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INCANTATIONS
CONTENTS The third collection published June 2002 by prime books USA ISBN 1894815203
cover by Simon
Duric Here is a new collection of diverse and intriguing supernatural stories that reveals the various arenas where good and evil do battle. Here is a new collection of stories that show the strength, depth and vision now emanating from this dual authorship. This exciting new collection contains secrets unravelled in Wales; the view from a New York analysts couch; theatrical dangers; fantasy and legend from Suffolk; witchcraft in America; haunted houses; teenage unhappiness; sexual allure; pain's sweet taste; memories of prison life; an unwelcome holiday souvenir from Gibraltar; echoes of death in Austria; stolen moments in Devon; disaster from divorce; a haunting of memory and fantasy. These are unpublished stories, including a new novella, as well as others drawn from well-regarded anthologies and magazines; Stoker recommended stories; and stories that are a wild roller coaster ride building and developing classical terrors in a modern manner. Enter a world of witches and demons, creatures and beasts, but most horrifyingly of all are the people; real people with emotions, problems, and torments. The authors of the two successful hardcover collections, Shadows At Midnight and the Stoker recommended Echoes Of Darkness, give us a book of supernatural horrors that linger long in the mind, that brings the shadowed terrors into the light.
If you think
of these two writers simply in terms of traditional ghost stories - then
think again - these are nightmares from a cracked modern landscape. “When it comes to horror, Maynard & Sims would rather chill the blood than churn the stomach. Quite simply, they give horror a good name; you give a damn what happens to the central characters, and that’s what makes a really good horror story.” Masters Of Terror, UK. T he stories in the book possess that rare, but essential, gift that every reader searches for in a good ghost or horror story: namely, the ability to leave behind a persistent feeling (an echo, as the title says)of uneasiness.” Mario Guslandi, All Hallows, Canada. “Buy it. Read it.” Jason Gould, Infinity Plus, UK “Economical nightmares of atmospheric subtlety and stark physical horror, Incantations is appropriately titled, suggesting a raw sense of occult power and the process of summoning demonic energies into another plane of existence." William Simmons in Cemetery Dance USA |
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Reviewed by Jeff Gardiner in The British Fantasy publication Prism summer 2003. Incantations, by Maynard and Sims is an impressive collection of short stories with a variety of settings and characters: tales ranging from sinister and disturbing to the downright nasty. This is good modern gothic writing and the two authors achieve a graceful literary style with effective descriptions and a realistic sense of place, all written with an eloquent turn of phrase. The stories cover the themes of sadness, loss, regret, vengeance, desire, bullying, marital breakdown, teenage angst and most contain elements of the supernatural. My favourite is The Pain Collector — an excellent story with intriguing characters, tenderness and tragedy, all within fifteen pages. I found this tale well paced and constructed, as well as extremely moving. Also effective is the 53-page novella at the end called The Business of Barbarians set in the 1950s in a seaside town inhabited by music-hall thespians. A conspiracy is uncovered that points to a disturbing cult with supernatural powers. The other stories in the collection have neat twists such as Rock, with its elusive ambiguity, or horrific denouements, like the four paged Unreasonable Behaviour. There are tales of witches, ghosts, haunted houses, sacrificial rites, flesh-eating spirits; and yet Maynard and Sims write their horror with a delicate fluency and a rare subtlety that makes these stories eerie yet charming. Some of the stories are less successful and do not sustain the intensity of the better ones, but overall there is real talent on show here and I look forward to seeing these two hone their undoubted skills even further.
Reviewed by Peter Tennant in The Third Alternative 32 Autumn 2002 Released in the wake of their gutsy novella The Hidden Language Of Demons, the latest collection of fifteen stories, many of which are previously unpublished, from this talented duo has a somewhat harder edge than the ‘quiet’ stories of supernatural terror on which their reputation has previously rested. The qualities you expect from Maynard & Sims are still in evidence; deft characterisation, the assured manipulation of atmosphere and mood, plots that slow burn to a chilling crescendo. Yet things have changed; the power of suggestion is no longer sufficient. The bad guys still want your soul; it’s just that they’re a lot more willing than previously to go through your flesh to get at it. Aptly titled, ‘The Business Of Barbarians’, is the longest story in the book and also the best, a masterly exercise in plot construction exposing the foulness at the heart of the theatrical world, with two innocents ensnared in a web of arcane evil. It’s a subtle piece of work, strong on character and with a more restrained approach than elsewhere. Restraint falls by the wayside in stories such as ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’, a snapshot of madness with a gut churning coup de grace, or ‘Holding Darkness Within’ in which a psychic investigator gets far more that she bargained for from a visit to a supposedly haunted house. In ‘The Nice House’, which brings to mind the ending of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, a young man discovers the horrific secret lurking in ambush behind the façade of an old people’s home, and a grief stricken girl is dogged to suicide in ‘The Pain Collector’. ‘Snow Beetles’ has a man on a foreign holiday recovering from the death of his wife, haunted by her restless spirit and, perhaps, his own feeling of guilt, the possibility that he could have done more for her, another beautifully crafted story, with a fine sense of place and mood, the Austrian setting brought to vivid life, while much of the story’s appeal lies in the ambiguity, trying to guess whose account of their marriage is the more reliable. The Jamiesian ‘Digging In The Dunes’ has amateur archaeologists unearthing an ancient artefact that causes havoc in the present day, and a similar scenario informs ‘The Humidor’, a lesson in the dangers of rooting around in attics, where you never know what you’ll find, or what might find you. ‘Beware The Beckoning Stranger’ has a psychic vampire draining off the abilities of the people around him and relishing his success as they inevitably decline. Not everything works. In ‘Names And Faces’, perhaps the most experimental story, a man visits a psychiatrist to learn the truth of his identity, but while there is some compelling imagery along the way, I found the shifts from first to third person an unnecessary distraction, while the ending is somewhat fuzzy around the edges. And ‘Warm Lies Cold Secrets’ in which a vampire and her human convert return to torment his brother is all a bit too vague, leaving too much to be surmised regarding the dynamics of this strange ménage a trios. But such stories are swimming against the tide. Incantations won’t be to everyone’s taste; in particular those who want happy, clappy horror with closure and comforting explanations for what’s taken place need not apply. The reality depicted in these stories is uncompromisingly grim, a world of pitfalls, both physical and spiritual, its metaphysical underpinnings tainted with evil, the whole infested with a random malevolence for which humans beings exist simply as cannon fodder. The people in these stories don’t deserve what happens to them, and there are no last minute saves, no holy rollers dashing to the rescue in the final reel with bell, book, and candle. Life sucks and then you die. And then your soul gets dished up as an appetiser for some ghastly spectral monstrosity.
