The Edge Online - Reviews: Simon Clark

The Tower
Simon Clark
Robert Hale, hardback, 224 pages, £18.99
Published January 2006
ISBN 0709080026
Leisure Books, paperback, 353 pages, $6.99 (US)
Published August 2005
ISBN 0843954922

Review by David Clark (2006)

In Simon Clark’s latest horror novel, a five piece indie band want somewhere to make a demo, and take the chance to housesit a several hundred years old manor, out in the countryside in Clark’s native Yorkshire. The horrid old dump used to be a nursing home, and it isn’t alone in its spookiness, it’s next to a swamp and an abandoned airfield. Anyone sensible would consider it the sort of place they wouldn’t want to spend much time in, but this lot think it gives them a chance to get their heads together in the country in preparation for their forthcoming success. (I thought only old hippies did this. And Blur, of course).

En route, our idiots and their groupies adopt a stray dog. Once inside their happy holiday home, an annoying clock chimes from somewhere deep within. Ask not for whom the clock chimes . . . Anyone else would discern bad vibes, run back to the Mystery Mobile, skedaddle home and settle for annoying the neighbours, but not this shower. They look for the clock, there are bad dreams and people disappearing. There may be something wrong with the electricity, often a sign of the paranormal. There’s a caretaker who enjoys impaling rats. And that weird dog, and it’s all too obvious that the house from Scooby Doo has dark secrets and a dark history.

Clark uses The Tower to delve, again, into Yorkshire’s deep past, to feature its pagan history overlaid with early Christianity, to expose the place’s true nature. Thing is, most or all areas of England are like that. While always distrusting the countryside, I used to like that stuff. Now, however, after reading about a hundred (or more) books about it, including many novels, I’m somewhat bored.

The Tower is full of standard horror ingredients including, these days, the spooky environmental stuff. The Tower is like one of those straight to video horror movies from the early 1990s, only set in Yorkshire rather than the States. One of the better ones, perhaps, but while The Tower is an enjoyable enough horror novel, I thought it a bit too long and a bit lacking in depth. By Clark’s standards it’s really nothing special.

Review by Andrew Darlington (2006)

Somewhere out beyond an unnamed river crossing one hour from York, the indie five-piece formerly known as Cuspidor are getting it together in the country. In a house, a very big house, in the country . . . This is Simon Clark back on his familiar bloodstained Yorkshire terrain following his mind-excursions into the Americana of Stranger and In This Skin. And it’s a group-jeopardy movie with his regular crew of clean likeable early twenty-something wastrels. You can almost cast it yourself. The setting is a darkly shining ‛Outlook’ haunted by monstrous dreams and past terrors with its own ballroom, and mad groundkeeper Cantley (Jack Nicholson?) hiding out in the outbuildings skewering rats to kill the pain in his own head.

It's also a House on the Borderland where a Masque of the Red Death plague siege had once been enacted, its megalithic simplicity resembling ‛a dirty tomb’. For Simon reveals Yorkshire to be the ancient land that it is. ‛Every church is built on the site of a pagan temple. Some even recycled stone carvings from the temples into the fabric of Christian churches.’ And from its opening pages – rescuing Jak the vagabond dog from becoming instant roadkill, the narrative flows as smoothly as oozing blood. The band is being re-moulded by ambitiously manipulative Fabian, a petulant preening lead singer and songwriter – you know the type. With him are Marko, who believes he’s the reincarnation of the ‛patron saint of rock drummers’, Keith Moon. Alongside guitarists Sterling Pound, and incoming Adam Ambrose with his video-friendly teeth and hair – and his 1966 Fender Strat, and 22-year-old John Fisher with his $4000 red Rickenbacker bass, the main narrative voice, troubled by the cancer-death of his father a year earlier. Plus: hangers-on Belle, Josanne, and Czech-born Kym (the first to die).

In turn, these wannabe hit-makers begin experiencing horrific premonitions – their own ‛death-dreams’ – that soon begin to become fact, drawn by the ‛dark irresistible gravity’ of evil. Each incident paced to the phantom chimes of the house’s ‛blind clock.’ Simon inhabits his characters fluently, tracing their doubts into forebodings, their fears into terrors. A sureness of touch that never falters, even when he’s doing his detailed construction of complex events, like the ‛medieval core’ of the tower, the house-within-the-house idea here, as meticulously described as the sequence trapped in the submerged Rolls Royce at the bottom of the New Venice Lake of flooded London in his earlier King Blood.

Although, with The Tower Simon Clark is not out to revolutionise the genre, shake its foundations or redefine its limits – as he seemed about to do with that amazing King Blood or, instead he’s just doing what he does best, delivering an effortlessly readable dose of eerie thrills. But even when he’s doing that he’s a severed head and mutilated shoulders above the opposition.