Bats Out of Hell: by Guy N. Smith

Guy N. Smith was something of a going concern at my old school, particularly among a select band of reprobates. I would watch enviously as his paperbacks were passed around, while slogging through How Many Miles to Babylon? or The Power and the Glory or some other piece of book. Smith's covers were worth the price of admission alone, and Bats Out of Hell is no exception, its front illustration being lovingly rendered by Bob Martin. The contents never varied - flashes of O-Level devilry followed by lashings of blood, in the best tradition of late 70s and early 80s mass market pulps. Only James Hadley Chase had the edge on Smith, and only because Corgi photographed girls for his covers, usually in various states of undress.

Bats Out of Hell's frustrated and adulterous boffin is Brian Newman, whose attempt to test the difference between early diagnosis viral/bacterial meningitis results in said bats becoming crazed fiends - carriers of a new strain of meningitis, which is fatal, of course, but after inducing madness, for good measure. An accident at the laboratory allows a number of infected bats to escape, and they slowly fan out across the English countryside. Newman and his trusty, blonde assistant are quickly on the case, even if the authorities are late on the uptake. We follow the course of the virus through the normally sedate English midlands - wiping out small church congregations here and gaggles of unruly schoolboys there, inexorably heading towards a major population centre. The bats finally reach the city of Birmingham, turning up in a Treasury vault, and Smith has much inspired fun at the expense of the assembled clerks, several of whom flee, leaving the remainder trapped and, ultimately, dead. The prime minister declares a state of emergency, and the midlands are sealed off and contained by a newly formed militia, the British Volunteer Force. While Newman works desperately towards an antitoxin, Birmingham is razed to the ground, and civil disorder becomes widespread. Yet when he does happen across a possible solution, it comes with the usual caveat - the potential to be worse in the longer term; because it will destroy all small animal life where it is used.

Bats Out of Hell is a quick, satisfying read. Smith's prose is surprisingly supple, with all pretensions no doubt subjected to the same red pencil as tender mercies, and while his characters are drawn straight from central casting, at least they are returned there thoroughly infected. The book doesn't quite make it into the apocalypse canon because the virus doesn't make it out of central England; however, its ending is a fine application of coincidence theory, which marks it as superior pulp reading.

Nightshade and Damnations: by Gerald Kersh

Gerald Kersh's 1969 collection Nightshade and Damnations gathers in one volume some of his best stories, many of which appeared originally in such unpromising publications as Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post. The '69 Coronet edition features an introduction by Harlan Ellison, who describes Kersh, accurately as it turns out, as a demon prince.

The stories are uniformly good. In The Queen of Pig Island a ship's captain finds on a remote atoll the remains of what he believes is an undiscovered race - but all he has found are the bones of a circus of freaks shipwrecked years before, and whose last brutal days of life are pieced together with moving apprehension. The Brighton Monster sees a strange creature captured by English fishermen in 1645 - it looks like a man, but is covered with strange tattoos and speaks an inexplicable tongue; over time the creature begins to degenerate, overcome by sores and a general lassitude that the reader is allowed to identify as radiation sickness. In Men Without Bones two jungle explorers find the remains of an ancient spacecraft and encounter the strange and revolting creatures living in and around it - but are they Martians or are they an undiscovered race of men? Men Without Bones is a fine example of how to restore a tired idea to vigour by powerful writing. The King Who Collected Clocks is another beautifully rendered fable in which a primitive automaton serves the interests of politicians as a clockwork regent. A Lucky Day for the Boar, with its Poe bookends, updates the 19th century master by borrowing his style to demonstrate the substance of 20th century techniques of mind-control and interrogation. And so on. Did I say they were good? They're often brilliant, and this volume culminates in one of Kersh's deservedly best-known stories, Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?

There are often unfair comparisons with Joseph Conrad in any horror fiction that dares to undertake a travelogue of darkness; yet here the comparison is at its most warranted. Kersh's stories are filled with knowing local colour which he mortifies out of existence, so that instead of moral exactitude were are left exactly nowhere. His horrors are race memories drawn from the past and the future and played out in the present as a collision of science, magic and folklore; hence his scientific natives are as unprepared as his bushmen for the peculiarly bespoke fates which overtake them. There is nothing here that is very surprising or new, but there is much to admire in the way Kersh draws new life from old forms and then mercilessly extinguishes it - and it is the accompanying cruelty that turns his reader's heart to darkness.

