. (A clue about what has happened may, or may not, be the terror one of the group feels when the nearby power station sirens sound).

What is clear though is that there have been personal losses, and wider ones, and that the group are trying to recover something. Dean touches on the dynamics of the group and I wondered if that was part of it - one young man assumes he has inherited the 'leadership' of the group from his father, something Ted quietly disagrees with.

I really liked the understand nature of what's happening here, the way that a rather dark reality is hidden by masculine fuss around a hobby and the group and views over what equipment to carry and the best way to proceed, with the presence of a stranger - an unnamed woman - being the catalyst for progress that Ted seems never to have expected. Perhaps.

Cover for "A Visit to the Bonesetter"
by Christopher Burns. Two passport
style photographs of a woman with
shoulder length brown hair. Cover by
Nicholas Royle (found photographs).

A Visit to the Bonesetter

Christopher Burns

Nightjar Press, November 2021

Available as: PB, 16pp

Source: Subscription

ISBN: 9781907341625

A Visit to the Bonesetter is also set in an alternate future, or present, albeit one that is perhaps troublingly close. In what begins as a seemingly farcical, not to say Kafkaesque, bit of theatre, Martin's wife Lisa is served with an order (and he with a copy) to 'present yourself' to 'our official bonesetter'. This is an event that everybody dreads, but, like Lisa and Martin, is unclear about the detail of. 

At one level it is a highly staged event, the summons deliberately public and delivered by uniformed officials following a standard operating procedure and with a flavour of jobsworthism about it. All meant to support a hierarchy, to reinforce who is on top. At another it is very intimate, very private, something that must not be discussed outside the home, this mystique oddly serving to bolster that public. 

It is described as an 'examination', the participant as a 'patient' but when Lisa returns, it's clear that what went on was not medical and not consensual - and that a part of her has been broken and can never be fixed.

The book builds up a creeping tension, based around the contrast between the mundanity of the event, the bureaucracy, its routine nature, and the extreme impact. Also crushing is the sense that all are or were complicit - 'People voted for social control. It was in the manifesto'  - even though they may individually resent or object to what is taking place. The story is very clever in the way that it denies its protagonists a way out, even a way to dissent internally. I wondered if their surname - Smith - might be a deliberate nod to Nineteen Eighty Four, or whether the coincidence might simply be what you get when you make your protagonist as representative as can be. 

Either way, a simple incident sets up very uneasy resonances, portraying an authoritarian State in its very essence.

For more information about English Heritage, Middleton Sands and A Visit to the Bonesetter and to buy the books or take out a subscription, see the Nightjar Press website at https://nightjarpress.weebly.com

#Review - Terror Tales of the Home Counties ed by Paul Finch

Cover by Neil Williams

Terror Tales of the Home Counties

Edited by Paul Finch

Telos Publishing, 22 October 2020
139 Whitstable Road, Canterbury CT2 8EQ
www.telos.co.uk
PB, 299pp
ISBN 9781845831592

This review first appeared in issue 41 of Ghosts and Scholars, a newsletter about the ghost stories of MR James (and ghost stories more widely).

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Terror Tales of the Home Counties to consider for review. 

I was pleased to see this volume in the expanding Terror Tales series, focussing as it does on a part of England often neglected, seen simply in relation to London, the Home Counties being regarded as London's dormitories filled with safe, chocolate-box villages populated by vicars on bicycles and stockbrokers polishing their cars on a Sunday morning. Given this reputation, horror authors may perhaps feel prefer to set stories in sinister London itself, or in more outlying, less cosy regions. It may be true that a bit more work is needed to establish a credible sense of horror in the Home Counties, but this volume shows that it can be done, and done with aplomb, even in the space of a short story. (We should perhaps recall Sherlock Holmes's view: 'It is my belief, Watson... that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside' (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches). 

So we find here a varied lineup of authors generating some really pleasing terrors in those leafy villages; as with the rest of the Terror Tales series this book features stories by both established and newer authors, and the tales themselves alternate with more factual pieces giving legends or nuggets of history that sometimes relate directly to the stories, sometimes less so, but which all add to the atmosphere. Again like the others in this series, Terror Tales of the Home Counties mixes stories that logically belong here because they reflect some aspect of the chosen region and those which could equally have been set elsewhere. There are, I think, rather more of the former than usual - even more than in previous anthologies, a story that doesn't overtly draw on a location in the Home Counties may, I think, still be inspired by a place or its atmosphere or reflect an author's formation or experience. 

That's true of all the anotholgies in this series but I found myself considering that for this volume there is another factor. The Home Counties as a region has an association with wealth and power and entitlement, characteristics that often set up protagonists for a fall (or give them the power to inflict horror on others) and so for example in Monkey's by Reggie Oliver, we see how a group of Etonian schoolboys, having a nice time on the river, encounter something dark. A ghost story located in Eton might be seen as parking tanks on MR James's own lawns and indeed there is a rather Jamesian feeling here - to stretch the metaphor a bit, I'd say Oliver parks his tank very neatly. There is a perfect balance between the everyday and the incursion of the strange. 

