This book knocked my socks off! I have been craving a good western for quite a while so when I saw Deaths Head Press was publishing a series in a new subgenre they call Splatter Westerns, I was extremely excited. The book has everything you want in a western but it's written by an author who pens work in dark fiction. I was stunned by the protagonist in the story. Salem Covington holds true to the typical western tale but is also atypical in so many ways which made him intriguing and enticing. Here's the thing, this book is dark but it's seamless. The body count stacks up and there are some scenes that were terrifyingly twisted BUT it was all very fitting of the real American West. I also particularly liked the readability of this novel. The writing style, the pace, even the way the book us formatted made this a smooth and easy ride. If this story is any indication of what to expect from the rest of this series, I'm all in.

The hero of this story is no hero at all. He's a blood-thirsty desperado consumed by darkness and armed with a six-shooter that yearns for death. Salem Covington is a man eager for revenge and he'll have it come hell or high water. He is exactly what you'd come to expect from the protagonist of a western only he's not. Covington is trained by the Apache Indians and well versed in many of the world's dark arts. He is definitely a force to be reckoned with and wanders the American west seeking more souls for the devil himself. Pray to God you get to keep your scalp if you cross paths with this scary desperado.

The American west is an unforgiving place where a man needs grit and tenacity to survive. This is the kind of place where if you look at someone the wrong way you're apt to eat a bullet. Throw in a gunslinger that wanders the earth tallying up a massive death toll and collecting scalps, things are bound to get bloody. Wile E. Young knows how to deliver the ooey-gooey good stuff. This is a gruesome and visceral tale. I think as a fan of horror you become numb to the gorey scenes in stories but often they are excessive or extravagant whereas in The Magpie Coffin it felt... right. The viscera is decadent and fitting.

I have to say, the first image Christopher Stanley's 26-story collection conjured in my withered old brain was that of Suggs from Madness singing (another) comeback single about drunken love affairs with the titular lamppost. Any notions of whimsy or white men playing ska-pop were soon dispelled by the first story though, which left me with a wry grin on my face. The kind you get from a ghostly tale which ends abruptly, and shatters any preconceptions you might have about the well-worn character of a struggling writer.
 
That opener gives way to a goodly number of other tales of the unexpected, and I use that phrase deliberately, as this gave me the same kind of vibes as the old TV show of the same name. The Lamppost Huggers... offers up some Very British Stories where bad things happen to worse people, or sometimes good ones. Not all of them are set in the UK though – the book takes you on a worldwide tour of dangerous destinations, and a range of diverse characters get pushed through Stanley's weird wringer. The globetrotting nature of the collection is a real strength, and even though the stories tend to fly by pretty fast, none of them running to more than 10 pages, you get a taste for each location before the frights begin.
 
And if you want to talk range, you're in for more variety than a week-long jumble sale here. Witches with a taste for justice, apocalypse-summoning kids, ghosts conjured by guilt, a few (un)happy Xmases, magick, fairies, dragons and more. There's even a spooky appliance story which gives Stephen King a run for his money. Each story is short but never sweet; sometimes gory, sometimes ghoulish but mostly effective and pretty much always creepy. Some fly by too fast – there was one story about teenage troublemakers which felt like watching Lost Boys on fast forward. That one didn't quite last long enough to sink its claws in, but it still packed in some effective imagery.
 

Unusually, the collection is divided into three parts, with each having a loose theme and a brief mood-setting quote. The first third has an overarching theme of lost childhoods (and sometimes lost children), where kids realise sinister fantasies in which they're separated from their less-than-attentive families. In that way, again, it brought me back to Tales of the Unexpected and Roald Dahl, as well as my own formative years in the 80's where kids were often cast as heroes, and parents as either an inconvenience or just plain shitty. There are echoes of Day of the Triffids, even Rosemary's Baby, a strong feeling of weirdness invading everyday situations along with a sense of hopelessness as situations inevitably spiral out of control, ending on notes that'll either have you grinning or grimacing.
 
