While true household names in the comics industry are few and far between, Joe Simon stands among the greats. My Life in Comics is an autobiographical account of the life and times of Simon, most notably the co-creator of Captain America, and the first Editor-in-Chief of what would become Marvel Comics. A true legend of the business.

Born in 1913 and growing up in the midst of the great depression, Simon was not the shy, put-upon nerdish type many might expect. Tall, athletic, and something of a tearaway in his teenage years, Simon’s creative streak appeared to be forged by a desire for success rather than some pure artistic expression. Even during his school days Simon exhibited a surprising commercial mindset, selling sketches and even gaining small commissions. It might not sound as romantic as some creators stories, but the time in which Simon made his early strides in his career makes perfect sense. He was a true professional, with a real gift for identifying not just what was good, but what his audience wanted.

Often, My Life in Comics reads like a conversation with a grandparent, benefitting and suffering for it in almost equal measure. The nostalgic look at times gone by is a great framing device evoking some strong imagery, and the personal anecdotes that Simon draws upon are genuinely entertaining. On occasions however, these anecdotes – charming as they are – feel like an aside to what comic fans will really want to get in to, and can feel slightly detached and superfluous.

Of course, there are moments when these small episodes and moments make for insightful reading. The opening pages in which Simon recalls the visit of a war veteran to his school class details what would become an early key in to Simon’s most famous creation. Reading about his days as a newspaper illustrator is also an example of an important and formative moment, such as his work depicting the strong muscular boxers of the time, while capturing an air of individuality and personality in each portrait. There’s a strange otherworldliness to these tales that make them really fun to discover aside from their obvious importance to Simon’s later work in the comicbook business.

As the book progresses, and the comic industry that we all know and understand begins to take shape, the tale becomes much more relatable, detailing his interactions with the likes of Kirby and Lee, and also the ongoing legal issues he faced with regards to the ownership rights of his characters and work. Until this point, the world in which Simon presents makes for strange reading. The depression era is so commonly depicted in fictional works that it can be difficult to take in Simon’s recollections of his school days as actually being in the same world as our own, but it is fitting for a man, who’s now in his nineties, was such an integral part of an industry that had yet to come in to its own. As the pages turn, we can see the perception of what a comicbook was growing and becoming more important to the societies that read them. At the centre of it all, was Joe Simon.

Reading the exploits of a man so strongly associated with icons that are still recognised to this day is something I can highly recommend to comic fans and historians. There are many retellings of meetings and relationships with lots of famous names, and feels far more genuine and good natured than many works that depict the industry. This is no in-depth deconstruction of the medium, but a great read that details the life of a hugely talented and influential creator on a quest to discover “the true American hero”, and a man who changed comics forever.

Joe Simon: My Life in Comics is available now from Titan Books.

Gary McMahon’s latest book takes place six months after the end of Pretty Little Dead Things, and finds Thomas Usher hiding out in one of the UK’s most haunted houses in an attempt to come to terms with the events of the last novel. A mysterious telephone call from a mechanical, clockwork voice jars him out of his downward spiral and puts him on a collision course with a police constable, searching for the truth about her abusive Father, and a discredited psychic with a taste for young boys, influenced by a supernatural entity with links to Usher’s past.

This book is not an easy read. To say that it’s bleak is something of an understatement. From the detailed descriptions of the oppressive urban squalor that the characters inhabit, to the depraved acts of the assembled paedophiles, murderers and low lives, the entire book seems to ooze desperation and depravity from each and every page. The human characters are among the most horrific in any novel that I can remember reading, and that’s before we get into the supernatural entities that are orchestrating the atrocities behind the scenes.

Dead Bad Things will not be for everyone. It’s a dark, disturbing read that seems to relish finding subject matters that most people would shy away from, and then shining a floodlight on it. Scenes are described in great detail, and every word seems to have been carefully selected to elicit an emotional response.

