Author: Alyson Faye

This is Anita Frank’s début novel and its publication date ties in most appropriately with Halloween- a PR match made in heaven. The blurb for the novel compares it to The Woman in Black, says ‘Some houses are never at peace’ and is a ghost story. So that was me in straight away for I am a sucker for haunted Gothic mansions, family secrets, lost children, and feisty heroines who are in danger. 

This is set in 1917 when the Great War is still raging abroad, and the losses at home are being mourned. One such bereaved fiancée is Stella Marcham, the heroine, who is sent to live with her pregnant sister after a nervous breakdown. She is packed off to her brother in law’s Gothic mansion, the fabulously named, Greyswick – and the building is very much a character in its own right. Brooding, cavernous, filled with corridors, whisperings, secrets, and in 1917 is run by an exclusively female staff, who are ruled by the formidable Lady Brightwell, who is quite the harridan and her right hand woman, the hovering, hellish housekeeper Mrs Henge (very much in the Mrs Danvers mould I thought who swishes around and pops up at all the wrong times).

The novel is split into two parts:- part one is Stella’s arrival, fitting into this household, grieving and  vulnerable, who arrives with her ‘strange, otherworldly’ maid Annie. I did find this a slow build, with lengthy descriptions of the house, and the characters. It does reward your patience but you do have to persevere. Very soon Stella and her sister, Madeleine, are hearing and seeing things which cannot be real and having buckets of conflict with the matriarch Brightwell and her seemingly gentle companion Miss Scott. Perhaps Stella is so grief stricken she is going mad? The threat of more medical treatment and indeed sectioning, hangs over our heroine all the way through the book and is a grim reminder of women’s rights and roles in the early twentieth century.

The second part of the novel is when Stella chooses to stay behind at Greyswick, after her sister and brother in law depart, to investigate the ghost’s and why it is still trapped in the house. Now the pace does pick up. A male character is introduced, Tristan Sheers, an injured war vet, a rationalist and psychic investigator who is there to disprove the existence of ghosts. Meanwhile the ghost is hyping up its activity levels; the focus of which is the top floor and the disused nursery. Annie, the maid, is connected in a supernatural manner, which allows her (conveniently for plot purposes) to act as an interpreter for Stella. The growing and changing relationship between the maid and the middle class, but fragile, Stella is another touching and convincing strand to the web of character interplays in the novel. 

The finale is well handled, with a particularly grisly and touching scene in the smoking room where the walls literally hold the secrets. Frank keeps the reveals and twists coming. It is fair to say that every woman in the house has her own secret and is hiding something. 

This is also a story about one woman’s journey to the other side of grief and finding herself again as well as how the evil of past deeds resonates in the present day.

4/5 stars.

Yes, if you love Susan Hill you will love this. 

Weakness – slow start, long convoluted descriptions and dialogue which takes some perseverance.

Available on Amazon.

I have been reading Sarah Rayne’s thrillers for years and always await her next one with baited breath then devour it one gulp. This is the fourth novel in the series, starring music researcher and academic Phineas Fox, his girlfriend Arabella  in a more peripheral role than previously) and best mate, the hapless Toby.

This time Fox is researching a book about the composer Franz Liszt and it’s a piece of his strange eerie music which provides the lead in in to the mystery. Rayne often uses this motif in her stories. How did Liszt know a Cockney music hall performer, the luscious but scandalous Scaramel? Is she linked in some way to Jack the Ripper, who terrorised Whitechapel in 1888? And does the newly refurbished theatre café Linklighters, with its eccentric owners Loretta and Roland, hide deadly secrets both past and present?
Well you can probably guess the answers to these questions but this review doesn’t want to give away any spoilers.

As in many of her books Rayne uses mirroring time lines – present day and 1880’s London- switching smoothly between the two, bringing each set of characters (now and historic) to vibrant life. Linklighters and the horrible underground sluice gate which lies below the restaurant is the physical doorway to the past and as usual Rayne uses old letters, playbills, sketches (by a young artist known only as ‘Link’), programmes, and newspaper reports as a series of informational signposts for us and Phineas Fox to follow. The way she overlays all this is very well done. 

The scenes set in the sewers were dark scary and very unpleasant. Rayne has done some research on the ‘ghost rivers’ which proliferate beneath London. She is very adept to at depicting the smells, sights and sounds of Victorian London. The story hops over to Paris for a brief digression too 

(both in the past and present day).         

