The moral right of Gary McMahon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION

NATHAN BALLINGRUD

Gary McMahon works. There is no pretension about the man. He does not grandstand, he does not wheedle for attention, he does not align himself with movements or spearhead publicity campaigns. He’s a writer, and he does the work of writing. In our Age of the Narcissist, this is something of a miracle. There’s a hint of stoicism about it, and more than just a glimmer of the Puritan work ethic. This contributes to his prodigious output, certainly, but more importantly it informs the nature of the work itself. At least it seems so to me, observing this work from my vantage point across the Atlantic Ocean. The protagonists of McMahon’s stories tend to embody the same principles. They are mostly working class people. Underlying the intrusions of the supernatural are the pedestrian horrors of their everyday lives. They don’t have the luxury of flight. They simply have to tuck their heads down and get on with it.

The proximity of poverty; the constant drumbeat of personal and psychological loss; the suppressed rage percolating beneath the skin, until it seems the only sane response to the world is to meet it with bloodshed — these comprise the substratum for McMahon’s stories, and whatever ghostly trespasses might lie in store for the characters, you can be sure they will either augment the fear already in place, or they will provide a strange and morbid relief. Let others fret over horrors from the stars; for writers like McMahon, there are depths enough in the black reaches of our own hearts.

The Grieving Stones, t
he novella which gathers us here now, is McMahon at the top of his game. He throws all of his own favourite themes into the pot, adding influences from other horror traditions, producing a work that manages to be as humane and tender as it is genuinely chilling.

Alice, our protagonist, is a widow coming to terms with her husband’s recent death. She has joined — somewhat grudgingly — a community support group; she attends regularly, but does not participate, choosing to draw what comfort she can from listening. The group is run by Clive, and it’s when we meet him for the first time that we get one of our first true glimpses of McMahon’s empathy and kindness as a writer. Listen to how he describes a delicate, fragile emotion for which we do not yet have a word:

“As she watched Clive coming towards her, she felt a strange pang of something she could only describe as regret. She didn’t understand the feeling, and let it slide by, but knew that she might have to examine it at a later date. It was like an emotional echo of a chance not taken, or a door not opened. She supposed that it was a form of guilt she was experiencing over thinking about his good looks when her husband was dead.”

If you didn’t already know McMahon’s writing, this would be a clear marker that you have something more than just a paint-by-numbers penny dreadful in your hands. You have something human.

Something alive.

And
The Grieving Stones
is crawling with life, in more ways than one.

Clive takes a few select members of his support group to an out of the way cabin for a long weekend of work therapy. (Here is this theme of work; if healing is going to be had, Clive maintains, honest labour will help bring it about.) A small distance from the cabin is the eponymous cluster of standing stones, which provides the cabin with its name: Grief House.

From here the story plays out in a series of surprising and unsettling reveals, paying homage to touchstones like Shirley Jackson’s
Haunting of Hill House
and Richard Matheson’s
Hell House
, and to the British folk horror tradition commonly treated by Arthur Machen and Ramsey Campbell. McMahon takes these strands and makes of them something entirely his own, however, melding keen psychological insight and empathy for the emotionally wounded with an artisan’s confident hand at conjuring spooks that M.R. James himself would envy.

(The Backwards Girl gave me a genuine chill — something that doesn’t happen often to a jaded horror reader — and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I actually laughed aloud with happiness because of it.)

In a McMahon story, the monstrous is as complex and mysterious as the human. Nothing is simple. There are no stark contrasts between hero and villain, if those roles exist at all. There are only gray shadows. Rocks and mannequins, ghosts and witches, even whole houses, all occupy a liminal space between the natural and the supernatural, between right and wrong, trading characteristics and slipping sideways through dreams, until the revelations — when they come — are an eruption of glorious strangeness. They disorient and reorient, reshaping our understanding of the world. Alice is in a liminal place too, and she is uniquely positioned to understand what Grief House has to tell her.

“She walked out of the room to join the others, wishing that none of them was here, that she was all alone in this house of wonders.”

That the monstrous is presented with an aura of wonder about it is one of the true joys of this story. There are equal parts beauty and horror, equal parts revelation and desecration. It might be the undoing of them all, or it might be the hinge upon which one might redefine a life which has come uncoupled from its meaning.

For years, Gary McMahon has been building a consistently excellent, socially relevant body of work, the equal of anyone else working in the field today.
The Concrete Grove
trilogy,
The Bones of You
, the Thomas Usher books, all the short stories and novellas published in collections or individually in chapbooks — they all work together to form a sustained exploration of the horror of modern urban life.

He works, in my opinion, without his due of recognition. One day, some canny publisher will gather these stories and novellas, maybe a short novel or two, into one fat compendium, and the audacity of this lifetime project will be made clear to all. Until that time, though, discerning readers will have to be alert to the vibrant small press scene, snapping them up whenever they appear.

Pandering to fashion usually wins out over complexity in the short term, but I’m a believer in the unsentimental eye of posterity. Gary McMahon is one of the finest horror writers of our time, and he will have his day. When that day comes,
The Grieving Stones
will be reckoned among the best of his outstanding body of work.

Nathan Ballingrud

November 30, 2015

Asheville, NC

THE GRIEVING STONES

Gary McMahon

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

The Yellow Wallpaper

–
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

PART ONE

GETTING THERE

CHAPTER ONE