Fear Across the Mersey XIII: The Show Goes On | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

A well-placed title as the collection moves on to its second half. Lee inherited what we call a corner shop in the UK (regardless of its location – the US ‘convenience store’ seems more appropriate) in central Liverpool. He is, quite rightly, worried about being broken into or robbed and this is another one of Campbell’s tales where the casual violence and everyday brutality of city life is never far from the foreground. Lee discovers that part of the wall between his shop and the derelict cinema next door has collapsed, can’t get anyone to repair it, and decides to stand guard overnight to deter burglars. He hears noises in the cinema and makes a brave foray into the darkness, but what he finds there isn’t nearly as bad as what’s waiting for him when he returns. Not only well-placed, but well-paced and well-written with one of Campbell’s best conclusions so far.

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane | review by Rafe McGregor

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane, Tartarus Press, paperback, £14.95, 29 August 2018, ISBN 9781719848800

 

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was an English author from Birmingham who was best known as a short story writer and poet, but was also a novelist, critic, and editor. He won two British Fantasy Awards and one World Fantasy Award for his short fiction and the Eric Gregory Award for his poetry. Most of Lane’s fiction was in the speculative genre, at the intersection of horror and crime (which was his first love as an essayist), and published by small or independent presses. In the two decades before his death at the age of fifty, he published five short story collections, four collections of poetry, two novels, and a novella and two more short story collections were published posthumously. This Spectacular Darkness is another posthumous collection, first published as one of Tartarus Press’ elegant limited edition sewn hardbacks in 2016. The volume is edited by Tartarus regulars Mark Valentine and John Howard and includes a foreword by Valentine, seventeen of Lane’s critical essays, and reflections on his essays, short stories, poetry, and novels by Howard, Valentine, Mat Joiner, and Nina Allan respectively. As such, it is divided into four parts: the eponymous essay, which was first published in Supernatural Tales in 2002; eight essays published in Wormwood, the Tartarus journal that was also edited by Valentine (from its first issue in 2003 to its last in 2022) from 2004 to 2013; eight essays published in other magazines and collections from 1981 to 2009; and the commentaries on Lane’s work, only one of which (Allan’s critique of his novels) is previously published, also in 2016. My sole criticism is that with exception of Allan’s, which includes a fascinating discussion of Lane’s unpublished novel, The Missing Tracks, I found the commentaries somewhat gratuitous, adding little to Valentine’s excellent foreword.

Lane’s essays themselves are all excellent, achieving exactly what I look for when I read writing of this kind and in this form: eloquent and succinct, presenting precisely the right amount of the content of the work under scrutiny, and original and interesting enough to prompt me to both seek out new authors and revisit familiar ones. Both Valentine and Allan mention that Lane had been working on a nonfiction volume that was never completed and would have been either a monograph or a series of themed essays on the subject of horror fiction in the twentieth century. The first essay in this volume, ‘This Spectacular Darkness’, is a manifesto for that book and would likely have been an early draft of its introduction had it been completed. It is the most accomplished and thought-provoking – even inspiring – of the entire collection and I return to it below. Lane is particularly compelling when it comes to his own area of expertise, the very specific overlap of weird and noir within the broader intersection of horror and crime. For Lane, it is a literal overlap in that some (but not all) noir narratives actually are exemplary (rather than marginal) weird fiction. ‘The Dark Houses of Cornell Woolrich’, which was first published in Wormwood in 2004 and focuses on Woolrich’s (1903-1968) ‘Black’ novels, makes an especially good case for this claim. In a similar vein, ‘Hell is Other People: Robert Bloch and the Pathologies of the Family’, which was first published in The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch in 2009 and takes Bloch’s (1917-1994) entire oeuvre as its subject, is equally engaging, presenting his most famous work, Psycho (1959), in an entirely new light (for me, anyway). On a different note, in ‘No Secret Place: The Haunted Cities of Fritz Leiber’, first published in Wormwood in 2008, Lane offers the best appreciation of Leiber (1910-1992), about whose work I am ambivalent, that I’ve ever read. His discussion of Leiber’s flawed but nonetheless brilliant Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is simply exceptional. 

