Christopher Fowler - Old Devil Moon

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Christopher Fowler - Old Devil Moon (Serpent's Tail, 2007)

Cover designed by Harriman Steel

Foreword: The Sinister Life

The Threads
The Lady Downstairs
The Luxury Of Harm
Cupped Hands
The Night Museum
Starless
Take It All Out, Put It All Back
The Twilight Express
Exclusion Zone
Identity Crisis
Red Torch
Turbo-Satan
The Uninvited
The Spider Kiss
Heredity
Let's Have Some Fun
Forcibly Bewitched
All Packed
Old Friends
Unnatural Selection
Invulnerable
That's Undertainment!

Afterword: Q & A with Christopher Fowler

Blurb:

A geologist trapped in a town without water is lured into a desperate escape plan. A boy plans a murder in an eerie funfair. A cop witnesses an inexplicable plague of madness. A teenager learns a deadly trick with his mobile phone. A woman unlocks a childhood secret with the aid of old comic books. A secret museum opens only at night... Old Devil Moon is Christopher Fowler's tenth collection of uniquely disturbing short stories, and contains the blackest humour and the darkest fears, set in worlds we walk through each day but rarely see.

Includes:

The Threads: Holidaying in North Africa, obnoxious English tourists Alan and Verity Markham learn the hard way that you don't steal an expensive tapestry from the local shopkeepers and then insult their Religion into the bargain. No sooner has he slipped the item under his coat than Markham endures the most appalling toothache. He's a long way from Harley Street so there's nothing else for it: he'll have to put his trust in one of the street dentists who sit cross-legged in a row before their medieval surgical instruments and mounds of removed teeth .... Arguably, this is even more squirm inducing than the classic On Edge. Splendid choice of opener.

The Luxury Of Harm: The narrator persuades Simon, his old school friend and partner in mayhem, to attend a Horror Convention at Silburton, Somerset. This year's theme is "Murderers On Page And Screen" and our man makes sure the conversation turns toward who in the room would make the most likely serial killer.

There's a lovely pop culture moment in this one, too.

"And through the mist I gradually discerned a splendor figure, his head lolling slightly to one side, one arm lower than the other, like the skeleton in Aurora's 'Forgotten Prisoner' model kit, or the one that features on my copy of The Seventh Pan Book Of Horror Stories."

That reference to the Pan's is apt: this would have suited one of the Van Thal's just so.

Let's Have Some Fun: Computer software designer Steve has seen his business plummet into terminal decline and now he's slumming it as a temp at Penning-Karshall, the most boring firm in Christendom. Learning of his passion for online gambling, Gabriel, the despised office geek puts him on to Hot Targets a virtual paintball game which requires the player to tag a pair of top-heavy, bikini clad Essex Girls as they run giggling through a forest in real time. It takes him a while to crack it, but soon Steve is winning big. So big, in fact, that he's invited to the Dockland's launch of Hot Targets' ambitious new service ...

Turbo-Satan: “Tower Hamlets, toilet of the world, arse-end of the universe … no money, no dope, no fags, no booze, nothing to do, nowhere to go, no-one who cared if he went missing for all eternity … I have absolutely nothing to look forward to … I hate my life …”

My first thoughts on reading this was “some bastard’s been reading my diary!”, but then I remembered I don’t keep one and besides, this is well written. It’s Fowler’s updating of the Deal with the Devil motif for the digital age with phony art student Mats discovering a hot-line to Satan on his mobile. At first, he makes a few sensible requests - “make the bus driver give me £10", etc. - but blows it when he starts trying to be clever.

Red Torch: He finally plucks up the courage to approach the stunning, skimpily dressed blonde usherette at the Greenwich Granada during a James Bond double-bill and, to his astonishment, she immediately leads him straight into the office for a quickie. Only when the utterly joyless fuck is over does he realise that, outside the darkened theatre, she ain't quite the looker he's been fantasising over these past weeks and her "youthful" charms are more far-fetched than anything in You Only Live Twice

That's Undertainment!: Mr Fowler has previous in the imaginary films department (Soho Black, Plague Of Terror, etc.) but he outdoes himself with this vitriolic state-of-the-industry address, although you may argue that there's nothing very "imaginary" about these blockbusters at all, or at least, there won't be very shortly. Jade Goody makes her big screen debut alongside Ray Winstone in Guy Ritchie's latest mockerney gangland caper Who Are You Calling A Tosser? (a sequel to the surprise flop Did You Call My Pint A Poof?): Hugh Grant brings his bumbling 'romantic' presence to Antiques Roadshow - The 3-D Movie, and - they really should show this in Primary School - a child dobs in her heretic schoolteacher mom to Republican Senator Jude Law in the cautionary My Mom's A Darwinist.

