LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING NOT WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN BY STEVEN J DINES

22/9/2021

but it’s a deceptive, brittle jollity and by the end no reader will feel short-changed in the horror department. All these stories are characterized by gentle but meaningful experimentation with form, an avoidance of cliché and a keen eye for metaphor, simile and imagery.

“They say that home is where the heart is/but home is only where the hurt is”. Marc Almond has spoken, and it’s a lucky devil who makes it to adulthood without accumulating a sackful of Mummy and Daddy issues. Dines has chosen to focus mainly on Daddy for this collection, a career retrospective of tales from Black Static and related magazines, along with a couple of new ones. Three of the stories are an interlinked framing narrative about a failed writer and his family, with the remaining tales intended to be the work of said writer.

Some of the stand-alone stories are great. “Men Playing Games, Playing God” offers something rare and precious, a realistic and nuanced depiction of old people living in a retirement home. Despite the ageing of the reading population, most horror fiction either steadfastly ignores the old or traps them in hackneyed depictions of appalling geriatric care doled out for cheap scares. The lives of the main characters – a quartet of men and one woman in their seventies and above – are far from ideal, but their living conditions are adequate and the main terrors they negotiate are of the emotional and psychic variety. This makes for some sophisticated characterization, with old people presented as individuals with pasts and futures and (in the narrator’s case) a great sense of humour, rather than just zombified victims surrounded by uncaring staff. The plot loses its way a bit towards the end, with a brief incursion into Coccoon territory, but overall it’s a fun character study, slow-moving but never dull.

“Pendulum” is a very affecting story with a structure successfully mimicking the to-and-fro movement of the titular oscillator, told from the point of view of a single mother whose attempts to bring up her autistic son are derailed by the selfishness of the boy’s father and the general horribleness of the world. In a collection where most of the narrators are men it’s also a convincing depiction of a woman who is routinely forced to put her own trauma to one side to keep on being a good mother, while the father of her child gets to loaf through a carefree existence courtesy of the gaming industry.

“The Things That Get You Through” is an entertaining macabre story about one man’s attempt to survive the death of his ex-girlfriend, with a structure based on the famous ‘five stages of grief’. At first glance it seems more light-hearted than some of the stories here, but it’s a deceptive, brittle jollity and by the end no reader will feel short-changed in the horror department. All these stories are characterized by gentle but meaningful experimentation with form, an avoidance of cliché and a keen eye for metaphor, simile and imagery.

That said, there is a lack of variety in tone and theme that becomes a problem as the collection wears on. Nearly all the stories have the same slow, depressed grand-father clock rhythm which, when coupled with an often joyless outlook, leads to a cumulative effect that is not so much hypnotic as deadening. Where the collection came unstuck for me was the trilogy of related framing stories, a frame so heavy it eventually brings the whole structure crashing down.

“So Many Heartbeats, So Many Words”, “The Harder it Gets The Softer We Sing” and “This House Is Not Haunted” deal with psychological disintegration in the nuclear family, as told from the point of view of a worried stay-at-home father. The man’s family – a weird-kid son who may or may not be autistic, a mother with pretty eyes whose life revolves around reproductive calamity, and a distant father with dementia - didn’t have enough realism to appeal to me. The narrator, on the other hand, is almost too realistic in his self-absorbed and passive trudge through a life that seems emptied of beauty or enjoyment of any kind, unless you count his paternal pride in his son’s speech and communication problems, which he finds poetic and life-affirming in the finest Guardian lifestyle columnist tradition.

Of course, you can write very good stories without a single likeable character in them, but you still need a bit of snap and momentum. An in-depth examination of mould, miscarriages and mucus, augmented with reflections on the nature of autism and the vagaries of the British publishing industry, can only be dragged out so long under these conditions. And personally, while I could handle the mould and the miscarriage just fine, I could’ve done with a whole lot less mucus. This isn’t just a trilogy about a lone snotty child. This is a whole fictional universe slick with bodily fluids of all kinds, and if I had to describe the aesthetics and technique in a single word, it would be “viscous”. Of course, this is a matter of taste, and some readers may actively enjoy the viscosity - if they have a seeping child of their own, perhaps. If in doubt I recommend allowing yourself to be guided by the book’s cover art, which is absolutely nailed onto the trilogy.

The bolshy po-mo tendencies are harder to forgive. The narrator regularly refers and responds to criticisms other characters have made of “his” writing (i.e. the standalone stories in the collection) which might be intended as self-deprecation but more often feels like an attempt to parry criticism before it arises. And when you’ve made a commitment to reading over a hundred pages of something that doesn’t really float your boat, it’s frustrating to be told that what you’re reading isn’t mere fiction, it’s Reality. After a while it even spoils your enjoyment of the stand-alone stories, because you find yourself parsing them for references to the framing narrative (which may be exactly what the author wants you to be doing, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.) As the concept falls in on itself, even aspects of Dines’ writing that initially appealed start to become tiresome, like the over-reliance on metaphor and compulsive soul-dredging.

Ultimately what you have is a collection with some very good writing in it, but which is let down by its overarching concept. Still, at least it bothers to have a concept, which is quite rare in genre literature nowadays, and several of the more middling stories show that Dines is trying hard to expand his range, so with any luck it won’t be long before he’s able to put out a really great varied collection.

LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING NOT WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN
BY STEVEN J DINES

The past is never far behind. If we do not leave it, if we insist on carrying it with us to the end...that end is a monster.

This stunning debut collection of dark, literary fiction drowns the reader in its themes of grief, regret, love, and hope.

A family is torn apart by tragedy and misadventure, their future creaking under the weight of judgment. Old men play at being ghosts while a young boy sees real ones wherever he turns. A wandering immortal desperately seeks an end to his pain.

Intimate, unflinching, and poignant, these eleven tales of the broken and the unmade include the two previously unpublished novellas, dragonland and This House is Not Haunted.