Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon (Solaris Books, £7.99)

 

Gary McMahon is a sick man and should be avoided at all costs.

I don’t think he’ll mind me saying that, because being a sick man is sort of McMahon’s business. The Pudsey-based writer is the author of a string of frankly disturbing novels, the latest being Beyond Here Lies Nothing. And it scared the bejabbers out of me.

I can’t think of what goes through McMahon’s head that he wants to write this stuff. But by the time I got to the end of Beyond Here Lies Nothing – which I read in a darkened room and kept glancing up at the shadows and jumping at imagined noises and scratching – I was applauding whatever madness Gary McMahon suffers from, and hoping that long may it continue.

Beyond Here Lies Nothing is the third and final book in McMahon’s Concrete Grove series, but it can easily be read as a standalone book – events in previous novels are alluded to but this is very much its own story.

The Concrete Grove is a fictional council estate somewhere in McMahon’s native Northumberland. It’s an at times rough and ready sort of place, but populated by decent people, too. McMahon’s first triumph is painting the Concrete Grove in believable strokes – there’s no middle-class Chav horror, nor any desire to search for nobility or grace among the poverty-struck. The residents of the Concrete Grove are just typically Northern council estate people, in all their various flavours.

Marc Price is a former Grove-ite, made good and left long ago to be a writer. Now he’s back, ostensibly researching an infamous case from the 1970s which was dubbed The Northumberland Poltergeist – the haunting of two young children in a flat.

But Price gets drawn into a more contemporary mystery that has links to both the poltergeist legend and the more real issue of a series of child disappearances on the Concrete Grove.

McMahon has a very nice line in modern, urban horror – the diary entries from one of the children haunted by the entity they called “Captain Clickety” in the 1970s incident are both terrifying and heartbreaking. The sudden appearance of scarecrows plastered with photographs of the missing children is chilling. And the way McMahon ratchets up the tension is the mark of a very skilled writer indeed.

The many strands of the story are brought together perfectly and McMahon offers a very satisfying conclusion to both this novel and the Concrete Grove series as a whole. If you haven’t read much contemporary British horror, then McMahon should be your starting point. I might have jokingly called him a “sick man” up top, but McMahon tackles the darkness with humanity and a keen eye for people.

And that’s very important, because as McMahon proves, real horror isn’t about monsters and ghosts, but about people, and how they cope with it.