A Sort Of Review: Lost Places (Collection) and Quiet Houses (Collection)
The Literary Architect
It’s been a long time since I read two collections in a row by the same author. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I can’t recall it ever happening before. Usually I’d take a break after having finished a collection, but such was the pleasure afforded by Lost Places, I had to jump right back in with the second collection, QuietHouses.
So, first up, the first part of a three segment ‘sort of review’ of the debut collection from Simon Kurt Unsworth ‘Lost Places.’
Next Saturday and Sunday, parts two and three will be posted.
The following stories are by no means the ones I thought superior to others in the collection. I thought all were equally entertaining, frightening and eye-opening in their originality. In an area of the horror/supernatural genre usually adept at producing traditional, but hoary old tropes gone unappetizingly sour over repeated misuse, it was refreshing to get a different take on the whole thing.A Different Morecambe
I’m partial to the idea of stories being set in seaside resorts or coastal towns, but I don’t recall too many that made such extraordinary use of the everyday in such a uncomfortable and malevolent way. The simple tale of a man and his toddler son taking a morning weekend drive out to the seaside town only to discover an alternative Morecambe, in which it’s not only the buildings that appear different, but the people also. The story makes superb use of knowing how to heighten tension suggestively rather than signposting why. Chilling child dialogue and great descriptive stretches of beautifully crafted prose make this a standout opening story for any collection.
When The World Goes Quiet
Zombie, or virus stories as some people are calling them these days, are ten-a-penny, but Unsworth’s take of Romero cliché gone overboard is marvelously free of expectant bursts of gore. It is an exquisitely detailed story of love, devotion and survival.
Intelligent, compassionate, and filled with a chilling authentic bleakness that builds towards awful, but unavoidable realization, When The World Goes Quiet picks up where other stories simply tail off. Don’t’ expect hordes of corpses corralling innocents down deserted high streets, or units of trigger happy squaddies running amok among the civilians. This is a story of quiet desperation, and overwhelming emotion. Just as importantly it’s about taking for granted the privilege and comfort of 21st century life we barely contemplate or recognize.
When The World Goes Quiet is the kind of story that horror fans and writers use to beat back the naysayers of genre, a story we cite as upholding the worth and values of the genre, an example of literary horror doing what it should do, scaring us, but also doing its best to say something meaningful about ourselves.
Make no mistake, Unsworth is not sermonizing here, he makes it clear through his lead character that he is as culpable as the next man.
The Station Waiting Room
One of Unsworth’s abilities as a writer much like author Nicholas Royle, and to some extent, Ramsey Campbell, is his instinct for getting a story from the most innocuous of settings (this will become ever more apparent with his next collection, the brilliantly claustrophobic Quiet Houses). He’s takes inspiration from mundane and dismal architectural remnants, what may seem like a mere flourish for the backdrop, so unappealing that you may wonder why he would bother, only to watch (read) with jaw-dropping astonishment as he quietly goes about reconstructing a wholly brilliant, different and terrifyingly aesthetic vision from what we perceived as the simplest of materials.
Unsworth is quite clearly a literary architect.
In ‘The Station Waiting Room’ a work weary commuter becomes the reluctant audience to an old man’s seemingly harmless recollection of the small provincial town he commutes to every day, the origins for which appears to be an abandoned and forgotten station waiting room.
Filled with atmospheric detail of Britain during the Second World War, effectively realistic colloquial language, and the inevitable emergence of a supernatural force Clive Barker would be proud of, Unsworth takes his ordinary surroundings and douses them in an unforgiving darkness.
If anything, Unsworth proves his range in his story, an architect indeed.
Next week I’ll be posting about the truly terrifying (in my opinion one of the finest short stories written in the last ten years of the genre) The Pennine Tower Restaurant and the World Fantasy nominated The Church On The Island, plus several other frightening stories from Lost Places.
Until then. Thank you for reading.
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