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darkling_talesI'm quite a fan of Jonathan Aycliffe, having enjoyed several of his later novels (the best of which is, to my mind, his epistolary novel of Transylvanian goings-on The Lost.) Lately I've made it my business to catch up on his earlier work, which has been an easy job given how cheaply Aycliffe's books are selling on Abebooks these days. So I thought I'd share my thoughts on four of his 90s novels!
The earliest I've read, Whispers In the Dark, came out in 1992, and although nearly 20 years have elapsed since then it has lost none of its power to frighten. Like all Aycliffe's novels, it's an almost incredibly doomy first-person affair narrated by an old woman concerning the terrible events of her early teens, when her wealthy middle-class family was broken up by her father dying insolvent. She becomes an orphan and is separated from her brother in the workhouse where they are forced to stay, but as soon as she is set free she goes off in search of him, a search that leads her to the discovery of some mysterious wealthy cousins. While professing ignorance of her brother's whereabouts, they welcome her into their luxurious life in their remote stately home while instituting a search for the missing lad. But as you can imagine, all is not as it seems!
I thought Whispers in the Dark was a very effective frightener. Aycliffe rarely relies on gore and prefers to distil fear from human evil and some very well-managed hauntings. The best of these are recounted at second-hand via a diary that the heroine herself finds in the house, and in fact Aycliffe is an expert when it comes to portraying horror at one remove, in the manner of the best pre-war ghost story authors. But it's not all about restraint: there are plenty of gothic trappings, with deranged spinsters, dead suitors, crumbling crypts and secret locked chambers all jostling for the reader's attention. The climax comes as rather a surprise, however, as it breaks away from these traditional values to involve some graphic physical horror, and the theme of child abuse also smacks of modern horror writing. This makes for a slightly inhomogenous whole, and I personally don't care much for horror involving children, but as a whole Whispers in the Dark is great fun, despite the depressing tone of the opening chapter.
It is largely Aycliffe's use of foreshadowing that lends gloom to Whispers in the Dark. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this technique: I don't really like having foreknowledge of the effect of a novel's events on its narrator, as it can destroy the suspense, for one thing. Sadly for me, Acyliffe's next novel, 1993's The Vanishment, is absolutely sodden with foreshadowing. It's about a man whose wife suddenly vanishes without trace while the pair are holidaying in a house on a remote Cornish headland, and who ends up caught in a web of historical tragedy, reincarnation and very modern danger as he tries to piece together the mystery of what has happened to her. As I adored Aycliffe's later Cornish novel A Garden Lost in Time I was hoping for some gorgeous local atmosphere, but instead the tone is sombre from the get-go and soon reaches the very pits of despair. It's clear throughout the book that the hero has been utterly destroyed by what he has found, and far from whetting the reader's appetite for horrors this merely serves to render the outcome predictable (especially if you've already read other Aycliffe books!) There are a small number of good hauntings, and it's clear the author has achieved his aim of writing a really bloody miserable novel, but it was all too much for me and The Vanishment is my least favourite of all Aycliffe's novels.
Funnily enough, Aycliffe's next offering, The Matrix, is one of his best, in my opinion! Despite the title's misleading hints at modern sci-fi, this is one of Aycliffe's knowledgable forays into ancient lore and occult practises. We follow Andrew, a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh (in the present day) who worms his way into a secret occult society while conducting undercover research for the Sociology department about suspected modern-day Satanic practises. He doesn't come across any black goats or ritual orgies, but what he does find is a terrifying grimoire of spells written by that staple of Lovecraftian horror fiction, a mad Arab scholar. As if by coincidence, a charming and urbane lawyer takes him under his wing soon after this, and offers to instruct Andrew in real occult practises. Andrew's desire for 'mastery' soon overcomes the objections of his rational mind, and soon he's off on a physical and spiritual journey that his Faculty strongly disapprove of! I found The Matrix simply terrifying. Aycliffe, himself a scholar of the middle-east and the Arab world, is particularly well-positioned to write about this sort of thing, and unlike most of his novels, this story is spread across two continents in a rich travelogue that brings to life the beautiful storm-buffeted islands of the remote Hebrides, the winding, dark old tenements of Edinburgh and the sun-baked (but equally sinister) desert towns of Morocco in equal measure.
