Tag: horror

Talking about female writers

13th October 2010 / / 15 Comments

There’s been an extensive discussion at Torque Control over the last week about the paucity of women currently being published in British science fiction. I want to do my bit to continue that conversation, and I’ll take as my starting point the magazine that popped through my letterbox a couple of days ago.

Black Static is a horror magazine rather than a science fiction one, but the issues of under-representation/lack of visibility of female writers in the genre are much the same. Black Static can usually be relied upon to highlight the work of female writers; indeed, in its last couple of issues, the magazine has published the twenty short-shorts selected by Christopher Fowler and Maura McHugh for their Campaign for Real Fear, and thirteen of those stories were by women.

In that context, it’s particularly disappointing to note that the current issue contains five stories, all of which are by men. Now, I used to think this didn’t matter with individual issues of magazines (see, for example, my review of Jupiter XXIV, where I don’t mention the all-male line-up) – anthologies, yes, because they make an individual statement; but I was less concerned when it came to issues of magazine, because they could be viewed in the wider context of the magazine’s complete run.

These days, however, I am inclined to think differently: any list of writers or stories makes a statement; to exclude women from a list is to imply that they don’t write that sort of fiction – which is an impression I would never want to encourage. It’s vital for readers, authors, editors, and publishers alike to keep an eye out for things like this, to prevent them from happening, and not let them go unremarked when they do slip through the net.

Going back to the current issue of Black Static, there’s an interview with horror editor Stephen Jones which touches on the subject of female writers in the genre. One of Jones’s comments is another sentiment with which I would have agreed readily at one time, though now I have reservations –  that the quality of the story is of paramount importance, rather than its author’s gender (or what-have-you).

I could agree with this wholeheartedly if the playing-field were level, but the playing-field is not level. Historically, more men have been published than women, and the effects of that filter down. I’ve never selected books on the basis of an author’s gender, but my book collection is still weighted heavily towards male authors, and that’s because there have always been proportionately more books by men around from which I could choose.

I’m well aware that the coverage on this blog is also weighted towards male writers, a situation with which I’m not happy. Whilst I may not be able to remove that bias entirely, what I can do is to make sure that I’m looking for and drawing attention to the work of female writers, of whatever genre. I’d urge others to do the same.

Gary Fry, ‘Strings Attached’ (2010)

10th October 2010 / / 1 Comment

Fifty-something Tullis travels to the seaside town where he plans to open his own burger bar; there’s just the little problem of the locals not being too happy about it — and the nagging feeling of a childhood memory just out of reach, which points to something rather disturbing about the theatre annexe that Tullis has bought.

Over the course of these Null Immortalis posts, I’ve talked a couple of times about stories whose elements I’d wish cohered a little more than they do. ‘Strings Attached’ is the opposite: a tale which is all the stronger because its elements don’t quite cohere. Fry hints at something dark, then suggests an explanation; but the events of the story don’t support that explanation fully — and there’s a sense that what’s happening here will not submit to any straightforward analysis, whcih makes the story all the more unsettling.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Gary Fry’s website

Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’ (2010)

24th September 2010 / / 1 Comment

A publisher rejects the manuscript of a struggling writer; the next submission they receive from him is a thinly-disguised tale of his taking revenge. The threatening MS is promptly sent to the police; but the narrative has changed – and may reflect the writer’s next move. This story has elegant flourishes typical of Lane (‘[As] a publisher…people assume the past is all that matters to you. They forget that you still have to breathe’), but the metaphorical underpinning isn’t as satisfying as that of (say) his ‘Black Country’.

Rating: ***

David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ (2010)

2nd September 2010 / / 1 Comment

Julia Trafton discovers that her late husband, the wealthy but cruel Lucien Kane, has been unexpectedly generous in his will: he has bequeathed Julia’s family home (which she gave over to Lucien when they married) to her. There’s a condition, however, Julia must remain in the house for one night, without moving any of fifty-two marked objects. This may seem straightforward enough, but the objects turn out to be the fruits of Lucien’s interest in taxidermy – including his own stuffed corpse, proudly on display in the bedroom.

The idea behind ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’ is creepy enough, but what makes Fitzpatrick’s story work even better is a wonderful ambiguity over the exact nature of the events taking place. Nicely done.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
David M. Fitzpatrick’s website

S.D. Tullis, ‘The Return’ (2010)

31st August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A girl who disappeared to who-knows-where, for who-knows-what reason, returns home as mysteriously as she vanished. She is different – withdrawn and unresponsive; nothing her parents try is able to bring their old daughter back. And then they discover that she has changed in ways far stranger than they could ever have imagined. I can’t quite piece together in my mind a conception of everything that goes on in the story; but Tullis’s writing is wonderfully unsettling.

Rating: ***½

Walter Mosley, ‘Juvenal Nyx’ (2010)

28th June 2010 / / 3 Comments

Another vampire story, but unfortunately one that’s not as successful as Roddy Doyle’s. Mosley’s protagonist is a student radical in the 1970s, when he is seduced by a woman who turns him into something like a vampire and dubs him ‘Juvenal Nyx’ – ‘child of the night’. Thirty years later, Nyx falls in love, sets himself up as a professional ‘problem solver’, and takes on a rather mysterious client.