A Place Calling Itself Jerusalem: by Philip Challinor

In this strange and alternate Jerusalem, history flits back and forth along a timeline that seems almost obsolete or abandoned, its robots and computers junked by considerations of what might have been, could have been... And it is quite a coup to restore to Pontius Pilate his soldierly sensibilities, to hone them with political considerations to the point where he resembles the undiplomatic warrior of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. In A Place Calling Itself Jerusalem, it is very much a soldier who makes reconnaissance of the politics of occupation and corruption, and who finds in their prisons the same man who is locked inside the gulag of the Gospels.

Jerusalem draws on the instinctive similarity between these two men - one a soldier, the other a being with an almost militant capacity for pain, which the former recognises as the kind of self-abnegating battle fatigue that often leads to the heroic sacrifice or the death march or the hunger strike. Pilate identifies the nightmare in which Jesus is caught by recourse to his own - he has navigated the stations of his own cross through the course of a day of meetings; and it is here that the author's invention becomes apparent - a wholly original piece of exposition by interrogation. Each meeting seems to complicate Pilate's mood and to simplify his resolve; yet just as the action remains locked, the technology has moved on and, apart from Pilate, the only curiosity is displayed by Jesus, whose touching upgrade of a robot suggests that in another life he might have been a software engineer. But he cannot affect sentient parties - prejudices and attitudes remain fixed, even as technology marks the world around them. He and Pilate are cognisant of a change; the others are lost to glitch and cognitive lag.

The book has a remarkably dry and acrid wit, disturbed only by the metallic tang of blood which seems to suffuse with the prose, rendering it brittle and bitter. The dialogue is absolutely gripping, as each station, Centurion, High Priest, or Judge, fumbles a way to excuses taken from a book which is lived but unread. Rising above these, as touching and as brutal as any act of mercy, is Pilate's final encounter with Jesus, a genuinely affecting moment, the power of which cannot be diminished, and which begs the question - just who is being released, and from what? In the end we can't help but draw the impression that this timeline is ended.

To my mind there is no modern author who work is so consistently anti-visionary - here it is not that men and women are trapped inside systems; rather they are caught inside the mixed emotions which serve to preserve systems. And that makes all the difference. As it has been remarked that reading Mr Challinor's novels is like being stalked by a cat, it only remains for me to say - true, so long as you remember this cat has serious claws.

A Place Calling Itself Jerusalem can be purchased as a paperback here, or an ebook here.

Warning Sign (1985)

Hal Barwood's Warning Sign starts out as a fairly sombre and serious bio-hazard thriller in which a deadly outbreak at a research facility leads to complete lockdown. Trapped inside with the infected staff is security guard Kathleen Quinlan, wife of local Sheriff Sam Waterston, who is quickly on the scene. He discovers that the facility, ostensibly an agricultural research centre providing much-needed jobs for the local economy, is really a business front for military experiments in genetic warfare, and that those trapped inside are likely doomed. He fetches ex-company scientist Jeffrey De Munn, and together they enter the facility in an attempt to affect a cure, and to rescue Quinlan, who is unaffected for reasons which wrap up nicely at the end.

Where the film switches in tone is with the arrival of Yaphet Kotto's bible-quoting company man, whose comforting words fail to ring true, largely thanks to the small army of troops and close-mouthed scientists in tow. His arrival coincides with the revival of the seemingly dead staff inside the facility, who are now not so much zombies as survival junkies (led by Richard Dysart) - their rampage throughout the facility is not that of the living dead: it is rather that of a confirmation bias towards life. These scenes retain the conventional mad stare and slaughter aspects of many containment horror films and they are, for the most part, directed with no real flair for splatter, with the exception of one brilliant twist concerning a pair of contact lens. In the end Barwood resorts to his named stars for a resolution, perhaps believing that box-office is the antidote to toxin, and that an outbreak of genre can be cured by star power.

Warning Sign is a well-regarded film in cult circles, perhaps because it is a film of two halves which run almost concurrently and so can be watched complicitly. Its latent power comes from the duplicity of the local townspeople who are perfectly willing to buy the subterfuge of an agricultural facility to maintain their lifestyles - their storming of the facility is not an act of rebellion at finding out the truth of matters; rather it is denial, an attempt to restore the status quo to an ordinary working day by producing their loved ones alive and well. Warning Sign will no doubt disappoint those expecting an expose along the lines of The China Syndrome or Silkwood, but it is just as likely to disappoint horror fans for its tepid recreation of Romero's The Crazies. Still, for all that, it's worth watching.