This is a powerful piece of fiction. It’s extremely well written, and the characters are (unfortunately) quite believable. I get the feeling that this book will stay with me for quite some time, worming its way into my psyche like some grotesque engorged flesh eating maggot.

Did I enjoy it? If I’m honest, probably not. This book took me places that I would not go willingly, but that does not make it any less compelling. If you like your horror dark, disturbing, intense and oppressive then this will be right up your street. Just be warned. This is not your usual horror story.

Dead Bad Things is out now from Angry Robot publishing

You may not yet know the name Ernest Cline but chances are some day he may be a big deal. Cline wrote the ill fated and under seen comedy Fanboys and is the very definition of ubergeek. He apparently drives around a DeLorean with the number plate Ecto 1 and counts internet geek heads Harry Knowles and Drew McWeeny amongst his friends. Ready Player One caused something of a stir this time last year when the film rights to the unpublished novel were sold to Warner Bros for some ridiculous amount. The book has previously been championed by the aforementioned geeks and therefore had me intrigued. Ready Player One is a great debut novel from Cline but has a pretty major flaw I couldn’t get past.

The story takes place in the future of our earth in the year 2044, the great recession has trundled on for three decades and the planet’s natural resources are all depleted. Record numbers are homeless and starving with most people living on the outskirts of major cities in ‘the stacks’: trailer parks where the trailers are stacked on top of one another to form makeshift skyscrapers. The population problem is so bad that quite often two or three families will live in each trailer. People escape this misery by logging into the OASIS, a huge global virtual reality network where people can go to school, socialise, work as well as do all the usual things regular gamers do. There is no reason to ever leave your home when connected to the Oasis. One day the founder of the Oasis, a billionaire by the name of James Halliday, dies and in his will he leaves a little video. The video shows Halliday in several scenes inspired by 1980’s pop culture and music and reveals that, somewhere in the Oasis, Halliday has left an ‘easter egg’ similar to the one found in Atari 2600 video game ‘Adventure’, somewhere in the Oasis you will have to travel through three gates and obtain three keys to find it, which are all also hidden in the Oasis. The person who finds the egg will win Halliday’s entire fortune and ultimate power within the Oasis. Due to this video the world changes forever, people become obsessed with 1980’s pop culture all over again, obsessing over the films and music of the time desperate to find some clue as to the whereabouts of the keys. The situation brings about two divisions in the subculture, Gunters; People obsessed with the legacy of Halliday and searching every available online biography and 80’s song, sitcom, movie or video game to become a fountain of knowledge and best placed to win the quest. The Gunters rivals are the Sixers, so named due to their six digit employee number given to them by corporation IOI. IOI wants to win the contest so they can assume control of the Oasis and start charging people for its services and turn it into a corporate sponsored nightmare. In the middle of this crazy world we meet Wade Watts, teenager and Gunter extraordinaire who with his Oasis avatar Parzival and best friend Aech are obsessed with all things related to the quest. One day Wade/Parzival manages to win the first key and clear the first gate through a series of challenges. His name appears on a scoreboard which has remained unchanged for five years. This brings him to the attention of the sixers, who he finds will stop at nothing in the real world or the virtual world to win the contest. Wade forms a fragile bond with fellow Gunter and potential romantic interest Art3mis who alternately distracts or re-invests him in the quest. Wade finds that he has to go to extreme measures and form unlikely alliances if he is to remain alive and win the billionaires fortune.

Imagine William Gibson’s Neuromancer with all the techno babble replaced by references to 1980’s pop culture and geek culture in general, that’s Ready Player One. It’s one of the easiest, breeziest reads I’ve had in a long time in relation to a sci-fi fantasy novel. I kept reading and reading in long sittings, not because the plot was particularly gripping but because I was in love with the virtual world that Cline presents us with and desperately wanted to read what obscure 1980’s reference to a song or a cartoon series would be dropped in next. If you were born in the late 70s or early 80s then this book is for you. Its overwhelmingly nostalgic and sweet and will make you pine for the days that you spent shoving ten pence’s into Q Bert or playing your Atari 2600 console endlessly at home. The core love story at the centre is also very well done. As a geek who has met girls online before I could fully understand it and the way its portrayed is both heartfelt and moving. The final page is almost tear jerking in its romantic sweetness.

