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.