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darkling_talesThis year I ordered myself a Christmas present of Strange Tales 3, the latest in Rosalie Parker's series of anthologies for Tartarus Press. For me it was a must-buy, if only because of the promised John Gaskin, David Rix and Reggie Oliver stories! As it turned out, Strange Tales 3 also contains other material at least as good as those authors' submissions. Series regular Nina Allan's The Lammas Worm is a splendid start to the proceedings, and is the best of her stories that I've read so far. This story (about a troupe of travelling circus performers who end up tangling with hideous pagan forces in rural Wiltshire after giving shelter to a strange wild girl) feels totally original (a hard job for any horror story nowadays) and has that double impact of terror and pathos often sought-after (but less frequently achieved) by modern authors in the field.
Traditional sources of horror then give way to more obviously 'strange' stories, with one author, Daniel Mill, even offering his tale of a mysterious religious community 'Sanctuary Run' as a tribute to Robert Aickman, the grandaddy of all strange tale authors! Indeed it would seem that most of the confusion and ambiguity driving these few stories can be put down to one ideology or another, be it political ('A Woman of the Party' by that lady of mystery Elizabeth Brown) or mystical. Gary McMahon's 'The Good, Light People' is the best of these, and this story of a young girl subject to enigmatic visions in a rustic church shows the author working in a very different vein from the gritty urban horrror and family psychodrama he usually explores.
But what of those three big-hitters, Rix, Oliver and Gaskin? Well, Rix's 'A Taste of Casu Marzu' was a bit of a let-down, mainly because it is so short. I was hoping for a leisurely, spellbinding sort of novella like 'The Magpies' (which was one of the highlights of Strange Tales 2), and the story's light-hearted subject matter (it revolves around a particularly foul, currently illegal cheese made with live maggots) was not really up my street. I can't accuse it of being a bad story though! With 'Countess Otho' Oliver (whose own anthologies are like gold dust nowadays) has handed in a very fair ghost story about a long-forgotten play manuscript which falls into the hands of a rather waspish young theatre actor, who soon becomes the receipt of some very unwelcome attention from a mysterious 'fan'...Although the play itself is like a kind of souped-up Mark Samuels vision of chaos, the theme of an implacable avenging supernatural entity and the bleak moral landscape hark back to the much older writer L P Hartley (try 'W.S.' or "A Visitor From Down Under" and you'll see what I mean!). Though that's not necessarily a bad thing, as Hartley's stories are long overdue a popular 'comeback' to my mind!
John Gaskin seems to have been very quiet since his last collection The Long-Retreating Day came out in 2005, but it seems he has used the intervening time wisely: his offering Party Talk is one of the stand-out stories of the book. It deals with unusual subject matter for Gaskin - an old woman recounting an account of a terrifying, otherworldly and very intimate ordeal she endured as a young girl (I'm pretty sure all the main characters in The Long-Retreating Day were men, usually middle-aged!) And more importantly, the slightly disapproving moral tone that has sometimes marred his otherwise excellent stories for me is quite absent here, which is only right, since there is no place for certainty, moral or otherwise, in the 'strange story'. There are some wonderful dreamlike moments and bizarre yet poignant images, but also a dash of good old-fashioned graveyard action to placate the fan of more traditional ghost stories! Clearly, a new Gaskin anthology would be a very good thing.
In the second half of the book, the atmosphere becomes decidedly sombre, even by the standards of supernatural fiction. Tina Rath's 'It's White and It Follows Me' is a cheerful helping of the author's usual historical fiction (the Jacobite rebellion, this time) which I think is her best story so far. This tale's note of light relief is all the more welcome when you see the turn the anthology is about to take! Joel Knight and Eric Carl Stenson hand in exceedingly dark tales of supernatural persecution and madness, and the two stories in a row about child abuse and murder are somewhat draining - Gerard Houarnier's 'The Other Box' is incomprehensible as well as grim, and doesn't achieve the kind of artistic dream-logic that usually take the place of normal rationality in strange stories (though perhaps more enlightened readers could make better sense of it!) Adam Golaski's account of sinister tribal beliefs and their effect on local children, 'The Great Blind God Passed Through Us', didn't quite rise to the heights he's capable of either. Towards the end of the book, the stories become more nuanced and genuinely ambiguous in terms of mood as well as content, which I think is a good thing. Simon Strantzas's 'His Father's Daughter' actually steals Daniel Mills' thunder as the best piece of Aickmanesque fiction in the collection, and Angela Slatter's fairy tale 'Sister, Sister' offers a refreshing change in tone.
As you may remember from my previous review, I was impressed by the previous Strange Tales collections (especially the second one.) I am equally enthusiastic about Strange Tales III. It is more consistent in quality than the previous two instalments, with most of the authors writing at the top of their game, and many of the tales also owe a little to the conventional ghost story, whereas some of Parkers' previous choices have been really quite 'out there'. This is something I personally approve of - I want a 'strange story' to be unsettling and bizarre, but I like to see the more conventional values of plot, characterization etc. respected as well. I am not yet sure if this collection will contain anything as memorable and challenging as, say, Quentin S Crisp's 'The Fairy Catcher' or the aforementioned 'Magpies', but I do find tales like these need time to really settle in the mind anyway, so I'll have to wait and see! In the meantime, Strange Tales 3 is a superb overview of the talent that is positively fizzing over on the British (and, to an extent, transatlantic) weird fiction scene today. Priced at £30, it's not tremendously cheap, but obviously it's a nice edition and I am expecting Parker's series to become one of those defining sets of anthologies people refer to years afterwards. A paperback edition would be a very good idea!
