Crime and consequences! We’re dashing from pillar to post, as they say, so today a mention for something entirely un-supernatural which recently came to our attention – Burn Me Out, a new novel from Vermont writer Brandon Barrows.
Burn Me Out will be published on the third of September, and we were interested because we’ve read a number of his weird or horror works, but hadn’t ventured into his more noir/thriller side until we read an advance copy of this one.
Al Vacarro is a made man, with all the honors and responsibilities that entails. But after a literal lifetime of violence in service to the Castella crime family, Al’s past is catching up with him and neither his present nor any future he can imagine seems to hold any hope for salvation.
For the sake of his family and his very soul, he needs out of ‘the life’. But how does a man escape the only world he’s ever known?
This is a story of blood and desperation, and these are the last twenty-four hours of life as Al knows it.
We read it in one sitting, and we thoroughly enjoyed it (f you can say that about a fairly dark series of life events). Our review:
“A gripping, atmospheric tale of the Italian mobs, of those who slowly destroy both themselves and the people they care for – all in service to a toxic blend of loyalty, ambition and ‘blood’. Barrows effortlessly draws you into forty years of one man’s mistakes, and the price he must pay at each step. Violence and humanity are intertwined with a deft hand, until you have to keep reading.”
We asked the author to say something about Burn Me Out’s background, and he commented:
“BURN ME OUT is a very important and personal novel for me. It is, in large part, about things I’ve been dealing with over the last few years: desperation, depression, hiding the most significant part of yourself from everyone (especially those you love because hurting them is the last thing on earth you want) and a deep, aching desire to matter and be recognized for it.
“I really want people to read this novel and enjoy it, but I also hope readers can empathize with some of the characters and their situations. Few, if anyone, in this novel is a decent person, but I think they’re very human and finding the humanity in bad people is just as important as finding it in the good ones.”
Well worth a look. On Amazon now for pre-order, released officially tomorrow in Kindle and paperback.
To get an idea of Barrows’ range, you might also try out some of his other works, such as:
His short collection, The Castle-Town Tragedy (Dunhams Manor, 2015), which contains an excellent set of three stories concerning Carnacki the Ghost Finder, the occult detective created by William Hope Hodgson.
A collection of weird fiction, The Altar in the Hills (Raven Warren Studios, 2014) – a range of much shorter pieces which draw strongly on themes from H P Lovecraft.
His comics series – Mythos: Lovecraft’s Worlds (Calibre Comics) – with artist Hugo Petrus, adapting such HPL stories as ‘Pickman’s Model’, ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ and ‘The Curse of Yig’ (all four issues are now available as a graphic novel).
His Marshal Ernie Farrar western mysteries, published in Crimson Streets Magazine. These can be found online here:
And his excellent series concerning the occult quasi-detective character Azuma Kuromori, set in contemporary Japan, has been featured a number of times in Occult Detective Magazine. The most recent was ‘Beyond the Fade Shrine Gates’, in ODM #7, and his next Azuma Kuromori story, ‘Angel Scales’ – concerning both Christian and Japanese mythologies – has been confirmed for a forthcoming issue.
Occult Detective Magazine #7 is also available right now in Kindle and paperback.
Fireball XL5 vs Alien; Time Team with Sapphire & Steel; Doomwatch and Danger Man! Today we cover The Curse of Fanfic – a charity anthology of mad fan fiction and crossovers which is only available in paperback until 1st September 2020 through pre-order (an ebook may follow). And we have reviews of two Philip José Farmer specials from Meteor House, A Rough Knight for the Queen and the far more serious Up From the Bottomless Pit…
How exactly does one get away with publishing an anthology of fan fiction, featuring crossovers with assorted characters from TV shows that are very much under copyright? Fanfic, as it is more commonly referred to, is tolerated to some extent, as long as it’s not profited from. The only way a publisher can possibly get away with it is when it’s for charity – which is the case here. None of the writers, the editor, nor the publisher will make a single penny from the proceeds of this book, and they won’t even receive a free copy – if they want one, they have to buy it. They really just did it out of sheer, unadulterated love. Only the printers and postal agencies will be paid for their professional services.
All profits from The Curse of Fanfic go to Parkinson’s UK, a charity that tirelessly researches the possibility of a cure for Parkinson’s Disease, the illness that eventually led to the death of the editor’s father, Donald John Castle, in 2017. It’s a great cause. My grandfather suffered from that disease too. It’s not something you’d wish on anyone.
