The Chalk Man – CJ Tudor

To say this is a debut novel… well, wow, there’s a lot to this tightly plotted, strongly characterised novel.

It centres on Eddie, the narrator, who is looking back in his early forties at events that took place in his small town when he was a you teenager.

It begins with a terrible accident when a girl is horrifically injured when a fairground breaks mid-ride. Eddie helps the girl with the guidance of a mysterious new teacher, Mr Halloran, who falls, entirely inappropriately, in love with her. She is eventually murdered and it’s Eddie that finds her decapitated body.

The book centres on Eddie trying to unravel what happened, moving between his investigations years later in his 40s and the events 20-odd years earlier.

And a LOT happens in this novel: inappropriate relationships, religious cults, great friendship groups, mysterious chalk drawings, bullying, murder, mistaken identities, unknown children, early onset dementia, and much more.

Although it’s ultimately a thriller, there are some heartwarming elements to this novel. The characters in particular are really well drawn – Eddie in particular is likeable because of his honesty, his group of friends when he’s younger (Hoppo, Mickey, Gav and Nickey) are a nostalgic portrayal of early teen friendship before its damaged by the realities of life, and more than anyone, Chloe, Eddie’s lodger who turns out to be a lot more than she seems.

At the heart of The Chalk Man, though, is a look at the effects of childhood trauma. Eddie experiences some horrific losses, and witnesses terrible things. They are unresolved at the time and so its no surprise that twenty years later he’s struggling to live a full life: still in his hometown living in his old house with no relationships to speak of. And it’s not just Eddie: Chloe, Gav, Hoppo… all are broken by their earlier experiences.

And at the same time, the book is also a look at memory: Eddie remembers much of what happened back then, but not all. Sometimes he’s guessing at events, other times he’s making it up, and occasionally he seems to be putting certain occurrences down to supernatural forces – in particular the Chalk Man himself, Mr Halloran, when in fact the explanation for what happened back then is very much based on natural causes.

Alongside these big themes is an exploration of some interesting sub themes. Growing up in a small town and the tenderness and tensions of teenage friendship groups are woven throughout the novel.

Devil’s Day – Andrew Michael Hurley

Like Hurley’s other works, Devil’s Day is a powerful blend of folk horror and northern place writing that draws you in through the uncomfortable atmosphere.

The plot itself is both simple and deep. It’s simple insofar as it’s the story of Johnny (told in the first person) returning to the remote farming hamlet where he grew up on the border of Yorkshire and Lancashire, bringing with him his pregnant wife Kat. They are visiting from the east of England where they now live after the death of his grandfather known as the Gaffer.

The depth comes in a few ways. At the novel’s heart is a portrayal of northern farming life as bleak and hard, a constant battle against the forces of nature – the wind, the snow, the rain, the unpredictable seasons, the nearness of death – which make creating a livelihood on the hills almost impossible. Yet it also attracts people,  draws them in, it gets in a person’s blood because the land is fundamental to what it is to be human. It’s a fantastic refusal to the image of the popular rural idyll.

And alongside this is the toughness of the people who live there; battle-hardened after so many years eking a living from this recalcitrant land. Johnny’s own family are dwindling, worn-out and often unwelcoming to Kat, seeing her as an outsider unaccustomed and unprepared for the work needed on the farm. And the others in the farms and houses nearby are the same or worse: insular, wild people who are just struggling to get by. And the Gaffer is a presence throughout, a strong often mean character known for drinking, womanising and gambling across the valley.

They have secrets, these people, not least about a young lad who came to the valley looking to steal from them, which led to a horrific event and the loss of the kid’s life – something hidden by them all, and which appals Kat’s sensitives. They think she’s soft, she doesn’t know what it’s like up here in the north, but the narrator, Johnny, implies she will and does learn to accept it.

And alongside the hardness of both nature and the locals, there’s also a sense of the supernatural, and specifically the idea that up here the devil jumps between people and animals, causing mischief and then moving on so as to avoid capture. We hear tales from Johnny’s youth about the devil’s presence at an accident that resulted in the death of a child, and we meet Grace, a young girl who befriends Kat, but is occasionally prone to violence and in a chilling scene talks as if she can not only read Kat’s mind but knows things she couldn’t possibly know.

Like Hurley’s other books – Starve Acr especially, but also The Loney – Devil’s Day carries the hallmarks of folk horror: the unwelcome outsider shocked by rural way of life, the forces of nature constantly at the door, and hints of a supernatural presence that dwells in the valley. Also like his other books, the horror and the supernatural are relatively under-played, and in that sense is a great example of what David Barnett has called Folk Realism…

“These books of Folk Realism aren’t interested in tidy endings or lengthy justifications. Like the vagaries of the landscape or, indeed, the weather, they are what they are. They are bewitching and magical, disturbing and horrifying, and help us tether our transitory modern lives to the bedrock of all that has gone before.”

And indeed, there’s a sense throughout the novel that something is coming – and in particular that Kat or her unborn baby might be harmed, whether by nature, by the people or by the supernatural. And yet by the end of the book we don’t have a sense of where the real danger lies, or if there even is one.

Darke’s Last Show – Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Imagine you’re an Uber driver and your ride is an engaging old guy waxing lyrical about an impossible magic show he’s just performed at a strip club – his last one, he’s just been fired – at which he pulled out all the stops and created a series of illusions that looked truly murderous and astounded the audience.

That’s what we have here – an ancient, powerful magician who goes (comedically) by the name of Devon Darke explaining to his driver what happened to him earlier that evening.

Darke had performed a show at his usual place, but this time pulls out all the stops. Rather than performing mere tricks he goes much, much further. He brings an obnoxious ‘finance bro’ onto the stage and makes him cough up cards, ripping his insides out, until he’s able to clean off the blood and declare ‘is this your card?!’. He saws a couple in half – something which nobody believes, despite the blood, bone and entrails for all to see. And he makes a cop slowly inflate until he bursts.