Ready Player One feels very prescient in terms of its subject matter, it feels like a story about the times we live in now through a very extreme lens. Like it or not, pop culture today represents something that constantly recycles itself ad nauseum. What worked for that key demographic back in decades past will be given a huge budget and modern sheen and presented for the youngsters today who have no clue about the original. This is often the case where original and unique ideas are cast aside because they don’t have the proven track record of a franchise like Transformers which worked with a demographic two decades ago. This is also true of music and fashion, constantly recycled and constantly with old trends long thought dead coming back for a whole new generation. So it’s not outside of the realms of believability that the 1980’s culture could come back in a big big way and become a way of life. Even more probable when you consider that the world presented in the book has the current recession trundling on for three decades and the decade of excess and spending culture that was the 80’s would be the ultimate escape. There is also the side of the story which relates to our world now that has to do with freedom of information. The internet is currently the Wild West in terms of what you can do or put online. Every week it seems I read a story about some government or corporate think tank looking into how they can better control the internet, how it can be sanitized and made profitable for someone somewhere. In the book the founder of the Oasis charges a measly fee for access when it begins and the rest (apart from credits which you earn like you would in the real world for work and can be spent on travel to different planets) is totally free. IOI want to gain access to the Oasis so they can charge for access and use it to generate advertising revenue. The Gunters oppose them en masse because they believe that what was free should remain free and they are protecting their way of life. It’s reminiscent of the whole online piracy argument and is a good discussion worth having.

Ernest Cline has built a really fascinating world here, the way he sketches out the basics with unfussy prose is wonderful. It’s conceivable that this book could become as influential as the work of William Gibson and be followed by retro arcade junkies and kids of the 80s the way that Neuromancer was big with hackers who committed many acts of cyber terrorism in its honour. Any day now as the novel grows in popularity, someone will put a playlist online compiling all the songs referenced in the story. So what is the major flaw? It’s that even though the threat does present itself in the real world, with IOI committing atrocious acts in the pursuit of the Easter egg, nothing in the virtual world feels life threatening. There are massive battle scenes with castles, giant Japanese mechas and swords and wizards etc but none of it is happening in the real world, so as a result the tension evaporates in lieu of catching cool references to things like Mechagodzilla.

Ready Player One is a great debut novel from a promising new talent, it manages to make watching someone else play videogames over their shoulder into a cracking read, which is quite a skill. Read it and then discuss with the rest of us just how the hell they are ever going to make a film out of it.

Ready Player One is out now in the UK

Hartslove is a novel based around one family and their home, the DeGranvilles of Hartslove castle, set in 1861. After their mother abandons them and with a father scarred by the horrors of the Crimean war and taking solace in drink, the children are forced to try and save their home by themselves. Daisy is the most prominent character, followed by her siblings, Garth, Rose, Lily and the undistinguishable twins Clover and Columbine. When their father spends the last of their money of an unruly horse he calls ‘The One’ they are at first furious. Soon they change their minds and do all they can to assist they horse in winning the Derby and saving the family home.

Their home is put up for sale and they attempt to train the animal with the help of the stableman, or so they think! Not such an easy task when most of the siblings are too young to ride, Daisy is crippled from a previous riding accident and Garth is paralyzed by fear at the thought of riding.

During the time spent training the horse, potential buyers frequent the castle, forcing the children to invent ways to make sure they never make an offer for their home, knowing full well their drunken father would accept almost any offer made. The children are used to the ghost known as ‘The Dead Girl’ that innocently haunts the castle but are inspired by her presence to fake their own hauntings to scare any potential buyers away.