Kamtellar: by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Be happy in the place of horseless carriages...

R. Chetwynd-Hayes is perhaps better known as a horror anthologist than for his own stories; yet in a productive career he published several well-received novels and collections, all of which are thankfully unabused by cult status. Kamtellar is the title story of his 1980 collection, and while it is billed as a novella, at 40,000 words it feels like rather more than that. There is much to admire in its deceptively simple premise, wherein it seems as though the characters of a Hammer movie have got behind the set to find it is, after all, painted on both sides. Inspired by one of Ambrose Bierce's anecdotes, and perhaps by the fate of Bierce himself, it pulls an Englishman out of the sedate Hampshire countryside and into a hellishly familiar colony, where social and spiritual arrangements are no more than a tax that the devil levies on the landscape.

Paul Sinclair's departure from our world is occasioned by a bicycle crash. He finds himself on the outskirts of a small village, the skyline of which is dominated by a huge black house that does not cast a shadow - being somehow its own shadow. He is taken in by one of the villagers whose beautiful daughter, Movita, does not escape his eye. Sinclair is immediately drawn into a struggle: every night doors and windows are barricaded as defence against the creatures which issue forth from the black house and lay siege to the village. Sinclair finds that these villagers inhabit a curious hell - they believe that the flying machines and horseless carriages of his own world are the heaven promised them for their endurance in the land of Kamtellar, and its capital, Hadelton. Sinclair persuades Movita to flee the village in the hope of reaching the capital. But in a hunt organised by the Great Satan, they are chased across the countryside by all manner of nightmare creatures; until Sinclair finds that in the land of the supernatural, rationalism is afforded its own distinct power. But, of course, it is possible to rationalise almost anything away, and Sinclair's found power proves his undoing, even at the very moment of relief. For as went the hunt, there goes Movita... like the Great Satan, he simply cannot help himself.

While it is possible to identify the moment when Chetwynd-Hayes realised he did not have on his hands the novel he wished for, and the accompanying note of disappointment, Kamtellar is still a wildly enjoyable story which often reads like Rogue Male rewritten by H.P. Lovecraft. True, there are few inventions of evil within its pages - rather its qualities are to be found in the extraordinary, stoic routines of the villagers; in the breathless chase of its climax; and in the shiftless angel Movita, whose presence in this world is a greater mystery than its existence.

Like the black house, this story is always its own shadow.

Shades of Darkness: by Richard Cowper

Richard Cowper's post-colonial ghost story Shades of Darkness was something of a departure for a science fiction author who spent much of his working life labouring under the shadow of his more famous father, the critic, John Middleton Murry. By all accounts the father was not much taken with the son's choice of genre, a point of view easily dismissed by casting an eye over Cowper's achievements; over a dozen books in twenty years, amongst them three undoubted classics (one novel, two collections). Thankfully Cowper Senior is entirely forgotten, whereas his son remains a solid presence in British sf, despite the fact that he is long dead and largely out of print.

Cowper's best novel is perhaps The Twilight of Briareus. This strange fusion of The Midwich Cuckoos and the Nativity is easily his most accessible novel and certainly the best he produced for Gollancz; sadly Cowper's other novels for that publisher largely failed to match his early work at Dobson, where two striking books, Breakthrough and Phoenix, established him as an outstanding mainstream interpreter of the New Wave. The only fault of these early novels is a certain flippancy in tone, as though Cowper were determined to be deprecating about his subject matter. Gollancz excised this fault, but the author's work became variable, ranging mostly between interesting (Profundis) and absurd (Worlds Apart). Where Cowper really excelled was in the field of novellas and long short stories. During the 70s and 80s he issued three splendid collections - The Custodians, The Web of the Magi, and The Tithonian Factor. These last two collections are among the best ever assembled by a British author. The title story The Web of the Magi is a winning combination of H. Rider Haggard's She and James Hilton's Lost Horizon, wherein a 19th century British engineer scouting a remote area of Tibet discovers a forgotten civilisation which dupes him into engineering time itself. Aside from its beautiful title story, The Tithonian Factor contains the environmental apocalypse story, A Message to the King of Brobdingnag, and the very English science fantasy of What Did the Deazies Do? These two volumes were never issued in paperback so far as I'm aware, but some of the stories were reprinted in a US marketed collection, Out Where the Big Ships Go. Sadly the best stories are missed from that volume. I should say that Cowper's White Bird of Kinship trilogy of books has been much praised, but I found that it didn't do much for me.