That same effective unease, and a reliance on world-ending scenarios follows into the second and third parts, where themes of climate change and altered realities also worm their way in. There are more bad parents, and put-upon children, more apocalypses and more peculiar goings-on in the most normal of settings. Most importantly though, you're always kept guessing. That's an essential part of any short story collection in my view, and this one does not disappoint. Plus, for the curious among you, there are a bunch of story notes at the end so you can delve further into the author's mind. Just don't wrap your arms around anything while you're there, you never know what might be waiting to pounce...

Review by Ben Walker ​

Paperback: 174 pages
Publisher: The Arcanist Press (1 Jun. 2020)
ISBN-10: 057865329X
ISBN-13: 978-0578653297

“She felt a growing surge of power in this relationship. The tables had indeed turned and she was enjoying every minute of it. She toyed with the idea of just leaving him and letting him find for himself the overpowering fear. Let him discover his own inner strength, she told herself with contempt. It takes no balls to ride a tractor. Was this the man she had pined for during more than thirty years in the underworld? This was her God, this weak man who carried peanut-butter sandwiches with him and whined when she wasn’t by his side when he awoke? She must have been insane.”
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Following the 2017 release of Grady Hendrix’s seminal history of the horror boom of the 1980s, Paperbacks From Hell, Valancourt Books set up its Paperbacks From Hell line last year. Curated by Hendrix and Too Much Horror Fiction’s Will Errickson, it brings many of the classics of horror’s heyday back into print, sometimes for the first time, with the original cover art lovingly restored. Given the inflating prices that the originals go for on the internet these days, this is a valuable service, bringing long out of print or hard to find books to a new and enthusiastic audience. This column will go through the series and review each title.
When Darkness Loves Us (1985) was Elizabeth Engstrom’s first published book, and combines the two seminal horror novellas ‘When Darkness Loves Us’ and ‘Beauty Is…’. Both are standalone, self contained stories, but collecting them together makes sense because they are complementary explorations of similar ideas and themes, and the overall effect of reading one after the other enhances both. Engstrom’s stories are both told from the point of view of women who are deemed monstrous by the society they live in. Both stories expertly explore how these labels are forced on these women by the abuse of the patriarchy, delivered both systematically and personally. As such they are effective both as frightening horror stories but also as thoughtful critiques of the idea of the feminine monstrous in a patriarchal society. This makes Engstrom’s stories unsettling on multiple levels, her deft characterisation allowing the reader to sympathise with these characters even as they are driven to increasingly monstrous acts.

‘When Darkness Loves Us’ tells the story of Sally Ann Hixon, sixteen years old, newly married and pregnant when she is trapped underground. Presumed dead, the rest of her family above ground move on while she lives the next twenty years underground, raising her son and living off of slugs and moss. When she escapes and returns to the surface, she finds that she cannot fit in to her old life. Her husband has remarried her sister, and there is no space for her above the ground. ‘Beauty Is…’ follows Martha Mannes, a developmentally disabled woman living on her own after the death of her parents, who attracts the unwanted attention of some young punks when she wanders into a bar by chance. Both novellas follow the viewpoints of these women and explores how they are forced into monstrousness by a society that doesn’t see them as fully human.

‘When Darkness Loves Us’ is the shorter and more intense of the two. Engstrom’s vivid description of Sally Ann’s survival in chthonic darkness is claustrophobic and terrifying. Sally Ann is accompanied by Jackie, the ghost of her previous boyfriend who was killed in Vietnam, and Clinton, her son, who is a creature born to the darkness and so does not share his mother’s sense of loss over the outside world. Engstrom tightly controls the tone, leaving us unsure to what extent the darkness is populated by monsters and to what extent it is Sally Ann imagining things as her grip on sanity loosens. When Sally Ann returns to the surface, she has lost her hair and teeth, and is badly undernourished, whereas her healthy sister has a family with her ex-husband. Sally Ann is forced into the role of the monster, the vengeful revenant who destroys the domestic bliss her sister has taken from her, by a society that has no place for her now that she is older and no longer has her youthful good looks. Her husband, Michael, is dismissive and patronising towards her, refusing to believe that she gave birth to his son underground. However once Sally Ann brings him down to her domain, he is revealed to lack the courage and drive to survive that allowed Sally Ann to live down there. But Sally Ann has simply replaced one god of the patriarchy with feet of clay with another; her son Clint is vicious, angry and abusive, and controls her life underground in much the same way that Michael controlled her life above ground. Escaping the patriarchy is more difficult than simply embracing one’s status as a monster; there are always other monsters to take their place.

