BOOK REVIEW: Secret Invasion: Tales of Eldritch Horror from the West Country

- By Allan Lear

Let’s be up front with each other, shall we? I’ll lay my cards out on the table right at the beginning, and then you can decide for yourself whether it’s worth reading the rest of the review or whether you should just go away and buy this book, as per the instructions I will eventually be giving you anyway.

Disclosure: firstly, I was put on to the existence of this book by a friend of mine who authored one of the tales herein. I will let you know who it is when it becomes relevant so that, if you feel contrary, you can disregard my capsule review of his story as mere bum-snoggery.

Secondly, this volume of short stories in the tradition of the great HP Lovecraft is being sold as a charitable concern to raise profits for MIND, so I was already predisposed to recommending it as support for a worthy cause; rest assured, however, that my tolerance can only be swayed so far by even the best of intentions, and that if this book had been an irretrievable puddle of old hippo snot then I would recommend that you make a donation instead.

Thirdly, if you have any sense of humour at all, you might already have realised that I loved the irony of a book of Cthulhu Mythos stories being written to raise money for a mental health charity. What next? An Irvine Welsh retrospective written by authors who actually live in Scotland?

Secret Invasion comprises fourteen short stories and a miniature graphic novel, as well as the text of an interview with Ramsey Campbell who, on a Liverpool-based horror site, must surely need no introduction to anyone. But here it is: he’s a horror author, he’s won more literary awards than any other living horror author, and he’s from Merseyside, so fuck off, we win. He is also one of Lovecraft’s many correspondents – HPL was famously prolific as a letter-writer and his fully-collected correspondence would no doubt dwarf his entire literary output – and thus well-placed to comment on the author’s continuing legacy as a horror legend.

Despite this local connection, Secret Invasion is set firmly in the South West of England. As is noted in Eccles’ introduction, this is the English equivalent of Lovecraft country; sleepy villages, decaying fishing towns and numerous, diverse rumours and legends place this territory firmly in the same psychogeography as Arkham or Kingsport, with the added advantage of a longer history of habitation and, thus, mythology. To add to this advantageous locale, Eccles has assembled as contributors a collection of experienced authors but also some writers who also possess expertise in non-fictitious but related fields.

The anthology opens with The Padding Horror, contributed by Mark Norman, whose useful potted biography informs me that he is a folklorist. Given the story he has contributed, this perplexes. The Padding Horror is a tale of sodding great supernatural dogs, like The Hounds of the Baskervilles but with the rational heart bypassed by a network of vesicles connecting Fortean weird science to the paranormal. Sodding great supernatural dogs are apparently Norman’s field of expertise, but one would expect a student of and writer on folklore to have more of an ear for the rhythm of prose. I had expected a fluid writing style heavily marked by the slippery economy of writings from the oral tradition, but Norman’s prose bangs and clatters like a socket wrench dropped down a fire escape. Add to this the fact that the reader is at all times several steps ahead of the narrator in understanding what’s happening, and unfortunately the result is a weak opening story.

The next contributor is Simon A Brett, a writer for Starburst magazine. His offering, Limpets, is a story in the grand Lovecraftian tradition, with dark forces moving unseen beneath the surface of everyday life. The tradition, however, is all Brett conscripts; resisting the urge to deploy any of the clichés of the HPL pastiche, he instead delivers an original tale which doesn’t so much twist as wrong-foot the reader with false expectations before delivering a conclusion that simmers gently in discomfort. This second story re-establishes Secret Invasion as an exciting prospect to the reader.

Andrew Lane is an established writer of young adult fiction, and this breadth of experience is on clear display in The Dark, Hidden Places, a story of an innocent astronomer caught up in otherworldly events. Lane makes reference to the “tropes” of Lovecraftiana in his introduction, and this particular one – of an academic rather than a gung-ho action hero as protagonist – will be very familiar to the Mythos reader. Nevertheless, action there is, and TDHP fairly zips along, a professional and sleek story only very slightly ruined by the fact that Lane’s biography totally gives the ending away. In a neat bit of graphic design, the explanatory notes are printed white-on-black in the negative of the stories themselves, so it will be easy to skip Lane’s introduction until after you’ve read his tale. Sadly this is also the point in the collection at which Eccles, or whomever he press-ganged into subediting, gave up on reading the proofs; from now on, expect an increase in typographical errors, double-printed phrases, and weird letters just popping up at the end of ellipses for no reason.