Shades of Darkness appears to have been Cowper's final novel. It was issued in 1986 by Kerosino books in a limited print run of 1000 copies. A further collector's edition ran to several hundred signed copies and contained a supplementary pamphlet of short stories. It is a ghost story with an African twist. Journalist Jim Fuller is deported from Uganda while uncovering a story of genocide there. Upon return to England he is sacked by his newspaper, which is now undergoing radical change as a Murdoch vehicle. He is persuaded by friends to turn his material into a crusading novel and rents a cottage called "Myrtles" on the coast near Colchester for the purpose of writing a first draft. He soon finds that the cottage is more haunted by Africa than he is - specifically by the conscience of a previous owner who had been very publicly caught up in the Mau-Mau revolt of the 1950s. Cowper makes use of a number of old tropes to move this story along at a fair pace - the remote cottage, the ancient, folded dress found hidden inside a trunk in the attic, the convenient cache of newspaper clippings, mysterious messages on the typewriter, and so on. But he inserts these so deftly that they do not feel like devices; rather they feel like secondary characters - we know them, we know their ways, and it is a surprise when they do not behave as anticipated. The cottage becomes an African bungalow; the dress is never worn by the plot; the newspaper clippings are reduced to ephemera, and the typewriter messages are neither threats nor gibberish but are rather an inspiration for Fuller to complete his book. He finds ultimately that he himself may be the tool of exorcism, under the guidance of a local witch, but he is so convinced by his African experience that he allows one more horror to complete his inspiration. It becomes a question of whether his imagination can survive its encounters with source material.

Shades of Darkness is a personably written novel. It features Cowper's trademark relaxed prose which tenses unexpectedly before slowly unraveling into anti-climax.  For the reader these multiple shocks are turned into a vivid, page-turning experience, and the book dictates a read of one or two sittings. Recommended.

The Edge: by Charles Beaumont

Charles Beaumont's name is fairly well-known amongst weird fiction and horror fans, perhaps because his books are irritatingly hard to track down and so remain on some infernal, unfulfilled wish-list. He was a chief writer on the original Twilight Zone series and penned the low-budget William Shatner film The Intruder, as well as a number of short stories which appeared in a variety of pulp magazines and were later collected in volumes like The Howling Man and The Edge.

The New People takes the well-worn theme of jaded suburbia and adds a reasonable (for the time) twist, but not a twist that could be used now. And perhaps not even then - because the story trades one suburban myth for another in a very effective way. Hank and Anne Prentice, and their adopted son Davey, take possession of their new home - rather uneasily, as the previous resident committed suicide. But they settle into a neighbourhood that appears otherwise respectable and modest. In fact, they themselves appear to be the only oddities: "He wondered what it would be like to sleep with her. Probably it would be very nice." She is, of course, his wife. Because Hank is impotent and Ann is a virgin. Here you can locate the twist in the story, the point being that suburbanites have a way of finding the one fatal weakness/strength in a stranger, usually to diabolical ends...

I'm sure The Howling Man has been anthologised by Pan or Fontana at some point. I have encountered it outside of the pages of The Edge, somewhere. Or maybe it's just that the atmosphere of the story is so immediately a classic that it provides its own afterlife. An American student, touring Europe before he takes a job with his family's legal practice, falls ill with pneumonia and wakes to find he has been nursed back to health by an order of monks in a timeless abbey. But the student is not their only guest - there is also the mysterious howling man of the title, of whom the monks decry all knowledge, refusing not only to hear his cries, but also to acknowledge his existence. The student resolves to help the man escape...  The Howling Man makes effective use of the New World meets Old World setup; its descriptions of the German landscape are almost medieval, treating Europe as an ancient forest that requires regime change.

