Customer Reviews

Twists in the Tale (Psychological Suspense, the Supernatural and Ghosts S.)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although there is a very creepy underlying macabre twist hidden until the last in most of these stories, what I found refreshing was the way it was used to pinpoint what had gone wrong in ordinary people's lives when unpredictable events had begun to topple them into dysfunctional relationships with others. Some of the stories are really quite poignant. I'm thinking of the very obese Barry the barber, described as a "Sumo wrestler who'd lost his wrestle" and who becomes humiliated by youths who wander past his shop down a narrow cobbled street in London to spray his windows with graffiti that questions his being impotent because too fat to perform. At first this didn't sound like bedside reading to me but it was actually described in a very individual way which made it moving.

Similarly, Bernie's widow, Emily, tries all sorts of ploys to convince herself that her late husband isn't really dead and she's madly determined to "reach out" in one way or another - which way, is what makes the storyline so mysterious and crept me out. This is in "The Parchment Recipes" where the skin-like feel of the centuries old handwritten recipe book she has found in her attic seems to give the impression that the book is changing in some way and has a life of its own. Although the idea is zany, again its the way the macabre, a bit like in Hitchcock, helps to bring out an individual's vulnerability and the hope that there will be another 'twist' which brings the victim a chance of something better in her life that made this worth 4 and possibly 5 stars.

If you don't mind an author who obviously enjoys playing with language and you're occasionally prepared to re-read a passage for the layers of meaning, then Twists in the Tale delivers the thrill of the unexpected and, I thought, without falling into the contrived.
I felt I lived alongside the characters in each story and it was this that made each narrative its own little world, chilling but therefore a welcome escape from the daily 9 am to 5 pm.
The main character, victim or predator, is not easy to forget and drives each story. I wouldn't want to meet most of the characters on a dark night and certainly not down a narrow alley but it's true to say they're all very memorable. Even the smooth and sophisticated Dr Hardacre, as his innocent patient Nurse Miranda can testify, is not the person you want to meet again, particularly not if you're laid on your back on the Harley Street hypnotist's couch in London, as in "Voices of a Hypnotist".

The romance at the end of these stories which is the novella "A Face in a Corridor" traces the relationship between a teacher, reduced to paranoia by his inner-city streetwise students, and the girl student who he sees as his 'passport' to those he fears are gathering with a hunting knife. The knife-edge trauma, if you'll forgive the poor pun, is nicely contrasted by the real tenderness the author explores between the older man and the teenage girl who, herself is not from the same middle-class educated background as himself.

Coming as it does after all the stories, which themselves are certainly full of mischievous twists by the author, I found the romance just what was needed to make a satisfying whole to this book.
The ebook being at just $1.17 has to be a real steal.

Mister Kreasey's Demon

The two octogenarian piano tuners, 'Hubbald and Bros' show Nickford's mischievous slant on the belief that generous old men are endearing. Nickford's trick seems to be that they 'appear' every bit endearing but are entirely sinister in offering the free gift of a Steinway to the rather nice customer who, he is told, is their 'favourite'. The two old brothers are very subtly built up until we begin to wonder whether the crematorium in their old chapel workshop is really still defunct or whether it can still be made to operate.

Father's Helping Hand is a good example of the fiendish way this author creates characters who are rarely what they seem.

In other stories we move from the vulnerable to the predatory, the spider-phobic to the agraphobic, the obese barber who is mortified more by his loss of self image than by the hoodlums who torment him for his inability with women, and then to the story in which wife, Emily, who 'reaches out' as best she can to the memory of her deceased husband, Berny, with the aid of a parchment recipe book, notices that the pages feel peculiarly like dead skin.

It's a good job you can read this as a cheap ebook on your PC by downloading the free KindleForPC reader or on a Kindle reader, because you might wonder what the pages were made of, if you bought the paperback.

I'm not generally persuaded by ghost stories and to be fair only three of the stories actually imply some form of the supernatural but it's likely fair to say that these stories are unique, because of the way the author hints at ghosts without getting in to bed with them, so to speak.

When Emily tries to "reach out" to her dead husband, Berny, in The Parchment Recipes, we don't see or have implied an apparition yet there is an overwhelming sense of presence and definitely a convincing handling of the idea that spirits can - through one psychology or another - tenuously connect. Although Nickford is a condensed writer, economical with back story, I agree with Barbara Erskine's comment and, like her, these stories did "make me want to keep reading".

The stuttering teenage Eddy in the second story, Family Tree, was for me enough confirmation that the descriptive tags given for the book were about right: "Psychological suspense, mystery, romance, atmosphere, travel, literary, character, music, ghosts".

I thought I'd read the ebook version first, and if I liked it, make the paperback a Christmas present because Christmas and dark evenings seem a time for mystery, atmosphere and ghosts. The book passed on all counts except two but this is probably just personal preference. I like to ramble through my books and tend to go for narratives with perhaps five hundred plus pages so I can live with the scenes and characters.

The book succeeded in this but is in places is in a rather condensed style. Yes, this gives it pace and kept it tense but in places it was almost too tense. Perhaps the word is disturbing. But then the stories are as described in the notes powerful without being gratuitous, even though some have their macabre moments.

