Abandoned review

Bill West a  short  story reviewer of  note has reviewed the  Twisted Tails III: Pure Fear (ed J Richard Jacobs and published by DDP) in his The Short Review here:

http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/TwistedTails3.htm

Of my  contribution to that exciting  anthology, Bill says:

“Geoff Nelder, who contributes the nail-biter Abandoned to this collection, is an award winning thriller writer. He is British and a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society which may be why bad weather features so prominently in his vertiginous thriller set five hundred feet in the air above a flooded London.”

If anyone  wants to read my story, Abandoned, and the  other excellent stories by excellent writers such as Marilyn Peake, Kim McDougall, J. Richard Jacobs, John Klawitter, K.L. Nappier and others then click on

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554045681

Call to scifi writers

 

 

WANT TO IMPROVE? Did you know about ‘ORBITERS’?

                         

           

- FREE WRITERS’ WORKSHOPS, for all BSFA members who want to write speculative fiction, from fantasy to horror.

 

           

 

 

In BSFA ‘Orbits’, groups of about five writers read and comment regularly on each others’ work with the intention of helping each other improve. Content can be short story or novel-length. You can opt for a Postal Orbit; an envelope circulated around to each group-member in turn, or an Online Orbit, the newer option, exchanging simultaneously by email. This means that any member in any country can now join us.

 

WHAT DO YOU DO?

It’s surprisingly easy. Send out your work, then just give others’ work the attention you’d like for yours: read carefully, comment thoughtfully, and be honest. You commit to read and respond, even if you don’t send in that round, and keep to agreed deadlines. Fair’s fair.

 

WHAT DO YOU GET?

Obviously, different viewpoints on your own writing, which, unlike with writers’ circles, you can mull over in private and in your own time, and, if you’re like me, get mad at and calm down again. [Yeah, wimp, but I am improving.]

Other benefits: critiquing others teaches you to assess your own work better. Sometimes a member can suggest a market, or an angle, or a book. And of course you’re no longer alone; others share the thrills, and frustrations.

 

DO ORBITS WORK?

Definitely, and I’ve been in short and novel, postal and online. Otherwise we wouldn’t have published members who stay in. If one group isn’t right for you then you can ask to try another. But remember: the best response is what makes your work better, not what makes you feel better? Members are trying to let you see your writing from other eyes, maybe an editor’s. And they want you to do the same for them.

 

And then of course you get to read all those new stories, maybe before they appear in print anywhere else.

 

            FOR MORE INFO, JUST GET IN TOUCH,

                                                                                    TERRY

 

 

 

For Online Orbit info, contact Terry Jackman: terryjackman AT mypostoffice.co.uk.

 

For Postal Orbit, please contact Gillian Rooke: jrooke1 AT btinternet.com

Around a dark corner by Jeani Rector

Around a dark corner by Jeani Rector

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

 

Published by Turner Maxwell Books

First published 2008

 

ISBN: 978-0-9561884-0-3

 

Jeani Rector writes noir fiction in an original way. Don’t expect gore and axes to leap into your face from her pages but you will squirm with discomfort. Luckily, the gore is on her characters’ faces and yet it is under your skin that  the real horror lurks. You could walk away but instead you will feel compelled to read on.

 

There are nine short stories and an intriguing novella – a ghost story in which a teenager reluctantly walks through a graveyard she finds the expected terror but not without being fascinated by it.

           

The anthology ranges from medieval to modern revealing that the years have yet to ease the horror potential life has to offer. One of my favourites is A Medieval Tale of Plague, possibly because I have researched the era (one of the fifteenth century plagues rather than the overdone 1665 Great Plague, so kudos to Rector for a wise choice of plague!). In this medieval plague we experience disease-ridden London through Elissa. She survives but succumbs to the horrors having to handle the rotten flesh of her dead employer. She enlists the help of a street urchin, who could be after her purse; so many bad things hide around the next corner. Although Elissa doesn’t succumb to the plague herself, the ordeal of moving around the pestilence is satisfyingly grim.

 

Horrorscope (what a brilliant title) is a neat story based on a man who takes his horoscope too literally and along with his hammer engineers an unexpected twist.

 

Lady Cop is a visual story with two main characters as patrol officers following the discovery of a body in the woods. American setting with an authentic feel. The lady cop is distinctly different from her initially sexist male partner but the two create a workable tension right to the end. Good job.

