Fear Across the Mersey XVII: Calling Card | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Along with the next story, ‘Watch the Birdie’ (the eighteenth), this is the shortest in the collection, a second ghost story for Christmas following ‘The Christmas Present’ (the third). The protagonist, Dorothy, is not enjoying the festive season, after receiving a threatening card on Christmas Eve and having rubbish dumped on her doorstep on Boxing Day. Her son-in-law points out that in addition to the addressee of the card being illegible, it was posted sixty years ago. On New Year’s Eve, she learns that the previous occupant of her home had a violent mentally ill son who drowned himself in the Mersey. His body was, however, never recovered…which adds a mundane threat to the supernatural. The tale reminded me of ‘The Ferries’ (the fourteenth in the collection) with its multiplicity of memorable and menacing images of water and the threats it poses. A good choice to share with friends and family around the fireplace.

Fear Across the Mersey XVI: This Time | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The story starts with Crosby, a moderately successful artist, leaving the dentist while under the influence of anaesthetic, creating the expectation of reality blending and bending along the lines of ‘Concussion’ (the second in the collection). There seems to be something like this in play as he has recurring thoughts about and encounters with an image of a blank face and something that scrambles on all fours (which may or may not belong to the same creature). Crosby visits his girlfriend, takes part in a game show on television, and hosts an exhibition of his work as the haunting continues. The narrative is elegant in style, with very fine description in places, and carefully constructed, but if there is an internal logic it escaped me entirely. As such, the conclusion was less a surprise than a non sequitur and I still think I must have missed something somewhere.

Best of Luck by Jason Mott (Amazon Original Stories) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Strong pacing and redundancy collide in creature feature story exploring friendship and power structures.

“Best of Luck”, the fifth offering in Amazon’s six-story creature feature series written by bestselling authors, revolves around two friends. Will holds Barry at gunpoint for a reason that author Jason Mott gradually reveals. 

The story tends to prolong philosophical arguments and repeat the same ideas ad nauseum. Another shortcoming: conceptually, it’s not all that memorable. 

On a more positive note, “Best of Luck” builds tension by dropping key information at an impressively patient pace. Initially, the story refrains from divulging the source of the confrontation. It plops in nuggets about Will’s backstory and this mysterious Henry that he keeps mentioning until an ineffective plot twist provides answers. 

“Best of Luck”, a commentary on societal power structures, explores the concepts of passing privilege on to the next generation and gaining and maintaining power at the expense of others. Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #79: Unsplatterpunk! 8: out now!

free epub | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #79: Unsplatterpunk! 8 is now out in paperback and ebook, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek!

Steel your guts!

The UNSPLATTERPUNK! slaughterscape expands its grisly reach with more tales that blend a positive message into a cesspit of gore and grossness. In this eighth issue, four heroines bash and slice their way to illumination.

A status-seeking it girl takes self-injury to throbbing new heights in a commentary on the allure of attention via victimhood. The Bachelor unites with Squid Game when a hand model joins a reality TV competition and learns that beauty goes beyond designer stilettos and jewellery. Bullied high schoolers achieve vicarious vengeance in an allegorical tale that explores the power of camaraderie. Kung Fu Sue, returning for her third UNSPLATTERPUNK! performance, gives fans another fix of her fighting virtuosity and nonchalance as she takes on a drug cartel with pachydermatous power.

The moral of the gory

If you’re looking for a splatterpunk anthology that wrings some positivity out of the carnage and nastiness, then this is the anthology for you. Mind you, you’ll still get the cracked bones, exploded heads, and ruptured organs… but you’ll get it with a ray of hope.

Contents

• Star Struck – Kevin Brown
• The BTB Royale – DW Milton
• Schoolyard Saints – Alistair Rey
• Kung Fu Sue and the Drug Lord’s Elephant – Harris Coverley
• The Quarterly Review – Stephen Theaker and Douglas J. Ogurek review The Blood-Drenched Honeycomb by Leo X. Robertson, Dating After the End of the World by Jeneva Rose, Dead Scalp by Jasper Bark, Envy by Ash Ericmore, The God of Wanking by Peter Caffrey, A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, Millionaires Day by Kit Power and the Ploopy Knob.

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Here are the blood-spattered contributors to this issue.

Alistair Rey is the author of the fiction collection The Art of Ghost Writing. His work has been featured in the Berkeley Fiction Review, Weirdbook, Juked magazine and Lowestoft Chronicle, among other publications. Rey’s fiction also appears in anthologies alongside such authors as Stephen Graham Jones, Philip Fracassi, Jonathan Sims and Gemma Files.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (i.e. transgressive/gory/gross subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World… One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. His novella Stone Ovaries and Bowling Balls Trapped in Beautiful Prodigy World (Planet Bizarro) offers a minefield of immaturity filled with bodily expulsions, princesses, deranged mothers, malapropisms and guacamole.

DW Milton is a pen name. The author has a day job but would rather be writing speculative fiction.

Harris Coverley has had more than a hundred short stories published in Penumbra, Crimeucopia, JOURN-E and The Black Beacon Book of Horror (Black Beacon Books), amongst many others. He has also had over two hundred poems published in journals around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.

Kevin Brown has two published short story collections, Death Roll and Ink on Wood. His fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published in over 200 literary journals, magazines and anthologies. He has won numerous writing competitions and was nominated for multiple prizes and awards, including four Pushcart Prizes.

Stephen Theaker’s reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism, Dark Horizons and the BFS Journal. His story “The Reader-Queens of Tranck” appeared in the BFS anthology Emerging Horizons, edited by Allen Ashley. He has written many novels, none of them well-regarded.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Fear Across the Mersey XV: The Depths | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Like its immediate predecessor, this story is also set in Neston and London (as well as a couple of other locations). Jonathan Miles is a famous crime fiction writer facing every author’s greatest fear: he has run out of ideas and has nothing left to say. Desperate for inspiration, he rents a house where a particularly violent crime took place. It doesn’t seem to help, but it does give him nightmares about even more violent crimes which, if he doesn’t immediately write them down, seem to come true. I read this immediately after finishing Joel Lane’s This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays, which includes three essays on Campbell and although I don’t rate ‘The Depths’ quite as highly as Lane, it is definitely one of the best in the first two-thirds of this collection. The real horror is, of course, the death of creativity and the desperation to recover it, not the nightmares.

Fear Across the Mersey XIV: The Ferries | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

James Berry works in publishing in London and his uncle, a retired sailor, lives in Neston, on the western side of the Wirral Peninsula, which sits between the Mersey and Dee estuaries. Like much of the coast north of Liverpool, most famously Southport, the sea has retreated from Neston, leaving an inhospitable, in-between wetland. Berry’s uncle disappears while he is visiting, apparently sucked into the saltmarsh, and Berry is haunted by a ship in a bottle he finds there. Campbell makes very good use of the uncanniness of a location that is neither earth nor ocean and describes the collapse of the border between the dry and the wet that follows Berry when he returns to London with inventive imagery. Aside from an internal logic that would have benefitted from more scaffolding, this is another compelling tale of terror that demonstrates Campbell’s mastery of the short story as a literary form.