Of the remainder, there is some energy and verve in Mother's Day, the story of an Irishman forced to mate with a stick-like Martian; The New Sound is the engaging story of the world's first (and last) practicing necroaudiophile; Song For a Lady is an atypical deathship story (depressingly this story reminded me that I'm one of the vanishingly small number of human beings who can put a face to the name C. Aubrey Smith); and in The Magic Man, a travelling magician in the Old West gives a little too much of his act away to strangers...

For the most part Beaumont's stories are very well-developed. They go where they need to go with minimum fuss and maximum gain. There is a good deal of attention to detail, and he has a talent for an apt phrase. As an author he makes no attempt to outsmart his reader; his conceits are such that we are delighted in short order, and spend the remainder of the story co-writing their conclusions. Sadly, Beaumont suffered a fairly odd and premature death in his late 30s from something called pre-senile dementia; perhaps he believed his own stories, which now resemble the grisly output of a cantankerous O'Henry gone impeccably to seed.

Requiem for a Wren: by Nevil Shute

When things like this happen, there's just nothing to be done about it. Even suffering itself is a mere waste of time...

It is widely held (among those who still care) that Nevil Shute never wrote a horror novel during his long and famous career. Yet Shute's bibliography includes a fair few departures from the norm. An Old Captivity, for example, details an overworked and exhausted pilot who slips into a Norse coma;  In the Wet features a risible alternate history set in a socialist Britain during the 1980s and detailing the "plight" of the Royal family and attendant parasites; his (brilliant) first novel, Stephen Morris welds two early novellas together as an engineering fantasy - this is a recurrent theme in Shute's work: that the application of mechanical and technical principles to human problems can solve them, or at least nurse them home. And that, of course, is pertaining to science fiction. Which leads us to On the Beach, perhaps his most famous novel, an apocalypse tale that adds nothing very new to the genre but provides a reasonable point of entry. It was successfully filmed, as were Pied Piper, No Highway and A Town Like Alice. For me, Shute's best work is Requiem for a Wren, and to my mind this is his horror novel. It is also the saddest book I have ever read, perhaps the only one that I have ever wept over, so much so that I doubt I will ever be able to read it again. It is a one sitting book, and the sitting resembles a wake. The desolation the book imparts is quite beyond description; but if you've ever felt compelled to make a promise to a fictional character, then the promise you make to Leading Wren Janet Prentice is one you will never break.

On a military training exercise Janet Prentice makes a terrible mistake - she shoots down a German plane, as she has been told it is her duty to do; but in this instance the plane is not full of bombs but instead is filled with political refugees who have somehow stolen the airplane and escaped Nazi-occupied Europe. An inquiry finds she acted in haste and she is punished accordingly. Soon afterwards her fiance is killed while on a commando raid in France. She is left with her memories, both of her career in the Wrens, and his affections. She also has his dog to care for, which she does, as lovingly as his memory deserves; until one day while walking the dog on the beach she blunders into some army exercises and the dog is crushed to death by a half-track. It seems to Janet by now that she is operating under a curse - and she looks back on the fateful incident of shooting down the plane as the moment her life turned against her. She is entirely lost, but the worst is yet to come...

All of this is contained within a flashback narrative told around two brothers, both of whom are in love with Janet at various points in her life; it is their intersection with her tragedy that gives the novel its bitter and bittersweet qualities. In the end the reader must take a personal stake and berate the brothers for their inability to save this woman, first from the war and then from herself. But even then it is not that she cannot be saved; it is that she will not be saved, and the final tragedy is a senseless race against time performed in a future tense.

In a strange way Requiem for a Wren has suffered the same fate at the hands of readers as L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between - the demonic aspect has been overlooked in favour of the drama resulting in powerful tales diminished by the attribution of coincidence or passion play or common spite. The truth is that these novels are fundamentally esoteric - and in the case of Requiem for a Wren, it goes only to confirm the calculation that if war is hell, then hell is other people.

The Bury Line: by Stephen Hargadon

Stephen Hargadon's The Bury Line brings new and terrible meaning to the networking skills required in the modern workplace. Though it displays a sure, light touch in tone, the humour is black throughout, in the manner of Gogol. In grand fact, the story is highly reminiscent of recurrent themes in much 19th century Russian literature, particular those of soul-destroying time-serving in the Imperial Civil Service. And if you think of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground as a sort of tube tale, then The Bury Line is the surface equivalent. Add to this Hargadon's marked talent for writing sympathetic characters and the story gains a good deal of its power to affect by way of shared disillusion. The characters are not laconic: they are laconics; a manifestation of progress reports and performance related pay. As they appear and disappear the reader becomes almost a nine-to-five familiar; and the story exists as a consultant meta-narrative to the daily grind.