One of my main interests as a critic and author of weird fiction has been the question of the genre itself: can weird fiction be defined or delineated in any meaningful way, how does it relate to similar genres such as Gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction, and if it is in someway distinctive from these broader categories, what is the best way to approach it? All of these and others, I tried to set out in a manner that was both comprehensive and concise in Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between, which was published in seven parts on the TQF blog and is available as a single document here. Lane’s approach is different to and – I’m going to admit it – more convincing than mine, dividing supernatural horror into two distinct forms or strands in the twentieth century. The first, which he calls ‘existential’ or ‘humanistic’ horror, had its origins in Judaeo-Christian belief, is anthropocentric, and was exemplified by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and Stephen King (b.1947). The second, which he calls ‘ontological’ or ‘anti-humanistic’ horror, had its origins in literary-critical modernism, is biocentric or cosmocentric, and was exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and M. John Harrison (b. 1945). Lane’s main reference to the two strands is to existential and ontological horror, which I found confusing given the close relation between the two adjectives in twentieth century philosophy, but the latter is similar to what I attempted to articulate with my conception of the ecological weird and to what many others before me have called cosmic horror or indifferentism (usually in reference to Lovecraft). Like all engrossing essays, Lane’s was a provocation, challenging me to first rethink the relation between the ecological and the cosmic and then the relation between ontological and existential horror…is absolute horror not when the existential is supervenient on or collapses into the ontological and, if so, are there narratives that combine both strands? Although Lane mentions Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) in this connection, he doesn’t answer the question in full, but the wonder and triumph of the essay is simply in raising it (and so many others). This is a genuinely unmissable collection for weird fiction enthusiasts.

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring | review by Rafe McGregor

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring by Patrick Zircher

Titan Books, paperback, £14.99, November 2025, ISBN 9781787746428

 

Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian (who first appeared in ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, in Weird Tales in 1932). Together with Fritz Leiber, the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (who first appeared in ‘Two Sought Adventure’, in Unknown in 1939), he established the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction. When J.R.R. Tolkien popularised epic fantasy, which was pioneered by E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the map of the fantasy landscape for the rest of the twentieth century was drawn. Howard and Leiber were both correspondents of H.P. Lovecraft, contributed to what Ramsey Campbell describes as the Lovecraft Mythos, and benefitted from their correspondent’s inspiration in their original work. Like Lovecraft, Howard was a prolific writer, publishing three hundred short stories and novellas by the time of his premature death at the age of thirty and leaving an archive of double that, much of which was published posthumously. Along with Conan, Solomon Kane was one of several of Howard’s serial characters to appear in narratives that combined fantasy with history, but he published across a wide variety of genres, including: boxing stories, tales of the sea, crime fiction, horror, comedy, and what we would now call erotica and narrative nonfiction. He was also one of the two founders of the Weird Western (along with Oliver La Farge), which was popularised on television in the nineteen sixties and in comics in the nineteen seventies.

Kane is a Puritan English swordsman who wanders the world righting wrongs at the turn of the seventeenth century, following his service in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). Howard published seven Kane short stories in his lifetime, all in Weird Tales, beginning with ‘Red Shadows’ (1928) and ending with ‘Wings in the Night’ (1932). He left two unpublished stories, three poems, and four fragments and the complete Kane was first published as Red Shadows (1968) and then The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (2004), with the fragments completed by Campbell. The Kane stories not only mix history with fantasy in Howard’s trademark style, but include elements of the weird that bear testimony to Lovecraft’s influence (in much the same way as it can be seen in Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser). Five of the seven original stories are set in Africa, however, which makes Howard’s racism impossible to ignore. Like Lovecraft, Howard was also a White supremacist, subscribing to the pseudoscientific theory that humanity is divided into biologically distinct taxa which coexist in an intellectual and moral hierarchy loosely based on lightness of skin. He also had what one might charitably call an unconventional relationship with his mother, committing suicide when she became comatose from tuberculosis and preceding her death by a day. There seems to have been a concerted campaign to sanitise Howard’s reputation posthumously, but Victor LaValle provides what I think is an accurate portrayal of the author when he fictionalises him as a pathologically racist private investigator in The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).

