BOOK REVIEW - SOME BRUISING MAY OCCUR BY GARY MCMAHON

Some of these child-centric stories, such as ‘Unicorn Meat’, were too unremittingly black for my taste (though you can’t say the title doesn’t warn you), but others contained an appealing thread of hope gleaming redly in the dingy tapestry of despair, poverty and cruelty

In my recent review of Gary McMahon’s novella Glorious Beasts I mentioned his long and enviable track record as a short fiction writer. Now Journalstone/Trepidatio have published a new collection of his stories from the last six years. The title, Some Bruising May Occur, is of manifest excellence, but do the stories live up to it?

They’ve certainly chosen a cracking one-two punch to start things off. ‘My Boy Builds Coffins’ has featured both in Black Static magazine and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8, and you can see why. McMahon is able to mine the simple premise described in the title – a small and otherwise crashingly normal boy unnerves his parents by taking up the building of mysterious miniature caskets – to unearth a fine crop of terrors such as parental guilt and inadequacy, bereavement, and the loss of childhood innocence. The latter is in fact a recurring preoccupation of the writer, although in many of the stories in this collection the innocence is not so much lost as wantonly smashed with the hammer of abuse by a procession of unfit parents and authority figures. The second story ‘Some Pictures in an Album’ is for my money the best of these, partly because it uses a technique I love – telling a very dark story through snapshots described by a traumatized narrator – and also because it avoids feeding the reader too much information, leaving a nice little garden of nightmares to flourish in the interstices of the plot.

Some of these child-centric stories, such as ‘Unicorn Meat’, were too unremittingly black for my taste (though you can’t say the title doesn’t warn you), but others contained an appealing thread of hope gleaming redly in the dingy tapestry of despair, poverty and cruelty. For instance ‘Little Boxes’ – which also boasts such a great basic premise that I’m amazed no-one seems to have thought of it before – is a very enjoyable look at the form a supernaturally-enhanced uprising of disaffected youth might take, though if you’re the sort of person who lies awake at night worrying about just how pissed off Generation Z are going to be when they grow up, then you might want to skip this one. ‘Hard Knocks’, which deals with a school shooting, also has a satisfying ending which contains a substantial component of revenge but without being too black-and-white.

McMahon’s adults, meanwhile, are not always evil, and many of the characters here are just ordinary people struggling to keep their heads above the black waters of modern life, with depression, dysfunctional relationships and addiction being recurring themes. Often the weird elements in a story will emerge seamlessly from the awful environments they occur in, and when you think back on the stories it’s often hard to remember at exactly what point the supernatural intrudes. And yet these incursions of strangeness, dark as they are, often add a note of liberation, however fleeting, to the hopeless, predictable and often marginal lives of the heroes and heroines. This is the case in ‘Tethered Dogs’, which features a prostitute granted an occult power (but at a very heavy price), and ‘What We Mean When We Talk About The Dead’. This examination of the afterlife is almost upbeat by comparison with the other tales in this collection, and together with ‘Tethered Dogs’ it is the most reminiscent of McMahon’s Thomas Usher novels.

Not all the stories are so focussed on social justice, however, and in fact some of the best are more overtly fantastical. ‘Kaiju’ pulls off the trick of making you seriously entertain the possibility of a Godzilla-type entity appearing without warning to clobber us all; it is, of course, seen through the lens of a survivor, but it has a more original plot than a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. ‘Cinder Images’ is a headfuck of the Nicholas Royle variety about a cursed film with the power to warp reality, and ‘The Night Just Got Darker’ is that rare thing, a story about the nature of writing that you can actually finish and enjoy. So whatever type of horror fiction floats your boat, you should find something that tickles your fancy here, as long as you like your horror lean, unsentimental and committed to depicting the modern world without airbrushing.

Review by Daisy Lyle 

This book is a tour of the dark places, a literary journey into the shadows at the heart of the human experience.

Despite what you might think, these stories take place in a world very much like our own. Here you will find darkness and light, love and hate, pain and ecstasy. People just like you and I live inside these stories: the hurt, the damaged, the mad, the bad, the hopeful and the hopeless...

Here, pain is often something to be endured on the way to some form of revelation. Death is not always the end. You will be faced by monsters, and you will discover that sometimes the worst monsters are those with a human face.

So be careful. Remain focused. Keep your arms inside the vehicle at all times.

In these stories, transformation will happen.

You will encounter the extremes of human nature.

And, yes, some bruising may occur

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