Number 51 - The Concrete Grove - Gary McMahon

 

This book is the first book I ever finished reading at a heavy rock festival... On Thursday night  I was left with only 50 pages to go when my friend (and passenger to the festival) arrived so I needed to be a little bit sociable. So I stuck it in my bag and finished it on Saturday morning sitting in my tent after waking up early.

I had virtually no signal so, two heavy metal filled days and much mental and physical exhaustion later, here's what I thought of it.

Those who follow this blog will know that i am very keen on McMahon's miserabilist musings. His novels are written from the point of view of those at the bottom of the heap. So much horror seems to be written about the comfortably middle class and fairly well to do section of society. The very real urban nightmare settings for McMahon's books really make him stand out.

This book, part one of a trilogy, is set in the Concrete grove of the title - a sink estate where people land after they've missed every safety net and crashed through every crack to hit the bottom.

 Hailey and her mother landed there after a family "incident" left them with nothing. One day Hailey visits The Needle- an abandoned tower block in the centre of the estate around which all the streets are arranged in concentric circles - and encounters... something. It's only the first chapter so normally I would regard that as fine for giving spoilers, but in this case, certainly not.  The imagery in that first chapter is so fresh and startling that to even hint at it would do the book a massive disservice.

The power that exists in the Grove has noticed Hailey and from that point on, things get decidedly weird for everyone around Hailey, including Tom, the helpful jogger who takes her home after finding her collapsed in the street. It can see a person's deepest hidden fears and make them face up to their own demons. Some people, like local loan shark Monty Bright, have welcomed them in. 

This is filled with bizarre, surreal and goddamned scary set pieces. Even the mundane is frightening in the Grove. To have a twisted supernatural force  at work at the same time helps remove almost every glimmer of hope from these character's lives.  However, because of the skill in the storytelling, that light is always there at the end of the tunnel.  Whether that's daylight, or a freight train coming down the tracks to crush everyone in its path is another matter.

This is the first part of a trilogy, whether the characters who almost/sort of survived this book will make a reappearance is something I'm excited to find out. 

Side note. according to the author's note at the end of the book, The Needle is based on a tower block in Dunston in the north east of England. The first address I can recall living in was on a street almost opposite that tower block.  There was a great urban legend about it (which isn't used in this book) which I may need to try to use in a story of my own.

I'm not sure if this book is still in print, but it is available online from most of the usual suspects.

Go out and buy it if you enjoy existential horror set in grim and all too recognisable urban settings.  I know I do. 

In fact, just go out and buy it if you like well written horror that'll creep the bejeezus out of you. You won't be disappointed.

Number 49 - Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

 I'm what could charitably called late to the game on reading this, considering it was first published shortly after WWII. However even the best read people have their gaps.  Mervyn Peake happened to be one of mine.

This is the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy. The next two being Gormenghast and Titus Alone (although I did see a fourth book about Titus on Amazon with a co-writer's name - I need to check what the deal is with that) 

Gormenghast is a huge castle/kingdom mired in ritual and tradition since time immemorial.  The book opens with Flay, the lead servant to lord Sepulchrave Groan, 76th earl of Gormenghast, rushing up to the Hall of Bright Carvings to tell the splendidly named RottCodd about the birth of Titus Groan, new heir to the earldom. We then follow Flay through the winding corridors of the castle and encounter most of the rest of the cast of this sprawling epic, starting with the corpulent chef Swelter and runaway kitchenhand with pretensions to grandeur Steerpike and finishing with the Groans themselves.

It's a marvelous way to introduce us to the characters and the castle. The location is a character all of it's own, slowly rotting away on the inside, much like Lord Sepulchrave. Other memorable characters include Fuschia, the Lord's daughter, the twins Cora and Clarice, his sisters, Nannie Slagg, Fuschia's and Titus' nurse, and the castle doctor Prunesquallor.

