WHERE ALL IS NIGHT, AND STARLESS BY JOHN LINWOOD GRANT (BOOK REVIEW)

19/7/2021

Not just a great piece of botanical horror, but one of the best stories I’ve read in the last ten years, in any category.

John Linwood Grant’s new collection is very much a game of three halves. I know, you can’t have three halves of anything – or maybe you can, since the first section “On Mythos” is full-on Lovecraftian, and we all know what he used to do to maths. And the opening story pitches us straight into all that non-Euclidian angst. “Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun” considers the emergence of a city under the Antarctic as posited by Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. However, it feels very modern with its deep-state political antics, data leaks and hikkikomori narrator, an obsessive builder of 3D scale models driven by obscure imperatives. This is a fun story that should appeal to fans of Charles Stross’ Lovecraftian incursions, but really stands out by virtue of its heroine, who gets up to a lot of hi-tech mischief and is a curmudgeonly social recluse to boot. This may not sound like a big deal - deliberate attempts to overturn gender stereotypes are common in weird fiction nowadays, and modern shelves are groaning with relentlessly plucky Victorian governesses, punk witches, girl ninjas and all sorts. But this one is actually a lifelike, convincing character, and that’s a lot rarer.

Turning stereotypes on their head is something that happens a lot in Grant land. In “Messages”, which benefits from a taut crime-thriller style, a woman and her daughter jack in their abusive pater familias and take up with a strange god who offers them permanent residence in Insania, which they both seem to greatly enjoy. “With the Dark and the Storm” is an ethnically-flipped piece of Lovecraftiana with a Nigerian tribesman as the protagonist and a Heart of Darkness-style white preacher cast as the deranged alien threat. “Lines of Sight” explores an inter-racial and inter-generational friendship between two neighbours who share an interest in transcendence and self-mutilation. These are all good stories with a lot more going for them than just their progressive politics, but for me the “best in section” was definitely the title story. “Where All…” is set among the ranks of a company of WWI tunnel engineers whose heroic burrowing activities remain largely unsung to this day. The underground world is brought vividly to life, and the way the sense of cosmic terror snags repeatedly on tiny mundane details (which must have involved a lot of historical research!) only increases its impact. If you liked The Keep by F. Paul Wilson you’ll love this!

The second section, “On Mystery”, was to my mind the weakest of the three. “Where the Thin Men Die” is the best story here, set in the smoky, sleazy world of stand-up comedy in the 1970s (and even further back) and starring a haunted comedian, Black Harry. In vibe and setting it’s pleasantly reminiscent of Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. All we need now is a story about a guy called Black Dick to complete the trio.

In a way, it’s Grant’s preoccupation with the past that is the undoing of this section. One of the stories (“Marjorie Learns To Fly”) got into my bad books by being an avowed homage to big-in-the-70s writer Ronald Chetwynd Hayes, a writer I hate, and several of the others have a similar vibe. Grant is just too successful at channelling the suffocating luncheon-meat-and-Terylene alienation dripping from much of the fiction of that era, stories in which women with helmet hair are always pondering how to dispose of the tyrannical ageing relatives they are forced to live with. I can never seem to identify with these trapped-in-amber characters (who somehow seem far more alien than Victorians or Edwardians) just as I could never eat the dishes in those unsettling 70s Weight Watchers recipe cards.

The final section, “On Myths”, is folk horror corner, much of it with a twist of comedy. “A Farewell To Worms” is a dark and hilarious jaunt down an obscure byway of Greek mythology with a pagan sensibility the equal of Saki and plenty of cutting but warm humour. “Sanctuary” and “The Horse Road” reminded me a lot of John Whitbourne’s excellent Binscombe Tales complete with a roster of numinous villagers, beleaguered clergymen and savage pets, and “The Horse Road” in particular is a lovely, touching and amusing story for anyone who’s into horses.

I also found the darker fare much more relatable than in the previous section. “Slow Remembered Tide”, about a village’s odd seaside ritual, should please fans of the Cathi Unsworth novel Weirdo, and “At Vrysfontein…”, an unrelentingly black story in the vein of Steve Duffy’s ‘The Clay Party’, offers a swaying Jenga tower of colonial misery from the second Boer War (because somehow one wasn’t enough).

“For She is Falling”, however, is a cut above the other material here. It’s an incredible fairy story – if that’s what the peculiar character Jump-Nancy is – sharing the beautiful, weird floral dynamism of Richard Dadd’s painting ‘Crazy Jane’. It’s an elusive but vivid high-speed caper in which the boundless transformative power of the botanical kingdom is pitted against the urban institutions that exist to process the insane and the socially damned. A lot is left unexplained in practical terms, and yet so much is expressed. Not just a great piece of botanical horror, but one of the best stories I’ve read in the last ten years, in any category.

This is one of those collections that really does offer something for everyone, with real versatility of style as well as content. Whether you like classic tales of terror, 70s macabre or gritty urban horror, you will be doing yourself a favour by getting hold of this book.

WHERE ALL IS NIGHT, AND STARLESS BY JOHN LINWOOD GRANT

Where All is Night, and Starless collects seventeen unsettling stories of our fears and weaknesses, and of our often unreliable strengths: stories of monstrosity and the occasional hope, deliberately themed across three aspects of weird fiction. The section 'On Mythos' covers re-interpretations and subversions of themes from H P Lovecraft's Mythos; 'On Mysteries' looks into strange transformations, and 'On Myth' delves into the realms of folklore and folk horror, each with a dark twist.