Recommendation: Whitstable by Stephen Volk

Let’s not pussyfoot about here – Whitstable by Stephen Volk, published by Spectral Press, is a triumph. I thought this book would be interesting when I first heard the premise of it, but upon reading it I found it far surpassed my expectations. It's a stunningly original story and a superb example of the novella as an art form.

Some specifics: set in the early Seventies, Whitstable’s central character is Peter Cushing of Hammer Horror fame. Initially he is holed up in his house in Whitstable after the death of his wife, wanting to see no one, unopened scripts left to gather dust, unanswered phone calls ringing in the silence. One day on the seafront a boy comes up to him, mistaking Cushing for one of his most famous characters: Van Helsing the vampire hunter. The boy is being fed on by a vampire at night (he claims) and he wants Van Helsing’s help… There is no vampire of course, at least not in any literal sense. But there is darkness to confront and heroism and sacrifice required. Cushing is reluctantly dragged out of his grief and tries to help the boy.

It’s a brilliant premise, but one that could easily have seemed forced or exploitative in the wrong hands. Fortunately, Volk doesn't put a foot wrong. The result is a book that isn't a horror story, but a one that could only have been written by someone with a deep understanding and love of the genre. Elements of vampire lore and Hammer films are woven through the fabric this realistic story. And the characterisation of Cushing himself is deft, the depiction of his grief deeply moving. 

And, and.... god I could just keep piling on the superlatives, but I'll rein myself in. Just promise me you'll read it.

(Buy Whitstable from the Spectral Press Shop)

The Shelter reviewed at Strange Tales...

"A wonderful exploration of powerful, quiet horror..."

Many thanks to Mark West for this review of The Shelter over on his Strange Tales site. Mark's a writer who, whenever he recommends a book I take note, so this review was especially pleasing...

Coffin Hop 2013 - A Halloween Horror Quiz

So, I'm pleased to say that this year I'm again taking part in Coffin Hop, an event where a whole load of horror authors, artists and bloggers get together, offer prizes, and generate a biz of a buzz around the genre. If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you'll find a list of all the bloggers taking part, which is maintained by magic and/or HTML. Go and check out all the links as there's some fabulous prizes to be had.

Anyway, for my own competition this year I've done a Halloween horror quiz - it's meant to be a bit of fun more than anything, so most of the questions are pretty easy for all your horror aficionados, and it's ridiculously easy to win a prize anyway:

• Anyone who scores 2/10 or more will also be entered into a draw to win a paperback copy of The Shelter (I'll be giving a few of these away)

• Anyone who scores 5/10 or more will also be entered into a draw to win a paperback copy of Falling Over

• Anyone who scores 8/10 or more will also be entered into a draw to win a paperback copy of Falling Over and The Penny Dreadnought Omnibus Volume 1

How to enter - anyway you like really. Put your answers in a comment below, or on my Facebook page, or email me.

Deadline: 2nd of November

So now, the questions:


1. What book by a famous horror author is this?

2. How many people does Michael Myers kill in the original Halloween?

3. Which book begins with these lines?

What was the worst thing you've ever done?

I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . . 

4. And which book ends with this one?

He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

5. In which horror film do you see all these bodies - and then realise they're all the same person...?

6. Who is this?

7. And who's this, and what film is she starring in?

8. What is the name of the film that's the basis of Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves?

9. What is the name of the girl in the red coat in Don't Look Now?

10. And finally, which UK town is this "real life Pennywise" terrifying/amusing/baffling people?

Good luck!

"...something here for anyone who enjoys fiction in the short form..." 

Thanks to The Eloquent Page for this, well, eloquent review of Falling Over - read it here.

The Ritual & Wilderness Horror

I recently finished The Ritual by Adam Nevill, a horror novel set, to quote the blurb, in "the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle". It's a fine novel, albeit one that I felt lost a bit of steam in its second half. It's also a very pure horror novel too: it's essentially about a group of friends lost in the woods, with 'something' stalking them. Even more essentially, it's a book about the fear of death.

That might sound a trite, even pointless description - aren't all horror novels about the fear of death? After all, what else is there actually to be afraid of, underneath? Maybe that's true, but it's surprising how many horror books and films pussyfoot around the issue. Very few put us inside the head of someone facing death for any length of time. The gory kills, the entrails and innards spilt in the worst horror films and fictions actually seem a distraction, a sensationalist focusing on the external side of death. The real horror is inside.

The Ritual dares to show us the thoughts of someone who believes they are going to die for a very long time. The sense of dread, of hopelessness, is almost palpable and is as scary as anything I've read for a long time.

