Three Reasons I Loved 'Clay' by Melissa Harrison

Three Reasons I Loved 'Clay' by Melissa Harrison:

1. Clay is a novel featuring about multiple characters all living near the same park in London, and one of its themes seems to be the importance of our relationship with nature, even (or especially) in a city setting. There are several lyrical passages describing the natural world and the changing seasons which reminded me of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. But the nature in Clay isn't over-romanticised - this is very much an urban twenty first century novel, set in a landscape of laundrettes and fired chicken shops as well as parks and gardens. The plot and characters still drive the novel, as they should, and so it never feels sanctimonious or preachy, despite its well thought out and timely theme.

2. The cover is just great - see right (although stupid me, I bought it as an ebook!) and this was a smashing book to be reading whilst the snow was falling, snug inside with a glass of port.

3. The ending really is genuinely moving and one of the most memorable I've read for a long time. Harrison does sadness (not trendy angst or cool existential ennui, but simple everyday sadness) really well. A lot of novels, particularly of the kind that get marketed as 'literary fiction' * often seem to falter at the end, as if the writer has run out of fuel before working out how to end the damn thing. Thankfully that's not the case here. Read it yourself and find out.

You can find out more about Clay here.

* let's for once not get into the genre vs. literary quagmire, eh?

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

Where The Horror Happens

Just a quick note to say I've been interviewed in the new issue of Sanitarium magazine, as part of their 'Where The Horror Happens' Q&As.

The questions are about the actual mechanics of my writing process - where I work, writing with music, that kind of thing.

It's a really nicely designed magazine, so well worth checking out their site.

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.

Review: The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 23

23! 

I remember reading some of the Mammoth horror anthologies when I was at university; possibly before. There's something pleasing about the fact that they're still around.

The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 23 is a strong collection of stories, although with perhaps a number of odd choices. I'm a huge Ramsey Campbell fan, as regular readers will no doubt wearily attest, but even I'd question whether he deserves to be in a yearly best-of twice. It doesn't help that his first contribution, Holding The Light didn't strike me as his best work (although even second-league Campbell is worth reading) but his second, Passing Through Peacehaven was one of my favourites in the volume.

A number of other stories in the book that I loved I'd already read before, including Tim Lebbon's story original from the House Of Fear anthology, and the two contributions taken from A Book Of Horrors (the stories by Michael Marhsall Smith and John Ajivide Lindqvist). Along with Mark Samuels' The Tower it was great to remake their acquaintance and give them a second read. Lebbon's Trick Of The Light in particular revealed lots of nuances the second time around.

Of the stories that were new to me, the most memorable were:

Steve Rasnic Tem's Miri, a haunting and disturbingly beautiful tale, about the past invading the insubstantial present.

Conrad Williams - Wait. Some brilliant imagery here, although I wasn't sure the ending dovetailed all the elements quite as neatly as I would have wanted.

Thana Niveau - White Roses, Bloody Silk. A bloodbath of a story, like Tarantino writing a drawing-room drama and getting bored three quarters of the way through.

Simon Strantzas - An Indelible Stain Upon The Sky. Another story which, like Steve Rasnic Tem's, shows melancholy and dull grief aren't incompatible with horror, but can enhance it.

But none of the other contributions were in any way bad, and as well as the above authors I'll certainly be on the look out for more work by Paul Kane, Alison Littlewood, Peter Atkins and Simon Kurt Unsworth.

Full contents:

Stephen Jones - Introduction: Horror In 2011
Ramsey Campbell - Holding The Light
Christopher Fowler - Lantern Jack
Paul Kane - Rag And Bone
Gemma Files - Some Kind Of Light Shines From Your Face
Joel Lane - Midnight Flight
Tim Lebbon - Trick Of The Light
Gregory Nicoll - But None Shall Sing For Me
Alison Littlewood - About The Dark
Daniel Mills - The Photographer's Tale
Mark Samuels - The Tower
Peter Atkins - Dancing Like We're Dumb
Simon Strantzas - An Indelible Stain Upon The Sky
Joan Aiken - Hair
Steve Rasnic Tem - Miri
Geeta Roopnarine - Corbeaux Bay
Michael Marshall Smith - Sad, Dark Thing
Robert Silverberg - Smithers And The Ghost Of The Thar
Reggie Oliver - Quieta Non Movere
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Conrad Williams - Wait
Simon Kurt Unsworth - The Ocean Grand, North West Coast
Evangeline Walton - They That Have Wings
Thana Niveau - White Roses, Bloody Silk
John Ajivide Lindqvist - The Music Of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer
Ramsey Campbell - Passing Through Peacehaven
David Buchan - Holiday Home
Stephen Jones & Kim Newman - Necrology: 2011

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.