Up next is Dark Words, an offering from Anna Norman (no relation or possibly some relation or possibly very very related indeed to Mark), who is not an author but a history graduate who specialised in researching some slightly occult topics. A lukewarm recommendation for an author of weird tales, one might think, but this Norman demonstrates a real skill for taking her real-world knowledge and filleting it for those details which will enhance the verisimilitude of a story without bogging it down in extraneous fiddle-faddle. Set around an archaeological dig and using this premise as a reason to feature a story-within-a-story set in an earlier milieu, Dark Words is an almost wholly successful attempt to tell one story in two voices and allow the reader to combine those voices to best effect. The ending felt somewhat abrupt to me, but to be fair, perhaps this is intended as the literary equivalent of a cinematic jump-scare.

Richard Freeman introduces himself as a cryptozoologist which, as I always understood it, is a chancer who buggers about pretending to look for creatures that definitely aren’t there, like Bigfoot or Nessie or Father Christmas or God. According to Freeman, however, they also take part in hunts for real animals that are suspected to be, but not certainly, extinct. This sounds like a genuinely fascinating line of research despite the very English part of me that says if a species has gone to all that trouble to be alone then maybe it has its own good reasons. Either way, Freeman spins an involving yarn about a zookeeper who messes with That Which Should Not be Messed With and pays the awful, sticky price. It’s good to see an author who can resist the temptation to put a needless twist in a story and just lets it play out to a natural conclusion, and Freeman writes with a smooth, clear style which makes it a pleasure to see how he gets from A to B.

A God Goes Home is written by Nigel Foster, who is a former journalist. According to his biography, he helped to create OK! magazine, but it doesn’t say anything about what he did when he was a journalist. This story is an attempt to bring a comic twist to the dark horror of HP Lovecraft’s universe, which is something I’ve seen done with surprising success in the past. Sadly, however, Foster’s effort is heavy-handed and, as a result, tiresome.

Right, now time for the alert, as promised. Dan Barratt is a writer, actor, radio presenter and mate. His gift to the collection is On the Breath of the Sea, an Innsmouthy tale about a man strangely drawn to the ocean. It’s a pastiche of the slightly overwritten style of early Lovecraft Circle members like August Derleth. What pastiche requires more than anything is a good ear, because too many slips from the idiom will interfere with the audience’s suspension of disbelief (as viewers of Downton Abbey find on a regular basis). Fortunately – for me, at least, Barratt clearly has a good sense of the tone of a piece, and his story is probably one of the most authentically “trad Mythos” in feel.

Wiping my brow, I can move safely on. I mentioned earlier that there is a comic strip as well as stories in Secret Invasion. This goes by the name of The Keeper, and was both written and illustrated by Stever Trickey, or possibly Steven, depending on whether I believe the contents page or his by-line. It’s a beautifully inked piece, with the creature featured drawing its look from sources both piscine and floral-fungal. Only a slight tale, for reasons of space, but Trickey balances this by weaving the tale in such a way that the reader’s own imagination has to do a lot of the work. History has shown visual representations of the Lovecraftian milieu to be fraught with difficulty, but the graphic novel is a flexible medium and Trickey does well here.

Technology and our increasing reliance on it is the theme of our next story: Dissolution, by Jessica Palmer. Palmer is a professional writer who has been resident both in Britain and the US, and her experience covers a wide range of genres as well as in non-fiction. Here she gives us a story inspired by Lovecraft’s famous quote about the sciences opening the door to truths too terrible for the human mind to bear, and it is territory she clearly feels at home in. The physical and mental degradation of her protagonist is well-handled and the tale is a pacey and atmospheric read which, I felt, seems to have run off a cliff at the end; we are left with frustratingly little idea of the bigger picture against which our lead character struggles, though this, admittedly, is a pretty Lovecraftian motif in itself.