Jack the Ripper hovers over the narrative, a shadowy figure who haunts Scaramel and her feisty maid, Daisy) and Rayne’s fictional solution to why Jack stopped killing is interesting, possible and thought provoking.

There are some violent scenes depicted and if you like your crime cozy with a ‘z’ this may not be for you. 

I would say that this time Fox and Arabella are overshadowed as characters by Loretta (the current black widow style owner of Linklighters) and Scaramel the Victorian songstress, who leapt off the page for me. If you’re looking for loads about Liszt and his music this isn’t the right book for you. His role is peripheral.

A dark, elegantly plotted historical thriller romp through Victorian London and current day Soho.

Bonus Content

Sarah Rayne has kindly given us an insight into the research which allowed her to bring her characters to life so vividly:

‘Taking on the man who is probably the best-known serial killer ever – presenting an aspect of him that nobody had so far thought of – was a slightly daunting prospect.  Linking Jack the Ripper, via a music hall performer, with the eminent composer, Franz Liszt, was more than daunting – it was formidable.

There were, though, lighter sides to the research.  It appears that Liszt, early on, almost led the life of a modern-day rock star, mobbed and adored, his fans fighting to secure scraps of his garments, and fainting in the aisles at his concerts.  

One anecdote in particular stood out for me.  During a youthful affair with the infamous 19th century night-club dancer, Lola Montez, Liszt found himself forced to sneak out of a Constantinople hotel bedroom in the early morning while she was still asleep, since, he said, he ‘feared her importunities were starting to damage his sanity, his constitution, and his virility’.

La Montez, on discovering her lover’s absence, gave way to extravagant fury and smashed up the entire room.  Mirrors were angrily splintered, and what was delicately referred to by the hotel staff as ‘bedroom china’ was hurled out of windows.    

It’s these odd snippets that bring the past vividly to life – although it should perhaps be added that Liszt’s later years were quieter and more seemly, much of his time being spent in a monastery near Rome, where he composed many religious and liturgical works.

It wasn’t just the people that came colourfully to life – it was the places, too.  At various parts in Music Macabre, characters become trapped, lost, and generally menaced in the remains of one of the lost London rivers that lies beneath Linklighters, the fictional music hall.  

Working out this section of the plot, it turned out that there were far more of these ‘ghost rivers’ than I had realized – from the Westbourne to the Fleet, from the Black Ditch to Earl’s Sluice, to Pudding Mill River and Carbuncle Ditch and Mutton Brook. Their names reflected their origins – some of which were ancient – and there was no discrimination as to where they wended their way.  For the purposes of the plot, the dried-out Cock and Pye Ditch fitted the bill beautifully. It once circled an area of St Giles – now more generally known as Seven Dials – which meant that Linklighters could be sited to be directly over it.

There was, though, a touch of dark humour in the fact that the old Tyburn was – and still is – directly beneath Buckingham Palace.  As one character in Music Macabre observes, it’s tempting to imagine times when, if there was an overflow, royalty might have had to wade through sewage, complete with gumboots and mops and buckets, to help with slopping out.’

I’d rate this 4/5 stars and yes would recommend it especially if you enjoy history/mystery with some horror. Great title too.

Music Macabre is available on Amazon and Book Shop.

This is the latest collection from Australian award winning author Deborah Sheldon. There are about 35 short stories here including some flash fiction (i.e. pieces under 1000 words). Some of the short stories have been published elsewhere, revealing an impressive range of magazines and anthologies in Deborah Sheldon’s CV but there are three new stories written just for this collection as well.

I first came to a Deborah Sheldon novel when I read and reviewed (for the Horror Tree site) her bio-horror novella Thylacines which I hugely enjoyed and so I became a fan of her fiction. 

It is always an enjoyable experience to venture into her fictional worlds, conjured up so vividly and so succinctly in these shorter pieces.

These are dark tales, which step into the underbelly of society and the fringes where folk scurry around to make a buck. They are set in hospitals, the outback, (the powerful punch to the gut opening story Basket Trap), on wheat farms, on roads in cars, in caravan parks (the bitter sweet The Sequinned Shirt where the past is a trap and the present is pretty grim too), in roadhouses, in urban offices (the clever twisting Cash Cow where comeuppance is brutal and final) and on the beach. 