McMahon doesn’t just cater to his male characters either. Although it takes a while for this side of things to fully emerge, the book is as much about motherhood as it is about fatherhood, and McMahon’s female characters are convincing and in some cases likeable, although a great deal of them are just as dirty, violent, compromised and/or psychotic as the men Cable has to tussle with in a series of (often literally) gutsy encounters. The love interest is a well-developed personality and isn’t just there to lay Cable (thank you I’ll be here all week.) Her own floundering in the moral quagmire of parenting has nothing to envy Spencer in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

If I had a criticism of the novella, it would be that you do at times lose sight of the supernatural element in all the rough-and-tumble, but eventually Cable and Walker’s quest leads them to a strange hill where tints of fairy lore begin to seep through. And, of course, there is the titular Beast. I won’t say too much about this, but lovers of cats great and small, and indeed wild animals in general, should enjoy its depiction and unpredictable story arc. An easy-to-read, briskly-paced work that ticks a lot of genre boxes but also has an emotional and thematic depth that creeps up on you, Glorious Beasts should have wide appeal, even in these times when the End often seems, as they say, extremely fucking nigh.

Review by Daisy Lyle ​

As well as releasing many great novels from both new and established authors Flame Tree Press are also resurrecting out-of-print classics, including Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence which was original published back in 1988, winning the prestigious best novel British Fantasy Society award. This is the perfect time to bring this outstanding chiller back to life for a new generation of horror fans as some months ago the Spanish film La Influencia dropped on Netflix and it was terrific to see a rare adaptation of this author’s work making it onto the screen. Although the film has relatively low scores on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB it remains a fascinating translation of the book, moving the action from Campbell’s hometown of Liverpool to rural Spain. Although there are many similarities, such as the main characters having the same jobs, moving the location, however, changes the dynamic completely. This review focusses on the book but will pick up elements from the film along the way.
 
The story revolves around several members and generations of the Faraday family who are preparing for the imminent death of family matriarch, Queenie. For years she had had a stranglehold over her relatives and her unpleasant nature has blighted the lives of those closest to her. Most have avoided her when they can, but her psychological impact upon their lives is so strong that few mourn her when she eventually passes away. Queenie was an outstanding character, who must surely rank amongst Campbell’s finest, she appears mostly in flashback and dominates what is both a disturbing and unsettling story. One could argue that many of us have a spinster like Queenie in their families, but as the plot thickens the reader realises she is much more than a bitter old lady. Think back to when you were a kid and that elderly relative who smelled and scared you slightly, only multiply that uncomfortable memory significantly and you have Queenie.
 
The blurb reveals Queenie dies in the early stages of The Influence so stating that fact is not a spoiler, however, the film is predominately built around the slow death of the old woman whilst she is in a coma in a remote farmhouse and slowly begins to influence her grandniece. Both book and film head in the same general direction, but it’s the journey of how they get there that differs greatly. The film also concentrates on the dynamics of the immediate family, whilst the book fans out with many more characters and has a much stronger sense of time and place, as Campbell’s novels often do, and are frequently set around the Merseyside area and the surrounding coastlines. 
 
The story is told in the third person from several characters point of view, including the niece Alison, her husband Derek and their daughter Rowan. Due to money difficulties they move into Queenie’s house and slowly but surely the reader is drawn into proceedings and the sense of unease develops. Like with most Ramsey Campbell novels, the pace is relatively slow and much of what goes on is connected to the problems in the extended Faraday family, a theme often revisited in Campbell’s fiction. Of course, Queenie and her residual effect is the root of all the most pressing woes.
 
The books main weakness was it was relatively easy to see what direction the plot was heading into and although there were plenty of nice developments and a few shocking moments I was not surprised the way things panned out. Watch out for two outstanding sequences surrounding train stations, involving two different characters, which will really have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up to attention. This is connected to a second scene where a child enters a dreamlike state where they are wandering around an empty Liverpool suburb trying to find their way home.