BOOK REVIEW: THE SEA CHANGE & OTHER STORIES BY HELEN GRANT

14/3/2022

The Sea Change & Other Stories by Helen Grant (review by Rebecca Rowland)

In “Grauer Hans,” a mother routinely sings the same lullaby to her young daughter each evening without fail. After, the child lies awake in her bed, and a small man knocks at her window in a plea to be asked inside. Creepily, “it never worried me that the window was so high above the street, my room being on the third storey of the house; I never wondered how he got there, or how he got away afterwards.” The girl soon learns who the man is: “a bogey, a monster, a demon. A leprous grey all over, he could slide invisibly through the night shadows, slither unseen through the camouflaging masses of cobwebs under the eaves, and tap the glass like diamonds.” Part nostalgia-campfire yarn, part terrifying fairy tale, this opening story sets the mood of Helen Grant’s The Sea Change and Other Stories: one of skulking dread and growing paranoia.

In the title story, my favorite of the line-up, a woman heads out to sea with plans to explore a shipwreck with an old friend when the boat’s sonar picks up a strange object along the ocean bottom. As they take a detour to explore the mysterious entity, the two find themselves standing in the middle of a very odd construction, and one of them experiences a sudden, nagging suspicion: “Call me superstitious if you like, but I reckon most divers have times and places when they know it isn’t right—you’re not meant to be in the water that day. And on top of that—well, I had a peculiar sensation of being watched.” The divers cannot further investigate, however, as eerily, the narrator’s oxygen tank depletes much faster than normal, forcing the two to the surface. What follows is a slowly-building claustrophobic horror on par with the films of Sphere and The Thing with imagery that stays with the reader long after the story is done. In her notes at the close of the collection, Grant reminisces about her own experience with scuba diving, and her attention to detail in the story and resulting verisimilitude is evident.

In “Self Catering,” the shortest of the seven stories in Grant’s collection, Edward Larkin is goaded into booking a vacation following an irritating co-worker’s constant jabbing. Larkin serendipitously steps into travel agent Cornelius Von Teufel’s office, where he peruses a number of horror-themed holidays but settles upon the company’s offering for their most “valued customers”: a special getaway “a hundred percent guaranteed to be haunted.” This ironic entry is a fun little ditty to break up the more serious, lengthier pieces and a nice palate-cleanser before tackling the remaining storylines.

The final entry, “The Calvary at Banská Bystrica,” is also the longest of the tales, but it is well worth the investment for connoisseurs of classic gothic literature. Akin to Robert Walton’s frame story in Shelley’s Frankenstein, the narrator shares a drink with a dear friend who then proceeds to tell him of his missing brother and his subsequent pursuit of the sibling whose last correspondence announced his plans to marry a woman whose appearance is only discernable through a hand-drawn sketch included with the news. The journey draws him deeper into the mystery through a series of subtly peculiar landmarks: “The niche contained only a small gilded bracket in the shape of a cherub’s head, upon which some object or statue had evidently resided in the past…The blind eyes stared out obliviously. I laid an exploratory finger on the glass; it was cool, one spot of coldness in the seething heat of the afternoon. Staring in I could see that a spider had begun to spin a web from the cherub’s cheek to the corner of the niche. It was an ugly thought, the jointed legs of the spider moving over the childish contours of the face.”

The gestalt of The Sea Change and Other Stories is one of modern gothic, literary horror. Readers who fancy their chills quick and dirty will likely be disappointed, but it is obvious that Grant exhibits a gift for language and story-telling. The scares are visceral if not slow-building, and fans of Shirley Jackson and Robert Louis Stevenson will be over the moon with a new favorite author to add to their library arsenal.

The Sea Change: & Other Stories
by Helen Grant

"Till human voices wake us, and we drown." - T. S. Eliot

In her first collection, award-winning author Helen Grant plumbs the depths of the uncanny: Ten fathoms down, where the light filtering through the salt water turns everything grey-green, something awaits unwary divers. A self-aggrandising art critic travelling in rural Slovakia finds love with a beauty half his age-and pays the price. In a small German town, a nocturnal visitor preys upon children; there is a way to keep it off-but the ritual must be perfect. A rock climber dares to scale a local crag with a diabolical reputation, and makes a shocking discovery at the top. In each of these seven tales, unpleasantries and grotesqueries abound-and Grant reminds us with each one that there can be fates even worse than death.

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