Maybe the starkness of the wilderness setting increases this feeling. After all, the central characters are in a hell of a mess before the supernatural element really makes itself known. They are lost, wet, alone, running out of food and a couple of them are injured, slowing the group down. They're suffering that modern dislocation that comes when suddenly, somehow in the middle of our routine lives we can be mortally in danger: they were on holiday for Christ's sake, and now this... But theirs is also an ageless fear, too: the fear of being lost in the woods.

It's the same fear Stephen King plays on in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - one of his best books I think, because it's so simple: the titular girl is also lost in the woods and scared she's not alone. It's a very different book, both in terms of plot and tone, to The Ritual but there's a similarity there. As there is with The Terror by Dan Simmons, another book where the horrors of the Arctic wilderness the characters can't escape (stranded this time, rather than lost) almost seem to dwarf the supernatural element of the plot.

So why, we might ask, do these books even need a monster - is it a mere sop to the horror audience? A set of stabilisers that these writers can't write without?

Well no, I don't think so. I think it's important to the effect of these stories, and The Ritual in particular, that the 'thing' is barely described, a shadowy but constant presence at the characters' backs. No matter how far they walk, it keeps pace with them; no matter where they hide it seeks them out. It's like Death itself, in fact. Not so much a symbol, but an externalisation of the character's plight.

But, these being stories, the monster can also be evaded, fought off- temporarily and at great cost it can be defeated. Sometimes we can make it out of the wilderness, of the woods we have got lost in. Despite a sense of hopelessness as great as any I've encountered in a novel, there are brief moments of respite in The Ritual, of light and hope. But I won't give the game away about whether they are ultimately groundless or how the novel ends - this really is one you need to read yourself.

The Ritual (UK |US)

Horrifically Horrifying Horror reviews Falling Over

Falling Over has had another review, this time from Anthony Cowin on the Horrifically Horrifying Horror blog. I could quote the whole thing it's pleased me so much, but I'll put my ego back in its box and just pick out a couple of sentences:

"The author obviously loves his chosen genre, the carefully crafted twisting tales are testament to that... I've been reading a lot of anthologies lately... This is my favourite solo work by far.

Everington’s precise use of language and almost instant setting of tone made each story easy to fall into. And falling does seem to be the theme here...  

That dread lifts from the page with Everington’s stripped back prose and storytelling talent.

James Everington has created a fine collection in Falling Over."

Okay, that was more than a couple; fair cop.

You can read the full review here or find links to buy the ebook and paperback of Falling Over here.

Guest Post: Hannah Kate & Impossible Spaces

So here's a guest post from Hannah Kate, editor and contributor to one of the most interesting anthologies I've read this year: Impossible Spaces from Hic Dragones. As you might gather from the title, the anthology collects together stories from across multiple genres that deal with places not on any maps, with weird locations and twisted geometries. Hannah's own story, Great Rates, Central Location, was one of my favourites - a story of shifting identities in a very singular hotel (if you've read The Other Room you'll know why that would appeal to me...) so I'm pleased to welcome her here for this guest post...

Take it away Hannah:

I'm really pleased to have been invited as a guest poster on James’s blog as part of the blog tour for Impossible Spaces, a new collection of strange and dark short stories from Hic Dragones. As you might see from the cover of the book, I edited this collection. As you might see from the website, I am also the founder and editor-in-chief of the publishing company.

But I'm also a writer myself, and it’s nice to be invited to talk about my own story in the collection, Great Rates, Central Location, which is set in a budget hotel in Manchester. I've written a piece for my own blog about the hotels that gave me the idea for the story, so I thought I’d write something today about the books that I enjoy reading (and which may or may not have inspired my own writing).

I've been a fan of horror and dark fantasy since I was a kid - when your dad teaches you to read using The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, then gives you Titus Groan and Gormenghast when you hit ten, it’s impossible not to be. But my tastes have changed a little over the years. As a teenager, I liked my horror Gothic. I read Dracula and Frankenstein, but what I really loved were the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho. If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and can picture Catherine Morland, you can picture me as a teenage reader.

I still love a bit of high Gothic – it’s like a delicious, melodramatic treat –but as time has gone on, I’ve found myself drawn more to a different mode of horror writing: the urban, the contemporary, the everyday. I particularly like horror (and fantasy) that is as realistic as possible, scenarios that could almost (almost) be real life… but that are just a little bit off.

I suppose part of this change of tastes could be down to a choice I made at university. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Roald Dahl, and while I had a lingering, nostalgic love for his children’s fiction, I became fascinated by his short stories for adults (several of which were adapted for the Tales of the Unexpected TV show – though this was ever so slightly before my time). My favourite short stories were always those that presented an ordinary – even mundane – world, which is unsettled by one piece of odd (or unexpected) behaviour: ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, ‘The Landlady’.