Martin goes through a succession of line managers. Watching them come and go at the discretion of upper management, he notes each one's foibles, and how these prove to be fatal to much-fabled efficiencies. Martin understands that another job is often another life, an afterlife perhaps. At first he watches his colleagues despatched to this afterlife; then he begins to experience them in other incarnations, on other networks; perhaps as symptoms of his own burgeoning disillusionment. In turn this affects his own performance and his work begins to suffer. It does not go unnoticed...

And this perhaps is how the story most startled me - it is not that the work suffers: it is that the worker suffers it.

The Bury Line is published in Black Static Issue 42. Well worth reading.

I, Mengele: by Philip Challinor

Following on from the author's Foundations of the Twenty-First Century, Philip Challinor's I, Mengele is a rare look into the academic and culture wars of an alternative history. F21C created a world in which Britain had fallen to the Nazi's during World War 2 - it succeeded by sidestepping the gaming mechanics of most alternative histories, instead concentrating on a curiously deft fit of Nazi politics and philosophy into daily English life. The book avoided epiphanies, deliberately so, except perhaps the resolution of duty into horror by means of a narrative that I would describe as speak into memory; by that I mean again that history is written by the winner. 

I, Mengele is drawn from the same alternative history. It is a critical study of an epic film, conceived in Germany, financed in Hollywood, made in Britain. In our history Mengele is famous, or rather infamous. In that history Mengele is neither; victory has rendered him an almost anonymous functionary as the Holocaust has been overlooked by historians of the Reich for obvious reasons. All this is about to change as the cultural custodians of F21C take ownership of some of the less daring yet equally important actions of the war years. But how can mass-murder be reimagined as heroic service to the Reich?

Mengele's life and exploits are presented as epic fantasy, filmed in the manner of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Herein lies the power of the author's imagination: Mengele's victims are become CGI monsters. They are recreated as writhing hordes and dark inhuman masses. Jews, Russians, Gypsies... all are thrown into the CGI melting pot to emerge as the villains of epic fantasy as we know them - the faceless armies of Mordor, or the boundless hordes of Mallorea. As someone who has always found much fantasy to be faintly distasteful, this came as something of a revelation for me as it pinpointed my distress. Perhaps the most striking comparison to be made is with Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. It hadn't occurred to me until I read I, Mengele that Spinrad's novel can be read similarly - as an attack on the dehumanising East/West divide in fantasy fiction.

The book also provides fascinating background detail, including Churchill's cribbing of Hiro Hito in his surrender speech; and the timetable for the invasion of Russia being moved forward by three crucial weeks to June 1st, just time enough to get the Wermacht to Moscow before Christmas, 1941. It is interesting to compare such details with David Downing's The Moscow Option, another front rank World War 2 alternate.

Ultimately I, Mengele demonstrates that a commentariat can make almost anything acceptable if its cultural context is engineered to reflect the prevailing political consensus.

You can buy a copy of I Mengele here, and its companion volume The Foundations of the 21st Century here.

Reclamation Yard: by Paul Meloy

The boy Elliot sees monsters. They are not of his own imagining. Rather they are the creations of his father, escaped from a children's book he had published years before. Now Elliot's father has dementia and the monsters he imagined for his book visit Elliot like the visible symptoms of his father's declining mental state. They troll the countryside and invade Elliot's home. Eventually his father is institutionalised, but it makes little difference - the power of monsters is drawn from an imagination gone to the bad. But just as that imagination gives up monsters, so Elliot is able to recruit help from its pages, in the form of a girl and her hot-air balloon who rescues Elliot's father from the institution and returns him for a final confrontation - in the Reclamation Yard of the title, which is, beautifully, locked with a robot's heart.

There's not a great deal that I can add. A summary of Meloy's story is its best possible review, so striking is it in conception. For anyone who has had to deal at close quarters with dementia in a loved one, there is a great deal of consolation to be had here, right out of the marvellous.

You can read Reclamation Yard in Issue 40 of Black Static wherein it is stunningly illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

The Voivode: by Philip Challinor

There is cosmic horror; and then there is cosmic holocaust.The former is the sensibility of human frailty in an unknowable universe; the latter is the insanity that ensues from it.

