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) 

By Simon Kurt Unsworth

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.

                                    

Lost Places(Collection Title)

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 21^st 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.

  

http://www.screamingdreams.com/ezine/Halloween2011.pdf

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005YFBMHQ/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_ask_aU4gC.1VT8SH5

http://www.spinetinglermag.com/2011/11/03/laughing-at-the-death-grin-review/

http://pdbrazill.blogspot.com/2011/11/in-music-there-is-always-shadow-by.html?spref=fb

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.

Black Country by Joel Lane (Nightjar Press).

A Sort Of Review: Joel Lane’s ‘Black Country.’

 (The aim of this short ‘sort of review’ is simply to expand on a few thoughts I had on reading the following publication. There will be no spoilers divulging important plot details.)

The Book/The Author (chapbook from Nightjar Press):

Black Country yet again shows why Joel Lane is still one of the most respected, admired and  important writers working in and out of the genre today.

The Plot:

A police officer with an interest in strange cases returns to his home town to investigate a series of juvenile related crimes. Perhaps the local children are behind a spate of break-ins, but identifying the culprits proves more difficult than at first thought.

The Background:

The town is a dying industrialized relic, literally forgotten after becoming absorbed into the boundaries of neighboring regions. It’s demise, already precipitated in memory by the investigating officer, is further echoed in the few, unhappy memories he has of his parents, and the subsequent emotional fall-out. This is not a happy homecoming.

Thoughts:

Lane shows how the oft-used minefield of the literary ‘homecoming’ can be artfully rechanneled into new and surprisingly fresh directions, often wrong footing the reading while delighting them at the same time. 

The story has an honest melancholy about it, rising above the bittersweet irony one might expect. There is something far more penetrating at work in the story, coming impossibly close to realizing how people genuinely perceive their past.

(The cover of the chapbook aptly details a map with pieces missing).

The reader is never forced into the disingenuous territory of over-dramatizing the nostalgia or the hurt, but focuses with intense scrutiny on the things which connect us to the past. Perhaps people of a certain generation might identify more readily with the ‘objects’ and miscellaneous symbols of Black Country,’ but the dark magic simmering in the prose of this beautifully described narrative, surely resonates with anybody over a certain age – that age being one when we are able to reflect with perhaps cooler yet infinitely more honest appraisals of who we once were.

Joel Lane has long been one of my literary heroes. That he has remained one of the genre’s truest pioneers, a deeply intelligent writer, highly principled and highly articulate of everything going on in our world, is always reflected beautifully, honestly and believably in his work.   

Black Country, a story in which memory and the heart might prove to be the same thing, in which capturing youth and childhood and holding them up to the disintegrating light of analysis prove to be their undoing.

A sort of review. No spoilers intended.

What I Thought: Antwerp by Nicholas Royle.

In Nicholas Royle’s gloriously dark, and stylishly unpredictable ‘Antwerp,’ the world of film-making is once again brought to life with Royle’s unnerving eye for authentic detail. This time we delve into the low-budget film-making of an American auteur working in Antwerp, Belgium. As with the Director’s Cut, Royle expertly juggles the story’s narrative from the viewpoint of several, remarkably believable characters, all of whom by-pass the role of supportive props.

This novel is a delicious labyrinth of plotting and mesmerizing intensity, in which real life characters mix with fictional ones. In ‘The Director’s Cut’ the abandoned cinemas and derelict buildings of London played a significant role in themselves, those crumbling edifices ‘perhaps’ reflecting the interior worlds of the characters who stumbled through them unaware. In Antwerp, where governmental law prohibits and protects the demolition of buildings much to the delight of online enthusiasts exploring their decaying architecture, the buildings can again be said to be architectural mirrors in which the questionable sanity of the protagonist(s) vacillate ominously in directions not yet clear to us.

Antwerp is an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut in which we have four characters from the first novel taking centre stage. But Antwerp, while dealing with the subject of cinema - scrutinizing its effects, its history, its meaning for those who are compelled to make it, and ultimately, those who are drawn into its world – while initially moving along lines perhaps similar to the first novel, eventually makes a sudden and jarring detour through a landscape of intensely claustrophobic dereliction, in which layers of meaning are peeled away to reveal more than was previously suspected.

The book snakes its way through a minefield of complex and daring ideas. Obsession, the effects of abuse, personalities within personalities, the enduring role of art, perspective, and national identity, all of which take place in Antwerp as a series of brutal and unexplained murders plague the city.   

The elegance of Royle’s prose superbly articulates the pace of the story, conjuring up a world of half-light, of cinematic shadow, from which a contemporary noir modernity hangs threateningly above the characters.

