SOMETHING FROM BELOW by S T Joshi -- a review
SOMETHING FROM BELOW by S T Joshi Review by Gary Fry S T Joshi has spent the great majority of his career commenting upon and editing/publishing work focused on cosmic horror, with only the occasional foray into writing any himself. But now we have a novella squarely located in that (other)world, so I guess we need to ask, given Joshi’s analytical expertise in this subgenre, whether he can pull off the same standard of material in a fictional sense. The book opens with Alison Mannering returning to her native town shortly after her father’s death. Her father worked at a local mine, the main source of employment in the area, and there are suspicious circumstances involved in his demise. Cue Alison’s investigations into recent events, all of which draw her inexorably down into the mine itself. The author is good at establishing character, his first-person narrative convincing in its details of a woman seeking reintegration into the locality of her youth. The friction wit...