A quick look at the assorted characters gives the impression that this book is going to be rather silly. This is not unusual as comedy and charities for very serious causes have long gone hand in hand. For my part, I saw “Steve Zodiac and the Alien Facehuggers” in the website description and immediately asked the publisher for an advance copy, so I could help promote it.
Paul Castle writes a brief, but very moving foreword about Parkinson’s and its effect on his father, and thus himself. I’d pretty much decided I would buy a hard copy for myself at this point. An introduction follows in which he talks about how many authors get their start writing fanfic and covering the copyright issues.
There are far too many stories in this collection for me to cover them all, so I will limit myself to the ones that were my personal highlights. However, I feel I would be doing the book a disservice if I didn’t at least list the full contents, so here it is…
The Addams Family, The Monkees and The Beatles
Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game
Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z
Doomwatch and Danger Man
Eerie Indiana
Fireball XL5 vs Alien
The Goodies and Space: 1999
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Inspector Gadget
Jonathan Creek and Jason King
Knight Rider and Airwolf
Lost in Space
Match of the Day and The Omega Factor
The Nanny and Super Mario Bros.
Only Fools and Horses and Dynasty
The Persuaders!
Quick Draw McGraw and Brisco County Jr
Red Dwarf in Man Alive
Sooty & Co. with Iris Wildthyme
Time Team with Sapphire & Steel
UFO
Van der Valk and Doctor Who
Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen
The X-Files and Rentaghost
The Young Ones
Zorro and The Wild Wild West
As can be seen, most stories involve crossovers of some sort, but not all of them.
I used the word ‘silly’ above advisedly. Anna Maloney proved my point pretty well with her contribution… The Addams Family in ‘Monkees and Beatles and Addamses, Oh My!’ It’s Wednesday Addams’ birthday and her parents have booked two of the most popular musical groups of the sixties to play at her party. The trouble is, they were under the impression that they were bands of performing monkeys and beetles! There’s an inspired mash-up of the lyrics of ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’, which left me wishing it existed on a disc somewhere. I have to say that, in my head, I saw this more as an episode of the 1973 animated version of The Addams Family.
Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game in ‘The Fox Files’ is very clever. Author Paul Magrs hints at an X-Files crossover in the title, but it isn’t. Mulder and Scully, however, weren’t the only people to have investigated alien incursions. He we see Basil and his manservant Chummers (Chummers and the concept of Basil Brush as a detective of sorts were introduced in the comic strip version, which appeared in the UK weekly, TV Comic) taking on some familiar aliens on behalf of a certain branch of the UK military, devoted to dealing with alien problems. This one is really fun, as I would expect from a writer of Magrs’ calibre.
The thing about fanfic is that it does rather rely on the reader’s familiarity with the characters. Cutie Honey and Mazinger Z are early 1970s Manga comic book creations of Go Nagai, and both made a quick transition to anime television series. Despite Nagai’s tendency to write crossovers with his characters, these two had apparently never enjoyed a significant clash before this. Doesn’t mean a thing to this reader, I’m afraid. Never read the Manga, never saw the anime.
In Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z in ‘Flash Forward!’, Kara Dennison (an author as unfamiliar to me as the characters she writes about) gives us a useful little introduction that serves well to introduce the characters. As for the story itself… I. Loved. It! Look, I’m not a huge fan of manga, or anime, albeit I do like some of the less cartoony stuff (Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima, Ryoichi Ikegami, Masamune Shirow etc.) but this was gripping.
I note that Kara Dennison has contributed to Paul Magrs’ Iris Wildthyme series, which is something I’ve long wanted to get into.
doomwatch
Having recently read and reviewed The Immortal Seaton Begg, I’m fairly confident that I would have known that Doomwatch and Danger Man in ‘Tomorrow (’s World) the (Roland) Rat’ was by Simon Bucher-Jones, even had I not seen his name on it. There are a handful of authors I know, who simply can’t resist throwing in a few oblique crossover references in their work that don’t really affect the story, but provide an added level of interest for those who get it. Win Scott Eckert and Frank Schildiner immediately come to mind. Bucher-Jones is definitely of this ilk, and names like Bernard Quatermass and ‘Q’ (of James Bond fame) are casually name-dropped here. Others are more subtle and not everyone will pick up on them. I’m pretty sure I missed at least one myself.
Tobias Wren is at the Tomorrow’s World studio, investigating a suspicion that not all of the super-intelligent rats from the Doomwatch episode, ‘Tomorrow, the Rat’ have been destroyed. Dangerman, John Drake is sent to assist. If we are to believe Bucher-Jones, we finally have definitive proof that John Drake is not the same man who ended up incarcerated in The Village… or do we? A chat I had with the author revealed that he had to cut a section which folded in The Prisoner, due to his having had to work to a strict word count. Now I really want to read the uncut version!
