Black Static

Gary McMahon is our featured author in the Case Notes section of Black Static #14, and he'll be along shortly with one of those daft either/or interviews that I'm so fond of because they require virtually no effort on my part.

In the meantime, and to whet your appetites, I thought I'd post my review of McMahon's first collection, Dirty Prayers, copies of which are still available at Gray Friar Press (click on the link below to visit and snag a copy for your Horror Essentials book shelf). The review originally appeared in Black Static #2, back in December 2007, and as part of a feature on four young writers releasing their first short story collections (some of the references in the review may not quite make sense out of context, but you're all clever people and I'm sure you can make allowances).

Anyway, here's the review:-

With a host of short stories and two novellas to his credit, Gary McMahon has the most significant track record of any of these writers, and that's reflected in Dirty Prayers (Gary Friar Press paperback, 287pp, £7.99), which is the most substantial of these books, containing twenty five stories within its covers. Harlan Ellison is an obvious influence, with echoes of Deathbird Stories in the religious imagery that recurs throughout the book, and the various Psalms that appear as interludes between each grouping of stories. He may lack Ellison's technical dash, but there is the same feeling of anger barely held in check, of raw emotion about to explode on the page. More than any of these writers, even Boatman, McMahon writes from the gut, with each story a body blow to the reader. However fantastic, his stories are rooted in the material and emotional squalor of our everyday world, tales of the displaced and dispossessed, fuelled by rage and disgust at the simple lack of common humanity that breeds these conditions.

Opening story 'Do Not Be Alarmed' sets the tone with Brent, a man who feels the world around him is going to hell in a hand basket, this social malaise given form by the alarms that constantly disturb his nights, like the plaintive cry of some beast off in the urban jungle. When his wife inexplicably goes missing Brent abandons his life to the search for her, following the alarms wherever they lead until he learns the terrible truth of what has become of the woman he loves. It is a story without pity, in which the modern world swallows up the innocent and betrays the rest, with the constant wail of the alarms as background music in a dystopia of our own making, one that has now assumed an identity and energy of its own.

'The Bungalow People' is a sad, bitter story, with an elderly couple left alone to die by their family and society, clinging on to the hope that somebody actually cares, but of course all in vain, McMahon's words an indictment of a world which allows such indifference. 'The Dead Kid' has a man haunted by a corpse, that of a boy murdered by his former partner, who has now moved on to somebody else, as if it is their love which is left corpselike on the front lawn, the outward manifestation of feelings turned sour, of all the things lost to time and circumstance. A calculating and disrespectful insurance salesman is lured to a rundown tower block in 'Estate of the Nation' where he meets a pleasingly grotesque end in a tale of modern day witchcraft. 'The Man in the Chimney' is a figment of the imagination of a lonely woman who begins to obsess about him and what he may be doing while she is out of the house, this obsession coming to both dominate her life and give it meaning. McMahon's assured prose and measured plotting elevate the story above the absurdity inherent in this situation to give us something that is both sinister and, in its coming full circle ending, strangely comforting.

Abusive fathers, cheating husbands and lovers are characters who recur over and over again in McMahon's fiction, as if he is trying to grapple with masculine roles in the noughties against a backdrop of outmoded machismo. Clay, the protagonist of 'A Grown Woman', is unable to control his temper and as a result all of his past relationships have ended badly. He is finally brought to heel by an archetypal female who cannot be tamed, his masculinity completely undermined, but also with the sense that his suffering is deserved, something he has brought on himself by refusing to confront his own failings. In another story the hero becomes 'Incommunicado', bereft of his ability to communicate with other people, who only hear swearing and obscenity from his lips. He is a man disenfranchised from his own life through being inarticulate, the concept a powerful metaphor for our inability to converse meaningfully with each other. In 'My Name Is' a young girl is picked up by men in cars, who take her home and she forces them to admit that they abused her as a child. Though none of them are the actual offender they all find catharsis by admitting their crimes, as if culpability is a by product of the male condition, with guilt an inevitable side effect.

'Smother', is a ghost story, the tale of a malignant spirit, but the heart of the story lies in McMahon's depiction of a couple who have lost a child to cot death and undergone the ordeal of being suspected of his murder, their pain almost unbearable, a black gaping hole at the centre of their existence. In 'New Science' a man has 'pity' sex with an old girlfriend dying of an incurable disease, each detail of their encounter heartrendingly plausible, from the disdainful waiter at the restaurant where they meet to the tenderness of their coupling, so that the reader is moved by the tragedy and unfairness of the situation, with the supernatural coda to the story, as with 'Smother', almost an afterthought.

The protagonist of 'Borrowed Times' is a man who discovers that he is simply a ghost in his own life, incapable of affecting anything, only having borrowed all the things he thought constituted his happiness, with McMahon's use of the second person reinforcing the sense of ineffectuality, that the protagonist is only a spectator, incapable of affecting events. There's a similar feel to 'My Burglar', the story of a professional thief who believes that by breaking into people's homes he somehow manages to experience their lives, but when he is interrupted in his work feels that he himself has been robbed. 'Comeback' opens with the return of wayward Sasha and her reception by her brother, but as the story progresses it is revealed that she is still carrying the baby she had aborted many years ago, and more family secrets are laid bare in a powerful tale of guilt echoing down through the years.

'Pray Dirty', which opens the third section of this book, is the story most reminiscent of Ellison's Deathbird Stories and one of the finest in the collection. The tenants of a rundown housing estate summon a god to settle scores with their grasping landlord, the story told from the viewpoint of an outsider and the details externalised more than in most of the other stories, but with a concern for the downtrodden at its core, along with the realisation that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. In the short 'To Invocate His Aid' a grief stricken father employs a black magician to raise the spirit of his dead daughter with mixed results, the action as gruesome as the end result is gratifying. 'Like A Stone', the tale of a man returning to the town of his childhood and confronting the sins of his past, I praised highly on its original appearance in the anthology Bernie Herrmann's Manic Sextet. It's a story that tackles timeless themes of guilt and loss, one of the most keenly felt and moving pieces in the book.

In 'Raise Your Hands' the entire world seems to turn against a man, inflicting violence on him for no reason, though there is the suggestion that actually this is what he desires, payback for some past, never specified transgression. 'Day of the Mask' has a young boy taking steps to stop the constant arguing between his parents, forcing them to wear a mysterious mask that he finds, one that alters their personalities, McMahon bringing the child's pain and quiet desperation to the page with skill, and seeding the plot with outré elements. Finally in 'Face the Strange', a story inspired by the work of Arthur Machen, a man haunted by the memory of his girlfriend returns to the place where she died and is granted a vision of nature that helps him come to terms with his loss. It is a beautifully written and evocative story, the fitting end for a very strong collection that provides yet more proof, if needed, that the short story is in capable hands.