Can ‘The One’ really win The Derby, would it make their mother return, will a rich family buy the castle before they have a chance to save it, or will the castle be snatched for underneath their noses but someone much closer to home?

First of all, I must admit this is not the normal kind of book I read, I am drawn to the sci-fi/horror fiction, so this was a slightly unusual read for me. Saying that, I can completely appreciate that this book is beautifully written. The characters are well described, both visually and in personality to create a great mental image, as is the horse (strangely enough this description hasn’t been adhered to for the cover of the book which is a shame). Reading it reminded me of classic children’s stories such as Black Beauty and The Secret Garden. But is there a place for this kind of novel when teenagers are reading far more grown up material? The style of writing makes it feel as if it is aimed at younger teenagers but the content itself feels suitable for a far younger reader. This leaves me slightly confused at who it’s really aimed at.

The ghostly touches to this novel saved it for me. The occasionally occurrence of ‘The Dead Girl’, an unidentified priest, strange statues and the made up hauntings by the children themselves stop this book from becoming too quaint and add a touch of dark humour that it needed. That being said, I would not say it’s enough to make this book appeal to boys or men.

There are a few twists and turns along the way, which makes this book enjoyable but I am afraid this story didn’t really grip me at any point and I occasionally found my mind wandering while reading it. I feel it was slightly padded and it the book was shorter, I would have found it a far more enjoyable read.

This is a romantically written, young adult’s (girls) book with a slightly old fashion, fairytale feel. If I had a well read, twelve year old little sister, I think this might be perfect!

Hartslove is released on September 1st by Quercus Publishing Plc

Some years ago I was walking past a second hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road, when something caught my eye.  It was a rather insignificant, dusty looking paperback, yellowed with age, curling at the corners.  However, without a second thought, I bought it, for this was a book which more than anything, reminded me of the heady, carefree days of my childhood, when everything was fun and innocent, including television.

The Ghosts of Motley Hall was a popular kid’s television show of the mid 1970’s which revolved round the ‘lives’ of five deceased spirits, who were unable (or unwilling) to pass on.  Devised and written by Richard Carpenter (one of those creative wizards who no longer seem to exist in modern, commercially driven television), the creative genius behind such innocent delights as Catweazle, Robin of Sherwood and The Adventures of Black Beauty, the show is remembered fondly by many who grew up during that period.

Reading the book, a novelisation brought out in the wake of the show’s success, you are reminded of its simplistic humour, which makes an appealing antidote in these days of full, in your face crudity, even where children’s entertainment is concerned.  

” He owned a rubber plantation.  He died out there.  He was knelt on.”

“Knelt on?” said Mr Wallace.

“By an elephant.  They say it was very quick.”

“The elephant?”

“No – the accident,” said Gudgin. 

Hardly sophisticated.  However Carpenter’s staccato one liners give the novelisation an innocent sharpness, in the same way his script did for the show, making his writing appealing, on different levels, to both adults and children  The actress Sheila Steafel, who played the White Lady in the television dramatisation, best summed up the appeal of the show, and in the same way the novelisation, when she said, “The reason may have been that the writer Richard Carpenter never ‘played down’ to the lowest common denominator ….”.

The other appeal in the book is Carpenter’s power of description.  Opening the book, in a similar way to how he did each episode of the show, he describes the house in such vivid terms that the reader can almost feel the cobwebs and chill which surround the decaying Motley Hall.

The wind howled round Motley Hall.  It blew the dead leaves along the moss-covered terrace and sent them spinning down the steps to lodge in the long grass of the overgrown lawn.  It whistled over the roofs and tossed the rooks against the twisted chimneys; it rippled through the ivy clinging to the walls until the old house seemed to shiver.

The same is true with the ghosts themselves.  Reading many novels you conjure an image of a character in your mind, completely different from the one who appears on the television or cinema screen.  Not so here.  Carpenter’s description of each of the ghosts is so vivid that, should you ever get to see the television show, it may seem that the lines between novelisation and dramatisation blur.  It helps, of course, that the same person wrote both, however Carpenter’s ability as a wordsmith comes to the fore and his characters almost jump (or should that be float) from the page.

