Recommendations from our site
“Patrick McGrath is a champion of Gothic fiction who I feel is grievously under-recognised by modern genre writers. We should be talking about his work a lot more than we do. Spider, which was made into a film by David Cronenberg several years ago, is about a man who has just come to live in a halfway house after being released from a psychiatric hospital. This is 1950s London. The house is situated relatively close to where he grew up as a child. He hears conversations and noises and strange sounds around him, but we’re never always certain they’re attached to the people he can see. Through his own writings, we come to understand what really happened with his brutal father and his protective mother, all as his interior architecture falls apart (an echo of Poe’s Usher). This is much more psychological Gothic horror fiction than the previous examples. There are no real ghosts here, no malevolent forces. This is about the deterioration of a human brain.” Read more...
Nathan Ballingrud, Novelist