The audience is sometimes troubled by what they are seeing but on the whole love it, growing bored when he turns to more mundane fillers in between. And by the end of the killer acts, each of the apparently dead people return to the audience smiling and laughing, allowing them all to leave knowing that all is fine.

But is it? Well, the story ends in a way that’s both sweet and macabre, though mostly macabre.

It’s macabre in that Darke asks Raul, the driver, to drop him at an out-of-town retail park, near Toys R Us. Where the four people he performed on in the show are waiting for him, all quite dead. The big illusion, it appears, was when they reappeared in the audience as living people when in fact they had been killed on stage. And far from the performance being Darke’s last show, there’s another one. Darke says ‘I’m done hiding. Starting tonight, the old science of the dark returns.’ And the story ends with him saying ‘the show’s over, now it’s the world turn…’.

But the story has element of the sweet in that Darke clearly likes Raul, gives him his full pay cheque for the evening and, as the story comes to an end, advises Raul to stay indoors and avoid what’s happening outside around him.

 The story is delicious in its style. Duckworth’s writing and descriptions are fantastic. And it’s helped all the more if you listen to the audio version on Pseudopod read by Jon Padgett. Darke’s monologue is delivered in a wry fashion, mocking the people who doubt his abilities, hinting that he has been around for thousands of years (Jesus, he says, was ‘one of the best warlocks to call on the old science’ and points out the irony that by the time Salem came around most of the real magicians were gone), and feigning surprise at the completely intentional actions that he himself does.

It’s similar in its theme to Ligotti’s Drink to me only with Labyrinthine Eyes –  an all-powerful magician forced to perform party tricks, and this culminating in the magician finally snapping and choosing to use their power on the world.

But alongside this it also has a clear social commentary. Darke is appalled by the behaviour of humans today – their unwillingness to be shocked by human suffering, people choosing to film rather than report acts of violence, their short-term attention spans and constant need for something to shock them. He’s seen humankind through the centuries and this, you get the sense, is real low point, which is why he’s perhaps had enough and decided to unleash the darkness he can access and control.

 Listen to the story on Pseudopod here: https://pseudopod.org/2023/10/27/pseudopod-889-darkes-last-show/

The Secret of Ventriloquism – Jon Padgett

This is a remarkable book. A collection of interlinked short stories that surely will stand as a classic of weird fiction and supernatural horror. It has shades of Ligotti and Lovecraft, it’s got a variety of styles and formats, it’s chilling and gripping.

There’s too much to say about this collection to do it justice in one review; I’ll do a quick overview of the book from the perspective of its big underlying theme.

At the heart of this book is the idea that beneath our human reality is a more fundamental force. It’s not clear whether it’s an entity, a form of consciousness, a world, or just a kind of other nature. It’s also not clear whether it’s benign or sinister, though Padgett tends toward the latter. And in keeping with this ambivalence, the supernatural force is hinted at or presented differently in the various stories.

Perhaps the most benign – though still disturbing – depiction is in A Little Delta of Filth, towards the end of the collection, in which a woman discovers a ditch through which she can enter a different reality. She puts her arms in and loses human sensation in them, and finds they gradually mutate into something quite different. But far from being pained or troubled, she feels a kind of delicious ecstasy which draws her back to the ditch desperately, until she chooses to enter the alternate world entirely.

Also ambiguous is Origami Dreams, one of the strongest stories in this book, in which a couple leave their kids and house in Dunnstown for a short holiday, but en route experience a dream-like occurrence. When they return back home their reality has completely shifted; it’s become confused, different in often random ways, changeable and their grasp of time and images is incomplete.

Their neighbourhood doesn’t look the same to begin with, their children are different, but gradually it all shifts, until their kids no longer exist, the wife disappears, and the narrator has no conception of who he is. He finds a note explaining that all this has happened to someone, not realising that he wrote that note years back, it seems, and in fact it’s him it happened to.

Whether there’s some malign force destroying the narrator’s reality, or whether the experience of the alternative reality just has that effect is unknown. But either way the story is deeply disturbing – both its sense of supernatural weirdness and the way it plays on common fears about being distant from what you know and love.

The presence of a more sinister force is stronger in The Infusorium, a hardboiled detective style story in which a cop and her partner Guidry are trying to unravel the mystery of bodies appearing deformed, elongated and skeletal. The evidence pointing to strange occurrences at a disused paper mill which every month omits a horrific thick fog that blights the city. Why precisely it’s happening remains clouded, but whatever it is, is resulting in the death, mutilation and apparent reanimation of people across the town.

And at the most malign end, there is 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere. Suffice to say, this presents itself as a manual for becoming a ventriloquist until around step ten at which point you (it’s written, unusually, in the second person) are entreated to see other humans as dummies to control, and ultimately to relinquish your own self to what he calls Greater Ventriloquism, implying that beyond our reality is something entirely other that is pulling the strings.

There’s so much more to say about these and other stories in the collection. Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown, for example, sees a bullied brother enact retribution of a horrific kind that suggests he is himself possessed by something. The Secret of Ventriloquism is written as a stage play in which these two brothers and their dead brother play out a disturbing ventriloquism act onstage. And at the end of the collection, maybe bringing it all together, there’s The Secret Society of Dummies, in which a woman finds that Dunnstown has been overtaken by a creeping, jaundiced, yellowing aura and the town she once knew has all but disappeared.

And across all these are certain events and motifs that bind the stories together. Much of the events take place in Dunnstown, where the main park, the derelict paper mill and the fog appear and reappear. The crash of a plane features in many stories, and refers to Flight 389, a story in which a man describes his perfectly reasonable fear of flying, and ends up dying in a plane crash above Dunnstown that’s caused by pilots who have become hollowed out skeletons, a crash we are led to believe was caused by the Greater Ventriloquist.

And there are dummies, reanimated skeletons, elongated bodies, deformed hands and daddy longlegs, all of which recur throughout the book to create the sense of a rumbling, dark presence constantly pressing through, distorting and slowly devouring everyday human reality.

