This Haunted Heaven, by Reggie Oliver

 

9781912586608

Tartarus Press, 2024

240 pp

hardcover

It is not only a true pleasure to have a book published by Tartarus in my hands once again, but added to that is the joy of it being a book of collected stories by Reggie Oliver.  Long may they continue to be published -- I love his work. In This Haunted Heaven, as the blurb notes, the author "insinuates strangeness into the lives of his unwary protagonists and the results vary from a profound chill to outright horror."   Let me add that it's not just true about this book, but rather it is the case  in every single collection of his that I've read.   

My big test in any story collection is always whether or not the first one  makes me want to go on to the rest, and with "This Haunted Heaven," Oliver passes with flying colors.  Set on the Greek island of Skliros, within just a few lines of opening this tale, the author mentions the Mediterranean Sea as being "Wine-dark," as "the romantics will tell you, imagining they are quoting Homer," but it wasn't all that long into the story that my brain drifted to Robert Aickman.  If you consider the themes in that story, my brain wasn't too far off the mark, but this is clearly a Reggie Oliver creation.   In "This Haunted Heaven," a university don returns to the island to finish his book Middle Eastern Cults and Greco-Roman Culture," which he believes will be the "standard work on the subject," or else his "life has been wasted." In setting down "how it all began," he remembers the first time, as a young Classics student, he had gone to the island as part of an ongoing dig at a site which had been dedicated to the goddess Cybele.  I won't say any more, but I had to remind myself that this was just the beginning and I needed to buckle up if the remainder of the stories were going to be this disturbing.  Speaking of disturbing, I was thrown completely off guard by "Fell Creatures," which wins my award for most unsettling story in this book, and yet I read it not just the once but twice.  As this story opens, a retired, widowed history teacher wonders if having extreme wealth might "warp" the characters of the "very rich," and notes that there was one couple in particular who made him "ponder the question."  For some time, he had lived in a cottage in Norfolk next to Strellbrigg Hall, a "large, rambling, and ... rather run down" eighteenth-century farmhouse.  Its owner, Roger Mason-Fell, had sold the Hall to the Argents, a wealthy couple with "shedloads of cash" and three small children. Months later, the Hall has been redone and the woman in charge of the renovation has invited the narrator over to see the changes.  She has set aside some strange items left behind by the former owner: a dollhouse complete with "doll children," a book dating back to 1798 and a set of old portraits.  What happens once the family moves in I will not divulge, but when all is said and done, "Fell Creatures" left me utterly stunned.  This story alone is well worth what I paid for this book.  Holy crap.  I don't believe I will ever read something like this tale ever again, and if I do, it will more than likely come from the pen of Reggie Oliver.   Anyone who's read anything by this author knows that stage plays a role in a number of his stories, given the author's background as an actor, a director and a playwright, this is hardly surprising.  "South Riding" is one of these, which begins with the attempted suicide of Don, an actor who "had been out of work for months," with no money and no prospects for any other jobs.  In his mind, "he was an actor of nothing," and anything else was "meaningless" to him.   After a counseling session, he rings his agent and to his surprise, he learns about the need for a leading man  in "an old-fashioned summer rep company" in a town called Disston,  on the coast "in the South Riding of Yorkshire."     He's pretty positive there is no such place as South Riding, and he probably should have trusted his gut on that.  

title page, from my copy

The remainder of the stories in This Haunted Heaven are all excellent, although I have to say that I wasn't completely in love with The Cardinal's Ring  -- for me, it just didn't have the same oomph as the others, but that's just a personal taste thing.   Your mileage may vary.  What I love the most about his work is that he is not only a master of atmosphere, but also the way in which he brings together past and present,  creating a lingering sense of menace and danger.  As I usually find while reading his work, his writing is so good that while in the middle of one of these stories, the house could have caught fire and I would have waited to do anything about it until I finished reading.  There just aren't that many authors about whom I can honestly say that, especially modern writers, but it's true. The dustjacket blurb quotes Publishers Weekly about another of Oliver's collections, saying that his stories are for "Readers who like their horrors subtle but unsettling," and that description is right on the money.   He is and likely will remain one of my favorite writers ever.  

Very, VERY highly recommended!!! 

The Incubations, by Ramsey Campbell

 

"Your bombs were meant to cast down Hitler, but they raised his spirits." 

9781787589292

Flame Tree Press, 2024

245 pp

hardcover  

First, my many and grateful thanks to Flame Tree Press for my copy of this book.  A new novel by Ramsey Campbell -- definitely not an everyday occurrence, so when I was asked if I might want to read this book and post about it, I jumped at the chance.  I wasn't disappointed -- not at all.  

When Leo Palmer was a boy, his school had decided to celebrate the twinning of their town with the German town of Alphafen as a way to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II.  His teacher had assigned the class the task of writing letters to the children of that town, which like Leo's home town of Settlesham, had been bombed close to the end of the war.  While not all students were thrilled about the assignment,  Leo chose a girl named Hanna Weber and sent off his letter; they'd been penpals ever since.  Now Leo is grown, working for his parents in their family driving-instruction business, and as the novel opens, is not having such a great time of things.  He is in the car with a student who is ready to take her driving test. After a couple of minor incidents, they continue on their way,  but soon the student has had enough -- Leo's directions and conversation have become so convoluted that he's "talking rubbish" to her, and she wants to go home.  He isn't doing it on purpose to mock her dyslexia, as she accuses him of doing once she is back at her house; he has no idea what is happening.  But that's not all -- he soon suffers a bout of hysteria when he gets back behind the steering wheel and decides he can no longer drive, a serious problem when you make your living as a driving instructor.  After a visit to a psychologist, Leo is off on a scheduled trip to Alphafen to finally meet Hanna and her family in person.  And it's at this juncture that the book seriously takes off.

