Review: Beneath the Surface by Simon Strantzas

All writers seek to plunge readers into their pages, gently coating them with a psychic grease that clings and drips its residue well after the books are re-shelved. Then there are authors like Simon Strantzas, whose stories are more like a suffocating tar, cocooning readers in a thick blackness certain to contaminate and continually affect the desiccated soul within. His first true debut, Cold to the Touch, already worked its black magic in this way. Now, Beneath the Surface, a previously rare short story collection, is poised to do the same thanks to a reprint by Dark Regions Press.

This book rounds up fourteen tales exploring familiar Strantzean underpinnings from new angles, but flails its tendrils differently than in Cold to the Touch. As in the other collection, these stories deal with bulging human dams who need only a slight provocation from the supernatural to unleash their melancholy contents. Here, however, the flavor of the gruesome sap that washes over us is infused with aftertastes owing more to H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti than to Robert Aickman. Cold to the Touch also saw stories set in far flung locales, while Beneath the Surface witnesses its terrible enlightenments occurring in strictly urban settings. Strantzas' city, possibly based on Toronto, is an epicenter for the gruesome, the degenerate, and the occult in this collection.

Take the book's opener, “A Shadow in God's Eye,” for instance. A faith seeker has his natural sight cruelly stripped away, only to gain insight into an unsuspected manifestation of the almighty holding dominion over this world. Strantzas' monstrosity is an original secret revealed, and effectively communicates the bleak despair within so much of his work. It is “The Constant Encroaching of a Tumultuous Sea,” though, that lays bare the urban terror aesthetic. It may take a saunter through a mass grave to convince the story's narrator that he has made a serious error by coming to the city, but what better way to reveal the unmistakable foulness of a metropolis functioning like a tomb for all its inhabitants?

“Off the Hook” is the finest example of the vicious knowledge concealed in assuming cities, and a serious contender for best story in Beneath the Surface. A librarian encounters a mysterious notebook, and then begins receiving strange phone calls from a garbled voice bringing some chilling news. This is serious philosophical horror. It posits quasi-theological possibilities truly unsettling to contemplate. The uncertainty clouding the story is as chilling as its outright conjectures. Another story, “The Autumnal City,” rests on dark ambiguity of another kind. A man in a tarnished city, oppressed with a borderline dystopian air and its eternal decay, seeks his salvation in a pale, wandering girl. Strantzas' prose excels in this piece, flexing his stylistic powers with imagery rooted in seasonal degeneration.

While urban horror writhes within nearly every story, several mix it with strong, unabashed Ligottian elements. In “You Are Here,” Strantzas guides readers into an underworld seething with dereliction and populated by mannequins. It quickly becomes apparent that the dolls have a bizarre connection with the urban explorer, sweeping him into fate's grasp. Mannequins crop up again in “Thoughtless,” where a woman undergoes a psychological experiment conducive to piercing reality's many disguises. Simon Strantzas seems to share Thomas Ligotti's obsession with a sham world, where the day to day splendors and terrors are mere trapping for an overwhelming existential blackness – the true form hiding beneath many costumes. “Behind Glass” echoes Ligotti's corporate horror. A wage slave finds much more to deal with than crabby co-workers and pompous supervisors after his company undergoes restructuring. Strantzas manages to put an original spin on a niche within weird fiction that's beginning to grow crowded. His shadowy office and aloof drones conceal a nastier secret, one on par with other workplace demons summoned by Thomas Ligotti and Mark Samuels.

Beneath the Surface is a predecessor to Cold to the Touch, and thus features labors born by Strantzas' earliest dark imaginings. Many tales are shorter than those found in the other collection. Most of the time, this causes no problem, as Strantzas is a gifted practitioner of the weird, with a proven ability to dispense his horrors dose-by-dose or in one painful blow. A couple stories, however, fail to satisfy with the three three dimensional depth seen in most works. “More to Learn” sees a researcher straining to free himself from a nauseating parasite. While capably written, it lacks the emotional and intellectual body slam Strantzas has rapidly become known for delivering. The same can be said for “Leather, Dark and Cold,” where an ominous tome haunts a college student into adulthood.