Sir George Uproar, Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, slowly materialised in the Great Hall.  His ghostly form was quivering with indignation and his face, which made one think of a rather conceited old bloodhound, was flushed and puffed with anger.

The similarities between the show and the book don’t stop there.  From the ghost’s efforts to disrupt the sale of their home to the British Banana Company, to their battle with Matt the stable boy’s evil doppelgänger who is intent on causing mischief and disharmony amongst them, Carpenter brings together a collection of incidents from the show to form a lively narrative, which can either complement the show, or be read as a stand alone novel without loosing any of its impact.

Novels and their television adaptations are often hard to marry.  You love one or the other, and are often disappointed when, having seen it on the screen, you read the book, or vice versa.  Not so with The Ghosts of Motley Hall, as this show (available again on DVD) and its novelisation, in more ways than one, seem so seamlessly to blend together.  Just one word of warning.  As with all good ghost stories, don’t read it late at night, otherwise you too may well hear the haunting sounds of the White Lady as she swings, to and fro on the end of the bell-rope!

Cleaver Patterson

A boy, Heber, has a bomb in his mind. Taffy Atom takes the boy through Beerlight City as he tries to keep him away from the cops, mobs and mercenaries who wish to do him harm should they catch him. His attempts to keep the boy out of harm’s way take him, and us, to a variety of locations and allow us to meet a surprisingly large (given the short length of the novel) number of characters that inhabit Beerlight City and make it the sort of place you wish you could visit yourself.

The action starts from the very first page when an assassin, a galoot, tries to end Atom’s life and from there things only get better. Atom makes a brief stop at the Delayed Reaction Bar where we get to meet Don Toto, by far my favourite character in Novahead. The dialogue between Atom and Toto is the funniest I’ve seen between any two characters of any fictional media, let alone a novel. They have a love-hate relationship; no clearer is this impression conveyed than when Atom tells Toto that he “fills a bastard shaped hole” in his life.

Atom meets far more characters on his journey, all as well characterised as Toto, that I could focus solely on those. However to do so would be to ignore all the other aspects of Novahead that make it such an incredibly good read. By far the greatest thing about this book is the way in which Aylett plays with words and ideas, often in a comically dark and pessimistic manner. He uses contrasting words and ideas so that something as boring and ordinary as water becomes the “violent staleness of burnt water”. Such a sentence seems illogical, and may make the reader feel uncomfortable, as though they’re reading something that simply doesn’t make sense. But that’s precisely the point. Beerlight City doesn’t always make sense and the characters don’t always do or say what you’d expect, yet it all makes perfect sense in the context of Atom’s world. This aspect of Aylett’s writing is one that I feel can make or break the novel for someone reading one of his works for the first time. It’s such a unique approach to storytelling that I feel it may not be everyone’s cup of tea and I would understand if the reason I love Novahead turns out to be the very reason some people may dislike it.

I’d be remiss if I ended without saying a little about the humour of Novahead. Like the writing style, the humour is heavily embedded in the wacky and the absurd. Aylett makes great use of the non sequitor, with Atom frequently doing, thinking or saying something totally removed from the situation he’s in. So successful is Aylett at blending comedy with narrative that you’ll find yourself pausing frequently until you can stop laughing.

I would urge anyone with a taste for the bizarre or who has a love for dystopian fiction to check it out. Or if you want something new and different to read you can’t go far wrong with Novahead. I haven’t even mentioned the Mad Max style highway chase or exactly what the trigger is for the bomb in the boy’s head. I guess you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

Novahead is available now at Amazon.co.uk

   

The first thing that needs to be said is that this book has been written for, and is aimed at, the young adult market. It is important to remember this not for any judgemental reasons or to demean the validity of the writing in any way but rather to illustrate the author’s high expectations of today’s book reading teens and her faith in their ability to handle complex and difficult subjects. Whether or not this unwavering conviction is justified remains to be seen but with a background in professional child and adolescent psychology, Ilsa J. Bick should know.

