Strange Tales - Tartarus Press

[helrunar]

Vaulted Ones,

Yesterday on a whim I added Strange Tales: Tartarus Press at 30, edited by Rosalie Parker, published in 2020, to my electronic reading device. This proves to be the sixth anthology in the Strange Tales series featuring various Tartarus Press authors and edited by Parker.

Contents:

‘Tartarus Press at 30’ by Rosalie Parker
‘Grassman’ by Rebecca Lloyd
‘The End of Alpha Street’ by Mark Valentine
'Hunger’ by Andrew Michael Hurley
‘Tell me, whacher, is it winter?’ by N.A. Sulway
‘The Flickering Light’ by Stephen Volk
‘Nervous System’ by Inna Effress
‘What it Says’ by Ibrahim R. Ineke
‘Monsieur Machine’ by Eric Stener Carlson
‘Great Dead American Authors Alive and Living, in Cwmbran’ by Jonathan Preece
'The Women’ by Tom Heaton
‘Meiko’ by J.M. Walsh
‘The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne’ by Angela Slatter
‘The Gathering’ by John Gaskin
‘The Wardian Case’ by D.P. Watt
‘The Afterlife of Books’ by Karen Heuler
'These Pale and Fragile Shells’ by John Linwood Grant
‘Collectable’ by Reggie Oliver
‘Flood’ by Carly Holmes

The initial draw for me was provided by the two tales by Grant and Oliver. Both were delightful in rather different ways. 'These Pale and Fragile Shells' is a story featuring one of JLG's recurring characters, one of the lesser known ones. Justin Margrave is described by the author as "a nineteen seventies gay art critic who, often to his annoyance, ends up involved in weirdness and folk horror." The character speaks of himself in one of the tales as "a rapidly ageing queen, slightly too thick of girth" which means he is of my people. Thus, I was quite curious to read this. "Shells" made me think in some ways of one of Elizabeth Hand's stories about unpleasantly neurotic artists and their patrons. The grotesquerie that is slowly unveiled when Margrave finds himself unexpectedly invited to stay at Torwick, a Regency mansion somewhere near York which is the home of art impresarios David and Philip Causton, is the work of crazed chalk sculptor Paul Iscariot. Will the forces Iscariot has been nurturing in his sinister eidolons of the ineffable unleash a maelstrom of horror to engulf the estate and all who dwell there? The author himself may have been surprised at how delicious I found this brief escapade into a realm of pretentious arthouse fun.

Reggie Oliver's "Collectable" is more strange, or even wistfully beguiling, than horrible--in fact, it's not horrible or frightening at all. Unemployed actor narrating the story finds temporary employment between gigs in 1972 at Kendall Hall, a home for very old, infirm, retired stage artistes. Could elderly, very much out of it Mrs Vandeleur of the strangely bright blue eyes have anything to do with the old postcards of Elsie Grace, "big star" whose glory faded well before the end of World War I, the memoirist found at an antiques fair in Norwich during his previous tour?

"The Wardian Case" by D. P. Watt mixes a moody cocktail of an obsessive botanist Bluebeard and a journalist investigating the disappearance of one of his more recent victims in 1969. This one does have some horror elements; though nicely composed, the story itself didn't impress me all that much.

"The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne" by Angela Slatter (one of the authors who has had several works put out by Tartarus) had good Welsh local color. Again, the story did not do that much for me. Nest's Mum Aderyn left when she was only three; Da always claimed the lady had been "stolen away by the fairies." The truth had nothing at all to do with the Good Folk, as Nest eventually learns. And after a lifetime of service and privation to the duties of home and hearth, Nest suddenly takes violent action.

"The Gathering" by John Gaskin. It was a surprise to Professor "Nick" Nichol that Dr Adam Brome, leader of the long since dispersed Torpids Club, calls a final get-together of the surviving octagenarian members at his estate, Blackshaws House, in darkest somewhere-or-other (Northern England?). The host eventually arrives in a scene that is all about the ghastly Grand Guignol inflected on humans by that most dreadful of spectres, Extreme Old Age:

Unidentifiable figures... were carrying a high-backed chair to the head of the table. In it was something Oakleat did not want to see. A fawn silk scarf hid the throat, and a green velvet jacket with brocaded lapels and cuffs concealed what little remained of a body that had once been beautiful. Only the claw-like hands, deformed with disease, and part of the head were exposed, and even the skull was partly hidden by a dark Tudor cap. But it was the face that held his shocked attention. The skin had shrunk back against the bones and the lower eyelids sagged away from the eyeballs leaving red rims that looked unable to hold the orbs in place. The lips had shrivelled away to leave a black hole where there should have been teeth. The skin was blotched and discoloured.

It is in continued search of moments at least somewhat as evocatively effective as this that I continue to trawl through these tales. There are others I have read not worth bothering to discuss, but the selection does hold its own note of intrigue. A number of the stories, such as  Stephen Volk's "The Flickering Light," don't belong at all in a volume of weird fiction--I presume the choice had more to do with the author's association with the press or some of the people who had published with it. I wonder whether this series will be continued.

H.

[andydecker]

May 21, 2022 4:16:12 GMT helrunar said:

Reggie Oliver's "Collectable" is more strange, or even wistfully beguiling, than horrible--in fact, it's not horrible or frightening at all. Unemployed actor narrating the story finds temporary employment between gigs in 1972 at Kendall Hall, a home for very old, infirm, retired stage artistes. Could elderly, very much out of it Mrs Vandeleur of the strangely bright blue eyes have anything to do with the old postcards of Elsie Grace, "big star" whose glory faded well before the end of World War I, the memoirist found at an antiques fair in Norwich during his previous tour?

It is also included in the Black Shuck collection I read recently. Wistfully beguiling is a good description. Oliver nailed the atmosphere of the nursing home pretty well, and I liked all the short character vignettes. The rest was sad, but tempus fugit.