Some books are single, perfect jewels. Some are arrangements of perfectly matched stones. Others are compositions of widely divergent materials - gold, lapis lazuli, porphyry, wood - that somehow come together to make a dazzling whole. Mike Allen’s latest collection, his third, is like that. The 23 stories and poems in it are very diverse. They range across a whole gamut of styles and sub-genres. Some of them form continuities with stories in other collections, or even other writers’ work, rather than with pieces in the same volume. And yet it all hangs together, and delights.
 
Mike Allen’s 2014 collection Unseaming was a finalist in the Best Collection category for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the This Is Horror Award, so expectations are understandably pitched high for this selection of his tales. And it doesn’t disappoint. There’s grand guignol body horror (“Puppet Show”). There’s folk occult noir (“Follow the Wounded One” and “The Cruelest Team Will Win”). There’s more or less Lovecraftian cosmic horror (“Binding,” “Drift from the Windrows”). And there’s tongue-in-cheek, weirdly sinister science fiction (“Blue Evolution” and the cover story.) Many of the stories continue the same created worlds that he’s already debuted in other stories, and some of the sub-niches are so good that you hope for still more to expand and develop the same setting. I certainly welcome Allen’s promise in the book’s Afterword of more stories set in “the centuries-old, unchanging city of Calcharra,” and a collection of his more noirish tales would be a vantablack delight.
 
The poems and prose-poems that appear among the more conventional stories, many of them co-created with verse luminaries like Christina Sng, exemplify a quality of prose and literary craftsmanship that extends through the whole book. This is absolutely not a collection that quietly tucks away its felicities of style and diction, where they won’t upset the kind of genre audiences who prefer to have their suspensions of disbelief untroubled by reminders that they’re immersed in works of art, not pixellated simulspaces. It parades sheer good writing. Not every story hits the same quality bar, IMHO, but the ones that do are finely finished tours de force of the storyteller’s art – and representative examples of the state of the modern weird/dark/speculative art.
 
Aftermath of an Industrial Accident also contains a generous selection of stories and excerpts from Mike’s other work, but those are just the cherries and icing on top of a rich and juicy layer cake. This has got to be a shortlist candidate for many Best Collection awards for 2020. It has a great cover that is every bit as jolting and unsettling as some of the contents. And it has one of the year’s killer titles. What are you waiting for?

Those of you who are already aware of Unnerving’s Rewind or Die series will have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Renee Miller’s Blood Lake Monster.

For the uninitiated, the aim was to produce something inspired by the kind of B-movie covers you’d see in the horror section of your local video rental establishment. Unnerving invited writers to be inspired by the likes of Critters, Squirm and Chopping Mall to produce stories including (among other things) toxic waste related oddities, stupid jocks, and huge wounds. With Blood Lake Monster, Miller well and truly stuck to the brief.

The story starts with the Daniels family in their trailer by the river in the small town of Tweed, Ontario, which we quickly learn is not a pleasant place to be, particularly for Maribel, who is in her late teens, and ready to escape to college. Her mum works nonstop to try to keep the family afloat, and her younger sister, Anya, seems to have also realised how uncool she is. Worse still, she’s a target for the local bullies, Luke, Jason and Brad.

One evening, when Maribel is walking home from a late shift at work, she is confronted by the bullies. She manages to flee to the lake where, earlier that evening, as result of burst tyre, a vehicle lost its load of chemical barrels.

As you can probably guess, from here comes our toxic waste related oddities and as the story unfold we find out whether and in what ways the jock bullies are forced to pay for their crimes.

While maintaining its B-movie influences, the plot did offer a number of surprises. I wasn’t expecting the time jump to come when it did, but it served the story well. It allowed the legend of the Blood Lake Monster to develop in the area over the intervening years. The legend itself is that a scorned woman can pray to the monster, and if she brings her man to the lake, the monster will put an end to him. I also wasn’t expecting to feel sympathy for the monster until I learned of its origin. The time jump also allowed Anya to grown up, and adult Anya is a far more interesting character.

Some scenes only exist for the monster to show its teeth, and attack with ferocity. Yes, it kills characters who we’ve only just met, and don’t much care for, but it remains entertaining, and as we get the monster’s point of view, it does help to develop that character. In this way, it revels in its B-movie influences. Hence, the suggestion that a large fish could have simply pulled a man from a boat and killed him is considered to be entirely feasible.
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Blood Lake Monster is simple, and it’s fun. Like other books in the Rewind or Die series, it’s a quick read. Most of the characters are little more than stereotypes, with the exception of the monster itself, which is undoubtedly the star of the piece, as you’d hope in a novel like this. If you pick up this book with little expectation in terms of character development, and if you’re into pieces that are willing to give the monster a fair share of the leading role, you might enjoy this. 

