GARY FRY

Albion Fay by Mark Morris – a review by Gary Fry        I’ve been a fan of Mark Morris’s work since the 1980s and have always admired his delicately balanced combination of clean, evocative writing, headlong storytelling, and realistic characterisation. More than anything else, Morris’s fiction is hugely readable, the prose possessing a hypnotic power which allows the author to achieve genuinely gripping scenes and even moments of high terror. Morris has written some long books – his debut Toady was a monster – but I’ve always been drawn to his less frequent shorter work, especially the rare story collection Close to the Bone , which was one of my favourites as a youngster. Anyway, when I heard he’d written a new novella I grew excited. The novella is my favourite horror form, and if Morris could deliver here, well, it could be a great experience. And it was. Albion Fay is a narratively complex, highly suggestive work, with a dark mystery at its core which...

THIRTEEN DAYS BY SUNSET BEACH by Ramsey Campbell – a review by Gary Fry   For a long time I’ve felt that a collection of Ramsey Campbell’s short fiction set in countries other than in the UK would make a great book. Remember such tales as ‘The Same in any Language’, ‘All for Sale’, and (more tangentially, perhaps) ‘Seeing the World’? I personally loved every one, and I strongly believe that stories taking place amid alternative cultures and geographical landscapes offer horror an additional layer of unease, of potential alienation. And so it seems unusual that – with the exception of a few chapters in the likes of The Claw and The Count of Eleven , along with a significant chunk of Pact of the Fathers  – none of Campbell’s novels has been set wholly abroad. Until now, of course. All the events of his latest, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach , take place on a fictional Greek island. The plot is relatively straightforward. Focusing exclusively on the perceptions of an older...

THE LAST BUS by Paul M Feeney – a review by Gary Fry   Just read Paul Feeney’s solidly entertaining novella THE LAST BUS. If action-jammed alien invasion tales are your thing, I’m sure you’ll take a great deal from this compact, well-written, nicely characterised work. I needn’t outline the plot – it’s straightforward enough. But I would like to focus on a few things I thought Paul did particularly well. The most obvious was the smart way he introduced his characters, especially when one female passenger describes others according to characteristics she’s assigned to them during previous bus rides. This was a nice touch, and if it was a theme which invited more development – the gap between perception and reality – perhaps Paul will explore that further in future work. I liked the novella’s pacing, too, with the main narrative broken up by episodic interludes very much in the style of good old James Herbert. In fact, quite a lot of this book reminded me of Herbert’s work – its l...