Panpsychism in the Slime Factory

“The world of human beings was but one among many. The world of chalk. The world of tin cans. The world of dust mites. She pushed a shot glass towards me. The world of tequila. Salt, drink, lemon. All these objects were conscious at some level.”

From The Slime Factory in Terminal Zones, by Gareth E Rees

Terminal Zones – Gareth E Rees

This is the first full collection of fiction from Gareth E Rees, a selection of short stories that are funny, tragic and portentous in equal measure.

Like much of Rees’s other writing, the stories lead in two different directions – some deal with the pathologies of modern life, mixing magic and the mundane to great effect, and some deal with the chaos yet to come.

Of the former are stories like a Dream Life of Hackney Marshes, in which a new Dad does all he can to escape his homelife and falls in love with an electricity pylon; Bin Day, when the inner-anger of a suburban home owner over recycling bins is gradually revealed to be more sinister than first appears; Themar Space, where a woman who collects trolleys in a supermarket carpark becomes convinced that a world-changing mystical event is going to occur in the carpark; and My Father, the Motorway Bridge, in which someone whose Dad is absent convinces themselves that the solid, ever-present bridge over the M25 is his.

Alongside tragedy and absurd humour, what these stories have in common is a sense that modern life is driving us mad. The relentlessness of daily living, the bureaucracy, the constant drive for money and entertainment and status, the always-present feeling of being on the outside of what everyone else seems to enjoy – it all conspires to create people who just crack. In the end these stories of the everyday eschews the magical explanations for the psychological or societal ones – the inanimate objects are stand-ins dreamed up by the protagonists, the magical supermarket event is in the end just the character’s wish for something – anything – of significance to happen to her.

The other theme some of the stories deal with is the chaos of a human future ruined by climate change and human greed. When Nature Calls, is a heart-warming but ultimately sad story in which two former squatters living on the coast see the land eroding and their house about to fall into the sea; the opening story We are the Disease is a future in which scientists on a ship in the middle of nowhere are gradually driven mad by an unknown manmade disease; or The Slime Factory, where a technology entrepreneur has finally created conscious vehicles from organic matter which, it become clear, are shaped from human bodies.

Funny and strange, these more speculative short stories have a common thread running through them too: that we’re screwed! Climate change is happening and Rees imagines a world where we’ve not changed or adapted, but left it too late and are desperately searching for last-ditch solutions or just burying our heads in the sand.

It’s nicely summed up by these sentences in We are the Disease:

“Science was a desperate affair these days. I felt sorry for the experts on board, clutching at straws, but this was paid work and it was good to be out in Earth’s last clean air.”

Our Share of Night – Mariana Enriquez

This is an epic piece of politically-charged gothic horror. It’s unrelentingly bleak, filled with supernatural and all-too-natural evil. I loved it – the characters, the atmosphere, the plot – but was repulsed at the same time.

It follows the life of a young boy, Gaspar. He’s the son of Juan and Rosario. Rosario is the daughter of an elite Argentinian family, the Bradfords, who have found fortune in the past and maintained it through dark magic, using a medium to commune with the dead and offering sacrifices in order to achieve immortality. They form a secret society named the Order. Juan is a medium who the family try to use (and abuse) in order to access the darkness. They require him to do horrific things, allow him little freedom and condemn him to a short, violent life.

Juan doesn’t know whether he’s passed on the gift to Gaspar, and commits a lot of atrocious violence towards his son in order to protect him, but it turns out it’s in vain – Gaspar has the gift too.

The first part of the novel sees Gaspar trying to live with his father after the death of his mother; his father is on the verge of death too, leaves his son to fend for himself much of the time, but at others subjecting him to abuse designed to protect him from the darkness he will inevitably confront as a medium. Gaspar is incredulous, unhappy, has no idea why his father treats him like this. And the reader, too, is left surprised by how callous, secretive and abusive Juan is towards his only son who he almost certainly loves.

We then move forward a few years when Juan and Gaspar have settled in a neighbourhood where Gaspar has managed to make some friends – Vicky, Pablo and Adela. At times this section feels like a coming-of-age novel, almost happy at times, but it ends in the only way this book could, with death and torment for Gaspar.

Enriquez flits about further, going back to Rosario’s charmed time in London before she got together with Juan and later, when Gaspar is living with Juan’s brother, Luis, and his family. All this time the Order are searching for Gaspar, wanting to trap him and use him, as they had Juan at times, and other mediums before him. 

I can’t say too much more without giving the plot or too many details away. But there’s so much to Our Share of Night – the horrific Bradford family, their stealing of children who they mutilate and imprison in their search for mediums and sacrifices, classic haunted house tropes, moments of warmth and love, plot twists and surprise connections between characters, revelations about some of the main characters that make you look at them in completely different ways, moments of stomach-churning body horror, cinema-esque depictions of the darkness, and so much more…

On one level you can – and I think should – read this big novel as a piece of classic supernatural horror. It contains all the hallmarks. It’s also got the essentials of body horror throughout, and at times a ghost story or haunted house feel to it. You can’t say it’s one thing, but it offers some of the main sub-genres all in one book. For that alone it’s worth reading.

On another level you could read this book about the relationships between parents and kids. “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad” as Larkin put it some years ago. There’s Juan’s abusive relationship towards Gaspar. There’s Rosario’s twisted, possessed family who most likely had her killed. There’s Gaspar’s friends, all of whom are broken in some way by their parents. Almost no parent-child relationship comes out of this book well.

You can, most importantly I think, read this as a novel about the ‘dirty war’ waged against anyone associated with the left in 1970s and early 1980s Argentina, after Peron was overthrown by a military junta. Up to 30,000 people are said to have been ‘disappeared’ during that period. This book, set primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s deals with that head-on. Some of the characters have family and friends who have disappeared, and are fearful of it happening to them. And the many children stolen and sacrificed the Order in their bid to maintain their own power feels analogous to this history. Enriquez does not draw this crudely or explicitly; she doesn’t equate the too, but there are supernaturally motivated and politically motivated disappearances through Our Share of Night.

