>>Nostalgia For Infinity

As I sit down to write this review in mid-August, 2011, the riots that have erupted across Britain over the past week have begun to subside, the energies that drove them dissipating in the face of a coherent police response and that most British of demotivators, the weather. But the anger, social exclusion, vanishing economic possibilities, lack of faith in police relations and sense of political betrayal that initially produced this eruption among Britain’s poorest urban communities remain.

Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove plumbs the fertile ground of such forgotten areas, its dark tale derived as much from the existential horror of hopeless or wasted lives as the natural and supernatural forces that prey upon them.

Lana and Hailey, single mother and daughter, have been forced into a life on an estate – the eponymous Concrete Grove – which surrounds the Needle, a derelict and sinister Brutalist block of flats. The Needle pierces the heart of a community racked with poverty, desperation and accompanying social issues like drug abuse, violence and entrenched petty criminals with a penchant for cruelty. One such ambitious thug is Monty Bright, a loan shark obsessed with the history of the Grove. Monty takes an interest in Lana and Hailey, using Lana’s debt to him as leverage while he tries to understand the growing connection between Hailey and the Grove.

A few roads over, just outside the estate, a middle-aged man named Tom supports and cares for his bed-bound and clinically obese wife. Tortured by his own demons and a sense of being trapped in his own life, Tom finds himself drawn to Lana and Hailey and by extension involved in whatever plans Bright and the Grove have in store.

The Concrete Grove’s most interesting conceit is its fusion of old mythologies with present realities. The backstory describes how the Needle and surrounding estate were built over an ancient Pagan site of nature-worship. The power of the old Grove remains but it has been corrupted by the pathologies of the human community that now surrounds it. Forces bleed out into our world, and not all of them are as ambivalent as those the Pagans once worshipped.

Although the actions of McMahon’s characters may not always convince – Hailey in particular makes a few leaps of faith and illogic that I struggled with – and Tom is one of those frustratingly frustrated middle-aged characters whose internal monologue is dominated by a desire to fuck anything with a blouse and a pulse, they are on the whole a sympathetic bunch who draw us into the worlds he has built around the iconic Needle. The thematic juxtaposition on which the novel is based is maintained throughout: England’s past and present, the powers produced by suburban sickness and health, all revolving around by the ambiguous forces of nature. The novel’s conclusion reflects this state of thematic balance well, although it’s also possible to read in a much more traditional horror motif.

The Concrete Grove itself clearly has more stories to tell. By the book’s close it remains a source of substantial mystery, and the desperate poverty and anti-social behaviour that surrounds it remains unaddressed and ignored by the wider world.

384pp paperback, published by Solaris Books.

[This review originally published in Vector #268, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. This version of the review precedes the published version being reformatted for printing but is otherwise identical.]

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Well, here’s something I’ve been meaning to write for about five months. The film Pontypool is pretty old news now: I originally heard about it in early 2010 due to its appearance on a ‘Best Horror of 2009′ list, and its original theatrical release was almost two years ago. Question of timeliness aside, I think Pontypool is one of the most interesting horror films I’ve seen in some years and easily worthy of being written about.

The film is almost entirely set within a single building, the local radio station of Pontypool, Ontario (a real and otherwise not notable town), focusing on a handful of core characters. These are Grant Mazzy, the recently hired, hard-drinking, cynical yet idealistic host of an early morning show; Sydney Briars, Mazzy’s Producer and handler – constantly trying to keep Mazzy on-message – and Laurel Anne, a production assistant recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Other characters are briefly featured, some only appearing as calls in to the station.

To briefly recap the film’s plot: Mazzy is on his way into work in the midst of a snowstorm. Whilst waiting at lights he encounters an apparently distressed woman who repeats the words “who are you” at him before vanishing into the night. (Later, her voice can be heard again, near the station – a portent of things to come.) Ignoring this odd event Mazzy heads on to the run-down station and prepares for another night’s work: a bottle of whiskey, arguments with Sydney about what he should be talking about, inane reportage on local colour, and mild flirting with Laurel-Anne.