The basic premise of the story, without giving too much away, is that a lone, teenage girl out hiking in a remote part of America is caught in a cataclysmic event which, along with destroying the networks of communication and utilities on which civilisation depends also causes certain members of the population to become blood-thirsty mindless cannibals – namely, fellow teenagers; whilst affecting another, smaller percentage of people in even more surprising and imaginative ways. As fantastically preposterous as this all sounds, be assured that a good deal of research has gone into every idea and even those seemingly impossible hypotheses have, as the story unfolds, apparently plausible explanations.

At first glance the characterisation seems heavy-handed – recently orphaned, apparently unloved and with a malignant brain tumour, no less, our main protagonist is as flawed as any sixteen year old girl could get; an eleven year old girl who figures largely in the story is characterised as being typically stubborn and difficult whilst the romantic interest is provided by a swarthy, dashing young soldier. But as the story develops the main character’s problems are explored fully and sensitively; the younger girl mellows from the antagonist to the one with whom we sympathise and the man reveals a mysterious depth to his personality.

There are a surprising range of very adult issues brought up in this book including cancer, war (the middle east in particular) and even euthanasia, all of which are dealt with honestly and frankly and it is reassuring to imagine the youth of today having an understanding of the complexities of these subjects even if, in reality, a large number of readers will instead be drawn by the guns, gore and graphic brutality, of which there is plenty.

What is also striking about this novel are the short, snappy sections each of which is on average only two or three pages long, a concession which has been made, no doubt, with the demographic audience’s notoriously short attention span in mind but which serves equally well for, say, a busy parent or public transport commuter. The passages are as punchy as Mike Tyson and cleverly crafted to keep the narrative flowing. It would be very easy to imagine that this quality of writing might be unsustainable for any great length of time, particularly given the frequency of surprising cliff hangers at the end of almost every section but, be in no doubt, Bick has enough steam to power a locomotive and the initial excitement and suspense is maintained consistently throughout. This is particularly important since Ashes is intended as the first book in a trilogy and as such should make the reader feel like they are participating in an epic tale rather than being taken for a ride – having read this first book I feel fully assured that the whole story has been well thought out in advance and will continue to be delivered with the same enthusiastic, terrifying style.

Ashes is released on September 29th

Author: Christopher Priest

Publisher: Gollancz

Out now

Before The Separation, before The Prestige, before even Inverted World, Christopher Priest produced a novel little-known, and long out of print. Fugue For A Darkening Island is almost 40 years old, as of 2011, so perhaps it’s little surprising that “as time went by sensibilities about the subject matter began to change, attitudes to it changed, even the vocabulary of it changed. The story, which I saw as an attempt to describe a global disaster in the ironical and liberal terms of its day, gradually became misunderstood.” (p.viii) The vagaries of time can be cruel and unusual indeed.

Evidently, however, the changing perception of Fugue For A Darkening Island has weighed somewhat upon its author’s mind, for in the introduction to this thoroughly revised edition Priest cites two separate reviews of his second novel – published years apart in the pages of the same magazine – which fell on opposite sides of the critical divide. To hear the author tell it, in one, a critic contemporaneous with Fugue For A Darkening Island’s initial release praised Priest for his progressive and insightful perspective, whilst in the other, Time Out bemoaned this award-nominated sophomore sojourn as an irrelevance of the right-wing.

