#BlogTour #Review - The Lynmouth Stories by Lucy V Hay

The Lynmouth Stories
Lucy V Hay
Available as: e (print length 35pp)
Source: Free copy provided by the author
ASIN: B07L3TS5XM 

I'm grateful to Lucy for a free copy of The Lynmouth Stories to consider for review and to Anne for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

When I was young, in the 70s and 80s, our family sometimes used to go to the seafront (New Brighton, on the Wirral) in the depths of winter. We had family nearby who we'd visit, but the highlight for me was walking past the shuttered amusement arcades and gift shops and watching the waves break on the rocky beach. 

Don't you think there's something two-faced about the British seaside? Something almost theatrical? A darkness, a theatricality that's probably there even in the hottest summer - just go round behind one of those arcades - but which comes into its own when the tourists go away and the locals lose their part time jobs. These are places where anything might happen, and accordingly, The Lynmouth Stories includes three dark short tales, set in and around the seaside town of Lynmouth in North Devon. 

The coast of Wales is visible from the town, functioning here in many glimpses almost as a sign that the outside world still exists, whether that is a sliver of hope nor a distant threat. For the protagonists Hay introduces us to, Lynmouth seems to represent a dead end - a stopping point, which they can't get beyond - or a point of decision, marking the end of one life, the beginning of another.

In Plain Sight

For Meg and her young son Danny, kidnapped and whisked from their ordinary lives to live in the power of an abusive man, it's an endpoint. He will never let them go. Meg has to trade herself for even the slightest freedom, and Danny is effectively a hostage for his mother's compliance. Rather than a place of fun, the town, which The Man eventually allows them to visit, is only a wider prison. Meg and Danny will have to be clever and brave if they're going to register their mere existence against the blank slate of winter Lynmouth.

Killing Me Softly

Catherine, who I think briefly crosses paths with Meg, is haunted by a darkness, but in contrast it's a darkness she has brought with her - or which has followed her to Lynmouth. I loved this story which is deliciously unclear about the reality of what's happening: A psychological state? An intrusion of evil? A stalker? Whatever the truth is, there seems to to be a real danger and risk of its taking root and spreading.

Hell And High Water

In the aptly names third story, another family out of season have come to stay in a remote cottage, a last minute decision taking no account of the unpredictable Exmoor weather which isolates costs them off, marking bad relationships worse. Told across two timelines, Hell And High Water focusses on Naomi and baby Tommy, whose lives and future are unexpectedly under threat. Weaving together local history and a shrewd reading of human nature, this was my favourite story.

All of The Lynmouth Stories feature women making choices - choices they have not sought, and which will affect others, especially children (not always their own). The grey, sea-wracked out of season two truly becomes a stage on which these choices are acted out, and leaves us wondering what the consequences were: we can guess some of them, but the picture isn't complete. We don't get to see all of the final act.

Overall, these are atmospheric and involving stories with a haunting background and they leave a great deal to think about.

#Review - The Red Suitcase by Hilaire

Cover photography
by Nicholas Royle
Design by
johnoakeydesign.wordpress.com

The Red Suitcase
Hilaire
Nightjar Press, October 2020
Available as: PB, 19pp
Source: Review copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781907341472

I'm grateful to Nightjar Press for a signed copy of The Red Suitcase to consider for review, together with other short stories published alongside it. 

The Red Suitcase is a delightfully poised short story, exquisitely observed and so, so sharp. The book itself is also attractively designed the series overall  one I'd strongly recommend. 

Dougie and his mother make a little extra money by renting out a room in their cottage to summer visitors. They live in, literally, a dead-end town by the sea: bus once a week, railway closed years ago, there is a sense of entrapment in this story, of going nowhere. The relationship between Dougie - a grown man in, I think, middle age - and his mother seems over close, her fussing over his digestion, endlessly offering antacid pills and asking if he is "costive".

The arrival of B, the woman with that red suitcase, doesn't exactly disturb this relationship - that would be far too much a cliché, and too unlikely - but it does, perhaps, cast a light on it and give Dougie a few days in which things are not as usual. B is a strange visitor at a strange time of year - it is Winter, not Summer - and she seems to draw out a strangeness in Dougie, too. Her having arrived in his life, he studies and considers her. There's an air of mystery to her - why is she here, how did she find the place, what is she doing? - which isn't resolved, but a sense we aren't seeing the whole picture (perhaps because Dougie isn't exactly looking in the right places?)

Perfectly captured by the cover image, in which we don't whether we are observing or being observed from the lonely house at night, this is a book of mood and isolation, the nameless little town appearing almost as a world to itself which is infrequently visited and where nobody (even the "hardy young women" of Summer) ever stays. There are plenty of secrets here, in a story that may be short, but makes an impact.

For more information about The Red Suitcase and to order a copy, please see the Nightjar Press website here.