Are you a fan of tales off-the-charts strange and weird, tales providing a unique reading experience? If so, then A Twist in the Eye by British author Charles Wilkinson is made to order. As an added bonus, this high quality limited Egaeus Press edition features a book cover with Tondal's Vision by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch wrapping around from front to back. Actually, there’s a second bonus: also included is Mark Samuels' brief but insightful Introduction to the sixteen short stories collected herein.
And quite the stories; weird is perhaps understatement. Although set in our modern world of cars and buses, there's something downright Bosch and Bruegel medieval about the men and women and children inhabiting these pages. Additionally, since Charles Wilkinson is working within the tradition of the supernatural and fantastic, these tales have an aura of dread and puncture Nature’s fixed laws with an occasional malign needle.
Charles Wilkinson told an interviewer he was drawn to reading and writing from an early age but didn't come to the "weird" or "strange" story until later in life. By my reckoning, this makes perfect sense since the tales in A Twist in the Mind strike me as the fruit of many decades devoted to craft - the language is exact and the characters and images and atmosphere are finely drawn, a literary counterpoint to those medieval artisans working in stone or wood or metal.
Keeping to the spirit of exactitude and wishing to share a measure of the collection's rich flavor, I'll focus on three tales from A Twist in the Eye that hit me with particular force. Here goes:
LINE OF FIRE
Eerie and unsettling right from the opening scene - riding a bus, looking through a window, protagonist Stephen spots five older men staring up at the front of his house, all five wearing stone-gray raincoats from years past, men with either grey or white hair who appear to be participating a some sort of ceremony, as if waiting for something to be unveiled.
We come to learn Stephen has inherited this house from a distant cousin, a woman by the name of Miss Knull, a house he’s more than pleased to live in since he feels he has been released from his previous life on the east coast where he was cursed with having been born a Habber. Moreover, he had to speak and listen to Arnold, Ruby and Frank, three highly unpleasant people. I mention those three by name since Stephen repeats their names more than once, as if to underscore his bitterness regarding his past.
Whichever direction he turns in his current village this morning, Stephen is confronted by hostility: on his way into town to make some purchases and attend to business relating to his house, a row of ten-year-old boys sitting high up on a stone wall stare down at him, all the boys cocking their heads at precisely the same angle; a woman with a long, hard face bristles in a rude, tough way when he asks about a possible commemoration; on his return, there’s a row of birds up on the wall where the boys once sat but one of the boys is kicking a can on the street and then launches a kick at him. Stephen swings round and take this occasion to speak with the boy and is greeted by an unnerving sight: the boy’s eyes have a quality “not comprehensively human.” The boy tells Stephen that his mam says he has no right or business living in the house. Creepy, creepy - the tone of this Wilkinson tale reminds me of Thomas Ligotti's darkly sinister Vastarien and The Last Feast of Harlequin.
The hostility continues: in conference with his lawyer on the subject of Miss Knill’s property, Stephen is told things are not as straightforward as he might think since the death of his distant cousin is not entirely clear – she might be persisting as a type of energy no easily dispersed. Oh, my goodness - the reality of psychic and energy states between our customary categories of life and death infuses additional levels of the bizarre and spooky into this tale. And all combined with a special way of seeing.
Stephen is given a glimpse of how such a special way of seeing might come about when he again encounters the boys and detects each one has a left eye that's damaged. And over time, he discovers the cataract in his own left eye is beginning to thicken. From here on out, the tale twists in unexpected and freakish ways. And if you have the misfortune of being caught in the line of fire, you might find yourself sliced down the middle. No kidding. Storytelling at its finest.
NIGHT IN THE PINK HOUSE
"The day we went down to the beach, Slater insisted that his interest in torture was of a scholarly nature. He even claimed to have found a prospective publisher for his work in progress, previously entitled The Phenomenology of the Scream." Thus the narrator begins his telling with a hefty sense of foreboding.
Mark Samuels judged this as the most effective tale within the collection, a tale "which is a monstrous indictment of human cruelty, self-deception and its horrifying legacy. The Sadean amusements of its rapacious, wholly unsympathetic characters finally bleeds over into their self-contained, personal hells."
HANDS
A weird tale but a sweet tale, speaking to how Charles Wilkinson can tap into the full emotional range of the fantastic. The unnamed main character, a man living alone in his recently purchased house by the sea, rests in his favorite chair and feels at peace for the first time since the death of his dear wife. Then, suddenly, he senses something flat like the palm of a hand pressing ever so gently on the crown of his head. He jolts to his feet.
Sometime thereafter he walks to the nearby small town and questions first a barkeep and then a woman acquaintance about the previous owners of his house. Turns out, when the husband died, his heartsick wife took her own life. He also learns the wife was a New Age healer combining relaxing music and with various techniques of massage. A combination ghost story and love story – a fitting conclusion to this outstanding collection.
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