It is a rare thing for authors to have either the opportunity or the inclination to return to old haunts and attempt to bring them up to date, but Priest has done exactly that with Fugue For A Darkening Island. A short novel about the end of the world by way of mass immigration from the devastated African continent, it is assuredly a more palatable narrative by modern standards than it was in lieu of these revisions, poised now to win over a whole other generation, but do not mistake me: by the same token, Fugue For A Darkening Island is still a story very much of its era.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Priest’s very English apocalypse begins insidiously, as all things English do. First, with racism on the rise in response to fears over African émigrés running amok on our purportedly unspoiled shores, the British electorate installs a neo-nationalist government sure to be the ruin of the nation. Shortly thereafter, “cinemas showing films with explicit scenes of the physical act of love raided by the police,” (p.12) and in the following weeks and months certain other freedoms are impinged upon. Yet the people agree that these are easy sacrifices to swallow, presuming they prove fit for purpose: namely in positioning the United Kingdom to stave off the two million refugees who are forcing landings and subsequent social upheavals all over the globe.

Alas, all does not go according to plan. As per the time-honoured tradition, “Most of those ordinary British people, tolerant in outlook, dealt with their fears by looking away, hoping the problem would sort itself out,” (p.57) but – who would have thought it? – it does not. In fact the splinter parliament’s policies serve only to exacerbate the problem. England’s borders are crossed with little incident, and soon “the sea threw up hundreds of dead with every tide,” (p.44) to the high-tea horror of a populace hideously ill-equipped for the civil war which follows.

Amongst those folks most affected by the Afrim invasion: Alan Whitman. Husband, father and lecturer, Alan is also a serial adulterer – an all-round middle class man, then – more troubled in the collapse’s early stages by performance-related anxiety (see p.13) than the death of millions of innocents. All that changes when guerillas force him out of his home, and affect a violent separation from his family. Finding himself personally slighted, Alan becomes “involved in a sequence of events that no one had expected and that no one now was able to stop.” (p.61) Quite against his better judgement, needless to say.

Fugue For A Darkening Island divides its unchaptered narrative into two parts. In the first, we are with the Whitmans as society dissolves around them, and they take to the countryside hoping to wait out the catastrophe in progress. In the second, set sometime later, Alan is down one wife and one child, and travelling with a band of fellow foragers as the war rages on. Respectively, these threads work to chronicle how the world came to be so changed, and latterly how Alan Whitman and his precious principles have weathered – or not – the storm.

Fugue For A Darkening Island is a minor work, admittedly, but a minor work from a major talent, for Priest – whose every new novel is an occasion for celebration, as The Islanders is sure to be later this year – has long been amongst the science fiction genre’s most literary proponents. That said, Fugue For A Darkening Island has its issues, even in this updated edition. Foremost among them, there is a certain emotional coldness to the narrative in both its formulations; a “cool detachment” (p.ix) which, though typical of its time, is sure to make Alan Whitman a hard man for some readers to sympathise with. Indeed, Priest’s voice is as distant during the more personable half of the whole as it is during the broad strokes worldbuilding which makes up the remainder of this novel’s 200-some pages.

On the other hand, this coldness also cuts to the heart of the matter entire, for Fugue For A Darkening Island‘s single most significant theme is the idea that we Brits are as a people no more in touch with ourselves, and our own feelings, than we are with the world around us. To which I say: fair point.

In truth it is startling how relevant this 40 year-old novel is, even today. From the current state of affairs in government to the institutionalisation of nationalism by way of the BNP, and from the catastrophic struggle over oil to the deep recession we – as with the United Kingdom of Fugue For A Darkening Island – are in the midst of, Priest’s novel is positively prescient in its foretelling. So too is it considered a classic for good reason. Even at this early stage, the esteemed author seems as much a contemporary of Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy as he does the usual sci-fi suspects. His prose is finely honed, his grasp of structure and tone a thing of darkly sparkling beauty, redolent of an elegance, a grace, even in its most stilted moments.

At the very least, this revised edition of Fugue For A Darkening Island makes for a fascinating study of how Britain and in particular one middle-class white British male in the 70s might react to the end of the world as we know it. And in the final summation, I do not know that we are a great deal changed.