And, finally, you could argue this book is about the elite, not just in Argentina but everywhere. Their success, their wealth, their power – it depends on the exploitation and abuse of others in order to achieve and maintain their position. Without their mediums and their sacrifices The Order would be gone. Likewise, without their workers or the ravaged environment, the financial elite would be no more.

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas – Syd Moore

A collection of stories that are presented as something like cosy horror but span a lot more – and are lot more interesting – horror than the book’s title appears.

As you’d expect, the book contains twelve stories. Many are written in the style of late nineteenth or early twentieth century ghost stories, like MR James, and you get the sense that this is what the publisher is trying to do with the book. 

It begins with a quintessentially Jamesian story, ‘Septimus and the Shaman’, in which a young man sits down with his mentor and teacher, Septimus Strange, who recounts an odd tale from his younger days as an academic when he found himself involved in a shamanic ritual that resulted in him appearing to see supernatural entities or visions.

But there’s a much wider variety of story than this in Moore’s collection. For me, two really stood out.

‘She Saw Three Ships’ is a lovely piece of folk horror writing. A woman travels to a cottage she’s booked for her family in a beautiful fishing village, arriving early to get it ready for when her husband and child get there the following day. It’s a gorgeous place but immediately the local people warn her to be careful, tell her she shouldn’t be there.

As she’s cleaning, she sees a boat arrive at the harbour, an old-fashioned boat. It’s met by the locals. Rather than welcoming them, though, the disembarking sailors are met with violence as the locals proceed to slaughter them. A further boat arrives and a horrific battle ensues on the beach and even up to her holiday cottage; she survives, it seems, only by hiding in a tiny priest’s hole under the stairs.

The next day it’s as if nothing has happened – the ships are gone, there are no dead, all is well. It is, it transpires, an annual supernatural ritual she has stumbled across.

‘Barefoot through the snow’ is a ghost story that leaves you sad and surprised. Told in the first person, a woman is walking in a white dress, barefoot through the wintery countryside to return home and find her two children. She’d been in prison but now finds herself out, no longer dressed in prison rags. She walks, ruminates on the past and what she sees now, how things are so dramatically changed on the way to her village – and on how she longs to see and hold her beloved children.

Only at the end is it revealed that the she is in fact dead, a ghost; she has died and is walking through a world in which she no belongs. 

The Promise – Damon Galgut

It took me a couple of attempts to start Damon Galgut’s The Promise. I think it was the style which at first feels like it jumps about from one character’s perspective to another, one paragraph after another; but actually, after only a small amount of perseverance, that style really is the power of this astonishing novel.

It’s a story about a white South African family – the Swarts – over several decade, from pre- to post-Apartheid. And it’s structured around the deaths of most of the family members. Not in a horror or crime fiction way, but as a device for exploring the behaviours and attitudes of the family and those surrounding them.

In the opening section Ma dies of an illness, and we meet her husband Manie and three children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, as well as various relatives.

From the opening pages the tense relationships between the family members become clear, partly animated by a promise which the youngest child, Amor, says she heard her Ma make to Salome, their black housekeeper before she died – a promise to give Salome the deeds to the house in which she lives. Amore implores her family to respect this promise but Pa denies any knowledge of it, and for decades the promise is ignored.

As the years go by, the other characters die – Pa, then Astrid and then Anton. Each time the Swarts’ come together for a difficult funeral and few days at the farm before moving back to their separate lives. Only at the end, when the rest of her immediately family is gone, does Amore follow through on the promise that has driven her since the death of her Ma over thirty years ago – and when it happens the gift of the deeds is far from clear-cut or accepted by Salome’s son in the way Amore might have originally hoped it would have done.

As I say, the power of this book is in the style – the way Galgut shifts between different protagonists’ perspectives, sometimes from one paragraph to the next, sometimes dwelling on a character for a number of pages. We get all the main Swarts family members, but we also get the bit-players in the story, right from the pastor who plays a big part in their life over the decades (taking their funerals, building a church on their land, receiving their confessions), right through to the people working in the funeral home preparing the body of Anton for his funeral. This approach allows Galgut to delve into the inner lives of the characters at a level where all of them, even passing characters, have a level of human depth and complexity that the amount written about them wouldn’t normally allow.

And it’s also worth saying that the strength of the book is in the treatment of racism and, more specifically, the corrupting effect of living for decades in a society divided by racial hatred and inequality. There’s a fear that pervades the Swarts family’s actions throughout– of the end of apartheid, of the decline of white power, of a sense that their farm is an island of safety in an otherwise hostile land. It’s not always spoken (though sometimes it is) but is often clear through the inner life of the characters that Galgut brings to the surface.

And for the black characters in the novel, most notably Salome and her son Lukas – they are marked to the core, scarred, by their lives in apartheid South Africa. Salome is physically frail, tired and old after working for the family for decades, doing the jobs they didn’t want to, living in a rickety house that wasn’t even hers. And her son is full if resentment for the life he and his family have ended up living, having ended up struggling with alcohol and spending time in prison as a consequence of struggling with the constant unfairness of a racist society.

Only Amor manages to avoid being consumed by the fear and longing for the past that animated her family, and she does so by renouncing all of it – her family ties, her inheritance, her life on the farm, all of it. She ends up living far away, working as a nurse for HIV patients, with nothing to her name. It’s her way of saying she wants no part of it, not her family and not South Africa’s racist past.

The Lottery of Babylon – Jorge Luis Borges

You know a Borges story, right? Short, abstract, enigmatic, philosophical, contains a whole world… The Lottery of Babylon doesn’t disappoint.

It’s the history of the development of a lottery in the city of Babylon. What began as entertainment – with people paying a small coin and in return a winner getting something of significance or value – gradually transforms over what seems to be centuries into a total way of life for the Babylonian people.

First not only a positive winning but also a negative one is introduced into the lottery. Fines. Imprisonment. An obscure wrong. Then the organisation becomes the omnipotent power in Babylon. Next the lottery is made not only free but compulsory. And it comes to touch – no, define – every aspect of the Babylonians’ existence.