Deborah Sheldon is adept at drawing you in, writing fast, furious dialogue, making you smell and taste the landscape and the characters’ sweat, taking you on a journey with the lost, the displaced, the broken, the runaways, the misfits and the mad, who populate the pages. Many of her characters are in transition, running away from their dangerous past.

I did say the tone was dark. 

This is not always the most comfortable of reads, be prepared to be challenged even disturbed by some of the narratives. There is violence and not many happy endings to be found, though there is some delicious dark humour to be savoured.

But the characters leap off the pages, real, flesh and blood, smoky and smokin’ hot sometimes. You might not want to meet up with them but in these stories you can hang out and still be safe.

My personal favourites – tough call but – the opener Basket Trap, took my breath away; it’s about one woman’s fight for survival in the outback in brutal circumstances, with whole back stories evoked in one sentence. Man with the Suitcase (reminiscent to me, of Donald E Westlake, author of The Hot Rock) in tone, and is a smartly written, slick caper story which reads like a mini movie and pays rereading for its twists and turns and White Powder set around an air plane journey, simply because it was funny and made me laugh.

Definitely worth buying and dipping into.

Bonus Content!

Deborah Sheldon shares a little of her thoughts behind the creation of the collection.

‘I chose the title Figments and Fragments because the collection largely comprises stories based on figments of my imagination or memory fragments.

This is my go-to technique for coming up with story ideas: allowing something to germinate. Something small. An image from a bad dream, perhaps, or a snippet from a painful event in my past. A strong, disquieting emotion that won’t ease up. An overheard conversation. I hold onto the figment or fragment and allow my subconscious to work on it for a while. More often than not, a story begins to form.

I think writers are, by definition, troubled souls! Fiction is about conflict and this is true for every genre, even upbeat ones such as romance. Like many writers, I’m drawn to the exploration of what it means to be human. I just explore it from the “glass half-empty” perspective.

Emotion is the universal human experience. It’s the common language we share, regardless of sex, age, nationality, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status or any other kind of identification label. Writers strive to put emotion into words. As readers, that’s what we look for in fiction; the shared experience of emotion, the mutual understanding, the reassurance that we’re all in this thing together.

Dark fiction digs beneath the social façades, the pleasantries, the polite smiles. I believe that horror, crime and noir are the most authentic genres of all.’

5/5 stars

Available on Amazon and Book Shop.

This is the latest horror/thriller from Australian writer Deborah Sheldon, published on 3 September 2018 from IFWG Publishing and is available on amazon to purchase. Sheldon has created a seemingly ordinary Mr Average, John Penrose, as her protagonist, however it becomes clear very quickly (and at 240 pages there is no extra fat on the bone in this tale) he lives a not so ordinary life. He might have a boring dead end job, rent in the suburbs, no friends and no social life and drink too much beer, but he has an extraordinary secret lodging with him. Both literally sharing his rental home and sharing his back story, set 30 years previously, which still casts long toxic shadows into the present day.

The unravelling of the past when the young, shy college lad John Penrose meets and becomes entwined in the lives of the twins Lyle and Meredith Berg-Olsen, both of whom he loves in different ways but with deadly consequences, is slotted in beside the current day narrative describing John’s tedious existence – moving from rental house to rental house, whenever issues arise with Meredith and her behaviour.

John still loves his Merry, he still sees her with the eyes of his first teenage love, but to us the reader, it is apparent Meredith is not the girl she once was and John is blinded by devotion. Sheldon cleverly gives us clues and hints, but avoids the full reveal about what ails Meredith, until the climax, which is exciting and well constructed and takes an unexpected turn in the last few pages.

A neighbour, a single mother, Donna with a daughter in tow, takes a shine to John, and they begin a sweet gentle courtship but in the neighbourhood animals keep going missing, Meredith never goes out of the house in daylight hours, a ‘witch’ is seen outside Donna’ s windows and John learns new facts about his past from an old school mate now working for a circus performing in town. The mundanities of life are being undermined.

 John has a truly unnerving night time encounter with Meredith’s homeless friend, Sebastian, which has John racing for his life through the suburb’s back gardens. Meanwhile at home the tension mounts. Long before John asks the killer questions, we the reader are suspicious – of Meredith and her hobby boxes and of what did happen that summer day with Lyle down by the river, for which John has carried a lifetime of ‘Contrition’ and provides the motivations for all that he does thereafter.