In Aycliffe's novels, dying doesn't necessarily let you off the hook where suffering is concerned, but in this novel the suffering meted out to departed souls tops anything else he's ever written. His imagination in that domain is almost sadistic, though as usual there is no gore or gratuitous violence involved. After you've read a few Aycliffe novels, you develop a feeling for the twists and turns the author is going to throw at you (in other words, you soon learn to trust no-one and nothing) , but in The Matrix he mainly stays ahead of the game nonetheless, constantly shovelling fresh horrors onto the stunned reader, especially towards the end! All this unfurls against a canopy of more subtle, quiet horrors, like odd dragging footsteps and rats in the walls that aren't really rats. I especially enjoyed the Jamesian understatement of the description of the pictures in the sinister book, and the dream scenes. If you want a horror novel that will stay with you a long time, The Matrix fits the bill nicely, and along with The Lost it's the Aycliffe novel I like the best.
Fast forward to 1999, and we come upon quite a different proposition: The Shadow on the Wall is an antiquarian ghost story-cum-mystery paying unabashed tribute to M R James, about a Cambridge fellow who comes to tussle with supernatural evil of the old shadow-of-a-shade school. In fact, it's possibly the only Jamesian novel I've ever come across. As concise writing is so important to the ghost story, you could say that the novel is at something of a disadvantage to the short story, as formats go, and The Shadow... could definitely use some trimming-down to qualify as a real Jamesian hit. Aycliffe has also had to face the problem of how to convert James' dry, academic, rather one-dimensional hero into someone whose company the reader can endure for the length of a whole novel. He's responded by imbuing his donnish hero with human traits - in the course of the novel he develops a wife, and even has a child! It's a brave attempt, but none of the main characters really ring true and I would say this is Aycliffe's least successful novel where characterization is concerned. That said, this is still one of the better supernatural novels I've read, and isn't quite as heavily tinged with doom as most of his efforts. It's also an essential port-of-call for hardcore M R James fans, with all the trappings of old-world university and church present and correct.
As I've mentioned scores of times, the novel is a punishing format for supernatural fiction, but Aycliffe is pretty much the best supernatural novelist I can think of right now. Of course, I'm now running out of Aycliffes to read! I've fought shy of reading his debut Naomi's Room because I usually hate horror fiction involving little girls, especially those possessed with psychic abilities (you know the type), so perhaps one of you readers could tell me if it really needs to be read? I'm also keen to find new supernatural/horror novelists, so if you have any recommendations I'd be glad to hear them :)
The earliest I've read, Whispers In the Dark, came out in 1992, and although nearly 20 years have elapsed since then it has lost none of its power to frighten. Like all Aycliffe's novels, it's an almost incredibly doomy first-person affair narrated by an old woman concerning the terrible events of her early teens, when her wealthy middle-class family was broken up by her father dying insolvent. She becomes an orphan and is separated from her brother in the workhouse where they are forced to stay, but as soon as she is set free she goes off in search of him, a search that leads her to the discovery of some mysterious wealthy cousins. While professing ignorance of her brother's whereabouts, they welcome her into their luxurious life in their remote stately home while instituting a search for the missing lad. But as you can imagine, all is not as it seems!
I thought Whispers in the Dark was a very effective frightener. Aycliffe rarely relies on gore and prefers to distil fear from human evil and some very well-managed hauntings. The best of these are recounted at second-hand via a diary that the heroine herself finds in the house, and in fact Aycliffe is an expert when it comes to portraying horror at one remove, in the manner of the best pre-war ghost story authors. But it's not all about restraint: there are plenty of gothic trappings, with deranged spinsters, dead suitors, crumbling crypts and secret locked chambers all jostling for the reader's attention. The climax comes as rather a surprise, however, as it breaks away from these traditional values to involve some graphic physical horror, and the theme of child abuse also smacks of modern horror writing. This makes for a slightly inhomogenous whole, and I personally don't care much for horror involving children, but as a whole Whispers in the Dark is great fun, despite the depressing tone of the opening chapter.