The wining and losing prizes are constantly surprising, and often multiple and overlapping. As Borges mentions at one point, the varied results of 30 or 40 draws might culminate in the death of someone in a tavern. Equally a winner might find themselves in government. Thanks to the lottery, the narrator has lost a finger and has a tattoo that gives him an arbitrary power over people with a different tattoo, but only on certain nights of the year…

It’s all entirely random – both the draws and the consequences – or appears to be anyway. And that’s the question. Is the lottery random? Is it run by a group of people who know what they are doing, planning it all out? Or are they as subject to the randomness as the Babylonians taking part?

We don’t know, and nor does the narrator. In fact he doesn’t even know if the organisation running the lottery still exists; it might have disappeared hundreds of years ago but the people continue the tradition all the same.

It’s never easy to interpret Borges, but I read this as a metaphor for religion. The outcomes of the lottery themselves, the fact the lottery is the thing rather than something entirely different, is arbitrary. Yet the people not only consent but willingly participate in it, letting the lottery structure and rule their lives.

They don’t know why the lottery exists, if there’s anyone running it, or if those people are long gone – but they don’t care. It gives people meaning, entertainment, purpose, something to submit to; so submit to it they do.

There’s no rebellion or breakaways or disgruntlement with the lottery, it’s the thing that binds and guides everyone, despite the fact that it’s ridiculous and makes people’s lives harder and more precarious.

Like religion, it’s an arbitrary power that has incrementally developed over the years and to which people have actively submitted and participated, using it to give meaning to all they do, no matter how random and in fact meaningless it is on the face of it.

Thirteen Ways of Not Looking at a Blackbird – Gordon B White

What happens when something utterly terrible happens but doesn’t get talked about, goes unspoken and ignored?

It festers and burns, and ultimately repeats itself, says White in this short story.

The device is a strong but simple one – a first person narrative from the perspective of the child of what sounds like some kind of horrifically sadistic serial killer. It begins when the narrator is a baby, and gradually moves through time to a point when we assume he’s a young man.

The kid has a close relationship with his Mum who, he pointedly says, can answer any questions he has about the world, and tells him almost everything he knows -from specific knowledge to abstract ideas, like about how before the word ‘blue’ was invented people couldn’t see blue (a subtle reference to not seeing something if it’s not articulated perhaps).

What she doesn’t tell him as a child, or allow him to talk about with her as he gets older – despite his pleading with her to have the conversation – is what his father did. Initially we hear that he works a lot, but actually it transpires that much of the time, as the kid was growing up, the father was absent, out of the home killing people, or even worse in the home, in the basement, doing whatever he did to them.

We don’t know how long this happened or any of the gruesome details, but you are led to ssume over quite a number of years and it was brutal. All the kid knows is snippets: once, as a youngster, a mutilated woman appeared from his basement; (it’s a disturbing scene); later his Dad is caught after one of his victims escapes; and later again the kid overhears school children talking about his Dad being a killer.

And despite all this, the Mum won’t talk about it with him. And won’t allow him to talk about it with anyone else either. Just like the father, who is absent throughout, so is his knowledge of what his Dad did. As such, he has no way to come to terms with it, to understand what or how it happened. At one point he says to his Mum he’s worried that whatever was wrong with his father is also wrong with him. But his Mum shuts him down: ‘there was nothing wrong with your father, and there’s nothing wrong with you’ she shouts.

And so the story ends as you begin to worry it might… it ends with the kid repeating his father’s horrific crimes and becoming a killer just like him.

So there it is. Horrific. And sad.

What this story raises, at its most universal, is the way in which avoidance breeds problems. The Mum resolutely won’t let the child know about what his father did, allowing a sense of fear to build within him, festering, gradually distorting the way he thinks about his childhood and his personality. She might be doing that for so many reasons – shame, trying to protect her child, inability to face it herself, fear of admitting guilt. For me it brings me back to the Lacanian concept of the ‘return of the Real’ – when something is suppressed it comes back in unexpected and uncontrollable ways. Rage. Despair. Frustration. Anger. Violence.

You could also remove the ‘horror’ from the story and end up with an analogy of divorce – the father is busy then gone, the Mum won’t talk about it or face it, and the child ends up repeating the same approach to parenthood when he’s older.

And White’s story – at a specific level – makes you ask what it must be like to be the partner or child of someone like that. Did the Mum know what was going on and pretend otherwise? Did she pretend to herself that he was just out at work, when in fact he was in the basement carving up bodies? And once you know, how do you face that? It’s such a deeply difficult thing to face, to accept has happened. You might feel guilt for not doing anything to stop it whilst also being terrified of the shame and, indeed of what might happen to you, were you to do something.

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Listen to this story on the always eerie Pseudopod podcast.

Afterlife – Stephen King

A wry short story with an amusing take on free will and determinism, guilt and redemption.

It begins with the death of William Andrews, who passes away with cancer. As his family look over him he enters the afterlife. There’s a white light, briefly, but then he’s in a corridor, from where he enters the office of Isaac Harris.

Harris is a middle manager in purgatory who’s job it is to help people choose which door to enter: one that allows them to move on and disappear, or one that allows them to live their life again, but with no memory of having lived it before.

He’s seen William Andrews many times before. Through their conversation we learn about Andrews’s life – his family and job, and most importantly, the mistakes he’s made through his life, injuring his brother accidentally, shoplifting and participating in what sounds like a rape whilst at college.

The question is, will Andrews decide to relive his life in order to do it better, to avoid committing those crimes?

Andrews is certain that if he were to relive his life he’d not make the same choices again and he could move into oblivion having nothing remaining on his conscious. Harris is amused by Andrews’s certainty, laughing about how he’s said all this many times before. It seems that however much Andrews thinks and hopes he’d do it differently given another chance, he’d actually end up doing it exactly the same.

