GARY FRY

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...

CHECKING OUT The bed and breakfast – the cheapest he’d found during a quick squint online – looked good enough. Johnson parked outside it, got out of the car, and hauled his overnight case from the backseat. The road led on to the centre of a small village boasting many rundown outlets. He’d have a wander down there later – seeking second-hand DVDs, maybe even grabbing a cheeky afternoon pint before eating – but first he must check in. The property, one of a row of terraces, was fronted by a smart arched portico. Autumn cloud robbed the image of the sunshine gloss he’d reviewed on the website, but Johnson was in no position to complain about that. This was the latest leg of his sales tour of the north-east, selling trinkets bearing little resemblance to presentations in the company catalogue. He knew all about the gap between fake and authentic. A sharp chime of a hand-bell inside summoned a man so short he struggled to deal with items on the reception counter. When he ...

THE DIVIDE by Alan Ayckbourn (PS Publishing) Review by Gary Fry It’s always been difficult to keep up with Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s prolific output. I try my best. Of the 83 stage plays he’s written since the 1960s – from early undisputed classics such as The Norman Conquests and Absurd Person Singular to tricksy modern masterworks like Arrivals and Departures and (his very latest) Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present – I’ve seen or read about 70. The range of his work is striking, including straight adult dramas (with often ingenious structures), genre material (sci-fi, thrillers, ghost stories), musicals, and children’s plays. And now he’s added a new form to his repertoire, the literary novel. Slow down, man! You’re giving me whiplash! Although The Divide was conceived and written as a novel, it was first presented onstage (in a shortened version) as a rehearsed reading (or a “narrative for voices”), a treat for regulars during the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s 60 th anniversar...

THE WAY OF THE WORM: an interview with Ramsey Campbell conducted by Gary Fry Gary : It’s two years since THE SEARCHING DEAD was released, and a year since BORN TO THE DARK. Now we have THE WAY OF THE WORM, the final entry in your Daoloth trilogy, which I’ve just had the pleasure to review [ LINK ]. It strikes me that readers new to the series now have an opportunity to read the series from start to end without breaks. Is that the way you feel it might be best enjoyed? Ramsey : I do, even though it wasn’t written quite that way – new short stories intervened between each pair of volumes. I found that each later volume gained energy from what went before, and returning to the characters to find how they’d developed was an inspiration in itself. I’d written novels before where characters age decades during the narrative – Obsession and Thieving Fear , for instance – but coming back to them after a few months away from this particular narrative is rather like meeting old friends after a wh...

THE WAY OF THE WORM by Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry And so we reach the finale of Campbell’s Daoloth trilogy, the author’s latest attempt to scale the peaks of Lovecraft at his finest. I reviewed the first two volumes when each was released, and links can be found here [ THE SEARCHING DEAD ] and here [ BORN TO THE DARK ]. In summary, let me say that I found the two books excellent entries in the series, both satisfying as standalone works and thrumming with anticipatory materials in advance of the last one. The simple question now is, can Campbell live up to promises he makes in those previous novels? The answer is yes. Quite triumphantly.   THE WAY OF THE WORM is relatively straightforward plot-wise. It’s 30 years on from events depicted in BORN TO THE DARK, and our hero, Dominic Sheldrake, is approaching his dotage. His son, now an adult with a family of his own, is heavily invested in the Noble family and their (nefarious) plans for the world, but Dominic won’t give up on ...

Born to the Dark: an interview with Ramsey Campbell Gary Fry Gary : It’s a year since we discussed The Searching Dead , the first novel in your Brichester Mythos trilogy [ LINK ]. Now I’ve had chance to review the second entry Born to the Dark [ LINK ], it’s time we chatted again. The first thing I wanted to ask concerns readers both familiar with and new to the series. Do you consider each book indivisible from the others or rather as self-contained reads? Ramsey : Indivisible for sure. The second volume refers to quite a few events in the first, and I don’t believe it would be sufficiently comprehensible to anyone who started by reading it. I’d also say we need to see how some of the characters have changed in the intervening decades (other characters, not so much). I hope the three books accumulate power from drawing on their early developments. I will admit that in my youth I started reading Tolkien with The Two Towers , having been alerted to his work by the review column in Asto...

BORN TO THE DARK by Ramsey Campbell A review by Gary Fry    The second in Campbell’s Brichester Mythos trilogy, this novel takes up the ongoing story of Dominic Sheldrake’s engagement with nefarious Christian Noble about 30 years after the first book’s events ( for my review of THE SEARCHING DEAD, see here ). It’s now the 1980s; Dominic has a family and a job as a lecturer in film studies. He hasn’t been involved with the Noble family since the 1950s, but all that changes when his son develops a sleeping disorder in need of specialist treatment. Dominic’s wife is drawn to an organisation which, on the surface at least, purports to practice revolutionary new methods but, it soon transpires, has a less benevolent intention. That’s the basic story of BORN TO THE DARK, and Campbell spends 270 pages dredging compelling tension from such minimalist parts. While THE SEARCHING DEAD (the first of the trilogy) drew on a wide range of supernatural episodes, both suggestive and conc...