In Philip Challinor's extraordinary novella, The Voivode, vampirism is in league with the pre-Galilean universe, and its enemy, the Church, is mired in the dark ages. The spacecraft Persephone, lifted into the void by the burning of ten thousand or so heretics, attempts to venture beyond Earth's furthest satellite, Sol. Instead it finds evidence of the Gililean universe in the form of a new planet that appears to orbit Sol; and it finds itself under siege from within, as a stowaway vampire lays waste to the crew with the help of the ship's doctor. Sangruel the vampire and the doctor change the Persephone's course to land on this new planet and claim it... but it claims them in the most curious and horrifying manner.

At the heart of The Voivode is a bloody transfusion; that is, a protectionist exchange of knowledge and of power. Earth's enlightenment is to be more of the same, on an industrial scale, as Challinor reveals the newly discovered planet to have been asset-stripped of its only resource, blood, which is, after all, the currency of vampires. Blood cells converted to coin.

The Voivode, like most of Challinor's work, is precisely rendered. There are touches of Ligotti and Lucius Shephard (The Golden comes to mind); in fact, the prose is better than the former and the conceit fully matches the latter. It is a major work of strange and vivid imagination, and in subjecting cosmic horror to economic rationalism, Challinor has found a wholly unique voice.

You can buy a copy of The Voivode here - I absolutely recommend that you do.

The Professor's Teddy Bear: by Theodore Sturgeon

 Theodore Sturgeon's bizarre story about a teddy bear which dips into the future of its human charge, causing murder and mayhem, has to be one of the first examples of the boy communicating with the man and vice versa. In this case, with diabolic intent. The messages escape safe missive form and are instead the dreams of the boy become the actions of the man. But the boy's dreams and therefore the man's actions are directed by the bear, in the best traditions of a warped toy. For the man, it means that he is in a permanent state of deja vu; which is, perhaps, the worst nightmare of all - he can remember being the boy, but the boy cannot remember being the man. The capsule of the story is the man's horror passed back to the boy. The boy doesn't understand the horror, but the bear does, revels in it, and wants more... until the man's outrage reaches back through the years and turns the boy against the bear.

The Professor's Teddy Bear finds Sturgeon at his most inventive and grotesque; it originally graced the pages of an edition of Weird Tales and is, perhaps, a story best described by reading it.

The Hunter: by David Case

The Hunter is probably David Case's great story of record. In it he demonstrates how men make beasts of themselves: it is not that they are defying their nature; it is, perhaps, that they are giving way to it.

Beginning with a series of terrifying killings in a remote part of rural England, which leaves the local constabulary baffled, the story switches to a Gentlemen's Club in London, where a retired big game hunter laments the company he keeps. Weatherby is the sort of man for whom civilisation is a retirement, a well-earned rest. His quiet life is not at all jaded because his life has been unquiet. His past permits him the luxury of a drink and a pipe because it so often placed those pleasures in doubt; those around him have no such claim to make and so are jaded by lack of doubt, by lack of danger. He is unsurprised when the police seek his help in catching the murderer, whom they now believe to be a wild beast rather than a man. Weatherby accepts the charge, not in the spirit of a last hurrah, but as a favour to his past, which has given him a splendid retirement.

The case is not straight-forward. Weatherby's calculation of tracks suggests two beasts at work, or one beast that transforms into another while in pursuit of its prey. This leads to panic as the press speculate about a Werwolf. People withdraw to their homes as the police roam the area in an increasingly desperate cordon. A killing indoors suggests no-one is safe. Weatherby obsessively stalks the fields and lanes, convinced he is being watched and stalked in turn. He is painfully aware of a fact that the police seem unwilling to act upon - that at the centre of the killing zone stands the stately home of another hunter: Bryon. Weatherby and Byron have history. They have a past. And it is that past which now erupts into the gentle countryside of England, as Byron becomes a murder suspect in Weatherby's mind, and Byron baits Weatherby about his retirement, which he insists has not been earned as Weatherby is a man of all reasonable precaution. Hunt without harness, advises Byron, stalk with only one bullet and the beast will show itself to you... a sporting stalk.