Fortunately, these stories are brief, minor imperfections in a collection filled with brilliant continuations of the horror enjoyed in Cold to the Touch. The most polished tales are often the more Lovecraftian as well. Just look at “A Thing of Love,” where an introverted writer tormented by his mother's death receives a curious package that transforms everything. This story's horror is also a dilemma: is it the writer's nightmarish transition that is the true horror, or is it the grotesque creature that has captured his heart? “In the Air” is a beautifully written rendezvous between the Lovecraftian and the Aickmanesque, skillfully married by Strantzas' drama about a wife and sister mourning a dead pilot.

Other tales seep unparalleled woe and wonderment tinged with cosmic horror. “The Wound So Deep” aptly completes the parasite stories contained in this book, as a bullied office worker is possessed by a tentacled growth that enables him to pursue his tarnished dreams by other means. A near apocalypse plays itself out in “Drowned Deep Inside of Me.” Another isolated misanthrope suffers through a blanket of suffocating blackness, inside and out, when the world inexplicably darkens at mid day and he is forced to comfort a neighbor and her young daughter. Both stories are symptomatic of the deeply human spirit embedded in Strantzas' oeuvre, and see a glimmer of hope, or at least relief, from strange quarters for the bitter parties involved.

Unlike many other books, where authors intentionally keep their secretive mystique tightly guarded like professional magicians, Beneath the Surface concludes with Strantzas' illuminating afterward. Rather than a full expose, the afterward is a road map to the fiction and an interesting look at his creative process. Anyone who has ever worshiped at the altars of Lovecraft and Ligotti should get their hands on this book. So should wild eyed seekers after cerebral weird horror. Sampling this affordable and accessible collection now is a fantastic introduction to Simon Strantzas, and a twisted bridge to his forthcoming collection, Nightingale Songs.

-Grim Blogger

Review: Beneath the Surface by Simon Strantzas

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Dark Regions Press Offers Two Rarities by Strantzas and Gavin

Dark Regions Press is on the march. Last month, the horror publisher began offering a reprint of Richard Gavin's Charnel Wine, and soon followed this up with a new edition of Beneath the Surface by Simon Strantzas. Both books only enjoyed limited readership in their previous incarnations, so Dark Regions has done the weird fiction community a favor by making expanded material from these rising authors available again. The books were initially released in very limited, deluxe quality hardcovers, and these are set to be followed up wider and more affordable appearances in paperback.

Strantzas and Gavin are known for artfully weaving echoes of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, and H.P. Lovecraft into tapestries dominated by their original voices. The reprinting of their earlier collections closely dovetails an expansion in popularity and critical opinion for their work. It also marks an exceptionally fast turn around for making out-of-print fiction accessible once again, a trend one hopes to see continue in the weird genre, where many years may go by with no reasonable way to acquire an author's best products.

-Grim Blogger

Dark Regions Press Offers Two Rarities by Strantzas and Gavin

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Weird Fiction Holiday Reading at Toronto's The Central

Two upstart weird writers of note, Simon Strantzas and Richard Gavin, will be conducing holiday readings of their respective works at Toronto's The Central next month. The evening should provide an extra chill as the cold grip of winter sets in amid the eerie blanket that ordinarily clings to holidays set in the dead of winter. Full details are available here:

A Ghost Story for Christmas
Spectral Hauntings for the Holidays

Date: Sunday, December 27, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm
Location: The Central, 603 Markham Street, Toronto.

A night of frightful original fiction read by the city's finest authors, including:

Richard Gavin, author of "The Darkly Splendid Realm"
Ian Rogers, author of "Temporary Monsters"
Simon Strantzas, author of "Cold to the Touch"
"Apparitions" editor Michael Kelly, and contributor Michael Colangelo

Doors open at 7:30PM, readings begin at 8:00PM.