Fireball XL5 vs Alien in ‘Alien Encounter’ is the story that hooked me in the first place. As such, author John Peel was well-placed to disappoint me. I shouldn’t have worried. Peel did an excellent job of rationalising some of the dodgy science in the original Supermarionation puppet show, giving them force fields to go along with the oxygen pills they took to allow them to breath without an atmosphere. If I had one small complaint it’s that he pretty much ignored the acid blood aspect of the Xenomorphs. We all know that Robert the Robot was made of a very hardy plastic, otherwise his outer skin wouldn’t have been transparent, but I would have expected some mention of the fact that the facehugger’s blood was dissolving the metal spar Robert used to defend Venus from them. Even so, I still loved it. It’ll obviously never happen, but I’d love to see this story adapted for television by the folks responsible for the Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet revivals.
airwolf
Knight Rider and Airwolf in ‘Knight and Hawke’ is one of the longer stories. I was more familiar with Knight Rider, having never actually watched Airwolf. However it was one of my favourites in this collection. Genuinely exciting, albeit we’re left at the point where the newly teamed-up heroes go off in search of the bad guy – leaving me wanting more.
Most of this book is dedicated to that most popular area of fanfic, that of crossovers between two properties whose copyright owners are unrelated. In the case of John S. Drew’s Lost in Space fanfic, in ‘The Times they are a-Changin’, we have another trope of the form – that of a story written specifically to address an unexplained detail in the original series. This time it’s why exactly Preplanus, the Robinson’s adoptive home of the first series, disintegrates, forcing them to relocate. I will risk a spoiler by revealing that it was Doctor Zachary Smith’s fault.
There are no crossovers in Liz Evershed’s Red Dwarf in ‘Man Alive’, other than the use of the title of Man Alive, which was a documentary show, presented by Esther Rantzen amongst others, which ran in the UK from 1965 to 1982. It is, however, one of the better stories in the book.
It makes a refreshing change when the good guys, who take on the task of fixing inter-temporal/dimensional screw-ups actually seem to know what they’re doing! I very much enjoyed Time Team with Sapphire & Steel in ‘A Matter of Time’ by Jenny Shirt. One could complain that Tony Robinson accepted what was going on rather too easily, but this, I suspect, was simply down to word-count limits.
UFO in ‘The Other 1980s’ by Adrian Sherlock has Ed Straker, Commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation, transported to an alternate universe by a UFO – our universe! He is horrified with the England of this alternate 80s, especially the ‘Big Brother Sister’ like woman who appeared to be in charge of a nation that had seriously lost his way. He is thankful to escape back to a world under siege from alien invaders. This is not going to appeal to staunch Tories (or Republicans in the USA for that matter). I loved it!
Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen in ‘The Story of Worzel of Scatterbrook Farm and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Royston Vasey’ certainly looked set to be one of my favourite stories in this collection. Author Dan Barratt didn’t let me down – it’s every bit as terrifyingly insane as I’d hoped.
As I said, those were my personal favourites. The others were good, but if I had any criticism, it’s that many were simply shorter than I would have liked. I suspect this was down to space restrictions and possibly limitations set by the copyright owners.
I can not review The Curse of Fanfic without mentioning the fabulous artwork by Paul Cooke on the covers plus a few internal illustrations.
In conclusion, this is a fun book, featuring so many mash-ups between popular characters that it’s unlikely that anyone wouldn’t find most of it of interest.
It’s for a great cause, so I encourage everyone to go pre-order it now, as once pre-orders close on September 1st, you won’t be able to get a copy.
It’s that time of year again. Under normal circumstances, Meteor House would be launching their new books for 2020 at Farmercon. For obvious reasons, this is now not happening; albeit a virtual version of Farmercon is now planned – just search on Virtual Farmercon XV (2020) for details.
Up From the Bottomless Pit has been previously published, initially as a serial in the first ten issues of the Farmerphile fanzine, published by Meteor House’s Michael Croteau, and then in the huge hardcover collection from Subterranean Press, Up From the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories, which is also now available as an ebook in the USA (sadly, not in the UK for copyright reasons). This, however, is the first ever affordable trade paperback edition.
After a brief foreword by Christopher Paul Carey on the context and publishing history, we get an introduction – subtitled ‘The Ides of March’ – by Sharman Apt Russell. She writes of the prophetic nature of Farmer’s book and that “Most of us feel that we are living at the beginning of an apocalyptic novel, in a state of foreshadow and suspense.” Russell states that the reader will know much more about what has happened in the World since she wrote this introduction on March 15, 2020 – literally the Ides of March.