Review by Benjamin Langley 

Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer (1887-1964), a key figure in the Belgian School of the Strange. Known in French, Dutch and German circles as a pivotal voice of the Weird, it is only recently his key works are becoming available in English translation. Thanks to Wakefield Press, this new edition of the collection that earned Ray his reputation as Belgian master of the weird tale is published in an excellent translation by Scott Nicolay. Thus Anglophone connoisseurs of the Weird and its origins can finally read Ray’s iconic collection The Great Nocturnal, originally published in 1942, and get to know a name who should be on a par with Poe, Lovecraft and Blackwood.

At the heart of the collection is the title novella, ‘The Great Nocturnal’, which retains all of its dark unnerving power and introduces the reader to Ray’s particular approach to the Weird. Ray finds horror and the strange in the rituals of the everyday, and the uncanniness of these stories creeps up on the reader from the mundanity of lived life. The novella follows the story of Mr. Théodule Notte, an old haberdasher who lives a dull life of routine until he discovers a book of occult secrets in his library which enables him to live in a dimension outside of time, at the price of murder. The tale features several key elements of Ray’s fiction, in the way the fantastic encroaches on the mundane, in the fascination with books and unfinished or intercalary texts, in the unreliableness of narrators and the tricks in general that stories play on their readers. These fascinations can also be seen in ‘The Seven Castles of the Sea King’, in which a young man newly released from prison gets drunk in a tavern full of sailors. His drunken ramblings and the obscure symbols he draws on the table scare the hardy sailors out of their wits, and lead to unforeseen consequences. The story in the end folds in on itself, gaining much of its power by leaving so much unexplained and the story open ended, as the quest for forbidden knowledge consumes all who are drawn to it. ‘The Phantom In The Hold’ features more drunk sailors and thoroughly unreliable narrators; the story offers a rational if gruesome explanation for its events, but by this stage the threads of rationality have been so disrupted the non-supernatural explanation itself feels out of place. ‘When Christ Walked Across the Sea’ features a protagonist whose role is to take on the mantle of doomed saviour without ever realising it. In ‘The Centipede’, three students get drunk whilst keeping a vigil on a dead woman’s house, awaiting the appearance of the psychopomp centipede who will collect the woman’s soul. However they are not all being honest with themselves or each other about what they are waiting for, and when it does manifest there is a heavier price to pay than any of them were expected.

The collected stories here offer a vision of a sordid world of drunks, down and outs, sailors and thieves, who eke out a marginal existence on the edge of the world and so are more likely to fall off the edge into the uncanny. These are ordinary people down on their luck, whose harsh existence is rewarded by these occasional glimpses of another world that encroaches on ours; a double-edged reward to be sure. There is no revelation for Ray’s characters, and their encounter with these deeper truths almost invariably leads to destruction. This bleakness aligns Ray’s worldview with that of Lovecrafts, though his approach to writing and dialogue could not be more different. With their obsession with arcane lore and the gaps in between stories, the tales in The Great Nocturnal share elements with Robert W. Chambers’ iconic The King In Yellow (1895) and Arthur Machen’s more infernal stories like ‘The Great God Pan’ (1894). However there is a bleakness in Ray’s stories that are all his own. Most of The Great Nocturnal was written after Ray’s imprisonment, and during the Nazi Occupation of Belgium, and correspondingly there is a very understandable sense of nihilism and despair running through these stories, coupled with dark gallows humour, as Ray’s approach to the Weird reflects the ongoing horrors of mid-War Europe.
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As well as providing eloquent translations and useful explanatory notes, Scott Nicolay also provides an extensive afterword that explores the contexts of The Great Nocturnal within Ray’s other works and of Ray’s work in general that is both essential and fascinating reading for those interested in the history of Weird Fiction and eager to find out more about the place of Jean Ray’s work in it. Jean Ray embellished his autobiographical information as much as his stories, claiming to be among other colourful things an alcohol smuggler during the Prohibition. This perhaps illustrates Ray’s fascination with narratives, how we receive them, and how the figure of the unreliable narrator interacts with the reader, all of which come through in his fiction as well.

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale

After the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.

Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kümmel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters.
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Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.