GLORIOUS BEASTS BY GARY MCMAHON: BOOK REVIEW

Gary McMahon is one of those authors you see popping up all the time in decent horror anthologies, and he is also known for his psychic detective character Thomas Usher (Pretty Little Dead Things, Dead Bad Things) and his more recent Concrete Grove series. He specializes in the kind of gritty, psychological but still very meaty horror that many authors from the North of England and the Midlands seem to do so well, and he always has his finger on the fluttering pulse of society. At a time when it seems that a number of social-injustice chickens are coming home to roost in even more obvious ways than usual, McMahon’s writing also feels distressingly prescient (that high-rise on the front of The Concrete Grove now looks much too much like Grenfell, for a start). In his new novella, Glorious Beasts, he’s gone a step further and ventures into post-apocalypse.

The events in Glorious Beasts occur in the wake of a period of time referred to with alarming vagueness as the “Plague Years”. The conflicted hero Cable is a mercenary and recovering alcoholic who roams what’s left of society with his quietly psychic young son, Walker, eventually taking on a job investigating a kid-snatching amid rumours of terrifying supernatural beasts. The exciting bits of the apocalypse have been and gone by now, and everything is bleak and dirty, with everyone just trying to get by in an increasingly loveless world where you can’t get proper tea any more (you can still very much get booze, but that’s a dubious comfort to our hero.) It’s a very cinematic kind of read: the pair travel a landscape very reminiscent of the rural bits in the Yorkshire-based nuclear disaster film Threads, and the near-but-still-fairly-screwed-future vibe unsurprisingly evokes The Road Warrior, an impression the taut, no-nonsense prose and lashings of unglamorous dirt, putrefaction and violence do nothing to dispel. There’s also something of an Eastwood cowboy movie feel, with Cable spending a lot of the book in tiring and often futile efforts to establish control over his life by acts of physical violence, without ever quite achieving the upgrade from reactive to proactive status.

However, as the story wears on other notes are heard, preventing ‘Glorious Beasts’ from turning into just another Cormac McCarthy imitation. In his afterword McMahon writes of his desire to explore the way conventional masculinity is crumbling in our modern world. This is certainly nothing unusual in itself – while women have been required to make massive adjustments to their own roles in the last fifty years without anyone shedding a drop of sympathy, the fate of Modern Man and his changing place in society seems to be of constant fascination to breast-beating writers and journalists alike. What is unusual is that McMahon manages to tread this well-worn thematic path without being annoying, sexist or self-indulgent. The focus on Cable’s relationship with his son (who, you will be relieved to hear, isn’t given to making precocious wisecracks) gives some Mouse And His Child-style emotional heft to the proceedings, and in fact I found myself wondering if the boy Walker is named after another book of Russell Hoban’s, the dystopian British rural sci-fi novel Riddley Walker.

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 ​

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