Up From the Bottomless Pit is not about a global pandemic, neither is it about the erosion of human rights. Before those things became the huge issues they are now, we were seeing evidence of an environmental catastrophe that may well already be beyond any hope of averting, even if all the nations of the World would accept it and agree to work together to save the planet. Sadly, that sort of cooperation is a pipe dream. Our leaders appear to be far more concerned with increasing their personal power and wealth than looking after the people who have to try to survive after they’re all gone.
I, of course, refer to the ever-present – and much denied by those who refuse to open their eyes – threat of global warming. In Up From the Bottomless Pit, however, Farmer brings things to a head even faster in the form of something easy to believe could happen – a catastrophic oil industry accident, which threatens all life on Earth.
America needs oil, and they need to be free from the yoke of dealing with those who have it. Despite the protestations of environmental agencies, they plan on drilling with their new lasers off the shore of Los Angeles. There’s no cause for alarm. After all, the problems caused by the previous minor earthquake were easily enough dealt with, and they had new equipment which could handle 50% higher blowout pressure than ever before. Far more than they could ever envision needing.
They were so very wrong! That’s no spoiler. Had that not been the case, there’s be no book. It’s in the meticulously researched details of just how overwhelmingly, horrifically wrong they were that Farmer scores here. That this is all well within the bounds of possibility, is truly terrifying.
James Cable is an engineer for Cal-Pax, a California based oil company. He’s a conservative Republican, and to a great extent, he shares some responsibility for the disaster. On the other hand, he’s a beacon of common sense in the battle to halt the momentum of an unimaginable shitstorm, which could destroy all life on the planet. Farmer makes much depressing use of politics and religion to put obstacles in his way. At the time it was written, some may have thought he was exaggerating the stupidity of people. In recent years it’s become pretty plain that he actually toned it down somewhat.
There’s a long sequence, which follows Cable and others as they try to evacuate the city while hurricanes & firestorms rage toward them. It’s one of the most gripping, edge of the seat pieces of writing I’ve ever read. Eventually, Cable returns to his new position as head engineer of the Bureau of Crises, and takes charge of Project Glory Hole. They battle to cap the huge gusher, all the while having to deal with interference from the money men and sabotage from crazy religious groups. There’s no happy ending. We leave the story at the end of one battle in a crisis that will take much, much longer to reverse. If, indeed, it can be reversed.
That Farmer managed to create such an entertaining thriller story out of a situation made more depressing by events that have occurred since he wrote it, is testament to how great a writer he was.
The excellent cover and frontispiece are by Charles Berlin. The fact that we have this book at all is apparently down to Craig Kimber, who owned the only copy of the manuscript and was not obliged to share it with the world. We should all be truly grateful.
I’ve read non-fiction by Philip José Farmer before, that is to say I’ve read fictional non-fiction if you like, in his fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage. There are also many interesting essays, convention speeches etc. amongst Farmer’s published canon. This, however, is his only full-length non-fiction work, although at only 100 pages or so it’s not especially long.
The book opens with ‘Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Erudite Adventurer’, in which Michael Walton (author of Sir Richard Burton and his Circle) gives us a useful overview of Burton’s relationship with fantasy, and how he appealed to Farmer. I, in common with (I suspect) many readers, have long been aware of Burton, but have never really taken the time to actually read his works. Indeed, my introduction to Burton was as a character in Farmer’s acclaimed Riverworld series. This introduction alone goes some way toward making me wish to redress that oversight.
Mark Hodder – another author who employed Burton to great effect as a character in his excellent Burton and Swinburne series – supplies the next introductory piece in ‘Philip José Farmer: The Liminal Writer’. Here we are shown how Burton’s ‘liminal’ nature, that of ever being between two worlds, never quite belonging to either, made him an ideal fit for Farmer’s (and Hodder’s) fiction.
Editor, Paul Spiteri brings both threads together in the final introductory piece – ‘Burton and Farmer: Incredible Adventures and Eternal Writings’. Here we discover the history of ‘A Rough Knight For the Queen’, originally written for a men’s magazine. The first book publication was in the collection of Farmer rarities, entitled Pearls From Peoria (Subterranean Press 2006). This is the first separate book publication, re-edited (Farmer never had a chance to proof the original) and with additional footnotes by Paul Spiteri.