Though I've read only a fraction of Howard’s oeuvre, his racism seems both more pronounced in and more intrinsic to his narratives than Lovecraft’s. In the latter, racism is always an ethical flaw but rarely an aesthetic one, by which I mean constitutive of the worldview that underpins the narrative and configures one’s engagement with it. It is no defence of Lovecraft to point out that his cosmic horror is founded on a fear of all that is unknown, of interplanetary and international aliens alike (or in collaboration). In contrast, Howard’s racism is constitutive of his worldview and, in consequence, an aesthetic as well as ethical flaw, creating an imaginative resistance for all but the most insensitive of readers. Notwithstanding, the African Kane stories are, in my opinion, the best, reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard at his best, albeit at times similarly offensive, jarring, or both. What makes this bitter pill a little easier for me, personally, to swallow is that Kane’s attitudes are completely compatible with what would have been considered an enlightened disposition towards people of different ethnicities and nationalities in the early seventeenth century. History is replete with racism, sexism, and elitism and Kane is a historical character from a past increasingly alien to our present.

Half a century after Howard’s death, Kane enjoyed an afterlife in comics with a serialisation by Marvel that ran from 1973 to 1994. In anticipation of the feature film, Solomon Kane (2009), Dark Horse revived Kane in 2008. Aside from the selection of James Purefoy for the title role, I have nothing positive to say about it and wasn’t surprised by the box office failure. Plans for a trilogy were abandoned, Campbell’s 2010 novelisation was as poor as his source material, and the comic series concluded in 2011. Fourteen years later, Titan launched another revival, releasing Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring in March and collecting all four issues as a graphic novel in November. The latest adaptation is largely the work of Patrick Zircher, a veteran artist for DC and Marvel, who is also the writer. His artistic style is mimetic and cinematic, with clearly defined and cleanly outlined figures, and a seamless integration of dynamism and narrativity in his use of panels. All of these features are evident in The Serpent Ring and the first extended action sequence, the boarding of a Portuguese caravel by an English letter of marque, is nothing short of breathtaking, as close to watching a well-choreographed action sequence on screen as is possible on the page. Zircher’s use of colour is also striking, his art here at its best when depicting the natural rather than supernatural, with a stunning African elephant and an awe-inspiring giant serpent particularly memorable.

The eponymous ring is the Serpent Ring of Thoth-Amon, a magic jewel of great power, and the narrative concerns two attempts to acquire it: a preliminary one that fails but brings Kane into contact with Rolando Zarza, a renegade Knight Hospitaller, and Abramo Bensaid, a Jewish archivist and scholar; and sets the scene for the second, which takes the three men and their entourage to the Kingdom of Ndongo, on the banks of the Kwanza River (more commonly known as the Cuanza, in northern Angola). Various clues suggest a dating of 1590, one of Kane’s earlier adventures, immediately after his service with the suicidally courageous Richard Grenville (who died at the Battle of Flores, in 1591). The origin of the ring draws on the legend of Lilith, who started off as Adam’s first wife, coupled with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and ended up a demon...which brings me to my main criticism. The artwork is excellent and the story for the most part compelling, but the mythological context – perhaps even internal logic – is an incoherent motley of Egyptian, Semitic, and sub-Saharan African, with what appears to be a touch of the Aztec thrown in. There are simply too many myths and legends involved and their abundance detracts from the suspension of disbelief. A less significant problem is the cast of characters. While Kane is indisputably the protagonist, there is no obvious antagonist and half a dozen or more point of view players seem to vary between central and supporting roles. As with the mythologies, less might have been more. Overall, the graphic novel is a disappointment, despite its many highlights and flashes of finesse. The revival is nonetheless worth continuing and I hope Zircher is given a second shot at Kane.

