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5.0 out of 5 stars
Imaginative Collection From Copper, March 17, 2011
This review is from: Whispers in the Night (Hardcover)
Whispers In the Night is the first of Basil Copper's later short story collections-- those published after a hiatus of near twenty years-- and the best, demonstrating his full range as a weird author. Like most collections this is something of a grab-bag, containing two tales, "One For the Pot" and "The Summerhouse", which do nothing for me, and another, "The Grass", which is a serviceable production of his teenage years. The remaining stories constitute the meat of this collection.
"Final Destination" illuminates a piece of historic nastiness, a subject which Copper approaches differently in the later collected tale, "The White Train". "Better Dead" pays delightfully horrid homage to the scary old movies of which the author is apparently a connoisseur, a revisitation of the theme he employs in the famous and much earlier published "Amber Print". "In a Darkling Wood" is a solid example of Copper's periodic Satanist tales, the historical setting and general plot reminiscent of his thrilling novel, The Black Death; this one marred only by a hero, Claverhouse, who is oddly slow to catch on to the evidence of evil about him, almost to the point of callousness.
Then there are the really weird tales, certain of which may stun the brain. The most conventional, comparatively speaking, is "Wish You Were Here", a long-building ghost story which attains a frightful and spectacular, if curiously unreasoned climax. Speaking of curious, what does one make of "The Obelisk"? This is one of the strangest stories I've ever read. I don't even really know what it's about, nor what is supposed to be reality and what dream. Nevertheless, it contains so many intriguing elements-- strange old book, Elizabethan aliens, mysterious and beautiful girl, seemingly incomprehensible conclusion-- that I have gone back to it many times, trying to ferret out the "truth". I confess that I need the handbook on this one. "Riding the Chariot" is another ghost story, of sorts, wrapped around a plot of nastily obsessive love, madness, and brutal vengeance.
My two favorites are the futuristic tales. "Reader, I Buried Him" is a hideous account set in a near future, in which the world falls prey to a loathsome disease. Researchers on a remote island begin to suspect that pervasive vampiric forces are at work, not only killing but conniving to cover up the truth behind the plague. The doomed narrator eventually finds the clinching evidence, but will his fellow survivors believe him? This story shares one unnecessary weakness with the author's classic novel, The Great White Space: a hero who is insanely desperate to inform mankind of approaching peril, yet who for wholly unexplained reasons himself conceals vital clues. In neither case do I understand that plot twist; it explains why the mystery has not yet been solved, without ever explaining itself. Lovecraft (whom I detect behind the scenes of both works) offers better rationales for prolonging doubt. We now come to the big one, "Out There", which surely provides all the ghastly mystery a reader can stand. In this vaguely described future world, civilization, or what remains of it, is menaced by a weirdly murky horror, the frontiers, also ill-defined, guarded by a chain of heavily armed, high-tech outposts. Our pathetic hero, Watson, is thrust into the crazily hostile, suspicious, regimented atmosphere of Station XK-24, where he haplessly endeavors to make sense of his suffocating corner of the world and the terrifying, yet entirely unknown peril beyond those two-foot thick titanium doors. The very last lines of the story eventually provide a modicum of understanding-- just-- but the majority of this one suggests a world fashioned by (or a tale written by!) a lunatic. Those who have read Copper's earlier "Shaft No. 247" will have an inkling of the inspired creepiness, in this case deliriously rammed home.
Mr. Copper is a writer who occasionally startles with the uniqueness of his imagination. There is plenty of good stuff in this collection, most of it not at all the usual fare, some of it difficult to critique for those who have not experienced it. I strongly recommend this book.
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