CHASM by Stephen Laws

When I was a kid, I always remember the standard grown-up response to moaning about the weather was to point out that yes, it might be drizzling again, but on the other hand the UK didn't get hurricanes, tornados or earthquakes, so a bit of rain isn't so bad. And as well meaning as this line of reasoning was, it did have a somewhat difference effect - namely to make me terrified of the aforementioned hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. Such is the impish nature of childhood imagination - if you're told "don't worry, that doesn't happen here", it instantly starts whispering "ah yes, but what if it did...".

And I wonder if Stephen Laws had a similar experience, for in Chasm, his tenth novel, he takes us to  Edmonville, a typical sleepy little English town, and then promptly hits it with the earthquake of your nightmares. Entire buildings are leveled, the ground literally splits apart, swallowing up whole streets, and so much dust is thrown up, the sun is blotted out. Out of this wreckage a handful of survivors band together and attempt to survive while they wait for the outside world to send aid to the stricken town.

Now for many writers, this opening scenario would be enough to plot out the entire novel. And indeed, tales of ordinary folk surviving after some society-ending cataclysm have been a staple of British fantastic fiction since John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. And indeed, in the early stages of the novel, as we meet the motley crew of characters who will band together to survive this epic disaster, it appears that is exactly the kind of tale Chasm is going to deliver. And indeed in the hands of other authors, this scenario would be enough for a novel in itself. However the wiley Mr Laws has some other tricks up his sleeve, and soon you will discover that the mega-quake that has leveled Edmonville is the stuff of nightmares in more ways than one.

Stephen Laws burst onto the horror scene back in 1985 with his debut novel Ghost Train, and followed it up with a string of well-received books that were hits with readers and critics alike. He proved time and time again to have a real flair for spinning out suspenseful yarns centred on original horror concepts, spurning the standard-issue malevolent ghosts, psychopathic killers and jaded vampires, and creating instead monstrous and macabre menaces that were both original and imaginative. And in Chasm Laws brought us perhaps his biggest and baddest creation yet - for this is no mere disaster tale, this is a conjuration of a truly epic evil. And the further you get in to this novel, the more you appreciate its scope and vision. Indeed when it was originally published back in 1998, Chasm was nominated for a British Fantasy award for Best Novel.

What's more, Chasm feels like a genuine progression too. While even in his first books, Laws always delivered interesting characters and intriguing scenarios, going through his novels you can clearly see a writer who is becoming more and more confident - not just telling bigger stories, but addressing deeper themes too. And Chasm sees him at the top of his game, effortless balancing all  the action of you want from a widescreen supernatural horror tale with small-scale, carefully crafted character developments. For a supernatural terror to be effective, we need solid characters with motivations and believable emotional lives to bring the horror home. And this is something Laws has always understood well, and hence in Chasm he never lets the scale of the horrors overshadow the more intimate moments and details of the varied cast of characters.

Laws also knows well that no matter how imaginative your monsters are, they have to operate at a human level too. When it's just people versus monsters, it's easy for storytellers to fall into goodies and baddies tropes operating in simplistic  black and white moral framework. However Laws has always been interested in the nature of evil, and how it is expressed through human actions and motivations, and itis something he has explored in many of his novels. Chasm is no exception, and hence while we do have an amazingly imaginative threat for our band of survivors to contend with, there's also more human menaces to deal with. And we are not just talking some folks going over to the Dark Side as it were, for Laws understands very well contrary to most fiction, the worst things happening don't necessarily bring out the best in us. And in Chasm human failings will prove be as big a threat as the cataclysm that befalls Edmonville.

Chasm is a massively entertaining book. There's more than enough action to keep you turning the pages, but the real joy of this novel is that Laws very adeptly throws in a new twist every time you get to a point where you think you know where the plot is going. There are some brilliantly imaginative developments that shift this novel far away from the usual post-apocalypse yarn you might be expecting, while Laws masterfully keeps the story grounded at a personal level, giving us characters we can relate to and a stake in  their shattered world. And while there is a lot of truly cinematic set pieces in the novel, in the end it is also a book about human weaknesses and has much to say on the real nature of evil.

Now sad to say, currently horror is somewhat out of favour in British publishing, and one of the casualties of this has been that Mr Laws' marvelous novels have been allowed to go out of print. But thank the dark gods for PS Publishing who are still carrying the torch of UK horror! And they have just published a new revised edition of Chasm, coming as a gorgeous signed limited hardback or a trade paperback. And if you're looking for some classic British horror, pick up a copy today!