-Grim Blogger

Weird Fiction Holiday Reading at Toronto's The Central

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Simon Strantzas' Cold to the Touch Reviewed

Simon Strantzas is a still looked on as a relative newcomer to the world of weird literature, but he has built high expectations for his stories. Fortunately, his latest collection, Cold to the Touch from Tartarus Press, goes beyond the rumors and the previous standards set, the comparisons and the anticipations, to arrive at an honest and promising representation of his work. In all fairness, Strantzas' Cold to the Touch must be considered his true debut collection, after his first book, Beneath the Surface, escaped the attention of many readers due to the unfortunate demise of Humdrumming Press. Perhaps this is for the better, as Cold to the Touch presents thirteen very polished pieces free from the stylistic groping and unbalanced themes that sometimes taint early collections by weird writers.

In this collection, Strantzas guides us through a world of surreal ugliness, where hope glimmers just long enough to be blotted out by a greater blackness, and the only escape from that darkness--when it appears at all--comes in salvations that are eerily vague, questionable, and definitely strange. In these tales, readers will hear the echoes of Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, but only from inside the steady voice of a different creature named Simon Strantzas. Still, this is not a writer clawing through the shadows of his predecessors and contemporaries, but one who has emerged as his own literary entity.

Cold to the Touch opens with "Under the Overpass," a strong tale about childhood cruelty and the lifelong footprints of psychological torment left in the wake of one senseless act. Without giving too much away, our viewpoint character experiences a coming of age that is distorted and feeble, never completely blossoming in every sense one knows when thinking about coming of ages. When he revisits the site of his childhood trauma, he finds paranoid reminders of the past, and a cocktail of emotions possibly more deadly unchained than suppressed. The story showcases Strantzas' talents for placing fairly realistic characters in strange settings. Readers come to know their pain and their feelings in an intimate way as they pass through less tangible, irrational shadows: a stylistic feature distinguishing this author from others like Ligotti and Lovecraft.

Later stories in the book such as "The Uninvited Guest," "The Other Village," "A Chorus of Yesterdays," and "Poor Stephanie" place similarly well portrayed characters in incredibly mysterious situations. Each contains an Aickmanesque sense of strangeness, but also border very close to the almost too confounding happenings represented by Aickman. However, Strantzas' talent for weaving this deep mystery with different sized doses of the supernatural is seen in these tales. The grotesque and unnaturally symbolic arrival of a spectral stranger in "The Uninvited Guest" contrasts with the shocking appearance of an...(ahem) "over protective" uncle in "Poor Stephanie," where a supernatural component more horrible than the cold reality served up in this story seems unlikely.

A different current runs through still other stories. Here, the sympathetic, pitiful, and wretched characters of Strantzas' worlds wander into bleak, modern settings reminiscent of Thomas Ligotti. "A Seen on Barren Ground" is a blatant nod to Ligotti's influence. References to puppets, a decrepit festival, and even gas station carnivals are alive in this story, where a tortured woman who has recently miscarried a child seeks relief from an old woman with a particularly odd ability. A character named "Tom" even shows up, though it does not appear to be a fictionalized representation of Ligotti himself (if so, it would be the first I am aware of). The story reflects familiar Ligottian themes, flickering shards of horrors from Ligotti stories like "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," "The Bungalow House," and "Gas Station Carnivals." It has a predictably bleak, but excellent ending that wraps up a homage by Strantzas to his literary predecessor, while proving he can comfortably work with the imagery and ideas of others on his own terms.

