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Post by dem bones on Jul 22, 2018 15:57:12 GMT
Stephen Laws - The Wyrm (NEL, 1994: originally Souvenir, 1987) Blurb: Something hideous is about to happen to the Border Village of Shillingham. Why does crazy Frank Warwick shoot at the workmen moving the old gibbet from the crossroads? Why should its inhabitants feel a sudden shiver of terror? Why are the local children drawn, as if by a silent voice, to play around the gibbet? The unearthly fog surrounding the village is thickening, killing the wildlife and cutting the inhabitants off from the outside world. Beneath the ground, something is stirring.
And as the bulldozers roll on unchecked, a dark and terrible evil, imprisoned beneath the gibbet for centuries, slowly awakes — burning for revenge against mankind.
For its inhabitants, Shillingham is about to become a Hell on earth.Michael Lambton, the 39-year-old author of several best-selling psychological thrillers, moves to a remote house in the wilds of Northumberland to recover from the nervous breakdown triggered by his darkest book, The Borderlands. Chary of human company, Lambton is uncertain whether his career will ever get back on track as he's lost the will to write. Each morning a young woman waves to him as she makes her way to work in the village. Christy Warwick is a waitress at kindly old Iris Wooler's coffee shop. Turns out she and the author share a fondness for Dire Straits albums. Her widowed father, Frank, shunned locally as a drunken lunatic, won't allow her to buy CD's of her own, so Michael daily plays her a different song as she passes the fence. They fall in love. Unfortunately, Christy has an unwanted admirer - Billy Rifkin, the official village bully, sheep killer and occasional pig molester ("The sow looked up at him enquiringly as he fumbled with his trouser buttons."). Billy can't bear the thought of "his" girl getting it on with the "weirdo writer" and plots to do them both an injury. Michael also befriends Sean Jackson, hippie and fellow Big City outcast, who runs Zoneshifts, a specialist fantasy bookshop in the middle of nowhere. Nothing much ever happens in Shillingford village so the removal of the centuries old gibbet post at the crossroads on Split Crow Lane brings welcome excitement. A new road is under construction and Mrs. Garranter of the Local Historical Trust has struck a deal with the Council that the gibbet be carefully removed and transferred to the local museum. An increasingly erratic Frank Warwick is set against this - as well he might be. From the sixteenth century, when the Wyrm last brought destruction to Shillingford, his family have been the keepers of the secret, their duties handed down from father to son. Christy is Frank's only child. Once he dies, there will be none to consult The Book of the Wyrm should the entity ever break loose. During the excavation, Frank is arrested for shooting at the bulldozers and putting a bullet through the wind-shield of Mrs. Garranter's car. The gibbet pole is buried far deeper than had been anticipated - it's fifty foot long - and ends in a thick solid steel spike driven through a coffin. The workman who discovers this goes insane on the spot as the blackened corpse within stirs and grins at him. Elphick of the archaeological team threatens to sue the contractors for damaging the pole but doesn't get the chance - the eyeball devouring, intestine eating , zombie and hellhound-raising, plague spreading WYRM is free and bent on revenge! Ghost Train and Specter are probably more accomplished, but I prefer this for the multiple set pieces and violent vignettes. It's a safe bet that Good will ultimately triumph over Evil, but survival comes at a huge price and we lose many a sympathetic character along the way, the off-page murder of a harmless junkie being particularly nasty.
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Post by andydecker on May 23, 2023 12:31:16 GMT
Here is the Sphere edition from 1989. Art by Terry Oakes.
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