James Cooper's first collection, You Are the Fly was released in 2007 to considerable acclaim. His second, from Atomic Fez Publishing, is strongly influenced by TTA Press; several stories appeared in Black Static, Christopher Fowler wrote the introduction, and the cover is by David Gentry, who provided the magazine's artwork for it's first dozen issues.
The Beautiful Red contains a dozen stories that can be broken down into three broad groups. The first are the four flash-horror pieces, all but one of which is original; the second are the reprints from Black Static, which take up half the book's length; and a rump of mixed original and reprints. Through all the stories run images of impending death, damaged children, broken families and corruption, forming the thematic threads articulating the book's skeleton.
Flash Fiction
The opening story, 'The Good Book' is a hallucinatory piece of flash in which the titular text (perhaps a sly allusion to the Bible) becomes inscribed on the flesh of its reader, and despite its brevity, effectively lays the foundations of the stories that follow.
But not all this group work so well; in 'F001/01' a killer prepares to die, having written a cryptic suicide note bearing only the story's title: When I change, I adopt a behaviour pattern known as F001. A threshing of the cortex; an inexplicable impulse that darts along the brain....
'Learning To Live In A Pretty Little Town' is barely longer than it's title, and comprises two disparate images which if linked at all, are only in the context of that phrase. 'In Each Dark Body There Lies' seems to be the various aspects of the serial killer made manifest, perhaps from his victims.
But in the majority of cases, flash horror doesn't work particularly well as a story, simply because dark fantasy relies on characterization and, if not sympathy, at least empathy for the character's situation. Which raises the question, what is Cooper's purpose in writing them? Could it be that rather than writing stand-alone stories, he is providing facets of an over-arching text?
Black Static Stories
The second and longest group of stories are those which first appeared in Black Static and could be seen as forming the book's spine. 'There’s Something Wrong with Pappy' is one of the best in the book, improving with each re-reading. A man whose wife has died from a drugs overdose strides out across the moors every night to visit another house, watched by his children. His daughter makes a model of the house and its mysterious inhabitents, who are clearly doppelgangers, while the focus of the story zooms in and out of the intimate.
The next story is the longest of all; in 'Eight Small Men' two middle-aged brothers meet again the couple and their teenage son who took them in twenty-five years before. But rather than kindness, the boys endured abuse, only heightened by a moment of kindness that went unremarked. Hints of what might have been only highlights the cruelty of the brother's mutual and singular torment.
'Because Your Blood Is Darker Than Mine' returns to the themes of damaged children and family secrets; it's one of the weaker stories but still worth re-reading.
Cooper closes the book with 'My Secret Children,' in which, as the original review of Black Static 13 notes the adolescent son of a widowed single parent cuts out pictures of missing children and decapitates action men, writing the names of the children on the action men's foreheads, while his father takes him to dog fights. The pair's mental state provides a far more disturbing atmosphere than any out-and-out horror.
True enough. But though this is the concluding story in the book, there is a third group, most of which concern writers, which may illuminate the author's purpose.
The Humdrumming Book of Horror
Written in collaboration with Andrew Jury, 'The Hack' is taken from The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror, and it begins more conventionally than any of the other stories, with a man renting an apartment in a house that reverberates to the sound of a typewriter. But as the new tenant becomes ever more fascinated with the incessant pounding of keys, so the story starts to dog-leg in unexpected directions. It's hugely enjoyable, and quite atypical of the rest of the book (which may be Jury's influence) while still fitting thematically.
From Postrscripts comes 'The Family Face:' a writer seeking a week or so of solitude to jump-start his stalled manuscript rents a cottage in the remote countryside. En route he encounters a family of fruit-pickers with a sideline in carving wooden dolls with startingly exact features. Later he encounters a boy with white eyes disembowelling a bird. From this point on the story descends into ever-deeper darkness made worse by the relentless inevitability of its denouement. Like all Cooper's best work, there is something fairytale-like about the story.
'We Are the Pigs' (written in collaboration with Alastair Mowbray) is a curious piece of meta-writing about a crash caused by five gowned women lying in a road, framed by 'discussions' between the authors about the story itself, and about horror cliches. It's funny at times, and the imagery is truly startling, but the story descends into cliche at the end, and ignores the central issue of why the group behave as they do, which the framing makes more important than usual.
In 'Albion' a traveller passing through an ordinary town provides the framework for a series of vignettes: the widower living in chaos while gazing at his black-and-white photo album; the abusive father who makes his children shelter in the cellar; the beaten boy hiding the book that is his only form of resistance; together they form a gestalt of suburban misery.
And perhaps these stories as a whole form a gestalt of a book, which may explain the flash fictions. Certainly, while it is less than a novel, The Beautiful Red is more than the sum of of its individual stories, and forms an impressive collection which will only add to a reputation that continues to grow.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