There's a Twitter account I follow which tweets images from pulp literature and occasionally shares book covers featuring "Women with great hair fleeing gothic houses" and the opening of Love Leaves Last by Mick Sims really put me in mind of those images as May just does that, fleeing in terror that someone - or something - will follow. As soon becomes clear though this isn't a straightforwardly gothic mystery, though it is a story of family secrets, a curse, and - something I always love - a warning foolishly ignored. Slightly comic, very scary and refreshing different. Again, though, we may wonder about the wealth and power of titled families and what lurks in their histories. Another story exploring this theme is The Topsy-Turvey Ones by Tom Johnstone, which manages to weave together a modern film-maker, a family curse, the Commonwealth radicals of the English Civil War and even the detention in 1999 of Genral Pinochet in Surrey.

Moving from old money to new, a characteristic feature of certain Home Counties villages which is picked up in this collection is their propensity to host newly wealthy celebrities. In the English Rain by Steve Duffy is set in the late 70s and tells of a couple of teenagers exploring an abandoned mansion rumoured to be owned by one of the Beatles. The terror is in the ease with which traces of 60s psychedelia they find there tip over into a different sort of weirdness. The atmosphere is heightened by Duffy's meticulous attention to detail and by a deeply ambiguous ending. And The Gravedigger of Witchfield by Steven J Dines, set during the present Covid pandemic, appeals to the deserted streets of lockdown to give Ben, who works with his father as a gravedigger, licence to wander unseen, and to enter the grounds of a house in the village which has been taken over by a wealthy DJ. Ben is surprised first to find an orgy in process (I would advise story is pretty explicit) but then to discover something darker still - which we may think finds an echo in his own life. Eerie, with an unexpected shock and a sense of palpable evil.

The Old, Cold Clay by Gail-Nina Anderson could perhaps be set in any one of a swathe of country towns or villages popular with tourists. It opens as Viv attempts to occupy a coach party, negotiating the delicate line between sometimes blunt historical truth and the kind of picturesque story that goes down better with visitors. But reality is about to take a hand. The darkness in this one was well counterpointed by the closeness, even cosiness of the community depicted.

Between by Sam Dawson successfully exploits the contrast between a modern, semi-urbanised region and traces of older and darker things, implicitly judging a pair of modern trendies taking on a rural cottage against the steadfast character of their grandparents' generation. It's a genuinely thoughtful story, posing questions about how one deals with the strange and hinting that even in our modern century the much-abused landscape and natural world may take a hand in human affairs. I'd perhaps describe is as Lovecraftian rather than Jamesian.

My Somnabulist Heart by Andrew Hook is a lovely study in ambiguity and tells a lot of story in a short space. We don't, for example, ever learn exactly how Ian, relocating to the country from London, earned his money, but we soon gather from what we piece together of his character that it probably wasn't done very ethically - but also that he's, perhaps fatally, disengaged from life and consequences, comparing reality - which he feels has no overall arc or direction - with fiction. Perhaps it's this that lays him open to something that is either form his imagination, or its very opposite - reality getting even? Either way, a deliciously thought-provoking and ambiguous ending.

Where are they Now? by Tina Roth teeters on the brink of the Home Counties, exploiting the fact that the margins of London often blend seamlessly into their surroundings. Drawing on the dark past of Mortlake and rumours of Dr John Dee, this story - told in the rambling, often distracted narration of an elderly actor - weaves together past and present, the mundane and the strange, to give a real sense of gathering trouble.

As the husband of a vicar, I was slightly disappointed that there are few stories in this book featuring clergy as protagonists. Surely they should be a staple of this sort of horror? However The Doom by Paul Finch himself bucks that trend with a lucid, sting-in-the-tail horror that hangs on the discovery in a remote church of a medieval Doom - a wall painting showing lost souls being tormented in Hell. Drawn into a theological debate with a nosy visitor, he's clearly out of his depth and we sense trouble but when it comes it is from an unexpected direction. 

Summer Holiday by John Llewellyn Probert is not a supernatural story, indeed more of a comic, albeit darkly comic, caper and more amusing than scary. It put me in mind of Kind Hearts and Coronets, so I guess there is another sort of Home Counties link there (albeit Ealing is more London) and elsewhere in the collection Bray Studios (where the Hammer films were made) get a mention too.

Chesham by Helen Grant was, for me, the outstanding story in this volume. Kay, returning to the family home to clear things out after the death of her parents, is one of three children. She's drawn the short straw because she hasn't been able to visit much of late, but in going through old photos and clearing cupboards and drawers she discovers a rather sinister vein of family history. Written with a growing sense of menace - the young woman alone in the silent family home - this one will, I promise, stay with you long after you've finished it.

The book ends with three stories that remind us that "Home Counties" is not always the same as "wealthy and privileged". The protagonist of Taking Tusk Mountain by Allen Ashley lives in Luton, and has been through some bad stuff in his life, but is now getting straight. There's a tension between keeping out of his dodgy mate Brandon's schemes, and getting enough money to move his girlfriend Mel and her son Leo out of the scuzzy area where they live. What follows is something of a supernatural tug of war, a very different story from the others in this collection as a half-baked caper goes completely wrong. A fun and enjoyable story. 

Moses by David J Howe similarly stays in the edgelands, this time on the fringes of London, where a grisly monstes stalks two young boys planning a night camping. This one really did build tension. 

Finally, The Old Man in Apartment Ninety by Jason Gould mixes horror with post-apocalyptic. It is set in Stevenage, rather movingly seen, after a catastrophe that seems to have destroyed civilisation, as having been something of a Utopia. Where is the horror in that, you might think? Well, it is there, I promise this one will also stay with you.

An enjoyable collection, with many stories that chill and a balance that, overall, does the Home Counties justice, I think, displacing that stuffy image and giving a glimpse of the darkness underneath.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website.