GARY FRY

THE SEARCHING DEAD by Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry   Over 25 years ago Campbell wrote a book called MIDNIGHT SUN, which he now, with typical humility, describes as an “honourable failure”. Would that the rest of us could pen such failures! I know I’m not alone in considering that novel a very fine contribution to the field of cosmic horror, but perhaps we should be happy that the author is never satisfied with his stuff and always aims higher. In interviews around that time, Campbell claims that “maybe in another 20 years” he’ll have “another go” at scaling the peaks ascended by Lovecraft and Blackwood. Well, he’s done so already in several works – THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS (2003) and “The Last Revelation of Gla’aki” (2013), both considerable successes – but when I heard that he’d chosen to write a trilogy of novels focusing exclusively on a Mythos theme, I grew more than a little excited. And so here we have the first entry in what promises to be Campbell’s most ambitiou...

The Greens by Andrew Hook Review by Gary Fry   I read a lot of Hook’s short fiction back in the day, during the good-natured rivalry between us hard horror types and his fey slipstream folk (joke). Hook’s fiction always struck me as inventive, cleanly written and often unsettling, so I was looking forward to what he was up to lately in this lengthy novella. The tale begins with a prologue of sorts, detailing the emergence of a couple of unusual children in an olde English community. It’s an intriguing opening, and when the piece switches to the latter-day, with a woman going about her familiar domestic routines, the stage is set for some kind of ancestral connection, some merging of the presence with the past. And so it goes. The central character’s husband is researching his and his wife’s genealogical trees, soon chancing upon a decidedly odd episode among her family’s distant relatives. But what have these strange children to do with this woman’s obsessive compulsive behaviour...

THEY SAY A GIRL DIED HERE ONCE by Sarah Pinborough Review by Gary Fry   I read this short novel in a single sitting and I can’t remember the last time I managed that (maybe a reread of Jackson’s similarly concise ’ Hill House a few years back). If “unputdownability” is the ultimate yardstick against which we judge popular fiction, then Pinborough’s latest has a helluva lot going for it. The book opens with its central character, Anna, living with her all-female family: sister, mother and grandmother. Her grandmother is experiencing incipient dementia, and it soon becomes apparent that Anna suffers a similar memory-related problem, which isn’t spelled out for the reader until later in the narrative (but those sensitive enough to detect apposite clues will work it out in advance). It’s a tense, intriguing opening, and as the plot unfolds to incorporate the family’s new home and location, these matters are driven deeper, as other residents become both friendly and threatening, with A...