GARY FRY

Trying to be so Quiet by James Everington Review by Gary Fry This novelette opens with a man reflecting on a recent loss, with hints at ghostliness as early as the first page. It sets the tone for an acerbic rumination on the grieving process, how the death of a loved one can bleach life of all its structure and meaning. Everington is very good at depicting such an emptied world, his language suitably lyrical and laden with apt metaphor. His central character, an everyman whose world has been savagely inverted, re-experiences varying aspects of his existence during a post-traumatic period. His working life is full of irritations – the pointlessness of that urgent client report, all the treading-on-eggshells colleagues, and the new woman in the office reduced to her sexual characteristics. This jaundiced view of life is set against wistful reminiscences, of heady academic days when two young people met and just kind of drifted into a relationship, the ways these things tend to occur. ...

Dead Letters – edited by Conrad Williams Review by Gary Fry   This book comes with good pedigree – editor Conrad Williams knows a thing or two about writing himself – and its hook is certainly appealing, a collection of tales focusing mainly on misdirected items of mail. I read the whole thing in linear fashion, presumably as planned, and here’s what I made of it. Many of the stories share a similar notion, that of a letter or package arriving at a house it wasn’t intended to be sent to. While this leads to some repetition across all the entries, it’s certainly interesting to see how different authors develop the plot point in varied directions. I have to say that my favourite story here was Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Wrong Game’. It’s the author at the heights of his powers as a prose stylist, with an extended sequence set in a hotel which displays every trick and literary technique he’s developed over such a long career. By the time we reach the menacing figure lurking at the heart o...