As with Up From the Bottomless Pit, I had some concerns as to how entertaining a read this might be. With the former, it was the ‘too close to reality’ nature of the story which could have led to it being too depressing. Here it’s the fact that it’s a biography of an historical figure. Would it turn out to be a bit dry? On the other hand, I was aware that Richard Burton led, to say the least, an interesting life, and it’s written by Farmer. I’m pleased to say that it reads like a short novel, and a very entertaining one at that, all the while being as informative and well researched as a biography should be.
In fact, it occurred to me while reading that it would have just needed the addition of some dialogue, the fleshing out (fictionalising) of certain aspects of the story that are sparse of detail, due to there being little documented proof of events, and this could easily have been expanded to an adventure novel, which could have even stretched to more than a single book.
Other, earlier posts on Philip José Farmer can be found elsewhere on greydogtales, such as here:
Something for those interested in Arthur Conan Doyle and Cottingley, Holmesian variants, folk horror, or just… scary stuff. One of our regular reviewers, Dave Brzeski, covers a four-novella release from NewCon Press (all can be bought separately).
NewCon Press Novella Set 2
Reviewed by Dave Brzeski
One of my oldest and best friends pointed me at these fascinating novella sets that NewCon Press were publishing a few years back. I’ve since picked up most of them in paperback, or Kindle format – some supplied by the publisher as review copies. I am deeply jealous of those who can afford the gorgeous slipcased sets of four hardcovers, as they are a work of art unto themselves.
The covers of each set are done by the same artist as one large painting, encompassing all four books, as can be seen in the accompanying illustration. Other than that, the stories are not connected, other than by a fairly broad overall concept. Set One, which I have yet to get to, are all related in some way to the planet Mars. Set Two has a slightly vaguer concept – that of dark horror/thriller, which seemed very much in keeping with the tastes of the Old Grey Dog and I, and so I decided to cover that one first…
The gorgeous portmanteau cover is by Vincent Sammy, not a name I was familiar with, but one I will certainly remember.
Title: Case of the Bedevilled Poet: A Sherlock Holmes Enigma
Author: Simon Clark
My expectations were quite high here. Having had the great pleasure of editing a story by Simon Clark for the anthology – Shadmocks & Shivers: New Tales Inspired by the Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes – I knew his writing was of a high standard. I was certainly not disappointed.
Jack Crofton is a published poet living in London during the Blitz. He managed to avoid enlisting in the armed forces by taking a job as a scriptwriter for the sort of short, patriotic films that were funded by the government in an attempt to keep up morale back home. Someone, or something, wants Jack dead, and more than that, it intends to make him suffer first.
Drunk, terrified after being threatened and chased by a violent soldier who resents his avoidance of battle, he tries to find someone who will listen to him. Things get stranger by the hour, as the people he encounters keep repeating the same mantra – “I’m going to be your own personal Monster. I’m going to make you suffer. And suffer you shall before you die.”
He takes refuge in a pub, where he finally finds a couple of old gentlemen willing to listen to his story. They offer to help, in exchange for a bottle of Whiskey – they claim to be Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson!
The next day, he puts it all down to the extremely drunken state he’d been in, and throws the piece of paper he’d been given with the address of the two old men in the wastepaper bin… but an accident at work, followed by yet another person repeating that same mantra, has him decide to seek out the help of Holmes and Watson after all.
Clarke’s vivid descriptions of the horrors suffered by the people of London during the Blitz are genuinely terrifying; I’ve rarely read anything scarier. Jack’s situation gets progressively weirder and more dangerous, as Holmes discovers exactly who is trying to kill him, and why. It’s equal parts mad science and supernatural. It’s never established with certainty whether or not the two old men were, in fact, Holmes and Watson. The readers are left to make up their own minds on that point, but it really doesn’t matter.
Title: Cottingley
Author: Alison Littlewood
It was probably twenty years ago now, that it occurred to me that the original fairy stories, the dark tales of The Brothers Grimm and others, before they were Disneyfied and made palatable to those who believed children should be shielded from the darker side of life, would make for some interesting dark fiction.
Evidently I wasn’t the only person to have this thought, as over the next few decades, many reimagined fairy tales/folklore based novels began to appear. In fact they became a bit of a trend – even the TV and Movie industries jumped on the bandwagon. The problem was that I didn’t really like a lot of it. So much of it was firmly along the lines of YA paranormal romance. Not that I haven’t found some excellent reads in that genre, but the market has been flooded with it of late… and it wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned back when I first considered the possibilities.