The stories "Writing on the Wall, "Here's to the Good Life," and "Fading Light" also recall Ligotti in more subtle ways. These are odd urban tales that take readers deep into the seedy urban vistas usually in the backdrop of Ligotti's work. Dark discoveries, awkward relationships, and terrible ailments cause the characters of these pieces to rush through haunted foreign alleys and appalling restrooms. Instead of the corporate horror found in these places in the words of Ligotti and Mark Samuels, Strantzas' characters find horrors of the self nearly equivalent to the visible frights lurking in the greasy bars and shoddy apartments. This is quite an accomplishment when one learns what creeps out of one's body--or into it--in "Here's to the Good Life" and "Fading Light."

Further stories in Cold to the Touch more effectively evade traceable literary influences and provide longer samples of Strantzas' skills. "The Sweetest Song" slams the prominent sense of mystery and alienation in aforementioned stories together to produce a stirring work of sad, bizarre, and mildly erotic horror. An unusual dance through the ballrooms of death and marital love animates every character, as the near hermit Cecil attempts to unravel the painful death of his wife, the unwelcome marriage of his nephew, and a myriad of strange events involving a flock of birds. Death, love, and ghostly partnership sketch a different story in "Like Falling Snow," where Strantzas introduces a dying woman cataloging her last days in a hospice. This story contains the only thing close to a happy ending in this collection, though the seemingly apparent migration of consciousness segregates this happiness from its normal meaning.

Strantzas is a Canadian writer, and two stories see the convincing usage of his nation's unique terrain and climate to stir chills. "Cold to the Touch," the title story of this collection, follows a science expedition to Canada's northern wastelands. Unlike H.P. Lovecraft's own strange story in the arctic, "At the Mountains of Madness," Strantzas' offering focuses on spiritual questions and frigid inner isolation rather than exterior scientific realism. Similarly, the punishing, otherworldly winds that bring havoc at a forest cabin in "Pinholes in Black Muslin" are one more problem to deal with for a viewpoint character already falling prey to his inner demons and soul killing weaknesses. Strantzas' Nature is a fearful catalyst that enlivens emotional furies rather than exorcises them, a nice opposition to the more elegant portrayals of nature by earlier weird writers like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.

Cold to the Touch is a formidable gift to the field of weird literature so full of diverse strangeness and mystery that it demands readers return to its pages in the days, weeks, months, and years after one has turned all its pages for the first time. In his Afterword, Simon Strantzas indicates a desire to coax readers into a dark nightmare they may never fully escape from. If this is the objective, it has been met in this collection that offers a fistful of bitter pills coated with different flavors of artistic weirdness. It also seems determined to mark the permanent addition of an important name to the newest circle of weird literature, a dangerously energetic writer who delights in filling other minds with his icy emotions and curious terrors.

-Grim Blogger

Simon Strantzas' Cold to the Touch Reviewed

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A Look at "Cold to the Touch" and Simon Strantzas

Simon Strantzas is not a very well known author of weird fiction right now, but that should soon be changing. Before the year is out, his second collection of short fiction entitled Cold to the Touch will hit the shelves and virtual book stands, bound by the skilled hands of Tartarus Press, providing aficionados of the weird the chance to examine his work. His first collection, Beneath the Surface, gained excellent reviews from fans of established "New Weird" leaders like Thomas Ligotti. Peers in the field of weird literature also responded favorably, as in this more notable review of his first collection by longtime spinner of strange strange stories, D.F. Lewis.

Despite reading a couple tales by Strantzas, I made the rare blunder of not buying Beneath the Surface before its limited print run was exhausted. As the years to come will likely prove, this was a serious mistake, but one I'll be making amends for by purchasing Stantzas' new collection as well as a copy of Beneath the Surface when it...surfaces.

His is a stark new voice in the black chambers of the weird underground that ought to make followers of Ligotti, Aickman, and Lovecraft bolt up and take notice. It's clear that Strantzas is a student of the rich atmosphere and the bizarre subtleties of the dark scribes mentioned. The author's insightful blog, featuring information about his own work as well as other weird artists, may be viewed here.

-Grim Blogger

A Look at "Cold to the Touch" and Simon Strantzas

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