Customer Reviews

A Shadow on the Wall

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Aycliffe's first venture into the supernatural since 1996's "The Lost" is shorter and simpler than his earlier titles but no less enjoyable. The East Anglian setting, turn-of-the-century university background and scholarly hero make it clear that he is paying tribute to M R James and that great storyteller conjured up few more terrifying images than the dessicated abbot in this novel, unknowingly released from his tomb in a remote Fenland church.

The setting, amidst the bleak, wintry Fens, is what you may remember most about this book, that and the frissons of fear as the shadow of the spectral abbot creeps closer and closer to the hero's loved ones. In Aycliffe's paranoid world, even the church can seem powerless against evil and the eventual resolution is a decidedly ambiguous one.

Recommended.

I'm reading my third Jonathan Aycliffe (who also writes as Daniel Easterman) and will be looking for more of his work. In "A Shadow on the Wall", mysterious scripture appears on a tombstone ('He shall return out of the dark'). An Anglican priest attempts to renovate a church deep in the East Anglican fens. A late-Victorian, Cambridge don is drawn into the mystery of the priest's death. This is M.R. James country, with its spectres seen through a shroud, darkly, and its hero, an unworldly scholar. If you prefer a shock-a-minute, buckets o'blood approach to horror, Aycliffe is probably not for you. If your imagination is your own worst enemy and all you require is a misplaced shadow or a scratching in the attic to keep you awake through the dark hours, read "A Shadow on the Wall" or Aycliffe's "The Talisman". This is the English, Jamesian school of horror at its best.

When Matthew Atherton, another fellow at the University, calls on Richard Asquith for help in unraveling a series of strange events at the church of Thornham St. Stephen, Richard himself plunged into a dark mystery of ancient evil. Matthew's brother Edward, while restoring the church, has opened the 14th Century tomb of William de Lindesey and has released a shadowy evil that haunts the village and is sucking the life from Edward.

The men arrive at Thornham to discover the church locked and Edward horrifyingly dead. Further events only darken the mystery, and Richard finds himself in pursuit of a shadowy affliction that haunts and destroys all the lives it touches. First attacking the villagers and the Atherton's, the evil at last turn's its eyes to those who Asquith loves and his investigation turns into a race with death and what lays beyond it. To accomplish this Asquith must unravel a horror inextricably tied up with events that occurred five hundred years earlier during the black plague.

Aycliffe, on the strength of this and several earlier novels (he also writes as Daniel Easterman) is often compared to Montague James, one of England's finest writers of ghost stories. James is one of a school of early 20th Century horror writers that included Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen. The similarity is undeniable, especially in the choice and use of plot devices. However, his choice of writing style, which is that of a novel of the 1890's, is more like that of Machen, who is my particular favorite of the group.

Arthur Machen was brilliant at descriptive narrative, setting eerie atmospheres with swift brushstrokes. Aycliffe, like Machen uses language carefully and has a fine sense of when it is more horrifying to leave something unsaid. Of course, all of Machen and James school were fine writers, and it is a deep compliment to Aycliffe's writing that he can be tarred with the same brush. With the exception of one perfectly horrible pun (an innkeeper reports that Edward dies of an 'apostolic' fit) he stays perfectly in character. I am looking forward to future novels in this vein.

It's not at all a fast-paced story, but the atmosphere is rich and foreboding throughout, and there are a lot of genuinely chilling moments. It's a ghost story with ties to religion, family, possession, and a whole host of other issues. It's definitely a psychological ghost story, as opposed to the more in-your-face, blood-and-guts variety that has become so commonplace. Even even when the most obvious instances of horror in this book transpire, there isn't any gore, which was refreshing. All in all, it's frightening and creepy, and the suspense - though it builds slowly - continues until the very last page. It's a great book for people who enjoy ghost stories without an overabundance of violence.