Leo is happy to finally be there and to meet Hanna, and the citizens of the town of Alphafen seem to welcome Leo on his arrival, honoring him with toasts, the singing of his national anthem at a restaurant and greetings from the mayor, etc.  He also experiences strange, inexplicable episodes that he tries to rationalize before moving on, as is his nature.  Things start to get even weirder when he meets a fellow countryman, Jerome Pugh, who has more than a slight interest in the connection between Hitler and Alphafen in a conversation that Leo finds distasteful and to which he takes offense.   And while I won't divulge much more about his time in Alphafen, I will reveal that Leo takes home more than simply memories of his visit when he returns to life in Settlesham. 

from MeteorologiaenRed

The Incubations sort of twins the reader's mind with Leo's in the sense that Campbell has structured his book so that as Leo's story unfolds, we too are also trying to figure out exactly what is causing all of this to happen, only to be horrified when connections are finally made and all is revealed.  What made this book such a page turner is that all along I sensed something not quite right running beneath the surface of Leo's conversations with the people in Alphafen, which seemed to take on a darker, more mysterious meaning than Leo comprehends.  Readers will latch on to the wrongness of things pretty quickly by reading slowly and carefully rather than buzzing through this book at top speed.  

I could not put this book down once I picked it up; Campbell has been writing horror for sixty years now (my favorite is still his Nazareth Hill)  and The Incubations shows that he is still going strong and hasn't missed a beat.  Not only are the dark moments in this book intensely creepy, but where it excels is in the more mundane moments that slowly morph into something much more sinister.  The themes he presents here are powerful and especially pertinent in our current world where technology aids in the rise of the dark forces that exist out there;   the issue for me is that it is difficult to say much about this book without ruining it for potential readers, and far be it from me to ruin anyone's reading experience.   What I can say is that fans of Ramsey Campbell will certainly not want to miss this one.  

 Highly recommended. 

Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, by Alexander Zelenyj

 

"There are more men in the world who wreaked senseless havoc than men who preached for peace."

9781913766306

Eibonvale Press, 2024

406 pp

I would have done a happy dance when this new book by Alexander Zelenyj arrived at my door, but there were people here so I just did it inside my head.  I have had the very great fortune to have read several of this author's short story collections, and this  newest one is definitely cause for celebration.   

In Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, Zelenyj cuts across and through genre in his stories to produce something entirely his own.  There are elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy at work throughout this book, but there are also any number of disorienting moments between these two covers that speak to a more surreal reading experience.  At the heart of these stories, and what gives them a resonating quality, is the keen attention he pays to his characters no matter the situation in which they find themselves, starting from the beginning.   In "Peacekeeper and the War-Mouth" a young boy from a Czech immigrant family is bullied by another boy at his school, and while he doesn't quite have the courage to kick his tormentor "square in the junk," he discovers another way to achieve the satisfaction brought by vengeance. In the next, "The Deathwish of Valerie Vulture," a popular comic-strip character, Valerie Vulture, who has been "everyone's sad little scavenger bird for over a century" comes to life, only to beg the cartoonist who has taken over the strip to finish her off.  She can no longer stand the "sick glee" of the many humans who've watched her suffer over that time, and can't bear being the "measuring stick" for people who have enjoyed her misery.  Unfortunately the cartoonist's boss won't allow that to happen because of the profits Valerie's brought in.  "Silver the Starfallen" in which the main character's deep sense of longing is brought to the fore, is set in the time after the defeat of the Danes by the Saxons.  A group of Northmen have been trying to keep out of the way of their enemy, their number including an "inexplicable" warrior by the name of Silver whose earliest memory is "falling like a star from the sky."  Evidently he is "not of this world," and misses the peace of the time "before man existed."  

Throughout this collection of tales, characters face the weight of the past, their own inner demons, and often crushing alone-ness, their experiences making for a beautifully rich collage of human emotions and especially their vulnerabilities.   This is most true in my favorite story, "Little Boys," which to me is one of the best stories this author has ever written, and I've certainly read enough of them to be able to say that.    On their mission to drop the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the crew of the Enola Gay start their long flight without a hitch, but some three hours in, the pilot, Lt. Paul Tibbets, discovers a strange black flower stuck to the bulkhead.  No one knows where it came from, but eventually more crop up. However, that's not the strangest thing that happens during this flight,  but about the rest I will absolutely say nothing more.  I read this story twice, put the book down for a bit, and then when I picked it up to start again I read "Little Boys" a third time. The imagery is absolutely stunning, as is the intent in this tale, and the raw emotion just leaps out at the reader.  Oh my god -- someday (and soon!) someone should nominate the author for some kind of award, if for nothing else, this story alone.   Then there's another personal favorite, "Bright Sons of the Morning," that finds a military investigator who is tasked with tracking down an ancient evil in the desert of Iraq.  Mackey finds this mission more personal than most he's carried out over his very long career, beginning with a strange and powerful cult as well as a rogue officer.  I had the sense of Apocalypse Now mixed with sheer evil as I read through this one, most likely the most frightening story in this collection.    The remainder of the stories are also excellent, with not a bad one in the bunch, illuminating the weariness wrought by the fact that, as the titular character in "Silver the Starfallen" notes, there are "more men in the world who wreaked senseless havoc than men who preached for peace,"  a truth that is definitely at home in our present.  

Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator is this author's boldest story collection so far, and although I have truly loved his books that I've read in the past, this book goes well above and beyond those on so many levels.   Most highly, HIGHLY recommended.