GARY FRY

THE SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES Edited by Mark Morris   Review by Gary Fry   We all love a good horror anthology, don’t we? Yeah, sure we do. Those of us old enough to recall the great days of horror – 70s and 80s – will fondly recall thumbing through gaudy paperbacks, seeking tales of decapitation and swimming pools full of acid. Such tales “got there first”, imprinting the genre on our juvenile minds the way goslings follow mother-goose. Flashbulb memories, right? That is, shattering flashbulbs, whose fragments violated our eyes, rendering the world henceforward splintered and edgy.   So much for waxing lyrical. All of this is a preamble to a review of an anthology that seeks to reinvest the field with some of this gaudy darkness, those stomach-pit frissons. And who better, I ask you, than Mark Morris to bring it together? More than anyone I know, Morris celebrates the joy of youthful encounters with speculative fiction. He’ll basically kill you if you say a word...

Silent Voices (Concrete Grove part 2) by Gary McMahon              A review by Gary Fry   The first entry in the Concrete Grove series is a pretty strong book, including one multi-strand set-piece that’s among the best things I’ve read in the genre for a long time. So I came to the next of the trilogy with high hopes for more of the harrowingly real stuff. Silent Voices is, however, quite a different novel from the first. It’s quieter, more restrained, and takes its time to yield its qualities. We’re familiar with the set-up, reminiscent of King’s It . Adults (three guys) revisiting a childhood grief; it’s as much about biographical detail and character development as horror events, of which, in the early stages, there are few. But the three leads are so well-drawn, you won’t worry about that, even if you are a plot-seeker. I sense McMahon exploring some biographical material in this book, particularly in the characte...