What this raises, ultimately, is the role of character and circumstance in determining a life. If youre born a certain way, is it even possible to live differently, or were you always destined to make those choices? The implication here is that really they weren’t choices at all; every single thing Andrews did was already determined, and he just needs to accept that’s the case so he can stop repeating his life over and over.

All that said, I also wonder – if you’re choice was nothing or reliving your life – how bad would your life have to be to choose nothing. You might just think, hey, why not, it’s something to do!

There’s another question that occurred as I read this – what about Harris? Why is he a middle manager in purgatory?

We learn in the course of the story that he was the owner of a factory that locked women in to work and the factory caught fire, killing many of the trapped women. So he is responsible for their deaths.

Why is he not repeating his life, or in some kind of hell, or just straight-up gone? We don’t know. It could be that he’s not really come to terms with what he did and accepted his role in causing their deaths. Maybe purgatory is in fact hell for him – trapped there for eternity, repeating the same thing with the same people over and over. He’d, after all, trapped the women he killed, and now he himself is trapped.

Regenesis – George Monbiot

Where to begin? This is a quietly devastating book that reveals the horror of the environmental crisis we face and proposes an attractive but radical solution.

The question Monbiot is trying to answer is how to feed the world without destroying the planet.

He argues that we’re causing a variety of dangerous and interrelated problems – destroying the soil, using excessive land to grow food for animals, creating a homogeneous and centralised global food system, putting food (of which there is plenty) out of reach of hundreds of millions of people, destroying land that nature needs to ensure biodiversity can thrive…

And he suggests a host of solutions, some controversial. These include incentivising meat and dairy reduction, arable and horticultural farmland being interspersed with trees, hedgerows and wildflowers, new strains of grain that can grow with out chemicals and ploughing, new fermented proteins as alternatives to meat, and more.

It’s not simple and there’s no one answer, but Monbiot’s book is meticulously researched and the vision if offers is positive.

As he says, it might not happen right now, but a mix of ecological collapse, environmental awareness and new technologies means we might actually be approaching a tipping point when change won’t necessarily be wanted but will in fact be mandatory if humans are to survive.

A Waiter in Paris – Edward Chisholm

I was expecting something between Orwell and Bordain with this memoir. That’s a hell of a lot to live up to! I was not disappointed.

It’s basically the story of a young guy who finishes university in London with no idea about what to do next, so he moves to Paris with his then girlfriend. Supported by her in the first place, he aspires to become a writer. But quickly their relationship breaks up when she announces she’s moving back to Britain.

He, however, decides to stay in Paris, and becomes set on a temporary job in a restaurant. He gets a position as a runner in a high-end French restaurant, and that’s where the story starts.

He charts his desire to graduate from runner to waiter to sommelier; to be accepted as part of the team; the long hours he and his fellow restaurants workers spend on their feet; the strict hierarchy between bosses, waiters, runners, cooks, kitchen porters; the racism woven through the whole restaurant system; the abuse each of them suffers all day, every day from terrible bosses; the petty theft, drugs, alcoholism, pilfering; the hours spent outside the restaurant drinking before returning exhausted and hungover for the next long day of service; the loyalty and disloyalty of the workers, all desperate for tips and work, showing solidarity with one another but forced to compete all the same; and so much more.

In the process he introduces us to his fellow workers – many of them immigrants to France from all corners of the world just trying to get by on their looks, charm, wits and capacity for hard work.

The writing-style makes this book. It’s gripping. You care about the people, their lives. It’s written with an urgency that’s infectious. It’s hard not to sympathise with everyone running around the restaurant, living on cheap coffee, stolen moments with a cigarette, snatched sleep. Chisholm may have been a good waiter; he’s a wonderful writer.

Up to around two thirds of the way into the book, Chisholm appears to be romanticising what for many is a pretty exhausting and ultimately unfulfilling life, running around between well-off guests and unhinged managers. He often seems unaware that though he might have felt it at the time, he wasn’t one of them. He was choosing to work as a waiter in a way that the Sri Lankan line chefs and North African waiters just weren’t and aren’t. At times it felt quite unreflective, quite unaware.

But then, towards the end of the book, as he leaves his waiter job, he does become aware, recognising that his experience is ultimately different to that of his fellow waiters, no matter how much he wanted to – and did in fact feel – a sense of fraternity with them. He writes the book, he says, in order to tell their story.

And what a book it is. It’s political, like Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. And it’s intoxicatingly spirited and funny like Bordain’s Kitchen Confidential. It tells truths about the hospitality industry. But more than that, it charts the working conditions of so many people who are forced to do hard and often demeaning jobs, and to vie with one another, because their livelihood is dependent on the whims of care-free diners and frustrated middle managers. In this way it tells the truth about work today.

Drink to me only with labyrinthine eyes – Thomas Ligotti

It’s a first-person account of a hypnotist who is putting on a show for a private party. At the centre of his show is his ‘somnambulist’, a woman who he controls completely through hypnosis. The woman, with whom the audience is transfixed – by her beauty as much as by the tricks and contortions he has her do – is entirely under his spell.

The show proceeds as it normally would, ending with a spectacular display of light; a finale. that the narrator feels is entirely under-appreciated by the audience. Rather than the incredible magical acts he provides, they want mere party tricks he complains.

You could be forgiven for thinking the hypnotist is just an illusionist until after the show, whilst the somnambulist circulates to the adoration of the guest, he spies a child watching from the balcony above. As a reader you’re unsure what might happen (this is Thomas Ligotti after all).

But what does happens surprises you – the hypnotist asks the child what do you see when you look at the somnambulist? ‘Yukky’, the child replies, to the hypnotist’s relief. It seems that children, as is often the case in supernatural fiction, can see through the magical facade to the real horror beneath it.

The story ends with the hypnotist, frustrated with the limited imagination and desires of the people at the party, promising to show them the body behind the glamour of a beautiful sleep-walking woman that he’s conjured: the body of a dead woman that he controls; one you assume in a long line of bodies he has repurposed for his own use over the years.

