The Respectable Face of Tyranny by Gary Fry

A review by Geoff Nelder of

The Respectable Face of Tyranny by Gary Fry

Spectral Visions Volume 1

Published by Spectral Press April 2012  website here

Suppose you are a recently divorced man with a typical teen daughter to bring up and protect. Stress enough for most ordinary people. Then add acute financial problems resulting in having to live in a caravan on a cliff top and you need fortitude. Into this mix your caravan is in the enigmatic landscape of Whitby, North Yorkshire, and you have more imagination than Roald Dahl seeing what might be hallucinations on the beach where the dinosaurs lived, and you too would wonder what life is all about.

Gary Fry has crafted a cunning tale here. No quotidian (his word of the month I think, and I like it) ghost or horror story but a recipe for madness, and yet a grasp for sanity as Josh sees symbols of his financial woes in the Jurassic landscape. This story, like others, by sheer coincidence – in the Spectral Press unique collection – have a personal resonance for me. I too have fossil hunted on Saltwick Bay, wondered about the disintegrating concrete boat from a World warring era, and smelt the metallic tang of pebbles but also the pungent nose-pinching odours of seaweed. I am a keen admirer of fiction that uses real geography and it is cleverly used here.

Praise be to the ammonite god that Whitby Abbey is used and yet no mention of Dracula is called for. Yeay – a first, surely. No vampire is needed to make this story stand out as a literary gem. A dwelling on life’s struggles in the static dwelling on the cliff – where strange electric flocks might be the children of the creatures of that coastline’s geological strata.

Who isn’t beset by financial problems in this global recession? If they lost you your marriage, home, and gave you new problems, how your mind would contort to find solutions. Yet, only in Gary Fry’s imagination has these elements combined – the ancient and the modern, past souls and contemporary life.

Thank you to Gary’s publisher, too for allowing font size changes to great effect. For example – On the beach    ‘… heard the sound return to him several times, on each

occasion quieter, quieter, quieter’

This is reminiscent of Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz p83 where Brother Francis timidly speaks in a tiny font to the Lord Abbot, then when asked to speak up, blurts out in capitals. Hah. That was in 1960, and generally it’s been discouraged since and can look childish, but masterfully done here.

A theme in the story is on tattoos. Teenage Sally wants one, of course, and dad doesn’t want her too, of course. Cliché so far, but it develops in an undercurrent way, and I love the way she teased him. Also the tattooed man in Whitby Fair so reminded me of Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, as does – in a good, ironic way – Gary Fry’s publisher himself: Simon Marshall-Jones. You are in this story, just as delectable.

This story isn’t to missed by those readers of the noir side to contemporary life, tainted by ghastly visions, supported by love. Cleverly done.

counting down to the Whittaker

I am trying to clear my desk in readiness for judging the stories sent to me by Donna  and Doug, the organisers of the Whittaker Prize literary competition. I’m judging the short story entries, which will  be piling in from March 7th. There are nine rounds finishing on July 11th. So, if there are, say, 30 competitors, I’ll have 30 anonymous stories to assess every two weeks. I am intrigued and in eager anticipation to see how the  writers change during the competition. Will some find it too difficult to be original or let their standards slip or improve over their nine entries?  The writers do not have to enter all nine rounds and can even miss  the first round but would have to pay the full entry fee. See details here.

Luckily the length of each stories is maximized at  2,500  words or I won’t get any sleep. I am used to critiquing fiction using a grid and that is how I am to judge the stories. The sections with a total of 100 are:

10 opening

15 characters

20 inventiveness

30 voice

15 ending

10 technicalities (spelling, punctuation, formatting)

It’s not too late to enter this competition. Click on the link above and give it  a go. Even if you don’t win you’ll have up to nine shorts to use for an anthology or magazines. Entry fee  £15 ($30 Cdn or US). Writers may enter BOTH categories for a fee of £25 ($50 CDN or US).

Prizes £100 ($200 Cdn or US) for the winner of the fiction category PLUS £100 ($200 Cdn or US) for the winner of the poetry category

Winning entries from each round (fiction and poetry) will be published in an ISBN numbered anthology available for purchase in early September 2009. Authors who place first, second and third in each category will receive a free copy of the anthology.

Good luck

 

As a consequence of being a judge in the Whittaker, I have been busy critiquing in other places, such as an anthology of stories based on an End of World common theme. Don’t worry there are a few survivors to tell the tale. I’m one of them, so to speak, and a group of us scribble away under  the eye of Sally Quillford. We  will publish the results in an anthology later this year.

I also need  to finish Xaghra’s Revenge, or at least craft a few more thousand words for the BSFA Orbiters crit group in time for March. Aaarrggh it IS March. Signing off…