GARY FRY

The Bones of You by Gary McMahon Review by Gary Fry The superb cover of this book reminded me of the recent film Sinister , which is a real favourite of mine, and so I greatly looked forward to something of similar persuasion. Here we have a male narrator, whose life is troubled, and who moves into a new home to start a new life. It’s a familiar narrative technique, allowing us to join him at this existential juncture and see how it all goes. But it isn’t going to go well; we all know that. This is a horror novel. McMahon spends the opening half of the book lining up all his dominoes, bringing them tumbling down in the second half. There are great descriptions of working, recreational and interpersonal life. The author has a real gift for documenting the minutiae of everyday life, the nuanced tensions arising between people, private concerns conveyed by body language, etc. It lends the outré proceedings a convincing backdrop. I really liked the way the darker events were hinted at, bui...

Best British Horror 2014 edited by Johnny Mains Review by Gary Fry I have a story in this book, but I’m going to review it anyway. I was intrigued by what new kid on the block Johnny Mains would do with the Best-Of format, and am delighted to report that I was impressed. Knowing what I know about the guy, I expected stories from the harder hitting side of the genre – the gory, the brutal, the monstrous. But no, here we have a very varied collection of fiction from a wide range of publications, as many that are subtle and suggestive as the alternative. Let me take each tale one at a time. Opener “When Charlie Sleeps” by Laura Munro is rich in allegorical possibilities, with the suggestively named Charlie a small creature existing in the bathtub of a rundown haven for women on the run. Its tawdry London setting forms a suitable background for this pungent tale, whose private events penetrate the macro situation, with hints about the personal having wider implications. In “Exploding Rapha...