The final story in Terror Tales of the Scottish Lowlands takes us to St Andrews and its environs - and also the Antarctic. It's a fine example of a period piece, drawing on the long and noble tradition of polar horror, where the killer cold and weird light conspire to remove characters from anything resembling normality. Lovecraft handled it well, of course, as did Conan Doye, and Mary Shelley's anti-hero set off into polar realms to pursue his hapless creation. Then of course there is 'The Waste Land', which I think the title refers to, in which Eliot draws on the idea of an additional presence that haunted Shackleton and two of his comrades. Some have interpreted this fourth presence as a guardian angel...
S.A. Rennie's story begins with the funeral of a celebrated - and notorious - explorer, whose body is interred beneath a Scottish chapel. The brother of the deceased returns to the family home where his sister welcomes him and shares some disturbing information. Suffice to say that their dead brother left behind conventional scientific notions in favour of disturbing, mystical notions about the hollow earth and stranger things. This is a nice nod to Poe - both 'MS Found in a Bottle' with its 'hole at the pole' and the incomplete saga of Arthur Gordon Pym. The latter ends with a vast, white figure looming out of a blizzard.
As more troubling information is revealed, it becomes clear that the arrogant, hubristic explorer sought out and found something powerful and dangerous in the Antarctic. What's more, he seems to have somehow brought it back. Intense cold manifests itself in and around the family home, and the climax of the tale is a tour de force of old-school weirdness, just explicit enough to work on several levels. Editor Paul Finch picked the right story to end the volume, one that lingers in the mind with its vistas of snow-bound wastes and monstrous presences.
And that brings to an end my running review of this excellent paperback. Get over to Telos books - link above- and buy a copy! Not only will you get hours of reading pleasure from the fiction, Paul Finch has also provided excellent capsule accounts of Scottish folk tales and true-life horror as 'palate cleansers' between each story.
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