A Touch of Chill

Joan Aiken
Fontana Lions

The homely and the exotic mix in fifteen unique tales. The macabre and witty stories are a melange of horror guaranteed to send chills up the spine of any sleepless reader.

I'm always happy to go for a trip into the estimable Ms. Aiken's imagination but I've been deliberately holding back on this one for when I had a real craving.  It was well worth the wait.

Obviously she's most widely known for her various books for children especially the 'Wolves of Willoughby Chase' novels and the 'Arabel & Mortimer' series but she also accumulated an impressive array of more adult fiction including many shorts of the weird, macabre or ghostly variety.  'A Touch of Chill' is the second anthology of those I've encountered.  The other probably has the edge in my affections but there is much to like here.

The opening story 'Lodgers' is perhaps one of the weakest but strangely is also one of the stories here that is perhaps most characteristically Aiken.  It concerns a creepy husband and wife who take up the empty rooms in the house of an overworked single mother with two poorly children. It's not a bad story, it just feels a little unfinished especially in it's ending.

The book is right back on track with the second story, 'Mrs Considine', a lightning fast tale of witchcraft  and premonitions and with the third, the wonderfully vindictive, 'The Swanee Glide'.

Next up is probably my favourite piece in the book, 'Listening'.  As a fan of experimental music and the tenets of 'deep listening' the story had me from it's second paragraph and whilst this aspect was only one part of what turned out to be a sublimely rolling narrative that begins with a dead cat and ends with a memory of a painting.

'The Companion' is a slight twist on the classic haunted house tale, 'The Rented Swan', in a bizarre love story whilst 'Jugged Hare' feels like an Agatha Christie pastiche.  'A Game of Black and White' sends the book back into the realm of the weird as a young boy celebrating his birthday during an eclipse finds himself trapped in a very unpleasant predicament of a far more surreal kind than the unpleasantness that seems likely to be about inflicted on the hapless teen burglar in 'Time to Laugh'.

'He' is probably the books best contender for 'most likely to appear in an anthology of the macabre' with it's wonderfully archaic tale of magical revenge although its successor 'The Story About Caruso' runs it a close second.  Conversely the more deliberately modern 'the Helper' with its heroin addiction, anorexia and robots is easily the least satisfying thing here although again it's successor, 'Power Cut', runs it a close second.

The book ends with two stories that I can only describe as Aiken-esque and are all the better for it.  'Who Goes Down This dark Road' is a frankly bizarre and funny tale of a young girl's hair and the teacher tasked with uncovering it's secret whilst 'A Train Full of Warlords' tells of a family in the aftermath of a tragedy and the ways in which each is dealing with it.

As I said earlier I didn't find this collection to be as wholly satisfying as 'A Bundle of Nerves' but it still offers a very satisfying selection of stories.  her stories transcend genre boundaries mixing the fantastical withe the macabre and the fun with the supernatural.  There are elements in her stories of the classic authors of the weird and the supernatural but also you can see echoes of her contemporaries such as Roald Dahl and I for one think it's about time she was regarded with the same level of esteem.

Children of the Dust

Louise Lawrence
Fontana Lions

After a nuclear war devastates the earth, a small band of people struggles for survival in a new world where children are born with strange mutations.
Everyone thought, when the alarm bell rang, that it was just another fire practice. But the first bombs had fallen on Hamburg and Leningrad, the headmaster said, and a full-scale nuclear attack was imminent.
It's a real-life nightmare. Sarah and her family have to stay cooped up in the tightly-sealed kitchen for days on end, dreading the inevitable radioactive fall-out and the subsequent slow, torturous death, which seems almost preferable to surviving in a grey, dead world, choked by dust.
But then, from out of the dust and the ruins and the destruction, comes new life, a new future, and a whole brave new world.

Every now and again I get an unstoppable craving to revisit the apocalypse; this has been the case pretty much since I could read.  I love post-apocalypse books (and films) and will pretty much read any I can get my hands on, particularly the British ones as they are less likely to devolve into shootyness. Lawrence's book does indeed deal with a British style apocalypse, in this case of the nuclear variety which suits it's 1985 publication date.

The book is split into three parts and follows the fortunes of three generations of one extended family as Britain is devastated in a nuclear holocaust and then through into the aftermath.

The first and by for the most harrowing part of the book tells of teenager Sarah who, along with her stepmother and two younger siblings is trapped in her living room as the bombs fall and the world dies.  Sarah's story tells of the futility of their survival methods as the fallout slowly poisons them through the dust in the air and the contaminated food and water they consume in their starvation.

Louise Lawrence

Part two introduces us to Sarah's absent father, Bill, who has become separated from his family due to the unfolding events but who is lucky enough to find himself in a government fallout shelter.  After a jump of some seventeen years we get to see how this bunker full of bureaucrats, scientists and soldiers are dealing with the apocalypse by clinging to the ways of the old world and expecting those who have survived outside and who have begun to adapt to the world to respect their spurious authority and accede to their wishes.

The final part relates the story of Bill's grandson as he ventures outside the now failing bunker and meets, for the first time, the mutated survivors of the fallout;  albinos with pin prick eyes and furry skin.  Faced with their kindness and understanding he is forced to confront his own prejudices and realise his place in this new world.

For the first two parts of the book Lawrence provides an unflinchingly nightmarish vision of the nuclear apocalypse as children slowly die of radiation sickness and newborn babies are left outside in the snow to die.  It makes for fascinatingly immersive reading but the book suffers from a weak third act where the mutated survivors are revealed to be ultra-powerful telepathic and telekinetic homo-superior and it all becomes bogged down in utopianist science fantasy.  There's also a fairly disquieting and distasteful Christian undercurrent that pervades the book with hints given that the apocalypse was God's way of removing flawed humanity in order to allow the spiritually superior mutants to take over.

It was though a book that was very much worth the read and showed an author unafraid to provide her - then - young readers with a story that didn't pander to delicate sensibilities and, for the most part, showed the then ever present threat of nuclear armageddon in all it's futile horror.

Buy it here - Children Of The Dust