This is a pacy, exciting read with strong horror content and some gruesome scenes which are well written but not for the faint hearted reader. If you don’t like shocks and scares this is not for you. There are noir currents at play here too, John Penrose is very much a man trapped by his femme fatale and one fateful act carried out one long ago summer’s day, which changed his life and from which he cannot get out from under. The guy just never catches a break. You’re hoping he will turn things around, but just like for Elisha Cook, Jnr in all those noir B movies of the 1940’s, you know deep down, it’s not going to happen.

Contrition is for sale at Amazon.

I have read all of F.G. Cottam’s book – so I am a fan of his dark horror with its accompanying chills and creepy settings ranging from a haunted house to a haunted boat. His trilogy, The Colony, is in my opinion a peak piece of writing for Cottam and when I read the first Colony novel I could almost believe it was a true story with a bit of faction thrown in – it was grippingly realistic and set on an isolated island. I think claustrophobic settings might be part of the Cottam charm; when the walls close in you know there’s nowhere to go..
This latest novel from him is, I felt, rather different in scope, tone and even style. In The Auguries the whole of London is showing signs of entering the End Times :- statues weep blood, a poisonous fog descends, a plane falls from the sky, the city floods and the infrastructure breaks down with bloated bodies floating in the streets and the accompanying looting (only Crouch End remains barely touched- there is a reason for that). However of these staggeringly devastating events are somewhat skimmed over as though they are a list to get through, but then the entire novel is a compact 208 pages, and Cottam has a lot to fit in and he does set a terrific galloping pace. So on the plus side this story is speedily told, fun, action packed and cracks along. You could read it in one or two sittings.
However the choice of a teenager, Dawn Jackson, (harbinger of a New Dawn perhaps?)as the main antagonist who holds the ‘Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom’ (inherited from her looter great grandfather) doesn’t work for me. She may/may not be autistic (a comment which is repeated to lesser effect each time throughout the book) but as she ignites the ancient spells to gain her own desires – she seems more of a psychopath than anything else and a not very believable one at that. Perhaps it’s an attempt to attract the Y.A. horror market?
The creepy scenes in her basement where Dawn imprisons what was once her rather nice brother, Peter, one of the most likeable characters, work very well indeed. They are miniature gems of Cottam writing at his best and her weird reanimated grandfather sent chills through me; but the good guy adults – a rather two dimensional female Professor and her academic male colleague (with military training which comes in handy) chase around Europe as though in a speeded up caper movie, (if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium) following the clues to the sixteenth century Almanac and its origins and creators. There is much jumping back in time and changes of points of view. The sixteenth century magical almanac chapters are interesting enough but there is too much detail.
This leaping around is somewhat disjointing and there is a lot of it for a 200 page book; so there is not much chance to settle into one point of view or time period.
I would say this is for Cottam die hards and if you knew to his oeuvre, start with an earlier one.

The Auguries can be found on Amazon:

https://amzn.to/2HJeJxE

In Ambrose Stolliker’s novella, ‘Old Hollow’, we are deep in the dying days of the American Civil War, (Spring 1865), in Virginia, in the company of a small Union scouting party comprising- our haunted, tortured hero Capt. Ben Lawson, his trusty, loyal, rough neck Sgt Jordy Lightfoot and the plot’s catalyst, the injured young Corporal Emil Boyd- whose plight takes Lawson to the town of Old Hollow where the real trouble begins.

The men’s characters and histories are well evoked with salty dialogue and references to the terrible battles they’ve fought in. If you are a history fan with an interest in the Civil War, then this novella will provide an added dimension to your reading. However, it is not necessary, for a reader can enjoy it as a horror, supernatural tale of dark forces at work.

The tension builds slowly, with the soldiers’ initial reservations about the intactness of the town of Old Hollow, despite a war raging close by and a disturbing encounter with a mother and teenage daughter, the violent Tessa, which warns us that all is not well in this home. Why is the Doctor so nervous? Who is the Preacher who controls the town with a will of iron? Or does he have help from other darker forces? The answers lie in the massive, gnarly tree with the dark hole at its centre from which erupts – abominations.

There is a price to be paid, and sacrifices to be made, not everyone who arrived in Old Hollow is leaving alive.

This is a fast, entertaining, creepy read, rich in detail, which resonates with the old legends of hidden towns which survived by luring in travelers to their deaths.

My only caveat is I would have liked more development of the characters, the plot and the history of the tree. A longer novella perhaps? This tale has the legs for it.

You can buy Old Hollow on Amazon!