Reviewed by Mario Guslandi for the HORRORWORLD website Am I partial to Maynard & Sims? You bet I am. But when it comes down to writing a review of one of their books this is no advantage at all for them. Because I expect only the best from Maynard & Sims, no less. So, when they produce something that I define “ordinary”, that means fiction ordinary for them but which could be easily considered “top rate” if coming from different authors. Incantations is the third collection of stories by these two fine writers: it includes 14 short stories and a novella (“The Business of Barbarians”). There are a great variety of themes, locations and atmospheres. Seven stories, in my opinion, are real standouts; the rest is “ordinary”(meaning what I explained above). To me, among the best stories are “Rock”, about an elusive companion whose lingering presence is more menacing than pleasant, “The Pain Collector”, not only one of the best titles I ever encountered, but one of the best stories I ever read, and “The Humidor”, in which a cigar box summons unspeakable horrors from the past for a couple in marital crisis. The other remarkable stories are “The Weeping Stones”, where a cold embrace from the grave reunites husband and wife for ever, “Pilgrimage To Oblivion”, a tale of modern witchcraft where a man tastes his first (and last) love experience, and “Holding Darkness Within”, a terribly frightening tale, the last three paragraphs of which are among the most horrific stuff you can find in today’s horror fiction. But, in my opinion, the real gem of the book is “Snow Beetles”, a veritable masterpiece of horror and death taking place in the beautiful scenario of the Austrian Alps. This story should be a “must” for any Year’s Best anthology (are you listening, Stephen Jones?).
One more
thing. Varied as they may be, all the stories in this collection show a
common under theme, loneliness. Some of the main characters are downright
loners, others are just forsaken people, and all are lonesome individuals.
This seems to be another lesson that Maynard & Sims want to impart: that
loneliness is the true, scariest horror in our lives. Reviewed by William P. Simmons for Cemetery Dance magazine Economical nightmares of atmospheric subtlety and stark physical horror, Incantations is appropriately titled, suggesting a raw sense of occult power and the process of summoning demonic energies into another plane of existence. Maynard and Sims conjure horrors by first establishing the believability of natural, objective places and people. Their characters are people we know and see everyday: men and women struggling through bad relationships, going to work and plodding along the best they can until, quite suddenly, their worlds are invaded by suggestions of evil, manipulative powers just outside the rim of understanding, or worse, by evils answering the summons of their minds. Although many of the author’s ghosts and demons occupy places “outside” human experience, attacking characters searching for sense of self in the ranches, ski resorts, and apartment buildings that represent the vulnerability of people we feel we know, the sense of domestic unease which Maynard and Sims so expertly evokes is strongest when malevolent powers share the motives and repressed desires of the characters which they torment. Several of the best stories in this collection explore ambiguities of self, emphasizing most particularly the theme of power transference between the weak and the powerful, the calculating and the naive, the living and the dead. In “Beware The Beckoning Stranger,” traditional folklore and modern cynicism release paradoxical images of rustic beauty and urban helplessness as a young woman fights to retain what little of her identity remains against a psychic vampire. In “The Pain Collector,” an excellent traditional ghost story (as well as a psychological character study), a young woman struggling with love loss and depleted self-appeal loses much more than her grief to a power that feeds off misery. In “Snow Beetles,” a surrealistic attack of icy imagery and calculating evil, a recently widowed husband finds himself victimized by his dead wife’s dreams, and in “Rock,” a story as simple in execution as it is high in shivers, a young professional realizes the lover he met on vacation is dead . . . and has followed him home. From the ambitiously menacing novella “The Business Of Barbarians,” to the calculating fright of “The Nice House,” Maynard and Sims revitalize the traditional thrills of haunted houses, ghosts, and witches by emphasizing the psychological turmoil of character’s minds. The result is a collection that works on several levels, appealing every bit as much to primal fears of the unknown as they do to our contemporary distrust of our neighbors, families, and ourselves. “Enjoyed Incantations. The craftsmanship was excellent, as expected, but I found almost all the stories to be very compelling reading indeed.” Gene O’Neill
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Copyright © 2008 L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims |
