Supernatural Tales

See below for a mention of the original story by George Toudouze in the new magazine Nightmare Abbey .

A new horror magazine? Surely not. But yes, here it is! And what a humdinger it is. Looking very like an old-style pulp with a nicely garish cover, but much bigger. This is a big premier issue, and offers an impressive array of fiction plus feature items.  In his introduction, editor Tom English discusses his love of the genre and his quest for a suitable title. Titles that are both pithy and original are, as any writer knows, not easy to come by. He finally settled on one used by Thomas Love Peacock for his parody of the Gothic genre. (And by your humble reviewer in a very minor work.) English also stresses that he wants to avoid 'gross out' horror in favour of more subtle fare, which is fine by me. Horror does not have to be bloody.  The cover is by the great Virgil Finlay, with interior art by Allen Koszowski. I think the latter's work lives up to the great tradition of horror illustration, offering both Gothic atmosphere and sly wit. There are two excellent non-fiction ...

 As I write, a gang of chancers, bigots, and giftless clowns known collectively as the British government is endangering peace in Northern Ireland. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that I've come to the end of this anthology of strange stories from 'Norn Iron'. Certainly the last story in the book does not, on the fact of it, treat of Troubles, sectarians, the strange evolution of nations. Instead, its subject is the sea and the shore, a theme that never goes out of style for islanders, be they British or Irish.  A man takes his child to the beach to see stranded whales in a narrative that is truly dream-like. There is more than a hint of magic realism in Emma Devlin's tale. (There's more about Devlin here .) But at its heart is a terrorist bombing and the way the King of the title found the sound of the sea soothing, a way of dealing with the noises in his head by hearing the eternal noise of great waters.  There are beautiful passages, here, but the central ima...

  The picture above is from a book of photographs of a British army training area in Germany. Red Land, Blue Land refers to the standard NATO colours given to friendly and enemy units. In this case, however, the squaddies were sent into the zone to train them for operations in the UK during the Troubles. The story concerns a woman in the Northern Irish town of Redlands who is haunted by the barking of a phantom dog. The mental stress this causes her gradually accumulates, alongside her quest for the truth about the mysterious creature. Eventually, her quest leads her to the book, with its grotesque images of civilians and terrorists posed around a replica of her neighborhood. Dummies stand at the bar inside the nameless pub, a hooded rifleman crouches behind a bin. And a dog strains at its leash, barking endlessly.  There is more than a hint of what might be termed unsympathetic magic, here. There's a sense that a fake community created to simulate a low-intensity war zone has...