Chasm is available as a limited edition hardback here

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MICROGORIA 62 - The Dark Masters Trilogy

This episode we take a look at a new book from Stephen Volk - the man who created Ghostwatch! In The Dark Masters Trilogy we will encounter four iconic figures from the world of the weird and the macabre. In Whitstable we meet with Peter Cushing, while in Leytonstone we have a rendezvous with a young Alfred Hitchcock. And finally at Netherwood, we will witness a strange meeting between Dennis Wheatley and notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - MICROGORIA 62 - The Dark Masters Trilogy

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THE DARK MASTERS TRILOGY by Stephen Volk

To fans of all things weird and wonderful, the name Stephen Volk will ring many notable bells. He first came to prominence with his script for the gloriously demented movie Gothic (1986), directed by the equally demented legendary director Ken Russell, which recreated the famous gathering of poets at Lake Geneva that gave birth to modern horror fiction - with Byron’s physician and companion John Polidori penning The Vampyre which spawned modern vampire literature, and Shelley’s wife Mary creating Frankenstein. Volk himself would go on to work with another horror legend William Friedkin, the man who brought The Exorcist to the screen, writing the 1990 chiller The Guardian, and brought terror to the small screen himself with the short lived but fondly remembered ITV series Afterlife, in which a pre-Walking Dead Andrew Lincoln investigated eerie cases involving a medium played by the brilliant Leslie Sharp. He would also script The Awakening (2011), a chilling big screen haunted house tale, and has published several collections of razor-sharp short fiction - Dark Corners (2006), Monsters of the Heart (2013) and The Parts We Play (2016). However if all of the above weren’t impressive enough, Volk is most famous, or should that be infamous, for creating the now legendary Halloween BBC TV special Ghostwatch in 1992, a ground-breaking drama that caused a massive uproar for basically scaring the bejesus out of millions of viewers (see my podcast on the show for more details). So then, all in all, with this impressive career, thrilling and chilling audiences in cinemas, on television and on the page, it is fair to say that Volk is truly one of the modern masters of weird fiction.

Now one of the things that has consistently made Volk’s works so compelling is his appreciation and knowledge of the history of the genre, and in recent years he has been exploring the lives and times of other icons in the field. In 2013, he published a short novella with the late lamented Spectral Press, entitled Whitstable, which took a look at the life of Peter Cushing in his later years. He followed this up in 2015 with another novella for Spectral Press, Leytonstone which delved into the childhood of Alfred Hitchcock. More recently a proposed TV project that never got off the ground inspired a a third novella along similar lines. However in this tale, entitled Netherwood, we have not one legend but two, with best-selling author Dennis Wheatley, the man who wrote a string of black magic thrillers such as The Devil Rides Out, having a curious encounter with a real-life occultist, the notorious Aleister Crowley. And now Netherwood is being published along with the two earlier novellas in one volume by the excellent PS Publishing, as The Dark Masters Trilogy.  

The book opens with Whitstable, which as many Hammer horror fans will know was Peter Cushing’s hometown. The story catches up with the famous horror star in the latter days of his career. When the tale opens Cushing has just lost the light of his life, his beloved wife Helen, and he is so stricken with grief that his own life is beginning to unravel. However like all the stories in this volume, what follows is not merely an exercise in storifying a biography. Instead Volk imagines scenarios and situations which will allow him to explore not only the lives and times of his subjects but also their characters. 

Hence in Whitstable, we find the deeply bereaved Cushing approached by a young boy who mistakenly believes that Cushing is in fact one of the famous characters he made his own, the dashing Professor Van Helsing from the Hammer Dracula movies. And indeed, while the boy may well be somewhat confused, he certainly does need a real hero in his own life at that time. And Cushing, being the true gentlemen he really was, obviously cannot help but do all in his power to help the lad. 

And although it may be a slight spoiler, I should reveal that this is not merely a story in which the real life Peter Cushing goes toe-to-toe with an actual vampire, like his fictional homage, Peter Vincent in the movie Fright Night (1985). Instead we have a far more compelling tale that will see Cushing going up against a very real world evil, but will also lead him to battling his own personal demons. Whitstable is a wonderful portrait of Cushing himself, and is packed with moments of menace and magic. But it is also profoundly moving too, a tale that is as touching as it is terrifying. And while obviously the events in Whitstable never really happened, by the end of it you will feel as if you have really met and spent some time with the legendary actor himself. 

By contrast, while our opening novella catches its iconic subject in the latter days of his career, the second part of the book sees us meeting one of the greatest movie directors of all time in his boyhood. Inspired by an earlier short story Little H (found in his collection Dark Corners), the next novella Leytonstone has us journeying to London in the early years of the 20th century, to visit Alfred Hitchcock in his childhood. The tale takes as its starting point a story that Hitch himself often told - that when very young his father took him to the local police station, where without any explanation, the little boy was locked up in the cells. This was, as Hitchcock was informed upon his release, to show him what happened to naughty boys. It was an incident that Hitch never forgot, although whether the so-called lesson had quite the desired effect is open to question. For in later life, Hitchcock delighted in manufacturing disturbing situations to spring upon folks around him, often of a somewhat cruel nature, just to see how they would react. 

