PHOBIC: Modern Horror Stories
Previous reviews of this publisher: HERE
Work by Matthew Holness, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Hanif Kureishi, Christine Poulson, Jeremy Dyson, Emma Unsworth, Nicholas Royle, Paul Magrs, Lavinia Murray, Conrad Williams, Paul Cornell, Chaz Brenchley, Maria Roberts, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Shearman.
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Sounds Between
by Matthew Holness
“Someone coughed loudly in his face and Philip turned away in disgust, prompting an insult that he ignored, fearful of provoking further confrontation.”
An amazing nightmare cloying slice of life in Philip’s soundworld and in the previously sound world before the new noumenon, his life with his partner Mary (if that is is she?) with hints of sirens and something insidious transpiring on the roads or underground trains around Thameslink, involving balloons and human heads as life’s virus as well as a mobile phone virus, a threat that mingles with life’s general anxieties and one’s suspicions as to one’s partner, and who sent what in which dream, all as part of his voice-over job in media films depicting atrocities. Wartime, — and roadkill, too. Loved it, and for something first published in 2007, it is the PERFECT co-vividness of hallucinatory disease, if it is a hallucination at all!
“Their balloon, Phil realised, feeling suddenly calm. Not his, or Mary’s, but theirs.”
My other reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/matthew-holness/
Sounds between books…or neighbouring rooms?
And from such Holness hauntings, at their simplest, of balloons with smiley faces to those monochrome-grey swagged TV puppets and zipped-up human-size costumes with which I was brought up in the 1950s, now to the zippies and twinkies and tubbies as other more colourful versions in the 1970s of the next backstory…except not colourful enough? Just doughy-eyed stalkers?
The Part of Me That Died
Frank Cottrell Boyce
“This had gone on for weeks. This absence of want.
‘That’s why I’ve come here. You remember me. You knew me before. What did I like?’”
From absence to its equivalent as a separate presence.
A haunting and well-characterised frontstory of marital murder and the resultant whodunnit plot.
Ps: I knew Sooty in the 1950s with Matthew’s father Harry. And I am thus devastated…that part of me now dead.
Cross-referenced with ‘Possum’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/28/the-new-uncanny-tales-of-unease/#comment-20682
The book’s cover after Magritte? Or a wraparound puppet from the wonderful Cottrell Boyce?
Fred Barker puppet, from my experience of early children’s TV in real-time
The Dogs
Hanif Kureishi
“…numerous other dogs, in various colours and sizes, streaming out of the undergrowth from all directions. Who had called them? Why were they there?”
This flash fiction takes on even more frightening aspects as a result of the context of this book so far, and of the ‘next door’ book simultaneously being reviewed *here* so far!
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/best-british-short-stories-2020/#comment-20262
Safe as Houses
Christine Poulson
Minimalist smarthouse, its architect the husband living there with his miscarriage-bereaved, miscarriage-haunted, dream-fraught wife, and their toddler son Toby; the wife’s twin sister is staying for Christmas. Significant that the unviable foetus had been female?
Arguably a disarming magic-trick played on a viewing monitor for Toby as a to be or not to be baby, a secret room the trick’s cabinet of vanishment, the trick crying now become real even for the adults in the room.
Simply creepy, too. Nothing smarts so much as simplicity, I guess.
My previous review of this author:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/10/the-new-abject-tales-of-modern-unease/#comment-20462
Uncannily cross-referenced now as counterpart of ‘The Underhouse’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/28/the-new-uncanny-tales-of-unease/#comment-20694
The Coué
Jeremy Dyson
“He looked academic and gentrified, so it was a surprise to hear a heavy Essex accent when he spoke.”
“The Coué was made to take. It draws it out of you like salt draws water. It feeds on that which you love the most.”
I was born and have lived most of my life in Essex, and I am quite academic, but this story’s autosuggestion disarmed me completely. The nature of the ‘hero’ — who masquerades as Christopher Trace (the original presenter of Blue Peter in the 1950s) at one point — and look at the Coué I made earlier! The Coué to end all Coués, worthy of the Horniman Museum, I guess, and you will not hear it from me what it really is, as described in this story, in case I then have to relieve myself of its curse by downloading it on you! I loved the atmosphere of our hero’s curio shop, its downtrodden suburban surroundings, and his ‘girl friend’, his whole backstory, in fact, and the visit from the man with the Essex accent, probably me, summoned by the Coué to this chillingly absurdist story as a critically cancerous autosuggested swaddling of you rather than directly attacking you head on. How can I exorcise myself of this story’s eponymous object, having not only read about it but now associated myself within its gestalt here in real-time amid all the other forum exchanges and countervailing trolls on the Internet? The nature of the Coué is not a million miles from the nub of all the curios so far of this whole book and its ‘twin’ book, too, I vouch. There, I’ve let it out of the bag (or bell jar). Over to you, now. Seriously.