Rebecca Lloyd

REVIEW OF SHADOWS AND TALL TREES ANTHOLOGY 6.
What I always dread when reading dark stories is that I’ll be confronted with the true horror in fiction writing – clichés. So it was great not to be waylaid by any amongst the sixteen strange tales in this anthology. There are haunted houses, to be sure, but they don’t count as clichés here, and especially not in Alison Moore’s Summerside, a story with an intriguing atmosphere and some skilful dialogue between house owner and tenant. In fact so competently and delicately does Alison handle the material that she has created a decent spooky house in just a few sentences. Houses are the settings for other stories in the collection and one in particular The Space Between by Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley is striking. I smiled at ‘…old fashioned tub with a plastic shower curtain celebrating goldfish’ – I can just see that abject thing. This story becomes more interesting by the minute and so I was able to overcome my dislike of the use of unfinished note-like sentences as a writing style, and the story does turn out to be original and unusual with some clever use of dialogue to evoke mood and feeling. Another original story idea was The Statue by Myriam Frey, in which the supposedly innocent and playful behaviour of a man pretending to be a statue turns very creepy, very quickly. An equally interesting premise is Death’s Door Café by Kaaron Warren, a fond story and slightly wistfully told. Writings found in a Red Notebook by David Surface is also a well told story in which two vulnerable young people become frighteningly lost in a featureless landscape. Written in the form of a diary, the entries begin in a calm and matter of fact manner, but quickly become more and more alarming as the two realise their predicament.
Ideally each story in an anthology should be strong both in terms of the originality of the story idea and in the style of its telling, but it is rare to find the two together. So also in this anthology in which some stories are terrific ideas but style and language use had not been in the forefront of the writer’s mind. Yet the purposeful use of language is very evident in other stories, for example Onanon by Michael Welmut. This is a remarkably strange story which I couldn’t possibly describe. I thought about it for a while and decided it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand all of it, just as you don’t have to examine the individual brush strokes in an impressionist painting and hope to understand it that way, so also, I felt the same for Onanon and was in the end happy to have been touched by the story. I loved this sentence:- ‘the words felt ill, somehow, concerned as they were with some implied creature on the periphery of the page.’ Thinking about style still, while again I wasn’t able to fully understand Road Dead by F Brett Cox, the slightly breathless tone of the story created by the use of short sentences and the lack of direct dialogue creates the mood and suits the subject matter.
For me, Shaddertown by Conrad Williams was particularly admirable. It is a powerfully written story full of fascinating imagery and tender humour and written with brilliant energy and perfect command of language. I noted a couple of other stories that were stylishly written. One was C. M Mukers Vranger, the sudden and alarming ending of which I had to read twice before I thought I knew what it meant. Another was The Vault of the Sky, the Face of the Deep, by Robert Levy, a sombre dignified story, elegantly rendered. I thought also that Apple Pie and Sulphur by Christopher Harman was written in a thoughtful way. At one point in this very long story, I was slightly reminded of the work of Robert Aickman. I particularly loved this:- ‘Sheep watched them approach, their faces stupidly noble, before prancing away under bouncing burdens of ragged wool.’ While I was less interested in the storyline, this story did have some excellent descriptive passages.
Thinking now about sheer creepiness, It Flows from the Mouth by Robert Shearman is wonderful in its strangeness, a story plainly but very fluently written. This story gets steadily weirder, but not because anything extraordinary happens for a long time, but because you sense that Shearman is leading you somewhere very deliberately, [and you trust him to get you there] – then the story gets very strange indeed. By contrast perhaps, The Golem of Leopoldstadt by Tara Isabella Burton has a particular kind of terror in it right from the first word. This is a dramatic and tense story written economically and boldly.
The choice of the present tense in Hidden in the Alphabet by Charles Wilkinson, gives this story a curious detached feeling that suits it well. It was quite like watching a film and the pace of it was intriguing. This is a subtle gruesome story, stylishly written. I liked this description of a boy as having ‘…enormous blue eyes but with a sort of shivery sensitivity that was irritating, like a pedigree dog that had been badly inbred.’
I’m always pleased to find well written dialogue and V.H. Leslie’s fairly traditional ghost story, The Quiet Room, not only has a good scary moment early on that notches up the tension, but has a convincing scene between a teenage girl and her father with solid dialogue. The father’s hesitation about how he approaches his daughter sounds true to real life and V’s mature writing style is a pleasure to read.
Apart from having a good story to tell and a stylish way of telling it, the settings in dark fiction are very often an important element. R.B Russell’s The Night Porter is a story set in a slightly odd small hotel with Marianne, an avid reader employed as a night porter, who gets tied up with a curious character, a Miss Fisher, and as the story develops it becomes increasingly tense and weird.
Altogether, this anthology has some good chunky stories on offer, and some writers’ names to watch out for in the future. It was my pleasure to be able to read them and leave this review.
Rebecca Lloyd