Fear Across the Mersey XII: Mackintosh Willy | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

‘Mackintosh Willy’ concludes the first half of the collection and is, unfortunately, one of the weakest thus far. As I’ve come to expect from Campbell by now, the eponymous individual is not what he seems, neither a flasher nor even a character with a speaking part. The tale is narrated in the first person by a ten-year-old boy who lives near Newsham Park, north-east of the city centre. I have no idea if Campbell grew up there himself, but the narrative sometimes reads as a fascinating and in places even touching memoir of lost youth. As horror fiction, however, it never finds its rhythm: a mystery is set up, solved immediately; the supernatural makes an initially brief and unconvincing appearance; and the resolution fails to follow from complication and exposition. If some of the content is autobiographical, then I think it would have been better put to use as literary rather than genre fiction.

It's a Wonderful Knife: Christmas Dundee | review by Stephen Theaker

December 2024, and Paul Hogan, star of the Crocodile Dundee trilogy (yes, there was a third one), is despondent, grumpy and lonely. And that's even before his extremely aggressive agent phones to say that Burt, his crocodile co-star, has died, and Hogan is expected to attend the funeral. He starts to wish he had never been born.

Meanwhile, in some kind of animal heaven, the animal actors who played Lassie, Jaws and Babe see what's going on and feel the need to intervene. So Burt the crocodile is returned to Earth in flamboyant human form, to take Paul Hogan back in time, to see how different the world would have been without him.

In this alternate reality, Crocodile Dundee starred Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. The film flopped so hard it ruined Linda Kozlowski's career – we hear her (as played by Thea Jo Wolfe) sing about her misery – and worse that that, it led to all-out war between Australia and Austria, as we learn when Burt (Oliver Cartwright) takes Hogan to the devastated future.

This fantastical musical was performed in a small theatre with a great deal of enthusiasm by a lively cast, who navigated a multilevel stage very well, especially during the song and dance numbers – the highlight of which was a eurodance number whose chorus was Schwarzenegger's shout from Predator: "Get to the chopper!"

It might be the simplicity of that song that made it work so well. The lyrics of other songs were difficult to make out, except in quieter numbers, and I wondered whether it might have been better performed without the help of amplification, in such a small venue. But then they were more traditional musical-style songs anyway, and I'm not really a fan of that genre.

The show had a few other problems for me. For one thing, the premise makes no sense. If Arnold Schwarzenegger had starred in Crocodile Dundee it would have been hilarious. The man was constitutionally incapable of making a bad movie in the 1980s. I should forgive it that – it's not as if this is trying to be a serious alternate history! – but it was on my mind throughout.

The other big problem, apart from a bit too much shouting and shrieking, is that Paul Hogan is a comedian and the Paul Hogan character in this doesn't get to be funny. It could have been any random Australian grump. Weird, when the Schwarzenegger character (played by Tom Kiteley) did get to be funny. Couldn't help thinking they should have built the musical around that character instead.

To be positive, the rather long conclusion, where Hogan thinks about his relationships and his life, had one audience member in tears. (I was too, but only because the theatrical fog caught in my throat.) The cast members who played multiple characters made each of them totally distinct. And Will Usherwood-Bliss as Hugh Jackman was memorable, fighting future Austria with his boomerang claws. **

It's a Wonderful Knife: Christmas Dundee is playing at the Old Joint Stock Threatre, Birmingham, for the rest of December. Tickets available.

Hemlock Grove: A Novel by Brian McGreevy (FSG Originals) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Cheap beer in a crystal glass: gifted slackers from different sides of the tracks hunt for a monster.

Two high school senior boys, one a werewolf and the other a vampire, team up to hunt a thrill kill werewolf whose victims are girls. It sounds like another famous vampire/werewolf teen duo, but these two are slackers who bumble around and get into trouble with the law. Gypsy Peter Rumancek lives in a trailer with his pot-smoking mom, and “walking god complex” and human roofie Roman Godfrey, heir to a massive steel mill fortune, lives in a palatial home. They both think the other could be the murderer, so they start a quest to figure out who really is. 