What Ligotti achieves so beautifully in this short story, alongside the power of the plot, is a juxtaposition. On the one hand is a powerful magician, probably a centuries-old supernatural entity himself, who controls the bodies of the dead as if they were puppets.

On the other hand, though, despite this power, he sounds like a sad performer who for some reason earns a living through shows that he feels never get the appreciation they deserve, so narrow are his audiences’ expectations of magic.

At the end, as he says to himself that he he will show them who or what the somnambulist really is, you don’t know if this is the vengeance he’s been waiting to enact for tens or more years, or one more idle threat from a bitter, under-appreciated performer.

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* I listened to rather than read this – on the fantastic Pseudod horror podcast, episode 434.

The Unfolding – A M Homes

The story of a well-off, well-connected Republican family coming to terms – or not – with America as it really is, not in their idealised view of history.

It centres on the Big Guy, a largely retired business owner, and his wife Charlotte and daughter Meghan. And begins on the night Obama is elected President and their candidate John McCain loses.

There are two main strands to the story. First, the Big Guy brings together a group of rich old white men who fear the election of Obama is a signal that their America – of male white privilege – is at risk, and they begin a slightly opaque plot to save America. They see themselves as the vanguard of an anti-woke, MAGA movement. It’s 2008, so perhaps Homes is saying they are precursors to the rise of Trump?

Second there’s the most compelling storyline – the Big Guy’s family. The election night triggers a change in his stay-at-home wife Charlotte, who has always anesthetised herself with alcohol and been borderline agrophobic. She comes clean, goes into rehab, appears to get a girlfriend  and, centrally, says they need to tell Meghan that she isn’t her birth child but a product of an affair the Big Guy had after their first child died. Meghan knew nothing of this and her life, her sense of identity, is thrown into turmoil. She struggles to come to terms with this more complex history, but in fact seems to embrace it.

The realisation in the family that their history is complicated, not a straightforward tale of a patriarchal nuclear family, is taken well, and they all adapt quickly. The Big Guy largely accepting his faults, Charlotte realising she’d trapped herself for decades, Meghan quite quickly coming to terms with – perhaps even enjoying – the less idealised view of her origins.

And this stands in stark contrast to the politics of the Big Guy and his little cabal of chauvinists. They are intelligent, talk about the founding fathers and the US’s history – in fact they believe they are preserving or even saving it – but gloss over the sexism, racism and inequality, focusing instead on their white, male privileged take.

It’s easier, perhaps Homes is saying, to accept or embrace the complex history in your own life but ignore it at a political and social level.

Hot Milk – Deborah Levy

This beautifully written novel is a snapshot into the life of its protagonist and narrator, Sofia, during a short period time that feels pivotal; a time when she finally appreciates herself and her own life really begins.

She’s travelled from London to the south of Spain with her mother, Rose, to get treatment from a private doctor, Gomez, for her mother’s apparent lameness. There she meets Ingrid, a woman with whom she begins a relationship; Juan, who she also hits it off with: and Julieta, Gomez’s daughter.

Not a great deal happens through most of the book, but gradually she realises that for much of her life she’s put everything on hold for her mother: living with her, giving up an anthropology PhD, her relationships, her future.

Things are already shifting for Sofia, but a particular turning point comes when Sofia vists her enstranged father Christos in Greece, meeting his young wife Alexandra (just four years older than Sofia) and their young daughter. In a telling line, during a conversation about money and him supporting his ex-wife Rose, he asks ‘why would I do something to disadvantage myself?’, a point at which Sofia begins to wonder why she does so many things to disadvantage herself.

There’s a lot going on in this short novel. Most explicit is the weight of the relationship between Sofia and her mother, Rose. It seems Rose is likely a hypochondriac, depressed and probably ill too, though not necessarily lame. She’s dependent on Sofia for everything, and gives her no freedom.

Sofia meanwhile encourages this dependency by always being there for Rose, perhaps using Rose as a reason not to do things, even while being resentful of the constrained life she finds herself in as a consequence.

They are close but mutually resentful, as you might find in a relationship where the father is long-gone and there are no siblings.

As a coming of age, or self-realisation, novel, we see Sofia beginning to understand her desires, or if not understand at least succumb to them, allowing herself to act on them, first with Ingrid, then with Juan, later in relation to her intellectual interests.

At a meta level, the book touches on the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent Europe-wide austerity as it affected Greece especially, but also Italy and Spain. It is at its starkest when Sofia visits her father and his young wife, an economist. He is rich but doesn’t seem willing to share with Sofia, and what’s implied is that the young (Sofia, Alexandra) are giving their lives to look after the old (Christos, Rose), despite the fact that older people have benefitted from an economy that now leaves the young endebted and poorer.

It’s worth saying too that Hot Milk is beautifully written. Its sparse, poetic even, all in the first person, apart from a few telling paragraphs in the third person where someone – Sofia herself? – is looking at herself from the outside, as an anthropologist might look at her subject.

It’s a short novel that feels so intelligent. Every sentence seems to overflow with meaning, as if all the superfluous words have been stripped out and only the meaningful, symbolic and allegoric remain.

Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Neomi is a well-off society girl from Mexico City asked by her father to go rescue her cousin Catalina from an apparently bad marriage to the handsome Virgil Doyle, who she lives with in a crumbling mansion in the Mexican countryside, along with the rest of the Doyle family.

Catalina had written, talking of ghosts in the walls, and as Neomi quickly discovers, something is wrong in the house. Daily affairs are overseen by the matron-like Florence, Virgil’s sister; the brother, Francis, appears to ge entirely controlled; Catalina herself appears to be being kept in a near-catatonic state; and everyone in in thrall to the ancient Howard, whose body is so old it is puss-ridden, putrified and appears to be decomposing.

The independent, fiery and smart Neomi investigates, gradually bringing the fearful Franicis on side. And she discovers a lot, though its not always clear, at least not until the end.

[Spoiler alert!] Ultimately the Doyle family discovered centuries ago a supernatural force, a fungus, that emanates supernatural power. They have ingested it for years, ultimately giving Howard a prolonged life and chosen family members – always male, of course – power. They have retained the power for themselves through incest, and murder, but were using Catalina as new vehicle for reproducing, and plan to use Neomi the same way.

