Fungoid.

Fungoid is the new novel from William Meikle and is published by DarkFuse. It’s an apocalyptic tale from an author who, over the course of his writing career, has wiped out huge swathes of the world’s population by means of alien invasion, cosmic seaweed and giant crabs (to name but a few) this time choosing to bring about the end of the world with a fungal infestation.

It’s an original take on the apocalypse and, it has to be said, an entirely plausible one. Just Google “largest organism on earth” if you need proof. The fact that any organic material can provide a home for the organism means that the world itself is infected – not just the people living on it and, throw in the fact that the fungal spores are dispersed by wind and rain and you have a truly terrifying scenario.

By concentrating on a handful of characters, Willie manages to corral what could have been a sprawling epic of book into a tightly constructed, fast-paced narrative – a cracking read that homages the pulp novels and B-Movies which must surely be its inspiration. Whilst greatly enhancing the pace of the book, this approach can have some drawbacks – most notably when world events are touched upon, outbreaks of wars and civil unrest relegated to a few lines or a paragraph almost making them seem like an afterthought. There are some scenes of environments overgrown with fungal hyphae which were very effective but again, a few more of these set-pieces may have enhanced the book.

It could be argued that this is the quintessential William Meikle book, combining as it does so many of the tropes and themes which have been a feature of his writing thus far. The fungal threat will be familiar to those who read his highly entertaining Professor Challenger collection The Kew Growths – which allows for a little in-joke within the narrative – but another recurring theme, the power of music also crops up here, most overtly in a reference to being “lost to the dance”, a literary motif used to great effect in the author’s collection Dark Melodies.

There’s science too – some real, to add verisimilitude and some made up, to add entertainment value. This is no ordinary fungus, it’s an escapee from a lab – situated in the same country that made Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps (i.e. not America).

I regard Fungoid as the literary equivalent of North by Northwest – a screenplay that was written for Hitchcock which contained as many Hitchcockian themes and set-pieces as it was possible to cram into one film. The director was in effect making a homage to his own work and there’s maybe something of the same going on here. Whatever, the end result is a deeply entertaining piece of writing which takes a number of well-established tropes and characters and moulds (yes – that was deliberate) them into something new.

From its small beginnings in a traffic accident on Watson Drive (there was always going to be trouble on a street with that name…) to its stirring conclusion on the Newfoundland coast I loved every moment I spent in the world of Fungoid. The end of the world is probably on a lot more people’s minds right now so it was nice to enjoy a fictional interpretation of that scenario.

You can, and should, buy Fungoid here.

Tormentor.

Tormentor is the latest novella from William Meikle and is published by DarkFuse. This combination has yielded some very impressive results in the past, both Clockwork Dolls and Broken Sigil were excellent reads, high concept stories delivered with consummate skill by the author so the signs were good that this would be another cracking read. And so it proves to be. Willie does sterling work writing stories using characters created originally by other authors (Sherlock Holmes, Carnacki, Professor Challenger), inhabiting and then expanding the worlds created for them in a hugely entertaining way but he's equally - if not more - impressive when creating his own fictional worlds such as is the case here.
The world created in Tormentor will be familiar to anyone who's read Willie's work, the book containing many of the themes he's explored and used in the past - Scottish folklore and history, ancient evil, an island location and err... fish. Not surprisingly, music has a big part to play in the story too and readers will soon find themselves "lost to the dance" once more as they immerse themselves in the atmospheric prose.
And it is atmospheric - the story relies so much on the location (the island of Skye) that the descriptions of the landscape and environment are as important as the unfolding of the narrative itself and these are handled marvellously, you can almost feel the cold on your face, smell the sea air. (And the fish).
The plot involves Jim Greenwood moving into the remote cottage he's just bought on Skye - a house, it turns out, with a long and mysterious history. Recently widowed, Jim has chosen the house as a means of running away from the world but the safety he feels there soon disappears as a series of stick figures begin to appear around the house, drawn in soot. The same figures then start appearing in emails sent to him...
The tension slowly builds from the appearance of the first figures and the pace of the story is handled brilliantly, a sense of paranoia and fear building as Jim tries to work out what the drawings mean, discerning, as he does, a pattern in the way they are presented.
There's some proper scary stuff going on in these passages, the author utilising the creepiness of the concept to its full potential. The denoument, when the explanation for the strange events is discovered, is eminently satisfying.
It could be argued that Tormentor is the quintessential William Meikle book, containing as it does so many of his trademarks as a writer. It could be,  the author has described how the story has been with him for a long time but only now has he felt he had the skills as a writer to do it justice.
It was worth the wait, Tormentor is a book I recommend highly.