Alison Littlewood has achieved something quite remarkable here. Cottingley is an epistolatory novella, entirely told in the form of letters from Lawrence H Fairclough, initially to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then to Mr Edward L Gardner – member of the Theosophical Society and author of Fairies; A Book of Real Fairies (1945) and Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel (1945). The fact that the replies from Mr Gardner are not included, only referred to, neatly removes the necessity of attributing fictional writings to a real person. Epistolatory books can often be very tedious to read. Much as I love Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I can’t deny that the early chapters, consisting as they do mainly of letters between various characters, almost defeated me. This is never an issue here. Not only has Littlewood managed to emulate the period style without sacrificing readability for authenticity, she does it entirely in the form of letters.
Along the way she manages to provide a perfectly reasonable sounding explanation for how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the extremely rational Sherlock Holmes, came to present what appear (at least to the modern eye) to be obvious fake photographs as evidence of the reality of fairies.
Title: Body in the Woods
Author: Sarah Lotz
While Body in the Woods is certainly very dark and creepy, the weird elements are all strictly real world. It’s no less powerful for that. Claire did something that was… inadvisable in her past and because of that she owes Dean a favour. She’s made other bad decisions before in her life, but this time, she somehow finds herself agreeing to something insane. The phrase, ‘digging herself a hole’ comes to mind, and it certainly fits more and more as the book progresses.
Dean has – every review I’ve seen has given this bit away and it is in the title of the story, so I can’t worry too much about spoilers here – convinced her to help him dispose of a body in the woods near her house. He denies having killed anyone, but is very reluctant to give details.
This, as you’d expect, does nothing for her mental state. To add to the pressure she has a persistent mould problem in the house she’s working on doing up while her partner is away for work. The story is interspersed with flashbacks that give some idea of how she came to be in a position where she’d agree to this somewhat extreme favour.
The body is eventually found, of course. A local, whose wife disappeared, is suspected, but there’s no proof. Eventually things get back to normal – except for Claire’s still fragile mental state. The ending is quite subtle. I had finished the novella in the not so small hours of the morning, by which time I was extremely tired. It left me thinking about it for a day and finally led me to reread the final chapter the following night, to make sure I understood it properly. I’ve since perused a few reviews on Goodreads on the suspicion that some readers might not quite get it. I was correct in this assumption.
It’s a very clever piece of writing, that needs you to pay attention, but it’s well worth it.
Title: The Wind
Author: Jay Caselberg
We return to a more folk-horror theme for the fourth book in this set of NewCon Press novellas. Gerry Summerfield has recently taken up a position as the local veterinary in the small farming village community of Abbotsford. It’s at best a stop-gap, until he gets the chance to move to a practice in a bigger town, or city. The people are nice, though and he can cope with being elbow deep in the back end of cows for a while at least. But that nice Mrs Marchant in the local shop hints that The Dark Days are returning. Frankly, he should have packed up and left right there and then, but maybe he hasn’t read the same stories and seen the same films as we have.
It’s a very well-written, quick and enjoyable read. I started it after midnight, with the intention of picking it up the next day, but soon found I’d finished the whole thing in one sitting.
The only criticism I have is this… the story is somewhat familiar. As I hinted above, we’ve likely all read, or seen it before. I actually reviewed a book fairly recently that covered the same ground. It doesn’t take many pages before we know exactly how things will pan out, and there are only two possible endings. The protagonist survives, or he doesn’t. Having said that, Caselberg simply tells it better than most. It’s less clear cut. The villagers are not evil – they simply do what they have to to survive. They don’t bring it upon themselves due to greed, or stupidity, their situation is simply what it is.
Do I recommend it? Actually, yes… just don’t expect any surprises.
In conclusion, I can’t recommend this collection of novellas highly enough. I look forward to reading the others. NewCon Press are currently on Set 7.
Tumshieheid, Tam o’Shanter, Mamma Lucy and hoodoo. Today, for a change, we have extracts from two very different forthcoming tales with folkloric roots, one by Scots/Canadian writer Willie Meikle and one by Yorkshireman John Linwood Grant. And two fun audio picks to go with them. Both come from the planned anthology Between Twilight and Dawn, put together by Golden Goblin Press and featured in their latest Kickstarter campaign for An Eldritch Legacy -The Cousins Come of Age (Sequel to The Children of Lovecraft Country) and Between Twilight and Dawn.
mamma lucy, by yves tourigny
If you just want to check out the campaign, it’s at the link below:
If, on the other hand, you want a taste of what you might be getting in Between Twilight and Dawn , and a couple of audio links for amusement, follow us now…
Tumshieheid
by Willie Meikle
“You don’t want a pumpkin—no kid of mine is having a bloody pumpkin. Pumpkins are corporate Americana, sanitized bollocks for the easily pleased. Pumpkins are cute and cuddly and bland Hollywood Halloween at its very worst. Bloody pumpkins. You’ll have a tumshie. Now there’s real Halloween for you.”
