GARY FRY

So here are all the books I've read since last October and my ratings for them. Just four given full marks, but a lot of other good stuff. Lionel Asbo – Martin Amis 10 The Ritual – Adam Nevill 9 McTeague – Frank Norris 9 The Beetle – Richard Marsh 6 Queen Lucia – E F Benson 9 The Pregnant Widow – Martin Amis 8 Jimbo – Algernon Blackwood 5 Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane 5 The Card – Arnold Bennett 7 Call of the Wild – Jack London 6 O Pioneers – Willa Cather 7 The Napoleon of Notting Hill – G K Chesterton 4 Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley 6 The Gambler – Fyodor Dostoevsky 8 The Tragedy of Pudden’ead Wilson – Mark Twain 8 The Rainbow – D H Lawrence 10 Washington Square – Henry James 6 The History of Mr Polly – H G Wells 8 Moon and Sixpence – Somerset Maugham 9 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad 6 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 8 A Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes 7 Apt Pupil – Stephen King 9 Christine – Stephen King 9 The Library Policeman – Stephen King 7 22.11.63 – Stephen King 10 ...

Here's the wonderful (Zach McCain-engineered) cover of the ebook rerelease version of my 2010 PS Publishing novel THE HOUSE OF CANTED STEPS. Coming from DarkFuse in February 2014. More info to follow.

LURKER by Gary Fry   Chapter 1     He was leaving her again.           Harry had to earn a living, of course—his salary provided for them both now—but even so, Meg missed her husband whenever he returned to West Yorkshire and worked his office hours.           Or did she simply mean that she disliked being alone?           She was unable to decide; it was too soon to have acquired any perspective. Their move to the coast had been her idea, an attempt to flee so many raw memories. And so it would hardly be fair to complain about Harry’s frequent absence.           After he’d moved to the door with his overnight case, she gave him a quick kiss. It wasn’t as if he’d never been away working when they’d lived inland. His job had taken him all over the world, and often for longer than the few days he ...

BOOK OF HORRORS edited by Stephen Jones Review by Gary Fry In his introduction to this book, Stephen Jones leaves himself a lot to live up, suggesting that the horror anthology has been sorely lacking lately and that his book is an attempt to address this problem. Well, how did he do? Let me take each tale at a time. The book kicks off with Stephen King’s ‘The Little Green God of Agony’. Despite hearing from others that this tale was King-lite, I rather enjoyed it. I don’t think it’s particularly frightening, but it has fun with issues of faith, medicine and money – the three peaks of US politics at the moment. A solid start. I enjoyed Caitlan Kiernan’s ‘Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint’ a great deal, with its incendiary central character and powerful allusions to various forms of “Armageddon”. Like a Poe prose-poem with erotic undergirdings. A fine piece. Peter Crowther is next, with his Bradburyesque small-town tale ‘Ghosts with Teeth’. The prose is quite cute, and not everybody digs t...