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synopsis

Dinner at an old tavern, a walk in the woods, beach vacation, an invitation to a party from a long lost friend. Sound like fun? If you are a character in a Terry Lamsley story, think twice. In this story any harmless diversion can be a catalyst for waking nightmares. Not a new concept for horror fiction, but not many writers can guide their characters so ruthlessly through the veil of normality and into terrifying mystery with the same sleight of hand as Lamsley.
       Criteria for survival includes the following: do not make friends with the new neighbors; avoid mysterious shapes seen in fields; stay away from stones with strange markings. Also, it is never a good idea to take a ferry to a strange island or pull off the road to visit a small village as the unfortunate folk of “Made Ready,” “Blade and Bone” and “Lost Boy Found” soon find out. In these stories the real and unreal, the seen and unseen are tied to the past and present, to the physical and mental. Components that will crash into and through each other, unleashing the supernatural, the bizarre and, for the unfortunate people at the center of the tales, almost always horrific outcomes. As Simon Strantzas writes in his introduction to this volume, they are “ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances.” And the fates of these ordinary people are not just determined by outside circumstances but by their own personal histories and attitudes. Sometimes they are so preoccupied by vanity and personal desire that they fail to recognize mortal danger. Sometimes they are simply naive. In fact, the fun amidst the pervading sense of dread in Lamsley’s work, is guessing which, if any, character will make it out alive. The chances for most are slim. Philanderers, snobs, the close minded, or anyone who has recently inherited anything, no matter what it is, will face peril. But so will the reckless and the overly timid. Even the mildly curious will not leave unscathed. The natural landscape is not to be trusted either and weather itself is often unfriendly: concepts placing many of these stories within the realm of folk horror. Land and sea are complicit in constructing the mental and physical mazes of fright found in “Back in the Dunes,” “The Walls” and “The Stunted House.”
       These are people not just estranged from the land, but from each other. Even as unseen phenomena conspire against them, the impetus for ancient dark magic to pierce through the screen of reality almost always begins with an inability to cope with the minor irritations of daily life. Small inconveniences develop into elaborate tableaux of horror. The awkward uneasiness of socializing or conversation at the beginning of a story (as in “Someone To Dump On” of “An Evening With Harrod”) might later come to mirror the shifting uncertainty of sanity. For Lamsley, a lack of communication between humans, from garbled phone connections to petty rudeness, comes to mirror the broken connections between this dimension and the next. And once the interdimensional connection is established, whether intentionally or not, certain doom awaits. Overwhelming horror becomes the only reliable device to awaken them from self absorption.
       But that’s not the only challenge these characters face. In their industrialized technocracy, where everything is supposed to be explainable, occult mysteries are often ignored. It is not until the spirits, monsters, or curses are already upon them that these people accept the presence of the unknown. By then it’s too late! In “Under The Crust” a man is inexplicably drawn to a garbage dump where refuse, cast off appliances, and ephemera of disposable society act as fertile breeding ground for a tunneled kingdom of garbage creatures. “Suburban Blight” breeds a disgusting, peculiar type of flower among the abandoned relics of an unused Olympic sports complex. Like a mixture of volatile chemicals, this extremely unfriendly plant flourishes when combined with the recklessness of urban development and the furtive ignorance of the city’s residents.
       Many of these tales are centered around Lamsley’s real life hometown of Buxton, England and are imbued at their core with the type of British dread commonly associated with M.R. James. Though set in the 1990s to early 2000s the past is never far behind. Medieval flashbacks creep through the narrative and at times the settings are evocative of the uncanny weirdness found in 1970s British television shows like Journey To the Unknown, Dead of Night or Children of the Stones. And yet Lamsley’s fears are universal. Anyone who's ever experienced bureaucracy in modern medical institutions will recognize the over the top biological nightmare logic found at the hospital/prison of “Sick House Hospitality,” while the unfortunate prevalence of childhood trauma haunts “Inheritance,” “The Break” and “Running In The Family.” It is as if in the midst of inhumanity among the living, a doorway to the un-human to “the other” opens, magnifying basic human fears a thousand fold.
       Yet there are passages containing dry, dark humor as well, as in “Suburban Blight” when hopelessly square protagonist Hal Hollins wonders at being “discountenanced by a mere vegetable.” And, it turns out, this world is not entirely without heroes. There is more than meets the eye to social worker, Sylvia, who is sent to check on a new client in “Volunteers” and elderly Conrad in “R.I.P.” engages a last ditch effort at rescuing a misguided friend, and maybe the whole town, from an ominous blanket of fog. Tragedy in these worlds, as in our own, is often inevitable, making the rare occasion of bravery all the more potent. Even when it involves little to no reward.
       Lamsley himself remains largely unheralded among wider audiences and his previous collections have been out of print for years, making this volume both overdue and essential. Not to be taken lightly, these tales are potent enough to put at risk a good night’s sleep. And like an ancient portal opened by one of Lamsley’s unwitting protagonists, the effects of the words resonate long after the book has been closed and the lights turned out.
             This two volume collection has a foreword by Ramsey Campbell, introduction by Simon Strantzas, and dustjacket art many interior illustrations by Ruth Sanderson. This collects all of Lamsley’s published short fiction, an essay, and other bonus pieces.