Traditional sources of horror then give way to more obviously 'strange' stories, with one author, Daniel Mill, even offering his tale of a mysterious religious community 'Sanctuary Run' as a tribute to Robert Aickman, the grandaddy of all strange tale authors! Indeed it would seem that most of the confusion and ambiguity driving these few stories can be put down to one ideology or another, be it political ('A Woman of the Party' by that lady of mystery Elizabeth Brown) or mystical. Gary McMahon's 'The Good, Light People' is the best of these, and this story of a young girl subject to enigmatic visions in a rustic church shows the author working in a very different vein from the gritty urban horrror and family psychodrama he usually explores.
But what of those three big-hitters, Rix, Oliver and Gaskin? Well, Rix's 'A Taste of Casu Marzu' was a bit of a let-down, mainly because it is so short. I was hoping for a leisurely, spellbinding sort of novella like 'The Magpies' (which was one of the highlights of Strange Tales 2), and the story's light-hearted subject matter (it revolves around a particularly foul, currently illegal cheese made with live maggots) was not really up my street. I can't accuse it of being a bad story though! With 'Countess Otho' Oliver (whose own anthologies are like gold dust nowadays) has handed in a very fair ghost story about a long-forgotten play manuscript which falls into the hands of a rather waspish young theatre actor, who soon becomes the receipt of some very unwelcome attention from a mysterious 'fan'...Although the play itself is like a kind of souped-up Mark Samuels vision of chaos, the theme of an implacable avenging supernatural entity and the bleak moral landscape hark back to the much older writer L P Hartley (try 'W.S.' or "A Visitor From Down Under" and you'll see what I mean!). Though that's not necessarily a bad thing, as Hartley's stories are long overdue a popular 'comeback' to my mind!
John Gaskin seems to have been very quiet since his last collection The Long-Retreating Day came out in 2005, but it seems he has used the intervening time wisely: his offering Party Talk is one of the stand-out stories of the book. It deals with unusual subject matter for Gaskin - an old woman recounting an account of a terrifying, otherworldly and very intimate ordeal she endured as a young girl (I'm pretty sure all the main characters in The Long-Retreating Day were men, usually middle-aged!) And more importantly, the slightly disapproving moral tone that has sometimes marred his otherwise excellent stories for me is quite absent here, which is only right, since there is no place for certainty, moral or otherwise, in the 'strange story'. There are some wonderful dreamlike moments and bizarre yet poignant images, but also a dash of good old-fashioned graveyard action to placate the fan of more traditional ghost stories! Clearly, a new Gaskin anthology would be a very good thing.
In the second half of the book, the atmosphere becomes decidedly sombre, even by the standards of supernatural fiction. Tina Rath's 'It's White and It Follows Me' is a cheerful helping of the author's usual historical fiction (the Jacobite rebellion, this time) which I think is her best story so far. This tale's note of light relief is all the more welcome when you see the turn the anthology is about to take! Joel Knight and Eric Carl Stenson hand in exceedingly dark tales of supernatural persecution and madness, and the two stories in a row about child abuse and murder are somewhat draining - Gerard Houarnier's 'The Other Box' is incomprehensible as well as grim, and doesn't achieve the kind of artistic dream-logic that usually take the place of normal rationality in strange stories (though perhaps more enlightened readers could make better sense of it!) Adam Golaski's account of sinister tribal beliefs and their effect on local children, 'The Great Blind God Passed Through Us', didn't quite rise to the heights he's capable of either. Towards the end of the book, the stories become more nuanced and genuinely ambiguous in terms of mood as well as content, which I think is a good thing. Simon Strantzas's 'His Father's Daughter' actually steals Daniel Mills' thunder as the best piece of Aickmanesque fiction in the collection, and Angela Slatter's fairy tale 'Sister, Sister' offers a refreshing change in tone.
As you may remember from my previous review, I was impressed by the previous Strange Tales collections (especially the second one.) I am equally enthusiastic about Strange Tales III. It is more consistent in quality than the previous two instalments, with most of the authors writing at the top of their game, and many of the tales also owe a little to the conventional ghost story, whereas some of Parkers' previous choices have been really quite 'out there'. This is something I personally approve of - I want a 'strange story' to be unsettling and bizarre, but I like to see the more conventional values of plot, characterization etc. respected as well. I am not yet sure if this collection will contain anything as memorable and challenging as, say, Quentin S Crisp's 'The Fairy Catcher' or the aforementioned 'Magpies', but I do find tales like these need time to really settle in the mind anyway, so I'll have to wait and see! In the meantime, Strange Tales 3 is a superb overview of the talent that is positively fizzing over on the British (and, to an extent, transatlantic) weird fiction scene today. Priced at £30, it's not tremendously cheap, but obviously it's a nice edition and I am expecting Parker's series to become one of those defining sets of anthologies people refer to years afterwards. A paperback edition would be a very good idea!
