A Kind Of Review: Simon Kurt Unsworth’s ‘Lost Places’ and ‘Quiet Houses.’
The Pennine Tower Restaurant
The Pennine Tower Restaurant is one of the most frightening short stories to come out of the genre in the last ten years. Whether the story is true will make very little difference to the reader. You might read the story on a crowded train, or in the comfort of your own home, either way the strength of the story will have the same shivering inducing effect regardless of the environment. As always Unsworth’s choice of location is inspired, a motorway restaurant reminiscent of a flying saucer caught in mid-flight atop a concrete column, an eyesore to some, a delightful relic for others, but which is in fact home to an ambiguous and terrifying supernatural entity. The power of the story lies in the meticulous matter-of-fact narration. The narrator of the story, or as I prefer to think of him, a compiler and documenter, lays out the story in wholly believable terms, enumerating and listing the names and the events as they are related to him, either through first hand sources or witnesses to those unfortunates who never made it out alive. The story feels like, and is, a throwback to the ‘true’ ghost stories of the 1970’s, those anthologies and collections which adorned many of the libraries of my own particular youth. And yet Unsworth makes it all feel undeniably modernistic in its approach. The story is layered in such a way, that the narrative ‘visibly thickens’ as the tension becomes unbearable to the point that mere discomfort is secondary. The authenticity of the story is not the point here, atmosphere is. BUT, if this story happened to be fiction, then this is all the more a success in terms of writing and effect for Unsworth. Smart and intelligently put together, the result is a genuinely frightening piece of modern horror tipping its hat to the past with elegant aplomb.
The Church On The Island
Rightly nominated for a World Fantasy Award, The Church On The Island tells the story of a young woman on holiday in the final throes of a disintegrating relationship who unconsciously finds herself looking for ‘something else,’ which arrives in the form of an old church in small islet off the shore of the Greek town she’s holidaying at. From the start Unsworth displays his eye for capturing the truth of relationships on the decline, carefully employing a empathic restraint which presents us with fully rounded people rather than the staple dramatics of characters so often a feature in genre stories. Unsworth cares deeply about his characters, even those we might not sympathize with so much.
It would be remiss of me to give too much away about the story, other than this not your run-of-the-mill haunted building story, in which the architectural outweighs the importance of the emotional. As much a character study as it is a supernatural story, it reads like Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft got together and produced this startling gem.
Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Second Collection: Quiet Houses
Unsworth’s new collection is a departure from his first in terms of structure and narrative. On the surface it appears we have a portmanteau offering wrapped up in 21st century trappings. But on closer inspection what we have is something much more emotionally involving. That’s not to knock portmanteau story collections. I love them, they remind me of childhood. But Quiet Houses is a much more sophisticated collection of interlocking stories, whose significance in meaning is not reached until the very last story. I have chosen to write about three of the stories from this collection. And like the first collection this is not a reflection on the other stories, merely an expression of those I thought I could do justice when writing about them.
First up:
Richard Nakata is collecting ‘evidence’ from people who have answered an advertisement asking for eye-witness reports to supernatural events.
The Elms, Morecambe: (the title of each story is the name of a place or building or location) is perhaps the least aggressive of the supposed hauntings in all of the stories in Quiet Houses, and yet retains the right to be judged as the most potent and deeply unsettling of the accounts. The Elms takes the oft used haunted hotel, and the oft used ghost that haunts these buildings, and completely reworks the idea that any haunting, no matter how often viewed with good humour by those who’ve become accustomed to its presence (such as hotel staff), is not an amusing anecdote for late night ghost story telling, but is quite capable of becoming a permanent haunting in which the unwilling, and well-meaning victim, finds themselves on the very edge of madness.
This story uses simplicity in making the seemingly innocuous palpably overbearing. What appears to start out as one kind of tale entirely transforms, so that by the last scene in the seaside café as the eye-witness leaves with their ghost in tow (or so we are led to believe), it is not wonder or fascination but outward dread which permeates the story, and the reader.
The Ocean Grand, North West Coast:
Probably my favourite of the collection. Three architectural restoration experts sleeping over on in a turn of the 20th century hotel for which they’ve been hired to evaluate (among other things), do not realize the supernatural residue and ghosts literally waiting within its very walls. Here Unsworth works his considerable talent for detail, the Ocean View brought to life not just by the ghosts in the story, but by the intricate descriptions of the physical. The reader will come away from this story feeling like they’ve just been stepped out of The Ocean View.
Beyond St Patrick’s Chapel, Heysham Head:
The conceit of this story might very well in the hands of a less accomplished writer have stumbled into unintentional comedy. Footprints that pursue. Or invisible supernatural entities whose footprints are the only evidence we have. And yet again, Unsworth faultlessly builds and constructs each particular scene, each preceding scene outdoing the next. Unsworth shows why he’s one of the most exciting and innovative writers working in horror today. It’s to his credit that he manages to whip up such a momentum of rapidly overwhelming horror from the simplest, and on brief inspection, the least worrying of hauntings.
To understand Quiet Houses the stories should be read in order. That isn’t to say they cannot be read as stand alone stories, they can, and undoubtedly will be, but I urge anybody to buys this wonderful book to start from the beginning.
Final Word: Just to reiterate. This isn’t a review. It’s a sort of review. And PLEASE go out and buy Simon’s collections, and anything else he writes. He deserves a wide fan base/readership for the excellence of his prose, the tightness of his plots, and the genuinely frightening, if not, terrifying atmosphere he creates.
Simon Kurt Unsworth is relatively new on the horror literature block, but he’s certainly going to become an established and a respected name.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Saturday, 26 November 2011
A Sort Of Review: Lost Places (Collection) and Quiet Houses (Collection) By Simon Kurt Unsworth
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.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Paul D Brazill's Collection: Brit Grit
A Sort Of Review
(This is not intended to reveal plot points of the following publication).
The Author: Paul D Brazill.
The Book: Brit Grit: Crime Fiction From Britain’s Grubby Underbelly.
Paul D Brazill’s ‘Brit Grit’: Crime Fiction From Britain’s Grubby Underbelly is exactly what it says, the grubby underbelly of Britain. Whilst the stories contained within this incredibly enjoyable collection are steeped in the atmospherics of noir, they are also paradoxically an ugly and authentic expose of people, the places they inhabit, and an age old adherence to a code of ethics long gone the way of the dinosaur.
While Brazill’s stories are laced with a perpetually ironic humor, the razor sharp comedy is in itself one of the many substantial layers overlapping an astute and dazzling honesty, which daringly approaches the social order and structure of the lower fraternities of the criminal hierarchy. He probably won’t admit to that, but the underlying concerns permeating his work, I, acknowledge despite the chuckles his work produces. That’s not to say Brazill doesn’t know how to pen a crime story in the classic vein he so obviously demonstrates. He does. His world is an alcohol fuelled paranoid road trip through places best forgotten by the characters that sometimes manage to stumble out into the wreckage of their survival only to accept that escape is not forthcoming, nor is the redemption they may inadvertently pursue.
Brazill is a writer who embraces his love of crime fiction and gives it his odd skewed bent, investing it with a laconic twist of comedy, and then firing it out into the drink sozzled night. He’s a hell of a writer intent on giving the reader an eyeful of the underbelly...whether they like it or not. Brazill is an upcoming name in crime fiction, and on the basis of this collection it’s not hard to see why. Cracking fiction from a writer destined for the top of the crime royalty tree.
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