Volk’s story recounts this boyhood trip to the clink through the eyes of little Alf, but the meat of the story is very much exploring the effects and aftermath it has on the future director. Once again, the story is jam-packed with all manner of details about Hitch’s early years and there are a legion of easter eggs for Hitchcock fans to spot, little allusions and echoes of famous scenes and images from his movies. But the real magic of this tale is the way in which Volk captures what it is like to be a little child, to be very much at the mercy of adults and struggling to understand the world around you and the people in it. Leytonstone is a much darker tale than Whitstable, and rightly so, for I think it is fair to say that the adult Hitchcock could be, shall we say, a somewhat difficult man to be around. However as sinister are the story gets, you never lose sympathy for the young Hitch, which is a remarkable feat considering what will unfold. 

So then after the stories of a true gentleman, and a man who was somewhat personally macabre, the final novella Netherwood rather fittingly has a good chap tangling with a man the press dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”. Although now remembered best for writing a couple of books adapted by Hammer Films, most notably The Devil Rides Out, Dennis Wheatley had served his country in the war and dominated the bestseller lists for decades with his adventures and thrillers, the most famous of which were his black magic novels. Indeed, Wheatley even created a public image of himself as being an expert on all things occult back in the day. 

Now Netherwood sees Wheatley receiving a summons from another iconic figure, indeed for many years the other name that would spring instantly to mind when someone mentioned black magic - Aleister Crowley. In earlier decades, this self-styled magician had outraged the world with his antics, very much creating the template for what we’d now call the classic rock and roll lifestyle. He travelled the world, took copious amounts of drugs, indulged in all manner of sexual excesses and sold millions of newspapers that eagerly recounted and indeed invented wild tales of his depavity. However by the 1940s, Crowley was largely forgotten, and suffering from the ravages of his excessive lifestyle, plagued by ill health, he lived out the last of his days in a somewhat eccentric boarding house in Hastings named Netherwood. 

In this tale of occult wrangling between two key figures in the history of black magic, Volk has a lot of fun with these colourful characters. To begin with there is the irony that while Wheatley has dropped out of fashion and is now a somewhat forgotten former master of horror fiction, Crowley has never been more popular, with his life and magical writings commanding a huge audience across the world. However what is more fascinating is that as the strange story of Netherwood unfolds we discover that neither man is quite the character that their public reputations suggest. To begin with, the aged Crowley, a man who dubbed himself the Great Beast 666, is appealing to the young Wheatley for aid against an evil occult menace. 

What follows is a fascinating meeting of minds. On one hand, there is as you would expect a clash of personalities, and indeed a conflict of philosophy and belief, between the conservative Wheatley and the libertine occultist. However there is also a touching mutual respect between the pair, despite their massive differences and constant trading of barbs and slights. Throughout the Dark Masters Trilogy, there is a running thread of essential ambiguity, and a recurring theme that explores the tension between having a famous public persona and the real private person inside. And these elements very much come to head in this fictional adventure between Wheatley and the Great Beast, making Netherwood a very fitting grand finale to the book. 

It is very clear that Volk has really done his homework in researching his subjects in these tales. Each story is a treasure-trove of biographical details and allusions. However as top notch as the historical elements are, the real magic comes from the way Volk gets you to step into the minds of his characters. In this book, you will not only learn about the lives and times of this quartet of iconic figures, but you will get to know them as living, breathing people. And while the stories are gripping page-turners, it’s the sense of intimacy with these men that Volk conjures that will really hook your heart. The Dark Masters Trilogy is densely packed with all manner of biographical goodies that will repay many a revisit, but I think it’s the often profoundly touching journeys we take into the private lives of these characters that will have you coming back time and time again. And hence this is a book that deserves a permanent place on the bookshelves of any lover of the weird and the wonderful.

The release date is 19th October. And this marvellous tome is being launched it at Fantasy Con in Chester. Of course, you can order the book online too, direct from PS Publishing - with the regular hardback priced at £20.00, and signed editions are available for £40.00. Grab it now, as I suspect this one is going to be a collector’s item!

The Dark Masters Trilogy can be pre-ordered here

HYPNOBOBS 140 - A New Year

It's a New Year, and Mr Jim Moon selects some highlights from  the past year. We discuss the world of the small press, review Ramsey Campbell's The Last Revelation of Gla'aki from PS Publishing, bend reality with Don Coscarelli's John Dies At the End, meet the marvelous Dr Ashens, and round off with the wonderful tribute to Peter Cushing that is the Spectral Press novella Whitstable by Stephen Volk.

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - A New Year

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