The strength of this nicely written and constructed story is the way these secrets unfold; you know there’s something deeply wrong, but it’s a complex secret and the reader learns about it as Neomi does.

It’s also an intriguing take on the patriarchy – how it’s the men who most benefit from the supernatural power, Florence helps maintain this, and its the continuous under-estimation of Neomi as a vain, entitled society girl that allows her to succeed in the end.

Catalina herself is much more typically helpless; she’s always been obsessed with fairytales, and the romance of being whisked away to a countryside mansion by Virgil appeals, until of course it is inverted and the horrific reality is revealed.

Two things really stood out in this novel. One was the way Moreno-Garcia plays with some typical horror tropes – the folk horror-like way in which Neomi leaves the city and experiences the unsettling nature of rural life;  the vampire-lore idea of a house built on soil imported from the home country (from England to Mexico); and the classic haunted house, which runs through all this.

The other thing – and the thing that really elavates this book – is that the supernatural power that drives Howard and his family is a fungus that appears to have a kind of creeping, malevolent consciousness. What it wants isn’t clear – if it even wants anything; it is non-human, and for precisely that reason its motives are unknown and unknowable. I’ve blogged on this previously here – https://gilesbooks.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/literature-of-the-non-human/.

There is more interest in nature or natural phenoma as things-in-themselves, as science discovers their complexity, their drives, possibly even forms of consciousness (think panspychism), but also their omplete otherness. What’s so intriguing is the attempt to write about the non-human, to feature it in a story, and the impossibility of ever representing it or portraying it.

Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange – Susanna Clarke

Wow, wow, wow – this is a novel to be in awe of. A thousand pages of incredibly written literary fantasy that keeps you gripped page after page.

It’s an impossible task to summarise the plot! A few things though. It’s set in the nineteenth century. Mr Norrell is an arrogant fuddy-duddy who believes he is the only person who can perform magic properly, and after a successful conjurring in York Minster goes to London and gets the ear of government.

Jonathan Strange is a young upstart who discovers an ability to do magic, becomes Norell’s apprentice but eventually moves on, his arrogance and desire to practice magic at his own pace getting the better of him.

Through the story the pair practice magic of many kinds, often with effects unknown to them. In particular, their magical activities break the barrier between the human and the fairy world, in which a  fairy with ‘thistle-down hair’ keeps people enthralled and controlled.

A woman – central to the story – who Norrell brought back from the dead (Lady Pole), Strange’s wife (Arabella) and Lady Pole’s servant (Stephen) all find themselves trapped each evening in this fairy world, but unable to break out or even speak of it during the day, such is the magic of the fairy.

Broken by the eventual death of his wife, Jonathan Strange reaches a point where he conjures up a darkness, a massive column in the centre of Venice, and eventually Strange and Norrell confront the fairy’s magic.

There’s so much more plot to this book – so many nuances and lines of fancy – but this is the heart of the story.

So what to say? A few things.

First, the style: incredible. Think of Charles Dickens if he were writing today in a way that mocks himself. Susanna Clarke write like a knowing Dickens, laughing at the characters and their ridiculous ways of behaving. But at the same time the book is full of footnotes and references, all fictional, to give the sense that this is a historically accurate record.

Then there’s the themes. There are some social themes. In particular, the main characters are men, with the women having only a secondary role, and you can’t help but assume that’s done intentionally, to reflect the ridiculous sexism of the time in which the book’s based.

And there’s a class schism. Many of the main characters are upper class, as you’d expect of that time. But it’s the servants and assistants who guide what they do and often provide the most interest – Stephen, a black servant to the Poles who has more about him than anyone, if only he weren’t trapped in the other world; and Childermass, Norrell’s servant who like Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, is the political brains behind his boss’s – and his own – success.

And there’s a beautiful battle between the old and the new. Norrell is a stuffy traditionalist who wants to keep things as they are, to maintain his own status. Strange is an innovator, wanting to experiment and try out new magical practice. But actually, in the end, both are are as bad as each other, creating forces they know nothing of, an other-worldly magical force that imprisons many and threatens to take over the human world.

And that’s maybe the great theme of this book: When you dabble in magic you can’t expect there to be no consequences. It’s an ungovernable power and you need to expect something in return. In this case the fairy with the thistle-down hair trapping people in his world and moving to destroy or at least invade the existing one. If you play with fire, expect to get burned.

The Lookout – Mariana Enriquez

This disarmingly simple story packs a complicated punch.

Elina is a heartbroken women staying at a beachside hotel for her 31st birthday to get some space. Already troubled after being attacked and raped in her teens, recent abandonment by her partner Pablo has resulted in therapy, institutions and prescription drugs. All ineffective it seems.

The hotel, it turns out, has a Lady Upstairs – a ghost or creature that lives in a locked up tower, that can shape-shift and reveal itself when needed. That’s not why Elina is there, but may have drawn other guests.

The Lady Upstairs spots Elina – with her inner trauma – and sees an opportunity to entice Elina into the tower before swapping positions and freeing herself.

We don’t know what happens in the end, though Elina – so hopelessly lost – is surely unlikely to see or resist the Lady’s trap?

It’s a common kind of plot, but there’s a lot in this short story. Great writing of course, and a sense of pity for Elina that Enriquez conjures up so quickly and easily.

But there’s also the tropes or references from folklore and horror – a woman in a fairytale tower, the Lookout, above the hotel, apparently trapped and desparate. A dead woman just waiting for someone so broken they can trick them into taking her place. And there’s the ocean – often seen as a place to refresh and renew, but also a place of the unknown and alien, the inhuman.

What is perhaps strongest in this story is the presence of trauma and the supernatural. Often in stories, a strange or unexplained phenomenon turns out to be a manifestation of someone’s inner trauma and can be explained away. But here there is both – the Lady Upstairs is a supernatural being that preys on women traumatised by lfe.