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THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Gary Fry

A short story that appeared this year in NIGHTMARE ABBEY #3, available HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE.

***

“If that had been a gassy giggle, it surely couldn’t have emerged from anything that resembled a mouth.”

A horror story that might have got away from me, but I was somehow destined to return to my book-reviewing roots paradoxically to find myself reading this story (most of my previous reviews of this author are inexplicably rooted in my reading past and are linked from HERE), and this one is genuinely suspenseful, honestly and plainly horrific, with an evocative sense of place, in many ways unashamedly and gruefully what-it-is, perhaps echoing in some way my own journey from a grey financial humdrum job and bringing up a family in the 1970s and 1980s also somehow bringing me later to writing horror stories… but this adept tale is, of course, not about me nor my erstwhile situation; it is about someone quite different, but it is a sort of parallel, as the character diverts from a boring business meeting near Bradford (where I had a few business meetings myself!) and he eventually finds, in the area, the township where he was once a gauche youth in the first clumsy attempts of dating girls, and the place where one particularly coquettish girl used to live with her father, her house now derelict and haunted by old childhood games, and much more that comes through some telling slit in time  and place that we both fear and love. He sort of dared it to happen, although he was not the sort who could really dare anything.

As I, the reviewer, have, unashamedly in my own way, dared dilly-dally with an Al again…

ESSIC TH GH T TIL LIVSHRE

 

ESSIC  TH  GH  T  TIL  LIV S H RE

PLEASE LET GO by Johnny Mains

A new story being published in December 2023 in a re-issued ‘Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types’.

A REVIEW OF IT AS PART OF MY ‘DESSEMINATION’ PROJECT HERE:-

“…that Aickman, man, he is zipped up way too tightly.”

A story billed as the best story ever written, as gifted this morning to someone older by someone younger, yet the story itself is about the very vice versa or inversion of such an act. This being an as yet secret unread story by a man much younger than the ailing man like me to whom he has given it to review, a story about Robert Aickman and his death, written by a fan herein becoming an arms length confidant of the great writer during his period of  dying, with cameo parts by people who knew Aickman, and involving sickly spurts of blood that never quite erupt in the real church of his fiction, except perhaps in the secret unknown Aickman story that is somehow bequeathed to the younger man using the same title as this alternating-current fiction from the Mains man. 

Aches and pains, the growing pangs of death’s remains.

But spurts of blood can at least be inferred from the pages of PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL, from which pages are also found these words: “…fiction though it be, could hardly with sense have been written at all.”

My previous reviews of Johnny Mains:  HERE