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This isn’t really a review so much as a “Wot I Think” – a quick run-through of some half-developed ideas and reasons why I liked or didn’t like this film. I’ve been arguing with a few friends about this movie and figured I may as well appropriate this argument for Great Justice, i.e. a post on my poor, neglected blog.

So, Jonathan McCalmont has been writing alternative ballots for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category of the Hugo Awards (an award perhaps best known for the controversy it causes by being utterly uncontroversial). Triangle is one of the films he included on the list and one of those which I checked out for myself.

The basic concept of Triangle is simple: a small yacht is capsized in an unusual storm and the few survivors are picked up by a cruise liner, the Aeolus, which appears to be uncrewed – until a masked figure begins picking them off with a shotgun. It’s not long before even weirder shit starts happening. Okay, from this point onwards there are going to be spoilers so if you want to check out the film free of preconceptions, stop reading now.

What makes Triangle unusual is its use of mechanics familiar to anyone who’s seen Groundhog Day or Primer – the sequences of events aboard the Aeolus, culminating in the murder of almost all of the survivors, continually repeat. Single mother Jess is the only survivor who appears to be an actor in these events rather than a recurrent victim, and as such she sets about trying to change events – to save the survivors, or to prevent them from boarding the ship in the first place.

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It’s a while since I reviewed anything from British genre publisher Abaddon Books (see here), and indeed since I read anything from them. I’ve got a certain measure of admiration for what they’re trying to accomplish but the fiction I’d read from them to date had not exactly blown me away. However, I didn’t count on a friend pressing this book into my hands and insisting that I must read it. “I thought it would be rubbish,” she said. “But it has zombie elephants!” She did, originally, pick it up on the basis of the barely-clothed “barbarian” woman on the cover (check out that underboob – now that’s what I call a literary quality, phnarr phnarr).

I think these two facts tell you just about all you need to know about the unique selling points of Anno Mortis.

Oh, sarcasm aside it’s fun enough. Here’s how it goes: in the age of Emperor Caligula (casual mass murderer and serial fucker of all things with holes), the barbarian warrior Boda (as in Boudica, get it?!) is brought to Rome to fight in the coliseum as a gladiator. She quickly gets caught up in some shady business involving dark rites and the bodies of dead gladiators. Around the same time, the feckless playboy and wannabe playright Petronius is forced into the apprenticeship of the Senator Seneca, who it turns out is involved in some shady business involving dark rites and the bodies of dead gladiators. I hate to spoil it for you, but they toootally end up sharing some adventures and unlikely chemistry!

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Steven Deighan has been plugging away in the indie horror scene for almost a decade now, and published his first collection in 2006 (which I reviewed for now-defunct site Yet Another Book Review). It was a promising if unpolished set of stories and I felt it was worth keeping an eye on Deighan’s work. Now, along with illustrator Terry Cooper, he brings us a short graphic novel titled ‘Feels Like Stephen King’. At a bit under 40 pages it’s more of a graphic short story than a graphic novel, but who’s counting? Aside from hardcore comics fans who are already grumbling at my use of the term “graphic novel”, of course…

Deighan’s story focuses on a somewhat autobiographical subject: Eric Bain, a young horror writer who is struggling to get his work noticed by a publisher. As the story opens he receives a returned manuscript in the post, and at first is filled with anger at another rejection. Once he reads the cover letter, however, he realises that DM Publications wish to publish his novel ‘The Dying Game’. As his relationship with the head of the publishing house develops, however, Eric finds that his life is beginning to resemble something out of one his stories.

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What’s this? Flash fiction on a Monday? This doesn’t seem right, not right at all.

But perhaps it represents an act of contrition. Perhaps the author has been lax, of late, has failed to write or post any fiction to this blog for some time. Shall we say four weeks? I believe we shall.

And perhaps the form that this act of contrition will take is the posting of a piece of flash fiction every day of this coming week, up to and including the now-traditional Friday, thereby restoring the karmic, fictitious balance for 2009.

Perhaps the level of quality demanded of the form this act takes may drop as a result of such pressures, but certainly the spirit of experimentation, the desire to push the authorial self, is as it should be in the established tradition of Friday flash fiction.

We shall see.

We shall see if the author can meet his own deadlines, yes?

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