Roman’s sexy mother Olivia has sustained a decades-long affair with her deceased husband’s married brother Norman Godfrey, a psychiatrist at Hemlock Acres Hospital. Peter’s girlfriend Letha, also Godfrey’s daughter, claims she’s been impregnated through divine intervention. Then there’s Shelley, Roman’s seven-foot-five-inch sister who wears boots that resemble milk crates. She is mute and born with physical differences but by no means stupid. Also, she tends to glow. Shelley will come to have a critical role later in the book. 

Dr Pryce is the slick and soulless director of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies, also known as the White Tower. He’s involved in something called Project Ouroboros – an ouroboros, by the way, is a symbol of a snake eating its own tail. 

What makes Hemlock Grove so unique is that author Brian McGreevy gives an intense literary treatment to teenybopper subject matter. The result is at times brilliant and at others maddening. Some scenes are highly entertaining: Peter’s recollection of encountering some vampires, for instance, or Roman’s taking over the minds of police officers referred to as “Nose” and “Neck”. And the novel features one of the best werewolf transformation scenes this reviewer has read.

On the other claw, McGreevy gets carried away with elevated language. Doing so may have been permissible and even welcomed at the advent of the monster genre, but this has been done thousands of times since then. Maybe we don’t need to take that subject matter that seriously any more. Examples of other distracting elements include a character reading poetry, a character thinking what it would be like to have a female’s hand on his face, and tangents aplenty. 

As the dispassionate duo attempts to solve the mystery, the story flaps along like a fish taken out of water. Still, despite the showboat sentences and extravagant vocabulary, it can be captivating. 

Hemlock Grove keeps the reader in a semi-haze, which may be intentional. Material is delivered in a variety of formats: traditional third-person narration, erudite emails from Shelley, newspaper articles, psychiatric transcripts, dictation of an autobiography. Also interesting is how Roman treats his sister: always patient and loving… and woe to those who would do her harm. 

Another thing I like: sometimes when one character poses a question to another character, that other character doesn’t respond or ignores the question and moves to another subject. That’s some Seinfeld-level authenticity.

The subject matter is immature and not earth-shattering. Even back in 2012, this stuff had already been done before, but the way the story is told… it’s like putting common beer in an expensive crystal class. Not saying that’s a bad thing. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Fear Across the Mersey XI: The Brood | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

Protagonist Blackband is a veterinary surgeon who likes to watch ‘all the local characters’ through his binoculars from the sanctuary of his apartment in Princes Avenue, in Toxteth, famous as the childhood home of Ringo Starr and for rioting in the summer of 1981. Campbell communicates the horrors of urban living in a wonderfully subtle, understated way…the anonymity, isolation, indifference, cruelty. Blackband has a particular interest in two of the locals, a pair of elderly women who live in a derelict house next to his block of flats and have been collecting a menagerie of stray dogs and cats, triggering his professional instincts. This is a slow burner of a story in which the suspense is expertly maintained as he vacillates between doing nothing and finding out what has happened to the animals. First one of the women disappears, then the other, and the stage is set for the finale.

Fear Across the Mersey X: The Invocation | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

‘The Invocation’ is the weakest of the collection so far. Like ‘Through the Walls’, the ingredients for a potent plot are set out in quick succession – this time a film studies student with an irritating landlady, a cut glass decanter that distorts its contents (if, indeed, it has any), and shapes and noises in the night – but their chemistry also fails, making the narrative’s cause and effect unmemorable. In addition, the resolution is far too reminiscent of ‘Baby’ and, unlike that story, largely unsupported by a scaffold of internal logic. I wondered if it was either inspired by or an intentional reimagining of M.R. James’ ‘The Ash-Tree’. While ‘The Ash-Tree’ is famous for its dénouement, it is overrated as a ghost story and, in consequence, a challenge for contemporary authors to revisit. As a reimaging of ‘The Ash-Tree’, there is a flicker of Campbell’s genius in ‘The Invocation’, albeit a flicker that never flames.