No One Gets Out Alive (2014) by Adam Nevill: 19-year-old Stephanie has been kicked out of her house by her stepmother after the death of Stephanie's father. She did well on her 'A' levels but can't afford university. So, in a terrible English economy, she works temp jobs, feeling more and more overwhelmed.
A sign in a convenience store for a cheap apartment at least offers some economic relief, though the apartment is in the run-down Perry Bar portion of Birmingham. The landlord, who calls himself 'Knacker,' is a bit creepy but friendly. So she moves in.
Things go rapidly downhill from there. Very rapidly. The bulk of the novel takes place over ten consecutive days, exhaustively described.
No One Gets Out Alive is easy to spoil, so I won't go into much detail about what happens except to note that Nevill merges supernatural and 'normal' horror effectively in an escalatingly awful series of events. Stephanie is an engaging protagonist whose growth over the course of the novel is believable and often heart-breaking.
This time around, Nevill goes after the media as a sort of sub-plot which also rings true. The dismal house is a character in itself, described in detail so as to maximize its miserable, disintegrating qualities. Claustrophobia is a major player here, along with the narrative's emphasis on bad smells, really bad smells, and really really really bad smells as augurs and indicators of Evil, like the fruits of the Devil or at least the mephitic products of the Devil's bottom.
Knacker and co-landlord Fergal are closely observed creations, terrifying and banal, especially Knacker. One does wish, perhaps, that Nevill didn't so closely link physical appearance to morality: Fergal never seems entirely real, and gets less 'real' as the narrative builds. Sometimes too much is too much.
Nonetheless, Nevill's description of Stephanie's suffering, and her reactions to that suffering, never cross the line into exploitation. Though it does feel at points as if the reader is being crushed by events, wrung out. One admires the skill, but one does not necessarily want to read about a character who suffers this much for this many pages for awhile after completing No One Gets Out Alive. Like maybe a year or two. Highly recommended.
The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane (2006): containing the following stories: The Lost District (2001); The Pain Barrier (1994); The Bootleg Heart (2000); Scratch (1996); Coming of Age (2003); Mine (2006); Prison Ships (1998); Like Shattered Stone (1994); Among the Dead (2005); The Window (2001); The Quiet Hours (2006); Exposure (2001); The Outside World (1995); The Country of Glass (1998); The Night That Wins (2005); Against My Ruins (2004); The Only Game (2006); Contract Bridge (1996); Beyond the River (2004); The Plans They Made (1997); The Drowned (2002); Reservoir (2006); An Unknown Past (2002); and You Could Have It All (2006).
The late Joel Lane, gone too soon at the age of 50 in 2013, was one of a handful of horror's finest modern short-story writers. Many of his stories were set in and around Birmingham, England. These stories presented a bleak, nightmarish, and very human universe of the lost and disconnected, generally trying to reconnect to something through sex, drugs, or alcohol.
And Lane really could be a short-story writer with the accent firmly on 'short' -- The Lost District and Other Stories brings together 26 stories in less than 200 pages. That's a lot of stories. Gratifyingly, none of the stories are hyper-short 'Flash Fiction,' and none of them are fragments or unfinished-feeling vignettes. They are actually stories, though often with equivocal endings.
Lane often deals with body horror, though generally in a subdued manner. When he does move into the graphically grotesque, as in "Coming of Age," the results are extremely disturbing given his general reticence when it comes to graphic violence. Otherwise, the horror and the weird intrude on the world in more muted ways, often leading to a final stinger of sentence.
In some cases, as in the title story, horror itself remains almost hidden. "The Lost District" could just be a standard-issue remembrance of things past. But if so, why the disquieting background of decaying Birmingham? And why the feeling that the civic 'renewal' that 'loses' that old district is some sort of malign, organic urban process and not simply a case of bureaucratic planning?
There's more than a hint of Ramsey Campbell in Lane's focus on urban and suburban English horrors, but there's also a more inchoate, almost miasmic sense of decay that recalls early J.G. Ballard in its emphasis on unexplained, gestating decay. Striking stories of disquiet, beautifully and sparsely told. Highly recommended.