It is largely Aycliffe's use of foreshadowing that lends gloom to Whispers in the Dark. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this technique: I don't really like having foreknowledge of the effect of a novel's events on its narrator, as it can destroy the suspense, for one thing. Sadly for me, Acyliffe's next novel, 1993's The Vanishment, is absolutely sodden with foreshadowing. It's about a man whose wife suddenly vanishes without trace while the pair are holidaying in a house on a remote Cornish headland, and who ends up caught in a web of historical tragedy, reincarnation and very modern danger as he tries to piece together the mystery of what has happened to her. As I adored Aycliffe's later Cornish novel A Garden Lost in Time I was hoping for some gorgeous local atmosphere, but instead the tone is sombre from the get-go and soon reaches the very pits of despair. It's clear throughout the book that the hero has been utterly destroyed by what he has found, and far from whetting the reader's appetite for horrors this merely serves to render the outcome predictable (especially if you've already read other Aycliffe books!) There are a small number of good hauntings, and it's clear the author has achieved his aim of writing a really bloody miserable novel, but it was all too much for me and The Vanishment is my least favourite of all Aycliffe's novels.
Funnily enough, Aycliffe's next offering, The Matrix, is one of his best, in my opinion! Despite the title's misleading hints at modern sci-fi, this is one of Aycliffe's knowledgable forays into ancient lore and occult practises. We follow Andrew, a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh (in the present day) who worms his way into a secret occult society while conducting undercover research for the Sociology department about suspected modern-day Satanic practises. He doesn't come across any black goats or ritual orgies, but what he does find is a terrifying grimoire of spells written by that staple of Lovecraftian horror fiction, a mad Arab scholar. As if by coincidence, a charming and urbane lawyer takes him under his wing soon after this, and offers to instruct Andrew in real occult practises. Andrew's desire for 'mastery' soon overcomes the objections of his rational mind, and soon he's off on a physical and spiritual journey that his Faculty strongly disapprove of! I found The Matrix simply terrifying. Aycliffe, himself a scholar of the middle-east and the Arab world, is particularly well-positioned to write about this sort of thing, and unlike most of his novels, this story is spread across two continents in a rich travelogue that brings to life the beautiful storm-buffeted islands of the remote Hebrides, the winding, dark old tenements of Edinburgh and the sun-baked (but equally sinister) desert towns of Morocco in equal measure.
In Aycliffe's novels, dying doesn't necessarily let you off the hook where suffering is concerned, but in this novel the suffering meted out to departed souls tops anything else he's ever written. His imagination in that domain is almost sadistic, though as usual there is no gore or gratuitous violence involved. After you've read a few Aycliffe novels, you develop a feeling for the twists and turns the author is going to throw at you (in other words, you soon learn to trust no-one and nothing) , but in The Matrix he mainly stays ahead of the game nonetheless, constantly shovelling fresh horrors onto the stunned reader, especially towards the end! All this unfurls against a canopy of more subtle, quiet horrors, like odd dragging footsteps and rats in the walls that aren't really rats. I especially enjoyed the Jamesian understatement of the description of the pictures in the sinister book, and the dream scenes. If you want a horror novel that will stay with you a long time, The Matrix fits the bill nicely, and along with The Lost it's the Aycliffe novel I like the best.
Fast forward to 1999, and we come upon quite a different proposition: The Shadow on the Wall is an antiquarian ghost story-cum-mystery paying unabashed tribute to M R James, about a Cambridge fellow who comes to tussle with supernatural evil of the old shadow-of-a-shade school. In fact, it's possibly the only Jamesian novel I've ever come across. As concise writing is so important to the ghost story, you could say that the novel is at something of a disadvantage to the short story, as formats go, and The Shadow... could definitely use some trimming-down to qualify as a real Jamesian hit. Aycliffe has also had to face the problem of how to convert James' dry, academic, rather one-dimensional hero into someone whose company the reader can endure for the length of a whole novel. He's responded by imbuing his donnish hero with human traits - in the course of the novel he develops a wife, and even has a child! It's a brave attempt, but none of the main characters really ring true and I would say this is Aycliffe's least successful novel where characterization is concerned. That said, this is still one of the better supernatural novels I've read, and isn't quite as heavily tinged with doom as most of his efforts. It's also an essential port-of-call for hardcore M R James fans, with all the trappings of old-world university and church present and correct.
As I've mentioned scores of times, the novel is a punishing format for supernatural fiction, but Aycliffe is pretty much the best supernatural novelist I can think of right now. Of course, I'm now running out of Aycliffes to read! I've fought shy of reading his debut Naomi's Room because I usually hate horror fiction involving little girls, especially those possessed with psychic abilities (you know the type), so perhaps one of you readers could tell me if it really needs to be read? I'm also keen to find new supernatural/horror novelists, so if you have any recommendations I'd be glad to hear them :)
