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Head Injuries
Conrad Williams
The Do-Not Press Frontlines paperback, 206 pages, £5
Review by David Kendall (1998)

Head Injuries represents a particular shaving from the horror block. A group meet up in Morecambe, a place that should be scrubbed from rather than placed on the map. There are hints of unpleasantness in their past, yet, like all good fictional characters, David, the narrator, happily leaves everything behind to meet up again with his buddies (without ever knowing what it’s all about).

Swimming in bitterness and bile as the book is, it’s hard to care what happens to any of the characters, particularly David, who is so pathetic you’d want to kick him all the time, except you know that’s exactly what he wants. All the characters act as ciphers, pushed around the miserablist landscape.

The plot? Take M John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart (novel) and ‘The Great God Pan’ (story); add the angular obsessiveness of the same author’s Climbers, stir in a smidgen of angst via Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy, cap it all with teen-twenties ‘moodiness’ and inertia, and you have a pretty good approximation of Head Injuries. Not a disastrous first novel, but overstretched and too predictable. My favourite character, the Bacchanal, daemonic MacCreadle is terrifyingly otherworldly; shame he has such a small part. Next time, perhaps.