The esteemed editor Eccles is himself up next, with a story of forbidden fruit called A Taste of Paradise, which is quite a difficult story to give a balanced opinion on. On the one hand, Eccles has little gift for prose, and hacking my way through the pulpy sentences scattered randomly with misplaced punctuation was something of a chore. On the other, Taste is an inventive and original story which takes the themes but not the tropes of HPL’s universe and delivers something fresh and surprising. This makes it something of a curate’s egg, but if Eccles works on his tin ear then more ideas like this would be most welcome.

Helen Stirling is an actor and voice-over artist who is making an early foray into printed fiction here. The result, The Sea Witch Rises, is a predictable but readable tale about true love conquering, or failing to conquer, all. Although the plot is pretty straightforward, Stirling’s acting background shows in the well-drawn and convincing characterisation of the piece, and the resulting depth of her protagonist anchors the reader’s suspension of belief well, which is a strong asset in a story of preternatural horror. Overall, a strong debut.

The Defender of Bodmin is a piece that really belongs at the end of the compilation, containing as it does many of the themes or tropes that have gone before. Author Jon Arnold, a semi-professional writer and contributor to various fan-backed projects, has surveyed the options available in the brief and incorporated them all: the Sussex panther, the isolation and inherent danger of the moors, the alien malignancy of Lovecraftian horror, the ambivalent ending traditional to Mythos lore – all appear in Defender. Arnold even manages to employ humour well in a Mythos tale, which is a tricky balancing act at the best of times. Certainly one of the stand-out stories in this anthology.

Placed auspiciously at number thirteen in the collection, The Knife is brought to us by Lee Rawlings, a librarian-without-portfolio for Phonic FM. As a radio presenter he should be naturally at home with the spontaneous and dynamic use of English to ensnare an audience, and perhaps this explains why he struggles with the more disciplined and strictly formal written usage. The Knife is the germ of an interesting story idea buried under ramshackle, garbled language. Further drafting would have been extremely welcome, because as it stands the reader is doing too much of the work.

The enigmatic Jolyn Drake produces our penultimate offering, The Cavern. Mr Drake’s potted history is of little help to the lazy reviewer, containing as it does no clues to his previous form other than a throwaway reference to training reindeer. He takes an unusual tack, setting his story in a West Country of some two hundred-odd years ago, when educated clergymen with time on their hands and a boundless curiosity for the natural world patrolled the coastlines, seeking fossilised evidence of the distant past of our world. This is a story of claustrophobia, paranoia, betrayal and failure, which is rich Lovecraftian pickings indeed. Richly evocative and skilfully told, The Cavern is a highlight of the anthology. And I’m not just saying that because Drake is probably in witness protection and could have me done by a button man.

Our final instalment is The Stones of Bayer Tor by one Christopher Glew. Stones is plotted the way Mythos stories should always be plotted: a full and comprehensive explanation of what is going on has been carefully worked out by the author, and then thrown away. In this engaging tale, possibly the most dialogue-driven in the collection, explanations are partial and unsatisfactory, strange alliances are made, unseen and unknown forces operate according to a scant and unsystematic handful of approximate rules. None of the characters in Stones are in control; the only difference between them is the degree to which they are aware of their impotence. Nakedly and uncompromisingly pessimistic in both tone and content, this is a tale marinaded in the pure Lovecraft ethos and a fitting keystone piece to the anthology.

Secret Invasion rounds itself off by interviewing the three artists who have contributed to the chapter-opening artwork, the cover and The Keeper, the comic strip contribution. These verge perhaps on the overtechnical for the layman, but there is interesting material on the challenge of bringing HPL’s unimaginable forces of malignancy into the visual media.

As anthologies go, Secret Invasion performs admirably. With fifteen stories and only three real clunkers, its hit-to-miss ratio is easily high enough to stand with its brethren from more established horror publishing outfits, and the fact that it is being sold in a good cause is a happy bonus; it deserves to be a success on its own merits.

Secret Invasion is available from www.blurb.co.uk/b/6597041-secret-invasion or from Cygnus Alpha’s Facebook page. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to MIND, the mental health charity. Secret Invasion carries a warning stating that some of the language in it might be unsuitable for minors; this reviewer thinks that if your children are reading stories from the Cthulhu Mythos then the word “bastard” is probably the least of their problems.

- By Allan Lear