My only other point is that to appreciate the story about A Musical Calling where the poor schizo, Sam Baldock, thinks he's called to Vienna by the spirit of Beethoven, I felt you need to know something about Beethoven to fully appreciate the storyline. This said, Raymond Nickford has obviously done plenty of research and others would probably find that the author supplies the background anyway.

Well, having found the ebook a bargain, I'm going to make the paperback an Xmas pressie, so I suppose that's a fair verdict.

Mister Kreasey's Demon

After reading two of the stories I felt this was a book I could recommend to any who might like Roald Dahl but perhaps not for say under eighteens - though personally I would have sneaked it under my pillow and enjoyed it earlier than that.

The author has got a really individual way of spinning a yarn so that you don't know you're bound up in a yarn until the end and then the 'twists' are what lend each story its impact. I found the two weird old boys Hubbald and Bros, the plus 80 year old brothers with their eerie and damp converted chapel workshop one of the most memorable. If anybody ever offers me a Steinway piano for free and invites me to chapel full of piano's opened up like butchers cattle, I don't care how chummy and quaint they seem over their tea and cakes, I' not putting a foot in the building - specially if the streets around are silent and poorly lit.

Some of the writing is a bit literary and occasionally I had to stop but then I saw layers of meaning beneath the surface. Apart from two, for me, the other stories were brilliant and the main characters
haunting.

With the exception of the romance " A Face in a Corridor," which is a small novel or novella at the end of these collected stories, each is like a vignette or portrait so that you might forget a detail of location or story but you can't quite forget the main characters.

This is true whether the character is the deluded and pitiable schizophrenic Sam Baldock, who believes he hears the voice of Beethoven and has to be escorted, for his own sanity, to the 'Beethoven Wohnung, Museen de Stadt Wien' Beethoven museum in Vienna), or whether the character is the more stable nurse Miranda in Voices of a Hypnotist who is nevertheless unforgettable for her pleasant naivety and vulnerability in the hands of the less than professional hypnotist in London's elite Harley Street.

It would be difficult to find any comparison to other stories as each is indeed quite unique but you are drawn in by a combination of plausible detail and sheer 'what if...' events had taken a turn or "twist" like those Nickford conjures. Sometimes you know you're in a story instead of a real world and yet I can say Nickford always seems to weave a web of detail and incidents which, like a kind of anaesthetic, carries you away without your feeling the needle.

The stuttering and hapless Eddy Glossop is unforgettable because, despite his impediment, and being aware that he's something of a liability to his father, after the death of the teenage boy's mother, he's perceived so minutely it's the poignancy of the story that hit me. This one did smack a little of Stephen King and not Nickford's more literary style but then that was probably a bonus.

When you've finished one of these stories it's almost as if you want to have a space before the next as each resonates so much that you are left thinking of the characters in one before you're introduced to those in the next story. This isn't a criticism as such but it's just like saying don't have two big slices of Christmas cake in case the two disagree with you.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that, like others of Nickford's novels I've read - perhaps most like his "A Child from the Wishing Well" - the character's are put so much under the microscope that you don't easily forget them and they tend to live with you after you've put the book down.

His style is very visual. In "The Parchment Recipes" and "Father's Helping Hand" you're creeped out by the portraits of some very eerie characters who are so fully rounded that it's like that feeling when you come out of a film like Schindler's List - except that Nickford's stories are, generally, much lighter, sunnier and perhaps more uplifting than SL.

Even so, there is something very cinematic about his style when he's writing stories, not that this is absent from his novels but, as I mentioned, each story is a vignette, condensed and unforgettable in so far as the characters are ruthlessly perceived and the visual images/atmosphere hard to forget.

A Child from the Wishing Well

Some of the stories have a cosy fireside start to them but this is probably what makes the sinister the more powerful when the narrative drifts into the spine-chilling twists.
What the two outwardly endearing old boys do in the supposedly disused crematorium at the back of the old chapel they rent to repair piano's is as fiendishly contrived as a Hitchcock film but in miniature. In 'The Parchment Recipes', the covers of the book have a creeping similarity to the feel of dried skin but in following the sixteenth century recipes written out in freehand, Emily is able to 'reach out' to her lost husband's spirit, almost as if she is actually touching him.
At first I was contented simply to be absorbed into the unique eeriness that this author achieves but, leaving aside some minor irritation with the literary focus of the writing, I found myself moved in a way that was refreshingly new and memorable.

If you don't mind an author who obviously enjoys playing with language and you're prepared to occasionally re-read a passage for the layers of meaning, then Twists in the Tale delivers the thrill of the unexpected and, I thought, without falling into the contrived.
I could live with the characters and not easily forget them, even though they're not all the type you'd like to meet on a dark night down a narrow alley or, for that matter, on a Harley Street hypnotist's couch in London, as in "Voices of a Hypnotist".
On the whole, short on gore but a quality read.
Hints of Hitchcock in Nickford's style, each story being a mischievous but satisfying "twist" as the title promises.