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Having a real good time with this weird and wonderful collection which seems to be getting better and stranger with every story.

Old Friends: "Do you remember when you were nine or ten, and you used to sit between your mother and father on the sofa, watching television on a rainy Sunday afternoon? Remember how safe and happy you felt? Well it can be like that always you know".

If you're going to be haunted, who better to put gentle willies up you than Terry Thomas, Leslie Phillips, Irene Handl, Sid James, Hatty Jacques and and a whole crowd of Carry On stars, living and dead? Paul, 58, is having a gloomy time of it. The business he set up with his friend back in the 'seventies as a fun thing to do is going under, his wife has recently left him because he's married to his job, he despises the ruthless ambition of his young employees who in turn sneer at him as obsolete for thinking there's still a place for integrity in today's cut throat society. That's when his comedy idols of the 'fifties and 'sixties intervene, tempting him back to a less complicated time. His wife is undergoing something similar with 'seventes pop idols ....

Forcibly Bewitched: This one has a definite touch of the E.C. comics about it. Magnus Peregrine (relax: his parents were hippies), super snide restaurant critic and aspiring Black Magician, fortuitously comes across the revenge spell he's been hunting down when he chances upon a particularly ropey Goth website. He's mightily miffed that Polish waitress Grazyia has refused to sleep with him in exchange for his giving her father's village cafe a favourable review and now he's going to teach her a lesson she'll never forget! But ....

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The Spider Kiss: Mr. Fowler's contribution to the ever popular Nature Is Revolting/When Funnel-webs Attack genre. In the scorching Miama heat, supremely profane, hard-bitten cop Matt Jackson and his new partner, Dan Dooley, find themselves struggling to contain a homicide epidemic as scores of respectable citizens inexplicably take to behaving like Angel Dust casualties. Their toilet habits leave much to be desired, too.

Dooley's Buddhist buddy Jim Pentecost says it's all down to "karma imbalance", we've fucked nature around so much that now the souls of dead insects are taking control of a people who've lost theirs or some-such hippie bullshit. Meanwhile, Jackson is down town trying to bust a naked girl who's gone crazy in a bar. Bit of luck, he might even get his end away before whatever drug she's on wears off ....

A face-munching instant classic. You'll also find it in Stephen Jones' Mammoth Book Of Monsters.

All Packed: Stewart, dying of AIDs, is packing his final suitcase, and can't bring himself to leave anything behind. All the crap boy-band records, all the useless books and comics, all the clutter accumulated over the years, even the poor budgie - boyfriend Daniel suggests he might like to shove in every last bit of furniture while he's at it. When death takes you out, what are you really going to need?

After the full on horror and laugh-out-loud black comedy of The Spider Kiss, this sombre and touching piece hits like an ice bath.

The Lady Downstairs: .... is Mrs. Hudson, and, were it not that she knew her place, she could tell a tale or two about her esteemed lodger, the self-aggrandizing, gibberish spouting, master of rubbish disguises Mr. Sherlock Holmes, tales he may not find to his liking. Take his latest case, concerning the abduction of the Templeford baby. Holmes is approached by a distraught Lady Cecilia for his assistance in finding her grandson, Godwin, snatched from his cot in the middle of the day and right under his mother's nose. There's been no ransom note and, much as she hates to point the finger at her daughter-in-law, Rose, no sign of an intruder. Holmes accepts Lady Templeford's version of events at face value and soon establishes that, prior to her whirlwind marriage to Archibald, Rose 'The Deptford Nightingale' Nichols, a chorus girl of some repute, was known to have a paramour, Arthur Pilkington. Sure enough, the infant is found unharmed in Mr. Pilkington's Haymarket residence. Good old Sherlock. Case solved! Or so it would appear.

Mrs. Hudson has other ideas. She knows from the days scandal sheets that Lady Cecilia had been against her son's marriage from the first - a union with a common stage-performer was "beneath him" - and refused to attend the ceremony. Could it be that Lady C. herself was the perpetrator?

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the night museum: "... Upon disembarkation in the basement, it is best to don galoshes and protective gloves if visiting the toilets or snack bar. Torches may be rented for the exploration of the crypt mummy cases - these are recommended in order to avoid the large hole to the rear of the basement, which leads directly to the Well of Walled-up Children."

A brochure advertising the dubious delights of a Museum of Morbidity located beneath London Bridge. It is advisable that you study this document at length before you do anything stupid - like visit.

invulnerable: As a girl, Superhero comics provided a release from a miserable home life before and after dad deserted, leaving her alone with a mother who despised the ground she walked on. Now, in adulthood, the same dear friends help her come to terms with what Mr. Purbick the newsagent did to her in the shop on the day The Death of Superman issue was delivered.