 Reviewed by Georgina Bruce Robbie and his friends on the Crescent do what all kids do in the summer – play games, get up to idle mischief, and wait for childhood to be over. But when an offcomer arrives on their estate, things that Robbie has always taken for granted are suddenly brought into question. Growing up normal is harder than it looks, especially when normal starts to look pretty strange from the outside. This excellent novella from TTA Press starts with a simple premise and escalates into some serious weirdness. There is not a little Shirley Jackson flavour to this story – indeed I’d go so far as to say it transplants the horrendously sinister tale The Lottery from its 1940s rural America to an industrial British landscape, and does so very effectively. This is an interrogation of the unquestioning following of tradition, of what it means to belong to a place, and what sacrifices a person must make to their community. The consequences of avoiding such sacrifice may be a kind of freedom, but it is a freedom that’s unwanted and cruel in its own way. There’s a preoccupation here with the urban and industrial, a sort of Fritz Langian nightmare of machineries both brutal and impersonal. Those who refuse to be well-oiled and functional cogs in the machine, those who are broken, must be hammered straight. The individual may protest, but the lesson of life is that the individual is only important inasmuch as he or she plays their part in the whole. This tremendous horror is condensed and metonymised in every element of Devlin’s work. Not one second of life is free from this underlying motion towards conformity, towards the crushing of the spirit. Then there is the domestic, the secretive female principle, hidden in basements and lubricated with unguents. Women whisper at walls, at darkness, and some kind of healing is produced. A sort of mother’s milk is eased from the machine, a tonic that repulses even as it cures. While men work in shifts and children are idle, the women oil the human machinery with this mysterious lotion coaxed from secret taps in their normal, ordinary basements. Devlin’s houses are often ordinary, familiar places that turn against their inhabitants – most notably in his excellent short story, The End of Hope Street, but also here. An impenetrable but inarguable logic transforms the domestic into its gothic counterpart; a house is not a home, but the outward face of a haunting. The machineries of everyday life are brutal. The freedoms of childhood must fall away before they are ever fully realised. Women must process grief and healing underground. This novella is full of horror because it is true, because it estranges us enough from life that it allows us to see it with clear, wide eyes. And Devlin delivers it all in transparent prose, eminently readable, only giving pause at moments for us to consider the justness of a phrase, the clarity of an insight. Malcolm Devlin is one of those writers who inspires great trust from readers, and rightly so. He is a quietly brilliant craftsman who never puts a foot wrong. His writing here has an authority and economy that gradually induces paranoia in the reader. We become conscious of the engines beneath us, and afraid. Highly recommended. purchase a copy from tta press by clicking here The devastating debut short story collection from British Fantasy Award-winning author Georgina Bruce. Haunting and visceral tales for the lost and the lonely. An emotional and riveting debut. Advance praise for Georgina Bruce's 'This House of Wounds.' "An astonishing, totally absorbing debut collection. Edgy, disturbing and delicious in equal parts. Georgina Bruce plays with myth and horror beautifully." -Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Author of Gamble, and The Black Country "The stories in This House of Wounds strike me as both an emotional and intellectual examination of pain, from how it spreads and is passed on to others to how it can easily turn us into different, crueller creatures. Each act formed in pain leads to another, then another, and this makes for twisted, beautiful reading. Georgina Bruce is a courageous and compelling writer." -Aliya Whiteley, Author of The Loosening Skin, and The Beauty   the heart and soul of horror fiction reviewsComments are closed.
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