In his introduction to this quartet of new novellas by some of the U.K.'s best practicing horror writers, Crowther (The Longest Single Note
) extols the importance of "subtlety and imagination" in the crafting of memorable tales of the macabre. The four stories here are low-key in their telling, but not all are the best examples of how an oblique approach can produce effective horror. In Terry Lamsley's eerie and sometimes darkly amusing "So Long Gerry," a student rents a flat that still seems to be occupied by its previous tenant and where a menacing alternate reality may be trying to assert itself. Mark Morris's "Stumps" suggests a malignant influence infesting the grounds of a family's newly purchased home through creepy, half-glimpsed twitchings of animated undergrowth. Where these two stories succeed in showing their bizarre events adding up incrementally to a horror that's greater than they show, Simon Clark's "Langthwaite Road" does not: the reader never knows why the stretch of roadway it explores hungrily absorbs unsuspecting travelers, or how its hero hopes to exorcise the horror by playing his guitar. Likewise Tim Lebbon's "In the Valley Where the Belladonna Grows" develops as a cryptic fable whose horrors never directly engage the reader's emotions. Notwithstanding their shortcomings, all these tales provide moments of lingering unease. (Jan.)
