GARY FRY

My Name is Mary Sutherland by Kate Farrell – a review by Gary Fry This lengthy novella (54,000 words) takes the form of a confessional monologue delivered by a late-teenager restricted to a support facility for disturbed children. Mary Sutherland narrates her recent history, from age 12 onwards, documenting a rich passage of time during which her mother dies and her father remarries, to that wicked stepmother of much dark fiction. And that’s essentially the plot. But it’s what Farrell does with this familiar material that sets it well apart from others. The first thing to admire is the voice: convincingly innocent, slightly bewildered, and decidedly offbeat, Mary’s tale-telling is both starkly honest and patently unreliable. Her habit of having us feel sorry for her plight – and yes, quite enough pitiable episodes occur for us to realise how dire her daily life has become – is frequently undermined by later admissions of some unspeakable act, usually involving animals. Indeed, it’s t...

The End by Gary McMahon – a review by Gary Fry I’ve read an awful lot of Gary McMahon’s work, either in manuscript form when we were both starting out together as regular writers or, more recently, in its published form. Having reviewed him previously, I’ve described his work as unflinching, inventive and powerful. I think my favourite book of his was the first of the Concrete Grove novels, which contained a sustained passage of horror across multiple scenes that truly got under my skin. And that’s why we read this kind of stuff, isn’t it – to be rattled a little? So I came to this relatively short novel in the hope of a similar experience. The title boded well – what could be more threatening, more viciously terminal, than the end ? And then, suitably apprehensive, I started reading the book. In many ways, as McMahon states in his afterword, the novel is his homage to those short, sharp shockers from horror’s tawdry boom in the 70s and 80s, whether dog-eared paperbacks or fingerprint-...

Lost Girl by Adam Nevill – a review by Gary Fry Everything’s girl at the moment, isn’t it? Check out the bookstores and the cinema, and there you’ll meet a girl on a train, one who’s simply gone, and another in a spider’s web. Man, has that girl been busy lately. But now, in Adam Nevill’s latest novel, she’s got herself lost…and it’s up to the father to find her. None of this implies that Nevill has simply hitched his wagon to some kitschy thoroughbred. Sure, the title of his book – Lost Girl – won’t harm sales, but I think that’s testament to the author’s canniness and commercial acumen, especially when working in a genre – the darker side of speculative-future crime (here), if not (as in previous works) full-blown horror – which needs all the promotional impetus it can muster. And Nevill’s careful market placement doesn’t end there. Lost Girl’s plot resembles quite a few recently successful tomes, including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , which has a father and child naviga...

The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Volume 2, edited by Mark Morris – a review by Gary Fry A disclosure: I enjoyed the first volume of this series so much that I made it my mission to get a story in the second volume. Luckily I achieved that, but it only makes reviewing this book tricky. Folk are gonna think I’m biased. But I’ve done my best to think objectively about the anthology, and so here goes. I’ll take each tale at a time and then sum up my impression of the whole thing.   HOUSE OF THE HAG - Paul Finch The volume gets off to a cracking start with that man Finchy’s trademark regional horror tale, which builds across some startlingly good landscape writing to a truly menacing last few lines. Seriously, I had less than a page left and wondered how it could hit the mark, and then it certainly did. An inspired – and scary! – piece.   FLOTSAM - Tim Lebbon This tender-minded story rests upon a story conceit, what might even be termed a gimmick, but Lebbon does good work wit...

Slaughter Beach by Benedict J Jones – a review by Gary Fry I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I started reading this novella, though in hindsight I guess the title should have offered me some guidance. Slaughter Beach : yes, that’s pretty much what the book is about, and dammit, if it doesn’t perform its duties with some fuss-free finesse. In telling the story of a bunch of characters – a photographer and his models, along with the crew they hire to take them all out to an isolated island for a photo shoot (great idea, guys!) – Jones doesn’t waste much time before getting to the meat of the action, sketching in his characters with just enough info for readers to connect with them and then knocking them down like skittles. This is a fast n furious ride, which put me in mind of the fiction of Michael McBride. This is a huge compliment, because although I’m not usually big fan of action-driven tales, I really enjoy McBride’s narratives, mainly because they achieve a compelling grip...

The Moon Will Look Strange by Lynda E Rucker – a review by Gary Fry My overriding impression after reading Lynda Rucker’s first collection of short stories is that of a writer who loves both horror fiction and mainstream literature. Her fiction draws upon traditional figures in the field – demons, supernatural entities, witches – without doing anything as commonplace as evoking them on the page. This sense of suggestive, backstage malevolence lends each narrative an unstable framework, and although the tales explore the internal/external world of people “just like you and me”, they occupy a slightly unreal world where an invasion by the outré is just a rapid heartbeat away. These are delicate pieces and reward slow consumption. In ‘Ash Mouth’ a disquieting entity is invoked, and if it never puts in a physical appearance, that’s testament to Rucker’s multi-sensorial prose, the way scent and sounds are as important to perception as any descriptive imagery. Indeed, it’s in examining the...

The Nameless Dark by Ted Grau – a review by Gary Fry Ted Grau can write – let’s make no bones about it. My first impression while reading this collection, even during the opening story, related to the strength of the prose, the jaunty, hip, rhythmic, colourful, witty, acerbic flow of writing which possesses a power all of its own. That makes reading Grau a real pleasure, whatever the kind of tale he relates, whether or not it – to coin a lame metaphor to which this author would never stoop – floats your boat. But then there’s the tales themselves, which, although thematically related via an incestuous relationship with cosmic horror (particularly that master of one-night stands H P Lovecraft), are varied and differ in tone, exploring such issues as alternative cult road-trips out into the Nebraskan deserts and a bereaved child’s observation of the fathomless heavens. It will come as no surprise that I rather enjoyed this energetic collection of some of Grau’s more muscular stories. N...

Aickman’s Heirs edited by Simon Strantzas – a review by Gary Fry   In his introduction, editor Simon Strantzas dispels one of my concerns about this anthology. I’d half-feared a collection of pastiches, of stories “written in the style of Robert Aickman,” and nothing could have irked me more. The thing about truly idiosyncratic writers is that if you try to imitate them, you tend to get all the ticks and mannerisms, with perhaps little of the substance. I think this is especially true of Aickman, whose work is so delicately enigmatic and hauntingly long-lasting that it’d take another such genius to achieve the same. And since when did geniuses ever resemble one another?   So anyway, we’re off to a promising start here: a collection of tales inspired by Aickman, showcasing the way that great author’s work has influenced modern writers, rather than trying to ape him. So how did all these handpicked heirs do?   It’s a plodding way to review an anthology, but I think it’s als...

Skein and Bone by V H Leslie – a review by Gary Fry Before picking up a copy of V H Leslie’s debut collection of short fiction, I’d read only one of her tales, the opener here, called ‘Namesake’, which first appeared – and deservedly so – in Best British Horror 2013 . Its artful combination of solid storytelling – yes, Leslie does plots! – literary mechanisms, cool prose, and emotional material persuaded me to seek out what I hoped would be more of the same. I wasn’t disappointed. Skein and Bone is a uniformly excellent collection, addressing an impressive range of subject matters and offering some poetically striking imagery. Each tale feels very different, and yet all are bound together by the same confident vision, the same sharp writing, and the same dark vision. Let me take a number of the tales in turn and discuss what I admired about them. The titular story ‘Skein and Bone’ has clear echoes of Aickman (‘The Trains’ springs most immediately to mind), as two youn...