“But Derek’s getting a pumpkin and…”
“Derek’s dad’s a bloody idiot then. A tumshie was good enough for me when I was your age, so a tumshie is what you’ll have.”
“What’s a tumshie, dad?”
John’s dad slapped his forehead in mock disgust.
“Don’t they teach you kids anything that’s not American? A tumshie is what people around here used for lanterns on Halloween Night—All Hallows—when they went out ‘acting the galoshes.’ We didn’t have bloody ‘trick or treat’ then, either—we had to work for our sweeties. Sweeties—not bloody candy.”
John hesitated before asking anything else—it was obvious that something had made his dad angry—he just wasn’t sure what it had been, so any further questions were going to be dangerous. John knew from bitter experience how painful a wrong question could be. Especially when his dad’s anger—never that far from the surface—was already risen.
So John kept his mouth shut, although he was desperately keen to know what a tumshie might be. He knew that he’d have to justify why it was so much better than the huge bulbous pumpkin Derek’s mother had brought from the shop earlier that morning.
A search online wasn’t particularly useful.
‘Tumshie is a word used in Scotland for a turnip, and a tumshie lantern was a Jack O’Lantern carved from a turnip. It is a traditional method employed to capture and hold a demon, the carved, hollowed vegetable symbolizing a fiery cage of hell, especially when lit.’
“Turnip? How will I explain that to Derek?”
His opinion didn’t change in the slightest when he saw what his dad intended to carve into his lantern. It was waiting on the kitchen table as the sun went down and Halloween properly started—much too late now to get a pumpkin. What he got instead was a deformed, purple-brown ball, rough-skinned, like it had a serious case of acne, and scarcely the size of two fists put together.
“There’s a story about this,” his dad said. “I got it out in your Granddad’s field, where he got his and I used to get mine when I was a lad—where the meteorite fell in ’44. Had to dig deep to get to the roots, too—it was dug in like a real bugger.”
“Everybody’s going to laugh at me,” John said, looking at the misshapen thing on the table..
“Let them laugh,” his dad said, and took out the big knife from the drawer by the side of the sink. “This is your tradition, this is. If they want to forget where they come from, more fool them. Come on—I’m going to need a hand with this—it’s heavy work—man’s work—not soft—not like them there pumpkins.”
And heavy work it was. His dad started it off, but it seemed that John was expected to do most of it himself. Although the knife was strong and heavy, the flesh of the turnip appeared to be as hard as rock, and John didn’t make much headway in making a hollow before his dad was forced to take over for a while.
“Give it here,” his dad said and grabbed the knife harshly before setting to an attack with some gusto. Rather too much gusto as it turned out, for although the turnip got mostly hollowed out in short order, the blade slid hard to one side as he was trying to carve a rough mouth, and it gouged a slice across his left palm.
“Bastard!”
Blood pooled in the hollow inside the turnip for several seconds as the man stood above it holding his wounded hand…
TRIVIA: Despite the ubiquitous nature of the pumpkin and its gaudy symbology towards the end of October, all serious folklorists and horror fans know that these orange monstrosities are latecomers to the game. Oh yes, pumpkins flutter their leaves and tendrils, and they puff out their big ribbed bodies, but it’s just show – for they know that the turnip, often recognised as the spirit-animal of Northern England, Scotland and Ireland, is the genuine symbol of All Hallows.
Swede, rutabaga, turnip, neep, tumshie – we don’t mind what you call the vegetable, but calling someone a tumshie means that they’re foolish, ill-advised or dim – contracted from the expression “tumshie-heid” meaning “turnip-head”. For centuries, bold Northerners have torn their fingernails, skinned their knuckles and stabbed themselves in the leg trying to carve through rock-hard turnip flesh in order to make something resembling a diseased skull.
And if you want to get deeper into the mood of classic Scots scares and the supernatural, why not listen to this great reading of the classic ‘Tam o’Shanter’ by Robert Burns, here recited by storyteller Ian Boyd?
Mamma Lucy knew there was trouble coming. It was a prickle at her neck; a new scent on the squalling wind that had turned up so sudden, late afternoon.
“Ain’t that always the way, when you don’t seek folk out,” she said to the ancient hen which had been her only companion for the last few nights.
