'You Have Reached Your Destination'

The final story in Last Stop Wellsbourne is, I believe, a heartfelt elegy by Tom Johnstone for a writer who is much-missed, who was taken too soon. It is a fitting end to a book that is in many ways a lament for goodness and decency in our society, a collection of political horror that succeeds where many lesser writers would have fallen.

Lauren is a writer attending a convention, where she misses the recently-deceased writer Daniel Way. I assumed that Daniel Way represents Joel Lane, especially after it emerges that Lauren and Martin were going edit an anti-fascist anthology together. At the convention Lauren meets an old man selling Way's book collection, and finds he will have to take most of them back again by public transport. She offers to load them into her car and drive them back. Whereupon her adventure begins.

The books, it turns out, have a life of their own. The boxes move about in the back of her car. They seem to be urging her on, to a particular location. It is always tricky to pay tribute to an author, but here I think Johnstone manages it, evoking Joel Lane's work with this subtly weird tale set in a suitably grotty England.

The boxes continue their thumping, muffled but insistent. That’s easier to cope with. It’s also more in  keeping with their contents. Daniel Way obviously preferred quiet horror to the noisier, more attention-grabbing sort. She wonders if it’s him that’s speaking through this strange medium, or maybe the countless authors living and dead printed on the pages inside his collection. 

I was really rooting for Lauren, hoping she would find happiness with the nice Gabrielle she met briefly at the convention. But, this being Wellsbourne in Little England, happy endings are off the menu. Despite high hopes and good intentions, things do not go well.

And so ends an ambitious and complex collection, one that aspires to offer a 'state of England' snapshot of a nation's pathology via the horror genre, and largely succeeds. Tom Johnstone has quietly risen through the ranks to become a first-rate craftsman of the short story.  I recommend this book to those who like their fiction strong, well-written, uncompromising in its moral outlook.