Number 15 - Beyond Here Lies Nothing - Gary McMahon

 

And near the end of my continuing series theme, the final part of the Concrete Grove trilogy by Gary McMahon.

It's a crying shame that Gary isn't as big a name in the horror scene as James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. He's equally as good as either with his own distinctive brand of downbeat urban horror.

Whereas Ramsey's books are filled with middle class characters and paranoia, Gary's books are filled with the inhabitants of the council estates that cause Ramsey's characters so much dread.

The council estate in this trilogy is a character all of its own, filled with people just trying to get on with life, whilst all around, the badness is like an infection that's impossible to shake.

A personal factor that made this book extra creepy for me is that the central character this time around is called Marc, spelled with a C, the good way to spell it. I don't actually recall this happening in any other book. Reading about horrible things happening to Marc hit closer to the bone than they might have done normally. People called John must be used this sensation, but it's new to me.

Marc is in the Grove for the funeral of a friend he met whilst researching a local urban myth. He runs into the strangely seductive Abby, whose child went missing a few years previous, the last of 4 girls on the estate to simply vanish. The child's father is a returning character, a gangster who appeared in the previous books, and he doesn't take kindly to people who take too much interest in his ex partner.

This is just the start of Marc's problems. There are a few parallel storylines going on, involving Marc, the gangster, and an obsessed copper who worked on the case of the missing girls with no success. 

They pull together quite masterfully towards the end, even though the characters don't necessarily all interact at any point.   That takes a lot of skill to pull off (and is something I only just realised today writing this, a full 36 hours after finishing the book) but McMahon does it with no visible effort.

The horror becomes more cosmic than the previous volumes, each book allowing the scope to widen a bit more.  Again, this expansion of the in-story universe seems effortless. 

The prose is easy to read yet still atmospheric. There are some images from this book that will be difficult to shake off.  Particularly those surrounding a very surprise return of a character from book one, and the injuries sustained by a supporting character. 

There was once scene that felt a little cliched, and stood out for the wrong reasons, but in a novel of this length, it barely mattered. 

Read the trilogy from the start if you can.  They're all standalone novels, but together are greater than the sum of the whole. 

I'll start as I began. It's a damned shame Gary isn't a household name. He deserves to be. I've not read a bad book by him yet and he's so much better than some writers who are far more famous.