Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Six tales, where often the setting is night-time and bleak streets. Even when the writing evokes beauty, as in Lying in a Field, there is something of the Gothic interwoven.

If Gothic, then it is only the final story, The Experience of Philip Waterford, that outwardly makes use of the genre’s ways of showing a character’s isolation – the letter as a narrative device – as Bram Stoker does. Otherwise the settings are modern and urban, most prominently so in In Posterum, a timely account where Artificial Intelligence forces its inventor to become complicit in an AI-predicted death. The theme of characters meeting their double, their doppelganger, is present here; elsewhere, in Richmond Road, the horror increases as protagonist George attempts to cigarette-smoke away a long freezing wait, but instead is forced to look along the street, at a series of disturbing images, that follow on from an unaccounted-for explosion at a neighbouring house.

A Liminal Sense  is Kafkaesque rather than Gothic. When the ordinary-joe hero is gripped by an unattractive and unavoidable smell, detectable to no one but himself, he leaves behind the liminal world of ordinariness for ever. His lover’s scent brings momentary respite, but that too mixes in with the surrounding stench. The horror continues, unmitigated by love.

A crushing and incomprehensible evil lurks at the edge of most of these stories. The devotion of the couple in Lying in a Field  confronts evil’s sombre effects, through the faith in each other that they discover. The image of the dance, of the tiny ballerina glimpsed deep in the girl’s eyes, suggests beauty even beyond that of their shared love. As the couple return to the edges of the suburbs – and therefore the city – we are left hopeful that the union between them, amid a gorgeous sunset, will prove stronger than the darkness that awaits.