Much in The Concrete Grove reminded me of Clive Barker’s work. I don’t know if it’s a British thing, but McMahon manages, like his more famous (for now) countryman before him, to blend sensuality with horror. I’m not talking here of your usual sex and violence, rather I speak of a blurring of the line between lust and loathing, between tenderness and terror.
At its heart, The Concrete Grove is a haunted house story with strong ties to The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House and, more recently, Hell House and The Shining. Unlike its predecessors, though, McMahon’s novel features a haunted neighbourhood with a single edifice not as the source of malevolence but as its centre. And like Barker, McMahon creates here a world which is not necessarily being invaded by the spirits of the dead, but one which overlaps with another, far stranger world. Much of this other world is left unexplored and only hinted at, but this only gives one further reason to read the next book in what is to be a trilogy. Also like Barker, McMahon sets his story in an urban environment, eschewing the rural, even pastoral settings preferred by his American counterparts and linking supernatural horrors with social and economic rot.
The plot is difficult to define but, as mentioned above, it entails a single building, called The Needle by locals, which appears to be a sort of nexus for an otherworldly infection, one which is evidently centuries old and rooted in the soil upon which the Concrete Grove was constructed. It is no coincidence, thematically or narratively, that the Grove is also an urban nightmare, crime-ridden and avoided even by the police.
The characters are well drawn and linked by what might be a shared melancholy but, as the story progresses, we come to realize they may have been brought together by forces far stranger than suicide, debt and accident.
I have enjoyed those short stories of McMahon’s I have been lucky enough to stumble upon in various anthologies, including End of the Line and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20. His mastery of subtlety and ambiguity in those stories has especially impressed me and it does so in The Concrete Grove as well. The elements of horror in the novel are created through unsettling imagery rather than abject gore or violence. Even the nature or source of that horror is largely left to speculation, possibly to be revealed or expounded upon in later books. It takes a skilled and, above all, confident writer to leave so much to a reader’s imagination and, based on The Concrete Grove, McMahon’s confidence is well earned and well deserved.
I look forward to the next in the series, titled Silent Voices and available in March of 2012.
Visit Gary McMahon’s website here.
Those of you who have enjoyed the titles included on the following list are likely to enjoy The Concrete Grove. Likewise, if you have read and enjoyed The Concrete Grove, you might want to try one of these: The Books of Blood by Clive Barker; Cabal by Clive Barker; The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker; It by Stephen King; Phantoms by Dean Koontz; Keeper by Sarah Langan; Audrey’s Door by Sarah Langan
