Terry Lamsley in Conference...

[joysilence]

The books of British author Terry Lamsley are pretty thin on the ground these days, and nonexistent if you want them cheap, so I was delighted when a good Samaritan lent me a handsome hardback copy of his second short story collection, Conference With The Dead. Having previously enjoyed his later anthology Dark Matters, I came to the book expecting more than a few chills.

And in the first three stories I got what I came for. Walking The Dog is a rather scarring tale of a young unemployed boy who takes on the job of walking a very curious, wilful pet belonging to a crazy old man. Set on Lamsley's beloved frozen moorland, the tale would fall flat in the hands of a lesser author because the events are so fantastical, but Terry has the skill to put +anything+ past the reader. And I suspect I'll be forever too afraid to crack someone's skull open from now on, for fear of what might lurk inside it. There goes my career as a heavy, thanks Tezza. Blade and Bone is to my mind the best story here, set once again in the hills and dales of Northern England, and combining rustic horror with the revival of a hideous act of torture that took place hundreds of years before. It is also the most Jamesian of the tales, with its accent on ancient relics and things best left untouched which are, inevitably, given a jolly good touch. The Break is more slow-burning and brings out Lamsley's preoccupation with society's lost and lonely, in the form of the aged and unwell who people a seaside hospice with a sinister secret. The hero is a small boy, which gives the ending an extra twist of nastiness. Over the course of these stories I became aware of a new theme for Lamsley, that of addiction and addicts. It's a theme I welcome personally.

After this splendid start, however, Terry began to lose his grip on me. In Dark Matters I had noted his fondness for sad people living miserable lives, and his unremitting practise of letting all his heros and heroines come to a sticky end. In the next few stories, both these penchants come to the fore in a manner that upsets the usual balance between pathos and fright - sadness inevitably kills off fear if allowed free reign in a story, and several tales consist of almost nothing but Dickensian displays of personal torment, with precious little by way of ghosts. Running In The Family and The Outer Darkness are particularly bad examples. Would it kill Lamsley to write a happy ending occasionally? And doesn't he realize that the constant knowledge of an unhappy ending exponentially reduces the reader's anticipation and fun? As one shabby loveless household bled into another I began to wonder about the collection.

Luckily, Lamsley picks himself up for the last few stories, though the heights of the earlier tales are never quite reached. Screens has all the loneliness and alienation we've come to know and love, but a good solid series of weird happenings keeps the reader hooked. Starting from the paradox that a screen is both something that projects and something that hides, he draws his hero into a web of televisual torment from which there can be no escape, while hemming him in with some classically horrible village neighbours. I was reminded of the cryptic, unsettling images from the tape in Ringu by the snaking, bulbous visions that swim across the television screen. I found myself rooting more for Andrew than any other character in this collection. And while many of the weaker stories focus on the haunted rather than the haunting, the end story The Extension strikes the perfect balance between unspeakable occult rituals and a son plagued with the memory of his serial killer parents, who put their corpses to use in a sickening manner (though in finest Lamsley style, that is only hinted at.)

All in all, I found the collection more uneven than Dark Matters, and therefore worse value for money. The two collections do have some things in common though: a delicate writing style, a way with vengeful ghosts glimpsed over water or around corners which are often mistaken for real people, and a deep, and sometimes compassionate interest in every aspect of human sorrow. He is especially good at writing about men or women who live alone, the way their minds tick over as they potter about their business, the inner monologue that fills the blankness of their solitude. And perhaps such people are indeed susceptible to seeing ghosts, since they have no human 'noise' to blur the spectral signal...

There is also a Ghosts&Scholars review of the later collection Dark Matters online here.