The Hunter is in some ways an academic exercise - two old hunters, re-fighting past campaigns, pitting two different philosophies of gamesmanship against each other for old times' sake. But the games are played out by spending other people's lives; and it is here that the story is most affecting - because Case writes superbly about people. There are no incidental lives to be lost in The Hunter - a fact that is lost to Byron, but not to Weatherby. Their final duel pits a force of nature against a force of human nature.

The Hunter is contained, or to be found rather, in the Twelfth Pan Book of Horror Stories, where it accounts for 82 out of 190 pages.

Archie Roy, RIP

Sadly not much remarked upon was the passing, in December 2012, of Scottish writer and academic, Archie Roy. Best known as Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University, Roy published a series of bizarre, esoteric novels during the 60s and 70s; at one time these books were among the most borrowed from UK libraries - at least, that's what it says on the rear cover of my copy of Devil in the Darkness. It is almost impossible to describe these novels without resorting to comparisons; John Buchan meets L.P. Davies perhaps. I will make an effort to review some of Roy's novels in the near future; it's about time they saw print again.

Roy was also partly responsible for the construction of a modern stone circle at Sighthill in Glasgow in 1979, now under threat of demolition by the ever destructive Glasgow City Council. Besides being a superb addition to Scotland's built heritage, something very rare since the 1960s, the circle is a fitting memorial to Roy's unique and wild talents: let's hope it stays.

Deep Dark Green: by John Connolly

Among strange stories there are some stories so strange that they approach the frozen region locked inside David Copperfield's heart. John Connolly's Deep Dark Green is one such story.

In a valley town lives a creature which feeds on the lives of the young. After unspeakable tragedy the townspeople flood the valley, leaving the creature chained inside its dwelling, at the bottom of a new lake. But it lives on, luring more victims into the viscous waters that are now its home. The narrator details one such incident, when he and his young lover ignore word of mouth warnings as old wives' tales and stray to the edge of the lake to make love. His lover enters the lake naked and does not return. He follows, diving deep into curious water, and sees an ordinary cottage sunk into mud, and decorated by tumbrils of weed that are the bodies of its victims; his lover already the trophy of an old monstrous wife, and his young love become an old wives' tale.

A beautiful story, impeccably conceived and developed; short, powerful and tragic. The prose is as viscous as the lake at the surface, but the deeper the story goes, the more intense is the sensation of holding one's breath as Connolly beaches his consonants and drowns his vowels. As context I was reminded of the old Welsh film, The Last Days of Dolwyn, in which a valley town is flooded for different reasons, with similar results.  

Deep Dark Green is contained in John Connolly's collection of stories, Nocturnes, a rather outstanding volume which places him in a strange, welcome place.

Barbary: by Jackson Kuhl

Two-Legged Tobacco

Appearing in the latest issue of British horror zine Black Static (Issue 31) is Jackson Kuhl's medicinal mummy story, Barbary.

Suffering from a degenerative condition of the eyes, our protagonist, an unexcited sailor, seeks relief through his pipe -- smoking neither tobacco nor opium, but a blend of the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians, sold to him by the wizened types who populate the back streets of any port of call. Kuhl inventively details the curing process of this exotic smoke, throwing in a hierarchy of kings to be crumbled into a bowl and sucked through a stem of centuries: the ceremonies around embalming and burial add something to pleasure and pain relief, and our protagonist finds his tastes to be aristocratic and expensive. However, a poor sailor needs as must, and he often finds himself resorting to a more contemporary blend, made up from the human refuse he finds in back alleys. In turn this leads to physical marking out of our sailor as an outcast, beyond the pale -- as his tastes decline, so does his conscience, leading him closer to the corruption of the ultimate blend, Anubis Gold, or pwned cannibalism.

Kuhl vivedly evokes a dissipated waterfront atmosphere; the cumulative effect of his prose deposits in the memory an arresting still from any 1930s double feature film -- perhaps, Mr Moto's Last Warning b/w The Saint Takes Over. There are wonderful echoes of Cornell Woolrich's story of physical and moral degeneration, Jane Brown's Body. And, as a pipe-smoker myself, I raise my Peterson to the author who has written an authentic horror story which works through artifacts rather than artifice, and which delights and surprises throughout. This is the first Jackson Kuhl story I've had the pleasure to read and, I hope, not the last. Well worth investing in a copy of this issue of Black Static to read Barbary alone.

Incidentally, the story is nicely illustrated by Ben Baldwin, who has chosen a bent pipe...