 

A clever yet understated story is Flight 529 in which we follow a passenger going through dire emotions as he faces ‘certain’ death as the plane plunges.

 

There’s more subtlety to this collection than in most horror anthologies. A modern penny dreadful with all the evil we’ve come to expect from Jeani Rector.

 

 

White horse – missed opportunity?

So the Angel of  the South is to be a giant statue of a white horse. It is to be assembled at Ebbsfleet in Kent. To me it seems a great shame that the horse will be wearing a bridle. See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/11/sculpture-mark-wallinger-horse
The horse is a noble creature and probably in existence  before  humans. The statue could have symbolised its nobility,  grandeur and  freedom, but with the bridle it represents subjugation, enslavement and the arrogance of humans to control nature. Shame.

satellites collide

It had to happen sooner or later. There are over 6,000 orbiting satellites and now two of them smashed into one another. A US Iridium active comms polar orbiting satellite clobbered an inactive Russian satelllite around 485 miles up. At nearly a ton each, the debris is considerable. With hardly any air friction  up there the debris will be travelling far at great speeds maybe for years. Approximately half will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, hopefully missing the International Space Station which orbits lower than most  comms satellites. It’s likely that debris will pass through the much higher orbit that geosynchronous satellites beam back most TV, and Eurosat images, hopefully without hitting any. There are so many satellites, and lost toolboxes in both 22,000 miles up geosynchronous orbit, mostly paralllel to the Equator, and the sub-1000 miles up polar orbits that we are creating  our own  Saturn’s rings!

The news item from the BBC is here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7885051.stm

The Absence by Bill Hussey

I am really growing into the  works of Bill Hussey.  He has a literary style I envy and which pulls you in with a thirst for  more.  A link  to his publisher Beautiful Books / Bloody Books is here.

My review:

The Absence by Bill Hussey

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

 

A English fenland family faces the truth about their history, and what they discover is deeper and darker than they could have imagined. Bill Hussey is the new M.R.James.

 

Paperback: 448 pages

Published by Bloody Books (April 2009)

ISBN-10: 1905636466

ISBN-13: 978-1905636464

 

When Joe Nightingale drove through a storm, too fast in a show-off car, the resulting accident killed his mother. The guilt would craze any normal young man and drive his surviving family into paroxysms. Yet, worse was to come. Joe wasn’t as normal as he thought, and neither was his mother. The novel spirals into the unknown with each chapter involving the reader with clever plotting,

 

Bill Hussey’s debut novel, Through A Glass, Darkly, impressed me with its twisted ‘alchemy of thought’ and noir ghostly storytelling. There is a link via the mention of Crow Haven between the two books though each stands alone as noir ghost novels.

 

My wife has mystified me by being able to sit in a chair and her gaze seems to focus on a spot behind me. When asked, she admits to looking at and thinking about nothing. I wonder if Bill Hussey knows her. However, in The Absence, this affectation is deeper and more worrying for Richard, Joe’s father. Many years prior to her fatal accident, Richard’s wife seemed absent, as if her soul had been taken. It’s only when both Joe, his girlfriend, his brother, and Richard investigate their past and find that apparent unconnected events were probably engineered that we find out what really happened – probably.

 

The horror element is unusual and cleverly mysterious. There is blood and gore, scariness and shock, but not as in traditional horror or ghost stories. Hussey is a master of scene setting so when the action moves to a ruined water mill in the Fens you are there. From interesting industrial archaeology you are thrown into the impossibility of the broken wheel turning, and gears grinding. From inside the mill, but also making her appearance when and where least expected, a demonic spirit strikes terror into those who sees her. She cannot be ignored because as the Tiddy-Mun bog spirit, she is the key to the whole mystery. While in traditional Lincolnshire folklore the Tiddy-Mun is the spirit of a withered old man, who controlled the fenland floods, Hussey warps the spirit, makes it more believable in a ghastly way.

 

Bill Hussey’s writing style pleases as it teases. Phrases I wish I’d written include: ‘…withered bluebells teetered on the verge of the great horticultural hereafter.’ ‘The (overweight) lawyer sat, and for the first time in his life, Richard felt sympathy for a chair.’