As a small side note: Antwerp uses one of the characters from The Director’s Cut to re-examine past actions not given full scope in the first book. If this sounds a little mystifying, somewhat vague, it’s because I’m afraid the slightest clue might reveal important plot developments.  But, personally, I was delighted that such odd actions as demonstrated at the start of The Director’s Cut, were now fully explored to such startling and disturbing effect in Antwerp.

Nicholas Royle’s Antwerp is every inch the achievement that The Director’s Cut is. I would even go so far as to say that its ending is possibly one of the most demonstrative examples in which  readers’ expectation are well and truly confounded.    

I would recommend this book for just about anybody. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read in recent years that defies genre expectation, occupying its own literary, and commercial genre. A wonderfully, thought provoking novel by one of  most original and talented writers out there.   

The Director's Cut by Nicholas Royle

A Sort of Review of Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut.’

(The aim of this review is not to divulge major plot points or to even give a comprehensive overview of the novel, but is an attempt to try to communicate some of the feelings and thoughts I had on reading the novel).

(1) Cinema, perspective, plot.

Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Director’s Cut’ is seemingly rooted in the familiar traditions of the thriller novel with cinema as its most prominent and eye-catching backdrop. The story unfolds within a framework of interconnecting viewpoints, a series of subtle, multiple narratives.

Four film students make an experimental film of a man committing suicide. This terrible event transforms the apparent conventions of the novel into one in which psychologically much is left to the reader to decide, regardless of how much emotional and interior story we are supposedly given. Years later the police find the body of the suicide, and the much older protagonists are now forced to confront more than just their guilt.

Part of the delight of this novel is how Royle refuses to centralize his narrative with one character. It’s a risky technique, yet Royle does what very few other writers can, relating the story within the relative physical narrowness of just three hundred pages.

(2) Location

London and train stations (derelict or operative), not to mention the ordinary streets of flats and shops and pubs that make up the teeming metropolis, become a topography of reference points to cinema, imagined or real. But this is London as lived in, one in which its  movements are felt like tides of gradually accelerating fatality, the plot entwined about the bland objects and relics of London now, and London ‘then.’

Old abandoned cinemas, train stations, depots, derelict buildings, attain a sense of architectural importance to the story that changes their day to day significance into something far more mysterious. There are layers to these buildings as there are to the story, which doesn’t just stop with the physical aspects of mortar or brickwork or even their demolition.

Royle has taken London at its most recognizable and injected it with a skewed perspective. It’s London, but perhaps not the one we wish to admit to.

(3) Characters

Paradoxically Royle creates four protagonists who are understandable in their motivations, actions, and lack of actions, and despite their flaws, or perhaps because of them, generates contradictory feelings towards them.

Most importantly it’s being able to recognize these so called opposing forces of emotional disparate qualities which gives the characters the impetus to do what they do, and to allow us to believe that ‘real people in the real world’ would also develop and evolve towards such questionable, yet almost inevitable conclusions.

 (4) The Novel

The Director’s Cut is a thriller, but not one in which traditionalism of genre is allowed to play out the way commercial Hollywood might envision. It succeeds in bending and deviating expected routes of plot for a heavier sense of character, undoing them and somehow resolving them along the way. The old adage that nothing is what it seems, is doubly enforced here, but not at the expense of the importance of the story. 

The Director’s Cut was first published in 2000. I read it this year. I expect people will still be reading it many more years to come.

                                                                              ***

Upcoming ‘sort of reviews’:

Next week I will be reviewing Antwerp, an unofficial sequel of sorts to The Director’s Cut. There will also be a short mini-interview with Nicholas Royle about the novels.

I’ll also be talking about Joel Lane’s marvelous chapbook ‘Black Country.’

The week after I will be doing an overview of two of the best crime writers out there, Paul D Brazill and Julia Madeleine.

Thanks for reading.

Mountains Of Smoke Reviewed by Paul D Brazill

Mountains Of Smoke reviewed by 'the noir Bukowski' Paul D Brazill

Mountains Of Smoke by Frank Duffy

Mountains Of Smoke by Frank Duffy. Published by Sideshow Press.

Frank Duffy Showcase by Steve Jensen

Writer Steve Jensen's Frank Duffy Showcase

Julia Madeleine reviews The Signal Block

Noir writer Julia Madeleine reviews The Signal Block & Other Stories

Ginger Nuts Of Horror review Mountains Of Smoke

A great review of Mountains Of Smoke at Ginger Nuts Of Horror.

Interview At Ginger Nuts Of Horror

Frank Duffy interviewed by Jim McLoud at Ginger Nuts Of Horror.

Welcome The The Signal Block

The Signal Block is the blog of dark fiction writer Frank Duffy.

Lets see how it goes.