GARY FRY

Nightmare’s Realm (Dark Regions) – edited by S T Joshi   Review by Gary Fry   In his introduction, S T Joshi shows how dreams have played a major role in the history of weird fiction, with many major practitioners writing tales influenced by or incorporating this most mysterious of human characteristics. The editor’s mission statement here is to continue in the latter-day this long tradition, and so let’s see how well the modern writers he chose fared.   The Dreamed by Ramsey Campbell This is one of Campbell’s tales set in a foreign location, with all the sense of dislocation his characters experience heightened. A guy checks into a hotel but is soon confused for another, and as the plot unfolds this convergence of identity becomes more and more apparent, until… Well, I won’t spoil it; all I’ll say is that the tale demonstrates Campbell’s uneasy dark humour and suggestive powers to the full. A great opener.   A Predicament by Darrell Schweitzer This brief tale involv...

BEST NEW WEIRD FICTION, VOLUME 3 – EDITED BY SIMON STRANTZAS   Review by Gary Fry   The thing about “best of” collections is that, although they’re commonly chosen by only one editor, readers are not going to love everything selected. These books are often varied, celebrating the wide range of fiction published each year in a specific field. That is why, as I review this book, I’m going to pull out the pieces which spoke particularly to me (although I can’t say I disliked any story here).   Let’s zero in immediately on the book’s big coup, a previously unpublished story by Robert Aickman. ‘The Strangers’ is as good as I could have hoped, one of the author’s queasy explorations of male sexuality. I’ve no idea why Aickman never included it in one of his collections, but wonder whether he felt it was too similar to certain of his other masterpieces. Whatever the truth is, this is a wonderfully suggestive and typically perverse story involving all the usual Aickman tricks: hi...

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...

The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood Review by Gary Fry   There seems to have been a small revival of fictions dealing with “hidden people” lately. I’m thinking of Ramsey Campbell’s exquisitely weird novel The Kind Folk and the recent (modestly effective) film The Hallows . Perhaps there’s something about the true nature of fairies which appeals to us all during these dark days of global strife overlaid by media-enforced bogusly sentimental discourse. Anyway, here is Alison Littlewood’s latest novel, also focusing on the hidden people of yore. It’s narrated by a young Victorian rationalist (Albie), in the thrall of social and industrial revolution in 19 th Century Britain. He’s committed to scientific enlightenment, and yet when he meets his young cousin, the pure Lizzie, he experiences some ineffably magical connection with her which haunts him for years to come. Then, some time later, she dies. Having gone their separate ways, Albie to the city, Lizzie to the wilds of Yorksh...

The Fisherman by John Langan Review by Gary Fry   I came to this book after hearing from peers how great it was, and that’s always a dangerous thing for an author. Can s/he ever live up to whatever hype a new title has garnered? I’d loved Langan’s earlier work – his inventive short stories and novellas – and so I was highly hopeful that this new novel would cut considerably more than the mustard. The plot focuses on a guy who’s lost his wife who meets another guy who’s lost his wife and family and who together go fishing. That’s it. That’s the plot. Hollywood is not salivating. But that’s no bad thing. Because as we literature lovers know, it’s what authors do with such material that truly matters. And here Langan gets off to a strong start. His pen-portrait of a man experiencing grief – the disjointed narrative, the ruptured habits, and transformed perceptual experience – has a pungent air of authenticity, the whole elucidated in a lyrical, laidback, breezy style that put me firml...