‘Juvenal Nyx’ is constructed from several different elements, which may be fine in and of themselves – for example, Mosley is particularly good at evoking the uncomfortable desire caused by the vampirism – but they sit awkwardly together. For instance, into the midst of a tale which portrays its subject matter in an otherwise ‘realistic’ fashion, walks Nyx’s client, who is every bit the stereotype of a supernatural femme fatale; she just doesn’t seem to fit, and there isn’t room in the story to indicate her place in the wider scheme of Mosley’s fictional world. In the end, ‘Juvenal Nyx’ is too fragmentary to truly satisfy as a complete piece.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Walter Mosley’s website

Joe R. Lansdale, ‘The Stars Are Falling’ (2010)

24th June 2010 / / 2 Comments

Lansdale tells the story of Deel Arrowsmith, a soldier who returns home to East Texas from the Great War, to find a wife who thought he must have died, a son who’s never really known him, and a life from which he is now impossibly distanced. Haunted by memories of his wartime experiences, Deel struggles to fit back into his old world.

The portrait of Deel in Texas is carefully observed, and I appreciate the parallels that Lansdale establishes between his protagonist’s two sets of experiences. But what makes the story ultimately come unstuck for me is that the narrative voice so suited to describing events in East Texas doesn’t draw me in to the wartime sequences, and that unbalances a tale whose success depends on its equilibrium.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
Joe R. Lansdale’s website

Tom Fletcher, The Leaping (2010)

24th May 2010 / / 0 Comments

Reading Tom Fletcher’s short story ‘The Safe Children’ was all it took for me to place his novel The Leaping on my to-read list. Now that novel is here, and it was worth the wait.

The Leaping centres on a group of twenty-something housemates who all work in the same call centre in Manchester, and particularly on Jack, who also has a sideline in writing articles about the paranormal. One day at work, Jack meets – and falls in love with – the beautiful and enigmatic Jennifer, though she warns him that it’ll be an open relationship, as she believes in the free-love ideals of the Sixties. This leads to certain complications involving Jack’s housemate, Francis (who shares the book’s narration with Jack).

Jennifer has recently come into some money after her mother died, and uses it to buy Fell House, a creaking old mansion in Cumbria, where she moves in with Jack. Back in Manchester, the remaining housemates plan a surprise birthday party for Jack – but some uninvited guests turn up, and everyone discovers that there’s some truth to the old tales of werewolves, after all.

One of the first things I noticed about The Leaping is how good a writer of voice Fletcher is. I like the narrative voices to be differentiated in stories with multiple first-person narrators, and Fletcher does this very well indeed.  Francis’s voice is particularly striking, revealing an earnest  personality and an obsessive eye for detail (he lists all his friends’ favourite books, films and music because, he says, ‘the only way of working out the true personality of a person, their true soul, is by their taste’ [42]). Those same character traits are used to brilliant effect later in the novel, when events take a horrific turn.

And it’s the horror where Fletcher’s prose shines its brightest.  The best of his passages about the werewolves are as good as one could wish horror writing to be, as Fletcher captures both the profound horror of having one’s very self undermined and transformed, and the primal attraction of the lycanthropes’ existence. He also gives his werewolves an air of genuine strangeness, which makes even this hoary old staple feel fresh – no mean feat.

Where I think The Leaping is less successful is in its treatment of the larger dichotomy it seemingly aims to dramatise – broadly speaking, that of modern life versus nature. Jack expresses disillusionment with urban life – and, with what he and his colleagues have to put up with at the call centre, it’s no wonder – but the ‘push’ of this doesn’t seem to me to be as strongly felt by the novel as the ‘pull’ towards the wildness of nature. When Jack talks about wanting to run with the werewolves, he does so with a deep yearning that’s woven into the very fabric of his words. But Jack’s comments about city life don’t come close to that, and this imbalance dilutes the impact of the theme.

Even taking this into account, though, The Leaping is still a very good piece of horror fiction. That puts an interesting spin on a venerable motif. After years in the wilderness, horror currently seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence; as long as there are writers like Tom Fletcher working in it, the field is in good hands.

Links
Tom Fletcher’s blog
Kamvision interview with Fletcher

M.G. Preston, ‘Extreme Latitude’ (2010)

23rd May 2010 / / 1 Comment

A short tale, told in diary form, of a scientist working at a polar weather station, who is slowly driven mad by a constant humming noise. The story works well enough in showing how the protagonist loses his grip on reality, as his diary entries become ever more frantic; but I think it falls down towards the end, because the supernatural interpretation that’s offered doesn’t quite convince, making it hard to accept the ambiguity for which Preston seems to be aiming. Almost there, but not quite.

This story appears in Black Static 16. Read all my posts about that issue here.

Tim Casson, ‘The Overseer’ (2010)

18th May 2010 / / 1 Comment

Depression-era London: our narrator, Darius, was born into a wealthy family, but is now having to deal with the hard economic times and has taken a job in a factory. He discovers a dark secret at its heart, in the form of the mill’s mysterious masked overseer. Casson evokes the atmosphere of the factory particularly well, and the ending takes the story takes the story off in a fascinating new direction. But the metaphorical underpinning doesn’t seem fully coherent, leaving me with the sense of a story containing two or three ideas that sit quite uncomfortably alongside one another, good though Casson’s writing is.

This story appears in Black Static 16. Read all my posts about that issue here.

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