Where They Lived
"...the pillars of unbuilt walls."
Another holiday story in the tradition of Campbell holiday stories. Here it is exotic Turkey, in pre-digital camera days, where a married couple are healing their aging marriage but meet another couple from England who are more than just a little obnoxiously oppressive and comfort-zone invasive. In fact there are more walls between these fellow countryfolk than perhaps between them and Turkey (that is now not so exotic and tantamount in the European Union). The lengths that are then gone to so as to partition the two sets of English couples are of what I am beginning to call by a special brand of Campbellian grotesque absurdism. The wide world is not an oyster, but a metaphorical terraced street. Gubless them all. One of them even makes up his own nonsense foreign language as a sort of filter-baffle. But the result is the same in any language.
"'If there's nothing we can do there's nothing we can do,' she said, and turned towards the wall." (28 July 09)

Root Cause
"...punching the books, as they ran, until the shelves looked gap-toothed."
A new Library Policeman story. Well, not exactly, but it features a probationary librarian in a library amid an urban deprivation and a pub that loses the letters of its name day by day. Responsibility and paranoia (perhaps watchwords for this book) play their part, as stalked by a mythic hubris. Life needs to be faced. But things are not didactic here. The only way to do good from fiction is to try not to do good from it. Let the characters stack naturally however vulnerable they are. Here we have books on shelves like terraced streets, plus real terraced streets outside now boarded up .... followed closely by the next cumulative leimotif: tower blocks (no doubt with lifts). (28 July 09 - 2 hours later)

Looking Out
"On his last visit the landlord had scurried through the house, not even waiting for Nairn to catch up..."
An essay in paranoia, with a sneered-at old man reminscent of 'The Sneering' scenario itself. Once the home with his wife, now falling apart, developing faces (imaginary or not) 'looking out' from windows and from dark corners .... a man hounded by the world at large and by the landlord in particular - or so he thinks. The house is a sort of Heath Robinson metaphor for the internet, as its website corrodes around the user with care-worn firewalls (earlier provided by anti-virus packages) themselves seeping darkly into each other...as one day surely they must.
I dare not interpret this story beyond that for fear of repercussions. Some may know what I mean. In fact the 'internet' conceit is just a cover-story for something else I really wanted to say about 'Looking Out' and the Jungian interconnectibility of everything through time and space. But that would be one fiction too far. One's got to look out for oneself. (28 July 09 - another hour later)  

The Dead Must Die
"As I make my way downhill through the blackened furtive terraces the tethered flames jerk above the soiled roofs, and I see I am descending into Hell."
There is a lift at the beginning of this story, and perhaps the aforementioned 'tower block' eventually becomes a terraced street again but not of houses proper but of terraced tomb-houses. But how thick are the walls?
This is a powerful story, cast in a Biblical language and style of hectoring, telling of the pious I-protagonist surnamed 'Priest' who fights against the Undead and their takeover of the world, by organ-transplant manipulation ... a parable as a Boschian / Ligottian vision. Family loyalties. Fire and Redemption. But, essentially, responsibility and paranoia, again. We wonder whom we, the readers, are actually cheering on. The Iconoclastic or the Sanctimonious? But it's somehow too grim to cheer at all. No grin in the dark here.
"But the Adversary has sent his minions to beset me." (28 July 09 - another hour later)

A Side of the Sea
"I turn away with the grin stuck to my face..."
Being a veteran of coach holidays, this tickled me plain, purl and crossstitch.
One has to have a sense of humour if one reads books that have something like 'The Dead Must Die' living next door to this story. And I hope people who read this review and its serendipities have a sense of humour, too.
This, like its next door neighbour, has piety and prayers.
A coach community is like a Coronation Street or Big Brother of the soul. Except DON'T get on the wrong coach.
I've been as far as Budapest in a coach.
I've not yet met the neighbour on the other side (of the sea?). A next door neighbour appropriately called 'Missed Connection'... (28 July 09 - another 2 hours later)

