Fourbodings

A collection of four brand new novellas of terror by British superstars Simon Clark, Tim Lebbon, Terry Lamsley, and Mark Morris."Langthwaite Road" by Simon ClarkA blacktop notorious for fatalities, runs out to Langthwaite, an ancient market town long ago inundated by ocean and now lying on the seabed. Leo Carter presides over the road and during the hours of darkness he watches things infinitely stranger than vehicles pass along its blood-soaked surface."So Long Gerry" by Terry LamsleyIt was the flat of his dreams, or so it seemed, but when he realized the place had not been properly vacated, he began to have second thoughts. And his neighbours were giving him trouble. The rabidly dysfunctional family across the landing were bad enough but the people downstairs were worse. Much worse. Then an old friend came to look the place over, and they discovered the dead girls."In The Garden, Where Belladonna Grows" by Tim LebbonA dark nightmare of solitude and rejection, pride and guilt, love found and lost. An apocalyptic vision from one woman's damaged mind, this allegorical tale is for anyone who has ever felt alone."Stumps" by Mark MorrisThe beautiful old house in the country offered a fresh start for Colin and Bridget Morgan, and their two children. But what are the strange wooden structures protruding from the garden soil, smooth and polished, like the tips of giant fingers? Why does Colin become so afraid of them? And what dark secret is concealed in the nearby woods? Sometimes the past has a nasty habit of catching up with you...

From Publishers Weekly

In his introduction to this quartet of new novellas by some of the U.K.'s best practicing horror writers, Crowther (The Longest Single Note) extols the importance of "subtlety and imagination" in the crafting of memorable tales of the macabre. The four stories here are low-key in their telling, but not all are the best examples of how an oblique approach can produce effective horror. In Terry Lamsley's eerie and sometimes darkly amusing "So Long Gerry," a student rents a flat that still seems to be occupied by its previous tenant and where a menacing alternate reality may be trying to assert itself. Mark Morris's "Stumps" suggests a malignant influence infesting the grounds of a family's newly purchased home through creepy, half-glimpsed twitchings of animated undergrowth. Where these two stories succeed in showing their bizarre events adding up incrementally to a horror that's greater than they show, Simon Clark's "Langthwaite Road" does not: the reader never knows why the stretch of roadway it explores hungrily absorbs unsuspecting travelers, or how its hero hopes to exorcise the horror by playing his guitar. Likewise Tim Lebbon's "In the Valley Where the Belladonna Grows" develops as a cryptic fable whose horrors never directly engage the reader's emotions. Notwithstanding their shortcomings, all these tales provide moments of lingering unease. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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