As you might be able to tell from those names, the whole thing has a positively Dickensian feel to it, as if old Charlie had decided to write a comic politic thriller in a fantastic setting. The prose takes a fair bit of getting used to. By today's fashions in literary styles, this is padded and over-descriptive. By my personal standards, it's a highly stylised, poetic and an absorbing read (even if there were a couple of moments where I found myself thinking he does go on a bit at times)

Steerpike is a fabulous villain, stalking the corridors of Gormenghast, ingratiating himself into the inner circles of power, manipulating everyone he meets. It's a bit strange that he's 17 at the start of the book and at the end of the book, after 15 months or so have passed, he's still 17, but that's a minor niggle.

Considering that the book is called Titus Groan, Titus barely features. His birth is the trigger for most of the happenings in the book since Steerpike is able to escape the kitchen because Swelter gets so drunk while celebrating the birth. But at the end of the book, he's still only a baby, barely able to stand, and has done very little for himself. It feels like the titles of the first two volumes in the series are the wrong way round to me.  Gormenghast would be a better title for this, and I know the opening line of book 2 is "Titus is six", indicating that he's going to take an active role in that book.

Again, that's a minor quibble, as is the fact that Peake calls spiders insects repeatedly in the narrative.

This well and truly deserves its classic status.  It's laugh out loud funny in many places. The prose is easy to read if you remove the modern filter from your brain and actually concentrate.  Once the story really gets going in the second half of the book, it's almost compulsive.

I will be finishing the series later in the year. This was too good to leave it too long to find out what happens next.

Number 18 - The Searching Dead - Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell is another of those writers I've been reading for decades and one of a select few by whom I own 40 separate books. This is one of his more recent, though I'm still slightly late to the party on it as it's part one of a trilogy that was completed a year or two ago.

Ramsey has never been a writer of schlock horror.  He has always relied on building an atmosphere that unnerves rather than going for the big loud scary stuff. That's not saying he can't write a set piece, he certainly can, but he earns them and they have so much more impact because we go into them with our nerves already on edge.

This book is no exception. Young Dominic Sheldrake lives next door to a graveyard.  The night before he starts at his new grammar school he witnesses a strange man in the cemetary. The next day he recognises the strange man as one of his new teachers, Mr Christian Noble. Meanwhile, an elderly neighbour claims a man at her spiritualist church has brought her deceased husband back. No prizes for guessing who the new man might be.

It turns out that Mr Noble is far from your average history teacher, and soon his malign influence is causing problems for many people. He has plans that involve the elder gods, and that's not good news for anyone.  But what can one young teenager and his two best friends do to stop him?

The setting is a brilliantly drawn small town in early 1950s England. The school and its environs feel absolutely real. I wouldn't be surprised if the more mundane (as in not supernatural rather than not interesting) parts of the story might be drawn from Ramsey's own schooling experiences.

Dominic is a very interesting narrator, telling us his childhood memories and always hinting at bad things to come.His relationship with his parents and his two best friends Jim and Bobby are eminiently believable. It's written in Ramsey's usual very formal style and contains a few of those well earned set pieces.There's a definite wry mordant humour running through the storytelling.  Simply naming the villain of the piece Christian Noble is a prime example

One thing I've touched on in other reviews is how much I dislike it when characters instantly believe in the most extreme supernatural events without any rationalisation (William H Hanrahan i'm looking at you here). One of the genius aspects of Ramsey's writing is that the characters struggle so much to comprehend what's going on around them. When strange spectres with gibbous blobs for faces are following them, they still don't believe the evidence of their own senses even as they flee in terror. This self-doubt lends an almost hallucinatory feel to his writing.

The story felt unfinished in this volume.  Nothing that happened quite lived up to the foreshadowing of disaster in his life - but there are two more volumes to go. As stated, this is book one of a trilogy.  Book two is on my reading list for the very near future and I aim to fit the whole series in this year.

This is a typical Ramsey novel, creepy as hell (or some malformed further dimension) and a damned good read.