I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.” ― Peter Cook

Review: Thin Men With Yellow Faces

Thin Men With Yellow Faces is part of the This Is Horror chapbook series, and is jointly written by Simon Bestwick and Gary McMahon. Sometimes when two authors I like collaborate I've found they muffle each other's voice, but other times it's more like amplification. I'm happy to say this story is very much in the latter camp.

Thin Men With Yellow Faces (and let's say right away what a great title that is) is a story perfect to read in a single setting, absorbing the grim atmosphere and allowing the tension to build. And build it most certainly does.

The set-up - child in trouble and menaced by human-like monsters - is like an episode of Doctor Who gone horribly awry, written with Northern verisimilitude and pessimism, and containing horrors that are very much adults-only. As you'd expect if you've read any of their previous work, these two authors don't stint on the chilling or grotesque.

The titular monsters are truly unforgettable, with a historical background that only makes them scarier. The story has a pleasing moral ambiguity to it, and could be read as a loose allegory about many of the horrors and injustices of the modern world (or our denial of them, at least). There's no easy get out for the characters here, and none for us either.

Overall this is a great collaboration, with the two-headed Bestwick/McMahon hybrid in fine form and breathing fire. You can (and bloody should) buy it directly from the This Is Horror site.

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Strange Story #20: House Of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say...

Most of the strange stories I've featured in this column to date have been short, controlled tales – paranoia and fear mounting to a single moment of horror. Whilst the best of these stories might imply a lot, they definitively state very little.

House Of Leaves is not that kind of story.

This is a huge novel (and one you must read in its physical version rather than as an ebook, as the photographs in this post will indicate) with multiple plots and sub-plots, typographical tricks, footnotes and diversions. It tells the story of ‘The Navidson Record’, a film by a renowned photographer about a very singular house.

The book takes the form of an academic treatment of the film, discussing its themes and veracity. This has apparently been written by Zampano, a blind man who dies in mysterious circumstances. His manuscript is recovered by a second character, Johnny Truant, who interprets the Zampano notes and The Navidson Record in his own way, as well as chronicling the breakdown he suffers whilst reading the material, despite the fact that he can find no evidence that the film even exists.

So the book is in effect one narrator annotating the notes of another narrator about a film neither can ever have seen (one doubting it is real, the other being blind) and that even if it does exist might just be a fake anyway. I think.

Added to this, the book is a labyrinth (and that word is chosen deliberately) of other stories, from Johnny’s tall-tales told to impress girls to historical accounts of people shipwrecked in the Arctic. The book also features seemingly never-ending lists (of architectural features, famous photographers, ghost stories etc.), mirror-writing, poems, and letters with a secret code. There are 'quotations' about the Navidson Record from people like Derrida, Camile Paglia, and Stephen King. There are a number of seemingly trivial mysteries that nevertheless prey on the mind: why is the word house (or any translation thereof) in a different colour & font to the rest of the text? Why is every reference to the Minotaur myth crossed through?

This book achieves ambiguity not through sparseness of detail but through a surfeit of it.

And there remains the fact that, despite the interruptions and longueurs, there is at the core of this book a truly frightening and original horror story. The Navidson Record starts with the Navidson family moving into a new house, and Navidson realising his house appears to be a fraction of an inch bigger on the inside than the outside: Lovecraft’s crazy geometry rewritten on a domestic scale. Soon after, a door appears in the house that wasn't there before, that appears to open onto a small, dusty corridor… which is clearly occupying the same physical space as the garden outside the house. Navidson, and later others, explore the corridor, and they soon realise the space behind the door is potentially huge (infinite?), and shifting and protean... and there might be something in that impossible space with them. The sheer impossibility of the house, initially represented by that small fraction of an inch, becomes something experienced on a far vaster scale. Added to this is the very human drama played out between Navidson and his wife Karen, who desperately wants her husband to stop exploring the house, and between Navidson and his estranged brother Tom. The book contains several moving moments of catharsis as well as it's brain-frying detail.

House Of Leaves seems to me a stunning achievement, a book that will become a true classic of the genre (despite the fact that no genre can really contain it). It meshes post-modernism with a strong knowledge of horror tropes, and comes up with something absolutely original. It contains enough intellectual stimulation to fuel a thousand post-graduate essays, but with enough twists and turns of the plot to turn it into an addictive page-turner too. Despite its size it’s compulsively readable, and re-readable – I've read it three times now and found new pleasures and confusions each time.

In fact, typing this, it occurs to me it's a love story, too.

Absolutely essential reading.

I'm guesting over at the Death By Killing site today, with my pick of five favourite short stories I read in 2012.

An impossible task to pick just five, obviously, but somehow I managed it. Check out my choices here.

Polluto: Wage Slave Orgy

Clutch your credit-chips close and head on over to see what Polluto has on offer: a world of malls, stretching endlessly into one another. Systems of oppression, both real and fictional. Corporations of the future, Flooded London, money and privilege, a human life claimed for art. A mathematician feverishly tattooing his formulae onto prisoners of war. Workers on special offer: cheap-labour, clone-labour and corpse-labour. And bear in mind, valued customers, that nothing comes for free!

A nice start to 2013: my story The Men Who Value Everything In Money is available in the new issue of Polluto magazine, edited by the awesome Vicky Hooper.

This edition of the magazine is subtitled Wage Slave Orgy.