Samurai and Other Stories.

Samurai and Other Stories is a collection of stories by the prolific William Meikle and is published by the equally prolific Crystal Lake Publishing. The opening story gives the collection its title and tells of a group of shipwrecked sailors uncovering something terrible in a Japanese temple, a story which displays many of the author's trademarks; a historical setting, a band of "real" men/adventurers encountering the supernatural, beautifully choreographed action and a nice tongue-in-cheek sense of humour.
Historical settings are a feature of many of the stories, most effective amongst them being Inquisitor in which the tables are turned on the eponymous protagonist in a tale of 15th Century Cosmic Horror, (not something he was expecting...) and The Havenhome - a story that provided the backbone to his novel Night of the Wendigo.
Another theme common to Willie's writing, his love of music, also winds its way through the stories, a folk-song provides the basis for a Revenge From Beyond The Grave story in The Shoogling Jenny, whilst The Scotsman's Fiddle plays a tune that opens doorways to places best left alone. The power of music is demonstrated dramatically in Rickman's Plasma - and not in a good way...
Private Investigator Derek Adams makes a couple of appearances, in A Slim Chance which ends the collection on a suitably dark note and Home Is The Sailor, a gloriously over the top zombie tale that I'm guessing won't be used by the Largs tourist board in any of its literature.
There are monsters here aplenty, many of them big, nasty creatures to be fought with sword and gun but the worst monster of all - of the human variety - is to be found in Living the Dream, a dark story of obsession and murder. Samurai is full of action and adventure, thrills and spills and plenty of supernatural chills. There's depth to the stories too though, and real emotion. These are most apparent in two of the quieter tales, The Yule Log - a melancholic tale of loss and Turn Again, my favourite story of the collection which illuminates the circular nature of existence, the links between the microcosm and macrocosm. Heavy stuff but presented with a deft touch, and evidence that there is so much more to William Meikle than a purveyor of pulp.
Samurai is a great collection, page turning stuff that will keep you entertained throughout. You can buy it here.

Broken Sigil.

I mentioned in my review of last year that I thought the novella was probably the best format for horror stories and - whilst I stand by that view (all these weeks later!) - I have to add the caveat that sometimes the themes and ideas imagined by the author demand a longer form so that they can be developed adequately. In the same way that some short stories outstay their welcome, so a novella can seem rushed, with too much crammed in. Such was the case with William Meikle's latest work Broken Sigil published by the ever impressive Dark Fuse.
Whilst this may seem critical or even negative, it's actually an indication of how much I enjoyed the book - I was literally left wanting more. It's a high concept story and the concept is an excellent one, one which I feel could easily be expanded into a full-length novel.
The story's protagonist is Joe Connors, a policeman working in the Internal Affairs Division whose latest investigation involves an "officer down" situation where one cop has killed another. The dead man is Joe's ex-partner and had at one time been his best friend, the reason for the breakdown in their relationship something which provides the basis for what happens when the investigation takes a step away from mundane reality and into something much more esoteric...
There's a distinct noir feel to the narrative, told as it is in first person and the dead partner scenario is a subtle nod towards The Maltese Falcon. As the story progresses, that novel (and film) becomes ever more significant.
To say to much about what Connors discovers in the house where the shooting took place would be to spoil the story but that's where the high-concept stuff I alluded to before really comes into its own. It's a highly imaginative premise and one which is delivered consumately (albeit too quickly...) Yes, Broken Sigil can be read as a police procedural with some supernatural overtones but there's so much more to it than that. It's a story of love and loss, of grief and obsession, of life after - or perhaps more accurately alongside - death and the lengths people will go to to cheat it. It's also a warning to be careful what you wish for and that some things are best left alone...
I really did want more from Broken Sigil, the concept behind it is intriguing as well as entertaining and I was sorry when it came to an end. It's a great read and I highly recommend it.