The hen had nothing to say, and so two of them waited quiet, waited steady, in the barn they shared. It wasn’t much – an earth floor, rough plank walls and a gambrel roof; straw and chicken feathers. Dusk was near. If she had guests coming, she’d need the battered lantern she’d found in one corner…
Less than an hour after her neck warned her to be ready, Mamma Lucy heard a grumble outside the barn, the sound of an automobile choking and stalling. She got to her feet and smoothed down her old print dress. She could hardly make out the flowers on it any more. Roses, maybe. Once.
“In here, Fredric.” A woman’s voice, frantic. “You can make it, come on.”
Two strangers staggered between the half-open barn doors. The woman was fair hauling the man, his arm limp over her shoulders, one leg dragging in the dirt. His head hung low, and he was muttering to himself.
Mamma Lucy didn’t like the words. She knew Deutsch, Pennsylvanian and true, a smatter of Francais and a few others. These here were words which shouldn’t be said, in church nor barn.
“Reckon you seen trouble,” she said.
The woman – girl – looked up. Nineteen or twenty years old. The setting sun at her back showed her thin, but not too thin. Mamma Lucy tried out a smile. A mistake really. With her milk-and-honey left eye, and her horse teeth, all set in a wrinkled black face, it seemed to scare the girl.
“My husband – he’s been hurt. We can’t get any further, and the light’s going…”
“Happens round this time.”
Mamma Lucy looked the man up and down. City clothes, but torn and stained. Some of that was blood; some wasn’t. He had a spoke of metal embedded in his right shoulder. She helped settle him on a heap of last year’s straw.
“Best tell me a name or two.”
“Name?” The girl blinked, confused. “Oh, I’m Esme Ranton. This is Fredric, my husband. The storm… we raced the storm. Fredric got hurt when the top tore off, and the motor started to fail. I took the wheel. I was heading for Bloomington, and then… I knew we wouldn’t make it. I had to turn, come this way instead.”
Mamma Lucy shuffled her big bare feet in the dirt. “And why d’you think you did that?”
“I don’t know.” Almost a child’s wail.
“Well, set yourself down, and let me look at this Fredric o’ yours.”
The old woman glanced outside to where a Model T Sedan hissed to itself, steam spouting from more than one hole, the windscreen broken, soft-top ripped open and all askew. She went over to the man. He was waxy pale, runnels of sweat through the grime on his face.
“When’d this happen?” she asked the girl.
“A few hours ago. Princeton… most of Princeton’s gone. The storm…”
“Been bad. A twister, maybe a parcel o’ them.”
The girl stiffened. “It tore its way from Missouri, right across Illinois, crushed everything in its path. There must be hundreds dead.” She paused. “How did you know about it, out here in nowhere? We’ve been driving non-stop.”
Mamma Lucy wondered about that wound. A metal spar had gone deep through his shoulder and into his chest. If she pulled it out, the blood might come gushing.
“I hear things.” She checked the pulse at his neck. Weak, unreliable, the patter of rain on a tin roof. She straightened up. “Name’s Mamma Lucy. Reckon you turned you this way on account o’ me. Folk do that, when there’s trouble.”
The girl sat down on a bale, shaking.
“You don’t realise what’s coming,” she said, flat-voiced. “I’ve seen… felt something – I can’t even tell you…”
TRIVIA: Mamma Lucy is a hoodoo lady, a conjure woman. Historically, the guiding principle for most hoodoo was belief in God and the Bible. Where Caribbean and New Orleans spiritual movements blended Catholic saints with African belief systems, a lot of hoodoo folk were Protestant in one form or another. Voodoo and hoodoo get confused, but they ain’t really the same. You might call hoodoo a dominant blend of African beliefs, with threads of European herb and symbolic lore pulled in as well. Much conjure-work links back to Ewe and Fon lore from West Africa. The lines got blurred, as Black people from different tribes and cultures were enslaved and forced together. They sought systems which might sustain at least a fraction of their origins and identity, including shared reference points. With time, some of these developed into beliefs and oral traditions which echoed the lost past but also reflected life in the States.
If this was a predominantly Black road, it didn’t automatically exclude whites, because it slowly drew in folklore from European immigrants, especially Germanic ones. It came from the big slave plantations, but as the 19th century progressed, it spread into communities through freedmen and women, and had value for many poor and disenfranchised people. It absorbed elements of Native American herbalism, and became its own thing. Hoodoo. Root-work is another name, from the use of medicinal or magical roots and herbs.
Your audio pick this time – a fun one, Louis Jordan’s ‘Somebody Done Hoodooed the Hoodoo Man’…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1916021220/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_5L50EbECQSZ0D