Missed Connections
"An unlit bus probably. It had seemed to pace the train..."
I rarely miss connections! From the coach journey in the previous story to a train journey in this one (these travelling street-communities of short-term and long-term-neighbours) ... the dark serendipities grow stronger and stronger. Here, a wondrous mass of images: trains are where you're not told anything about delays as it waits forever on the track inexplicably; not being able to 'grow' friendships and antipathies as one can on a coach but, especially on a train, one does sometimes have to endure chatterboxes; the fleeting fear of colliding side-on with a train travelling next door; the incessant cougher from "McGonagall" (and, oh yes, I forgot the relentless word-itches from 'McGonagall' that slid into 'A Side of The Sea')...
I'm sure there is a big clue in this story to unlock the rest of the book: a book by Robbe-Grillet (not the usual sort of book to take on a journey). I once remember reading a French anti-novel in the Sixties that spent chapter after chapter describing rain in Manchester. This train journey, although described in this relatively short story (almost a vignette or prose poem), is remarkably relentless, nigh endless.
Reading this book is like 'Going Under' for real, each story with its own aerial, its own mobile communication to other readers along the way.... (28 July 09 - another 90 minutes later)

The Change
This story fulfils the book's title: 'Ghosts and Grisly Things', while putting a window in one of our walls and a bus-stop close outside it where queues form. The window makes the wall psychologically less secure, but many walls have real windows or at least ghostly fenestration...
A companion piece, somewhat, to 'Looking Out' (and to 'The Sneering' and 'Through the Walls' with indeed another car crash and odd street-lighting!). It is an effective essay on the spiritual condition of Horror Writer, in this case a semi-professional (who also works for the Inland Revenue). But he's not writing of a blood-sucker, but a werewolf.
Identities dim and brighten, and even grins are rehearsed. Treatment of self and nemonymity. This is the first time in the book that walls grow vulnerable, as two-way filters, with only shapeless 'baffles' as meagre safeguard...
This story and its title give another leitmotif: transformation. Aickmannerisms for the modern reading eye - or should I say the future modern eye, if this story turns out to have morphed into existence when the influence (as perceived) was still ringing changes.
'Passage to India' and 'Picnic at Hanging-Rock'...
"For a moment he was helpless with panic, then he realised that the glass protected him." (29 July 09)

Welcomeland
"...the net curtains of the gardenless terraces were grey as old cobwebs..."
A near perfect Proustian Nocturne. A sheer dark delght. Only 'near' perfect, as, for me, it has suspect moments of rare didacticism.
The terraced street earlier in this book did become tantamount to grave-houses; now, in that light, it has meaningfully developed to house sideshows of a fairground in a canal-environed area formed from the buildings of the protagonist's childhod home town. It is a poetic trip, a holiday in 'Last Year in Marienbad', 'The Masque of the Red Death', 'The Carnival of Souls'.... Childhood that comes back to bite you as the same dog. The same exorcism in any language. The same root cause. (29 July 09 - 45 minutes later)

See How They Run
"'The Swine,' the tobacconist whispered fiercely, glaring at Fishwick."
Fishwick is in the dock for brutal serial murders and the story's protagonist, Foulsham, is on the jury. Windows look at each other over the city. There is some sort of epidemic - as if madness is catching, madness and murder. And limps. Phone-ins and houses without phones. This is the culmination of the book's gestalt (and I sense by instinct that the long story (the book's final one) that follows 'See How They Run' is a yet unfathomed coda (or an 'Alternative'?), i.e. not structural to the totemic gestalt - we shall see). Here, though, the walled enclosures surely come home to roost. A city of streets, not a single one of which can be chosen, as they say.
"Foulsham switched off the radio and imagined the city riddled with cells in which people lay or paced, listening to the babble of their own caged obsessions." (29 July 09 - another 2 hours later.)

Ra*e
"'Have they found the swine yet?'"
The title has lost a letter, like that pub in 'Root Cause'. Makes it like an Egyptian God or a manufactured foreign language that some take on holiday as a defence mechanism.
Here we have an avenue of twinned houses near a golf course. Not a terraced street. I was right: it is the coda, not the code, of the book. The Twin Peaks-type victim's mother could have prevented a lot of trouble or even predicted the story's ending if she had read 'Through the Walls' first. But I am being flippant about a clever, but uncharacteristic, story in a loose-limbed popular crisp language.
This is not a back story, not a side story, this is a free bonus track.

'Ghosts and Grisly Things', I think I have shown, is a g*stalt. I also hope I've shown, by strength of the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, how this McGonagall-in-the head type of review can entice new readers to it and renew it for old readers. I've not broken down its walls but perhaps taken the old wallpaper off them. Each reader has his or her own ownership of the book they read. The author, equally.
It's an honestly great book that allows one to do that to it. It is a great book, full stop.
It has enjoyable separate stories if taken one by one. But if you as a reader also want to place them on your own personal real-time potter's wheel, what's the betting your g*st*lt would be different from mine? And from the author's? Thus 'The Intentional Fallacy' hath it. (29 July 09 - another 2 hours later)

END