Tales of the Unexpected has been a big influence on my writing. I never watched The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, so when I imagine a strange and off-kilter world, where ordinary people get dragged into something different, something ‘off’, it’s the Tales of the Unexpected theme music I hear, not the Twilight Zone.

As well as weird and twist-in-the-tail fiction, I also enjoy fiction that’s more easily described as horror. 

Again, I like stories that are grounded in the everyday – but an everyday that’s dark and wrong. It kinda goes without saying that Stephen King is the master of this type of tale. One of my favourite stories by King is his novella The Sun Dog. The story’s opening is so beautifully ordinary – a kid gets a Polaroid camera for his birthday; he’s quite excited about it, and gathers his family together to take his first photo… but as the picture develops in front of his eyes, there’s something wrong with it. It’s the perfect set-up (in my opinion) and the gradual reveal of the ‘wrongness’ is expertly timed.

I recently reread The Sun Dog, and followed it up immediately with Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence. Again, Campbell’s status as a master of horror doesn't need to be stated, and I'm over-the-moon to have been able to include his short story ‘The Place of Revelation’ in Impossible Spaces. This story is a wonderful example of the way Campbell can evoke ordinariness, whilst simultaneously undercutting it with a deep, ancient sense of dread. This is also apparent in The Influence, in which supernatural menace is combined with commonplace family life. Although the ‘evil’ in The Influence is not the eldritch, grand terror found in some of Campbell’s other novels, it is a more claustrophobic, creeping horror – and that always works for me.

Finally, there are a couple of up-and-coming horror writers whose work I'm really enjoying at the moment. Simon Bestwick – whose short story ‘Trading Flesh’ can be found in Impossible Spaces – is one of them. Although ‘Trading Flesh’ is a dark, twisted steampunky (in the twisted, post-apocalyptic way) tale, Simon’s novel The Faceless (which I can never recommend highly enough, no matter how hard I try) is grounded in a more ‘real world’ realm of children’s bogeymen, family relations and the historical trauma of war. It’s a truly terrifying read, and Bestwick is brilliant at conjuring up a thoroughly believable world that is riddled with seriously disturbing secrets.

And just in case you thought I was only plugging writers I've had the good fortune to edit… I also want to mention Tom Fletcher. Fletcher’s début horror novel The Leaping is a chilling tale (which gave me actual nightmares). I've seen reviews of this book that have concentrated on the second half of the story, which is set in a bleak Cumbrian landscape redolent with ancient terrors and barely-hidden trauma. But the book actually begins in Manchester, and Fletcher’s descriptions of the unsettling nothingness of city centre living and call centre employment is, perhaps, even more frightening than the rural Gothic of the Lake District. As a Cumbrian-by-birth, adopted Mancunian, The Leaping is, perhaps, closer to my ‘real world’ than any of the other stories I mentioned in this post, and that made me love it even more.

Thank you for indulging this little glimpse into my reading preferences. As I said at the beginning, I don’t know for sure how much any of these books have influenced my own writing… but I know I've had countless hours of enjoyment either way.  

Impossible Spaces: buy here...

Review: Roadkill by Joseph D'Lacey

Roadkill by Joseph D’Lacey is the latest This Is Horror chapbook, although this story is only loosely horror, being a sort of existential Mad Max. Although there’s plenty of back-story, the entire ‘now’ of the plot takes place over just 100 seconds; the central character is involved in a race in a presumably post-apocalyptic world, pushing a stripped-down vehicle as fast as it will go towards The Edge – possibly transcendence, possibly nothingness. The physical aspects of this race are expertly evoked – the sounds of the engines, the heat of the metal against the driver’s bare skin – but it’s clear there’s more at stake here than a mere race. The world-view and goals of the character seem as stripped back of everything inessential as the cars they are racing… But the strange visions of a fox the narrator sees as he races, and the interconnection he feels with his opponent, suggest something larger, something more expansive to life than simply carrying on the same road as fast as you can...

 

In the midst of all this, the fact that D’Lacey manages any kind of world-building at all is impressive, although even in the flashback sections the reader sees only glimpses of the wider world, as if it were all whipping by at 180mph… It’s clear from these glimpses that the drivers and the cars they drive represent something fundamental to society as a whole; the race itself has something of a ritualistic air about it. Occasionally I wished the world was fleshed out slightly bit more, and it will be interesting to see if D’Lacey returns to it in any future works. Tight, taut prose keeps the story as focussed and single-minded as it’s protagonists. An interesting, original story from D’Lacey, and one I enjoyed reading and rereading.

 

100 seconds… 180mph… and a whole philosophy of life. Not bad for a short novella.

(Available on Kindle)