 

If I had a criticism of The Absence it would be that the unravelling of the subplots came via more than one character, so repetitious slowing the action; and Wicca terms such as changelings were defined. These are minor points and for many readers irrelevant since they may welcome having plots unravelled and esoteric words clarified.

 

My copy of The Absence has already been snatched from my hands by an eager fan of horror woven through myths and legends. She’s in for a treat and so would any reader of Bill Hussey’s novels.

 

 

Exit, Pursued by a Bee gets an award

Exit, Pursued by a Bee was nominated for the Preditors & Editors readers’ poll last month. Out of over 160 entries Exit came second. It has won the right to wear a badge for being in the Top Ten.

Preditors & Editors readers poll 2008

This award pales into the mists of insignificance compared to visting my daughter and her husband on the day of the birth of my grandson. Brilliant!

The Garbage Man by Joseph D’Lacey

I was sent a pre-published copy of The Garbage Man by Joseph D’Lacey, the author of the ground-breaking horror novel, Meat.

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

 

ISBN: 9781905636471

Publisher: Bloody Books May 2009 or earlier

 This book is to be released in the spring by Bloody Books / Beautiful Books at http://beautiful-books.co.uk/bloodybooks.html 

Back in the early 1970s I was one of the first school teachers of environmental science. Born as a hybrid from geography and biology, the subject my students studied involved them working on a farm, studying the weather, plotted global climate change and air pollution. They planted trees, and measured environmental features like rivers and air pollution. We wore masks, wellies and hardhats to visit Yorkshire’s largest landfill site. Those students had read Clive King’s Stig of the Dump (1964) and so has Joseph D’Lacey as evidenced by his homage by naming a landfill gateman as Stig.

While I taught those students my wife taught at Oldham’s Breezehill School, which hit the headlines when the pupils weren’t allowed onto their playing field. Why not? Because it was built on a completed landfill site and the anaerobic subterranean layers of soil and fermenting waste generated methane that bubbled up through to the playing fields above. Kids with matches enjoyed the phenomenon until the authorities stepped in. When we consider what is thrown into landfill sites, legally, illegally and damned strange it is surprising that new forms of life haven’t grown from the neo-primeval soup. That is what happens in The Garbage Man. Not just a horror story but a warning.

An additional ingredient to the mix of landfill chemicals is required to create gruesome creatures, and that is imagination. Joseph D’Lacey has imagination to the nth power, and uses it to generate this novel of disparate characters that are spun into a profound yarn. The giant test tube of the landfill produces creatures unseen before. Their use of garbage components gives them attributes not possible with purely organic beings and there is a moral imperative behind them suggesting they might inherit the Earth if…

Initially I worried that there were too many main characters, nine not including the fecalith: a sentient monster formed from both human and inhuman garbage, reclaiming the Earth from the waste-makers. Of the more human characters we have Richard, a family man struggling to combat his incipient paedophiliac urges. His is a potentially fascinating character but sadly that perverse aspect isn’t explored – maybe in another book. Mason Brand is a kind of Earth – Gaia hero in that he alone appreciates the awfulness of landfill but also the bio-power in the ecosystem. These characters live in their own sub-plots but it is the same town and so they interact sooner or later sometimes with unexpected consequences. The female characters are particularly intriguing and as three dimensional as you’d find in any great novel: Agatha, who with her preferred street name of Aggie is the only townsperson to escape. Being a teen beauty she made a spirited but brutal life as a model in the smoke, but she returned a wiser woman a few months later only to face the zombies. Which was worse, the city human S&M abusers or the small town landfill monsters?

This isn’t a zombie story. Well it is, but much more so. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia (Earth as a superorganism) hypothesis will find much to appreciate in The Garbage Man, as will any reader with ecological roots.

Taking the writing style beyond the ordinary, D’Lacey crafts phrases I wish I’d written. For example: ‘A crumbling farmhouse cupped in the palm of the land.’

Also: ‘…sky-written across the blue of his mind…’ and I know I’ve experienced Ray’s sensation when he ‘…made his feet walk to the bar while the rest of him seemed to stay in the beer garden.’

We have stylish writing serving up plates of horror and with gore for relish; who could ask for more? The title belittles the content – I would have called it Gaia’s Revenge.

 In a few days I’ll place here my review of a more subtle horror from friend of Joseph D’Lacey, Bill Hussey. His The Absence is a touching, poignant and literary horror you mustn’t miss.