Mark Beech (editor)
Egaeus Press
Is there a theme in supernatural fiction more prone to cliché and cozy familiarity than the haunted house story?
With
this mammoth new anthology, Egaeus Press aims to reclaim that supremely
primal tradition, not only from glossy movies, cartoons and
television-era ghost hunters, but also from the Victorians, and the
great, academic spook story authors of the 20th Century who, by their
nature, sought to calibrate, anthropomorphise and provide justification
for acts by forces which might hitherto have been considered beyond the
scope of human comprehension.
Crooked Houses takes its cue from
this earlier age. Though many of the stories presented are set in the
modern world, the forces which pervade are primeval, unquantifiable; the
stuff of folk-tales, family curses and collective nightmares.
These houses have very deep roots. These houses have teeth.
The book comprises 17 previously unpublished stories.
Over the past few years I've been occasionally dipping into Egaeus Press' publications and each has been a real treat and this anthology of haunted house tales has proved to be no exception. What we get is a nicely eclectic array of takes on the concept from the Jamesian to the pulpy to the elegantly literary.
The opening tale by Rebecca Kuder is a very Richard Brautigan-esque story of a house burning told in remembrance by a father left to raise his feral son which I liked a lot but it did leave me craving to know more about the son. The Brautigan echoes continue with Richard Gavin's story about a mother keeping a preternaturally organised and tidy house with the aid of whatever is in the old cabin. I'm not entirely sure I got what Gavin was doing here but it made for an enjoyably strange read.
Colin Insole's 'The Shepherd's House' is a story of mysterious deaths that haunt, and have always haunted, a small town. It's got an intriguing premise and despite being one of the longest in the book I certainly wouldn't have complained if it had been longer.
The next two kind of lost me a bit as Helen Grant's 'The West Window takes a story of a young man saying goodbye to his family's ancestral home and allows it to gallop off into unnecessary strangeness long after it should have drawn to a close whilst Steve Duffy's 'The Psychomanteum' felt like it was written with a southern gothic tick sheet. Neither were terrible by any means but they failed to grab me.
Reggie Oliver's 'The Crumblies' where a family takes possession of the home that had been the inspiration for a series of children's books shares a similar premise to Kim Newman's novel 'An English Ghost Story' and makes for an intriguing story. It's written with Oliver's customary finesse but with its dangling plot threads and hidden ending it does read a bit like a synopsis of a much longer story.
There are echoes of 'Hellraiser' in David Surface's thoroughly creepy 'The Devil Will Be At Your Door' as the mystery of a house where two children, who don't seem to have ever existed, have disappeared draws in fresh victims before the book loses me again with the next two stories which both feel entirely over-written. John Gale's 'The House of the Mere' which seems to be the story of a thesaurus who moves to the country to escape a naiad whilst Albert Power's 'Fairest of the All' is an icky blend of 'Lolita' and 'Dorian Gray'.
We're back on track with Lynda E. Rucker's 'Miasmata', a fun little tale of a mysterious door that feels like it would have made for a fine 80s horror novel and it features a thinly disguised cameo for Brian Showers of Swan River Press.
I'm always very pleased to read a new Mark Valentine story and 'The Readers of the Sand' is a delicately enigmatic tale of a meeting between four people with an affinity for the stuff in question. Carly Holmes tells a nicely creepy story of loss hidden from prying eyes and expressed in secret in the gracefully poignant 'Doll's House' whilst James Doig's 'At Lothesley, Montgomeryshire, 1910' is an entertaining slice of pastoral gothic horror very much in the vein of M.R. James.
Rebecca Lloyd is another that seems to be channelling 1980s horror with 'In Cromer Road' bringing back all manner of Amityville memories in her story of a house plagued by ghostly winds. Katherine Hayes' ' House of Sand' is an oddly hallucinogenic tale of a house party slowly dwindling away to nothing and the house along with it whilst for Jane Jakeman the modest terraced house lies at the centre of the entire 'Mythology' of a nation before the book ends with Timothy Granville's 'The Piner House' where a building exerts a narcotic influence on it's tenants and is a fabulously dreamlike way to close the book.
As I've said before in other reviews and will no doubt say again anthologies are a notoriously tricky prospect to review. What I enjoyed will not necessarily transfer to another reader but when a collection is as strong as this then it does make life a lot easier. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and whilst I know it's out of print now having sold out almost immediately there is a possibility of another run in January 2021 for which I would heartily recommend contacting the publisher to let them know you're interested.
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