Mary Williams

[joysilence]

Do any of you know anything about Mary Williams? She's a prolific author of supernatural novels and short stories (as well as historical romances) who wrote steadily from the late 70s up to her death in 2000. I recently stumbled on one of her collections, The Dark God (1980), via the 'if you liked this you'll also like these...' section of the Fantastic Fiction website. But despite her impressive output, she remains an obscure figure, at least on the internet. All I could really find about her was this obituary by Richard Dalby (yes, him again!), which provides details of her life, which was certainly rich in variety. The former ballet dancer and journalist wrote a small number of novels and poetry as a young woman, but seems to have waited until she was 72 before coughing up her first piece of supernatural fiction. After that, however, there was no stopping her! The great majority of her work was written in her 70s and 80s.

The Dark God is composed of the eponymous novella and a handful of short stories. The Dark God begins with a tense domestic scene, as we find the rather fey heroine Aleyne struggling to suppress a vague malaise, though God knows she's not short of a good concrete reason to be miserable. Stranded in a cottage in a remote Welsh valley with only her ex-fiancee Adam and her manhunting half-sister Lucinda for immediate company, she's also forced to make do with a rather unsavoury crew of neighbours for her social life, most of them wealthy second-homers. The most dodgy of the lot is Maurice Herne, a bachelor with a penchant for occult practises, whose party trick is to lure the local women into his arms by repeatedly playing an odd piano tune of his own composition. Clearly taking his cue from Mr Karswell in Casting The Runes, he throws a lavish fancy-dress party in the woods on the night of the Summer solstice, ably assisted by his strange young protege Bran. Most of the middle-aged guests are too busy feeling embarrassed by their silly fairy costumes - or too drunk on Herne's famous 'punch' - to notice anything untoward, but when Herne suggests a game of hide-and-seek Aleyne bumps into something nasty in the dark trees. For the rest of the community, the effects of the evening's entertainment are more subtle, and when Hallowe'en comes round, most of them are still keen enough on Hearne to take part in another one of his parties, this time celebrating Samhain...

The Dark God deals with the sort of subject matter I really enjoy, so I was favourably disposed towards the novella at first. Williams also has the requisite grasp of Nature - both good and evil - necessary for any writer dealing with 'Panic' or sylvan horror. However, Williams' characters let the story down badly. They are largely one-dimensional, and more damningly, one senses most of them exist mainly as vehicles for some of Williams' weirder opinions. She levels a bizarre amount of undiluted vitriol at her middle-aged women characters, a pathetic bunch of frumps, deluded old wealthy women trapped in loveless marriages to toyboys, or - worst of all - women who are still virgins in their fifties. Given that Williams herself only married at 45, she displays a curious lack of sympathy for those women still 'on the shelf', be it by accident or choice. But then, authorial sympathy is in pretty short supply chez Williams. Most of her male characters would be considered boors nowadays, although the reader is not prompted to hate them quite so much for their wife-beatin', gold-diggin' errors. I can't remember a novel so lacking in compassion, and that's got to be a bad thing. I also detected a certain coy prurience at work, especially in the description of Lucinda and Hearne's sexual antics, and the raunchier scenes have a Mills and Boone edge to them which I could certainly do without. I'm still not quite sure how many times the word 'earthy' appeared in the text, but by the time I'd given up counting we were already into double figures.

However, I soldiered bravely on through the pagan mayhem, and was rewarded in the last third of the novella by some memorably creepy moments in an old abandoned church, complete with sinister denizens, and a rather good rendition of the usual Centuries-Old Evil that underpins the woodland community, which all the real locals shun. Despite her unconvincing characters and wacko relationship politics, Williams manages to crank up the tension enough to make the reader feel some relief when some of the players emerge sane and alive at the end of the novella. The tutting morality of the earlier stages evaporates by the novella's conclusion, as we are forced to consider that, while bad people come and go, Pan himself is likely to remain with us. And the small crop of short stories in this collection are better-written than the novella, being mainly bittersweet vignettes of lost loves and forgotten Welsh idylls tinged with the supernatural, as opposed to out and out horror. I especially enjoyed 'Poppies', a very short story with vivid imagery.

Williams' late arrival on the scene may be partly responsible for her obscurity. In the circumstances, I would love to be able to say I'd discovered a hidden jewel of an author, a brilliant writer unfairly overlooked by the industry. Sadly, Williams' talents are a bit modest for that. I noticed in Dalby's obituary that he carefully avoids making any reference to the quality of her work, and this could be partly out of tact, since Williams does have her flaws and was never in the big league of horror writers. Still, if her writing is slightly trashy at times, it's a fun sort of trash, and I can imagine some people reading her novels as a 'guilty pleasure'. In fact I may well end up checking out more of her work myself, since her story collections and novels can be had online for a matter of pence - though having been a horror fan for nearly 20 years, I think it's probably a bit late for me to start feeling 'guilt' of any kind, given some of the rubbish I've ploughed through in the past ;)