The Ravine.

Friday nights as a kid always meant one thing - The Virginian on telly. Although I was probably too young to fully appreciate the storylines, it must have sparked something within me, generating a love of westerns that continues to this day. My love of horror developed a bit later but it too has grown and developed over the years in parallel. What could be better then than a horror/western fusion, a combination of my two favourite genres? Well, not a lot actually.
The Ravine is William Meikle's latest novel published in a variety of formats by Dark Regions Press, following on from their last collaboration, the immensely entertaining (and wonderfully produced - the hardback edition truly is a thing of beauty) Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy. 
Part of the joy of genre fiction is the familiarity of its conventions, there's some comfort to be derived from reading a story where we immediately know what the characters are going to be like. Using stereotypes, archetypes even can be lazy writing though, and it takes real skill to use them in such a way that they bring a knowing smile to the reader but still endow them with enough depth for the reader to care about them and what happens to them. William Meikle does this and that's what makes his books such a joy to read.
Mysterious gunslinger? Yes. Noble cavalry officer? Yup. Rancher down on his luck? Oh yes. The Ravine has them all. What it also has are angels, demons and zombies, oh, and some very weird fish. Chuck all those elements together and you end up with a cracking tale of adventure and horror with some brilliantly effective set-pieces. What you also get is a tale of honour and redemption - the story could have been set in any time period or location but the western setting is perfect for it, a harsh environment where men, and women, very often had to do what men, and women had to do.
I loved The Ravine, and heartily recommend it.

The Hole.

The Hole is the latest novel from William Meikle and is published in a variety of formats by Dark Fuse.. It tells of the bizarre happenings in and around a small town in America where a strange humming noise brings about headaches and nosebleeds in the local population. It brings about much more besides however, namely huge holes in the landscape into which large parts of the town – and its inhabitants – topple.

As if this weren’t bad enough, creatures begin to emerge from the hole, to terrorise the survivors…

Oh, and the Government have set up barricades manned by military personnel around the town with orders to let no one leave…

So the scene is set for another tour de force of pulp fiction from the imagination of the best purveyor of out and out genre fiction currently plying their trade.

The Hole cracks along at a fair old pace (and is relatively short for a novel) and I devoured it in three sittings. Even though the narrative hurtles along, there’s still room for character development which makes you care about what happens to the protagonists despite their genre cliché origins – no mean feat in itself and testament to William’s skill as a writer.

The story’s influences are many and varied, strongest I guess is Invasion of the Body-Snatchers but I also felt the resonance of Stephen King’s Under The Dome and The Mist with their themes of isolated groups of people under the threat of something beyond their comprehension. The Hole is very much its own beast though, using – and acknowledging - these themes and influences but adding a hefty dose of originality to produce an end product which is a heady mix of science fiction and horror with some genuinely creepy set-pieces. There are contemporary cultural references too, HAARP, CDC and FEMA get a look-in and, as a resident of the “desolate” North East of England, I was pleased to see fracking getting a mention too.

On his website, William explains that he writes as an attempt to escape and that’s exactly what I did when reading The Hole. It’s a thoroughly entertaining book, one that took me back to the novels and films that first captured my interest in the genre. You pretty much know what you’re going to get with a William Meikle book which I say not as a criticism but as something positive as, without fail, they always meet – if not surpass - those expectations. I like to think that he has a whale of a time writing his books, I know I do when I’m reading them.

The Unspoken.