Welcome to ‘The Dusty Bookshelf’, where forgotten books of yesteryear get the reappraisal. This month, it’s the turn of:

‘The Dark Land’ by Mary Williams

Published in hardback by William Kimber, 1975. Jacket design by Ionicus.

Certain authors (not all) have an ability to carry you to a different place. Mary Williams was just such a writer. Her collections of ghost stories, published by the trailblazing independent publisher William Kimber during the 1970’s and 1980’s, set mainly along the Cornish coast and it’s inland environs, were the next best thing to being there.

Remote country lanes, quaint fishing villages, isolated cottages and sinister manor houses, usually provided the backdrop against which her stories of lonely people, melancholic, malevolent spirits and vegetation with a life of its own took place, and were wonderfully evoked by the cover art of Ionicus. His unsettling paintings mainly of the said buildings often with a single lit window, as in the case of The Dark Land, drew you in, giving you a taste of what was to come within the pages of the book. And what a wonderfully ghoulish menu Ms Williams concocted.

The Dark Land is a perfect example of what Williams did best – tales of unease. The very titles of the fifteen ghost stories in this volume would be enough to send a chill down the spine of even the most stolid reader. ‘Obsession’, ‘Laughter’ and ‘Guppa’, capture in a single, simple word a sense of foreboding, and lend the stories which they introduce an unconscious air of tension.

William’s strange tales are not the kind to provide sudden shocks, so those who like their horror hard boiled will doubtless be disappointed. If however you prefer the terror to simmer slowly beneath the surface, the odd nastiness bubbling up, before the whole shebang erupts at the end, then you may be better pleased. Take for instance the opening story, ‘Possessed’. At twenty four pages it is one of the longer in the book, though in actual fact very little happens. Even when it does reach it’s grisly climax, the description of the victim’s demise is sparse, leaving it to the reader to put the flesh on the corpse so to speak – it’s probably what Williams doesn’t say that makes it more frightening. However if and when she does colour between the lines her wonderfully evocative word paintings of the Cornish coast and surrounding countryside makes the place come alive, ‘blowing in gusts against the windscreen, from the high moors where the cromlech stood, outlined gaunt against the rim of earth and greenish sky. Beneath it the skeleton shapes of ruined tin-mines were already being drawn into the general deepening greyness of furze and rock.’ Brrrrrrr – chilling!

The individuals who people her stories are, on the whole, loners. Take for instance the little boy at the centre of ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ who is sent to convalesce with his grandmother and spinster aunt, after an illness. Unable to relate to his elders whom he sees as out to spoil his fun, he sneaks out of their house unobserved to investigate the deserted ‘dwelling opposite, an immense Victorian erection most people would have thought a monstrosity’, that he has been expressly forbidden to go near. That this rebellious disobedience is his downfall goes without saying. However the reasons that lead him, and the victims of the other stories into the macabre situations in which they find themselves arise as much from lack of human companionship and understanding, as from any real malice on their part.

Then you have the other main characters (in fact they are probably the central ones, as the main action takes place in them, and they seem to draw the humans into their orbit), the houses. These sinister buildings, from seemingly everyday houses to mansions and homes for the insane, take on lives of their own under William’s pen, as in the case of holiday home for mentally handicapped children in ‘Initiation’, which remained half built due to an injunction taken out against it years before, and the presence of which haunts a young couple who have moved into a cottage opposite, with tragic results.

Like many of her characters, both human and otherwise, Williams was somewhat of an enigma. Married three times, she started writing sinister tales as a child. However it was not until later in life at the age of 72, after a career incorporating acting, book illustration, writing romantic fiction and as a contributor to newspapers and BBC Wales, that she started to seriously focus on the macabre and supernatural. By the time of her death in December 2000, she had written over 200 ghost stories in 17 collections.

Often today, writers are too clever for their own good, believing that they are sharp and witty, whilst in actual fact using too many words to say very little. William’s on the other hand never wasted one.