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.