Cancer plays a big part in my life given that I work in a pathology laboratory where the principal work is in the diagnosis of this horrible disease. I must have read mountains of literature about it, and spend most of my day looking down a microscope trying to identify it so was intrigued to see this new collection of short stories edited by William Meikle which is subtitled An Anthology for Cancer Relief. It contains seventeen stories and all profits will be going to the Beatson Cancer Research Institute, a laudable aim, and - given the quality of the writing on display here - will hopefully be hugely successful.
Many of the stories within The Unspoken use the theme of cancer as their basis, either overtly or indirectly whilst others have no link to it at all (or are so tenuous that I missed them completely). Notable amongst these is Harbinger by Stephen Laws, an enigmatic, ambiguous tale that I loved precisely for those reasons. It was great to see something new from Stephen (although I'm not sure when the story was written) who was - is - a bit of a hero of mine, having written some brilliant novels set in his - and my -home region, and who probably didn't get the recognition he really deserved.
The theme of the desperation of being diagnosed with cancer leading to Faustian deals is explored in ascending order of success by Stephen James Price's Pages of Promises, Anna Taborska's Underbelly and, in my opinion the best of the three Stevens Savile and Lockley's The Last Gift.
There are contributions too from the editor- The Unfinished Basement - which I'd encountered previously in his wonderful Dark Melodies and the publisher, Johnny Mains with another story I'd read before in his collection Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types, with The Cure - a truly disturbing story that was the highlight of that collection for me and which still has the power to shock even on second reading.
David A Riley provides a blood-soaked slice of fantasy in A Girl, A Toad and a Flask whilst John Shirley gives us the board meeting from Hell (aren't they all..?) in Where the Market's Hottest.
The two stand-out stories for me were ones where the theme of cancer was used most tangentially, Gary McMahon's Bitter Soup highlights the decay and necrosis associated with the disease in a harrowing tale full of disturbing imagery and Simon Kurt Unsworth's Photograph's of Boden, a psychological horror that plays on the theme of the inexorable spread of a life-changing, life-threatening process.
The Unspoken is an excellent collection of stories covering a wide range of styles. Given that cancer is derived from the Greek word for crab, it's only fitting that Guy N Smith has a story in here too. You can buy it here and here and I thoroughly recommend that you do.

Dark Melodies

Dark Melodies is a collection of short stories from William Meikle and is published, in a variety of formats, by Dark Regions Press. On his website, William describes himself as a writer at the "pulpy end of the market" - a genre that is, in my opinion, unfairly looked down upon. Horror, in particular, is a broad church - which is why I enjoy reading it so much. I enjoy the stories that hold up a mirror to society, using metaphors to comment and even sometimes educate but I also enjoy a good old monster story, of the kind that got me into the genre in the first place. Genre writing is frowned upon by those who think it panders to the masses, that it is easier to write than higher works of great literary merit. Bollocks, frankly. It could be argued that the "literary" novel is a genre in itself, following its own conventions and rules. Irrespective of genre, there is good writing and there is bad writing. Dark Melodies is good writing. Very good writing.
There are eight stories in the book, six of which are original to the collection. As the title suggests, the stories share a common theme of music. They share much more though. The book is cleverly constructed - like a symphony - with motifs and themes recurring throughout. The music in these stories is a key to unlocking another world, a theme explored most notably in The Unfinished Basement, The Death of Sergeant Macleod and the opening story in the collection The Tenants of Ladywell Manor - a pastiche of Pride and Prejudice which introduces cosmic horror to 19th Century society in a thoroughly entertaining way.
The story also introduces the phrase "lost to the dance" which then re-occurs in all of the other stories,  a clever device to create another link between them, akin to the main theme of a symphony being repeated in its different movements.
There are other linking devices too, the piano in The Persistence of Memory may or may not be the same one found in The Unfinished Basement (and may, or may not have been fashioned from a Navy ship in The Tenants of Ladywell Manor). The music, or rather the tune that is played to bring about mysterious and terrifying consequences, may be the same in every story - perhaps The Death of Sergeant Macleod..? A manuscript, detailing an earlier, disastrous encounter with the "other" world features in The Unfinished Basement and provides evidence for Meikle's Private Investigator Derek Adams to uncover the truth in a fittingly exciting - and thoroughly entertaining - conclusion to the book in Rhythm and Booze...
A couple of the stories, The Chamber of Tiamat and The Mill Dance, are more stand-alone, less linked to the overarching theme. I guess they're the key changes, the middle eight...
William Meikle is a new author to me but on the strength of Dark Melodies I will certainly be seeking out more of his writing. It's a while since I've been so entertained by a collection of stories. Dark Melodies was a pleasure to read -and I don't mean a guilty pleasure. It's a collection that struck a chord with me and I heartily recommend it.