Cities that Shriek: (Un)real Geographies
By RSL
Every author brings with them the world they’re born in, but some authors cannot shy away from the depth of feeling and connection they have to space and place, some who could not be a writer were it not for the way they capture the twist and turns of the very city they lost their baby teeth.
Real or unreal is a pointless boundary: if it’s a place, and we can imagine it, it exists—even if it keeps us up.
Some places are real, some places are truly unreal, and so I wanted a list to reflect how we never really go the same place together, that our exposure to online filters of the world is no different than visiting the textual renditions of one in our heads. We can go to cities like London or New York, but they are always imbued with the fantasy the author consciously or unconsciously paints them in. The New York of Plath’s Bell Jar could very well be the subterranean courts in Kafka’s The Trial— because horror lies in our response to the world, in the infectious understanding of reality that we share with one another. Real or unreal is a pointless boundary: if it’s a place, and we can imagine it, it exists—even if it keeps us up.
The Lovecraftian Cityscapes Book List:
- Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane
- The Face that Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
- Night Film by Marisha Pessl
- The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
- Leech by Hiron Ennes*
1. Where the Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane
From Goodreads:
Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands:
A young woman needs help in finding the buried pieces of her lover… so he can return to waking life.
Pale-faced thieves gather by a disused railway to watch a puppet theatre of love and violence.
Why do local youths keep starting fires in the ash woods around a disused mine in the Black Country?
A series of inexplicable deaths lead the police to uncover a secret cult of machine worship.
When a migrant worker disappears, the key suspect is a boy driven mad by memories that are not his own.
Among the derelict factories and warehouses at the heart of the city, an archaic god seeks out his willing victims.
Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape.
Why?
Lane captures how the Black Country is constantly throttled by crisis. Written from the perspective of a police officer desperately seeking the safety of the law and logic over an increasingly illogical universe, the weirdness never abates. Imagine X-Files, if Mulder had no Scully, only a corner shop with cheap wine and marlborough cigs, and a journal to write in to leave to no one.
2. The Face that Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
From Goodreads:
Ramsey Campbell’s daring look into the mind of a psychotic killer was published in truncated form in 1979; an expanded edition was later published in 1982. The paranoid outlook of the book’s main character, Horridge, is a grim commentary on a bleak Liverpool suburb and Thatcher-era England. Millipede Press is proud to present this masterpiece of paranoia literature in a brand new edition, with the corrected text by Campbell and the compelling photographs of J.K. Potter.
WHY?
Neglected peoples, a Liverpool put into managed decline (defunded, delegitimised, and eroded as a culture), Campbell doesn’t shy away from the real world effects that this pervasive hatred can cause. Liverpool to this day is home to the poorest boroughs in the UK—and the text feels like a reflection on that.
3. Night Film by Marisha Pessl
From Goodreads:
On a damp October night, 24-year-old Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror film director Stanislaus Cordova–a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.
For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.
Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world. The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.
WHY?
New York is the city that never sleeps, where delirium and fever dreams are the only respite from the constant malaise of adverts, cluttering crowds, and the intense fear you are being followed. This novel loves the many manifold ways to tell us that revelation—you can never be alone, so why bother, and learn to enjoy the slow encroaching strings that control our every moment, nestling into our vision.
4. The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
From Goodreads:
“If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney – that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest.
“It was impossible to truly know the place. It changed with each influx and retreat, and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they could escape its insidious currents. No one ever went near the water. No one apart from us, that is.
“I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden for ever, no matter how much I wanted it to. No matter how hard I tried to forget….”
WHY?
The quiet and hungry, stretching hills that belong to the North East and West of England can cast spells on any who first lay their eyes on the landscape. It can be easy to live in Liverpool all your life, in council flats under nights stolen of their stars by supermarkets big enough to be a church, without ever seeing this world Hurley depicts. It can be easy to get lost there, to never want to leave—the only hard thing is coming back, and realising the life waiting for you is a lie, and that the Loney is the first time you’ve ever seen the truth.
5. Leech by Hiron Ennes
From Goodreads:
In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies.
For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed.
In the frozen north, the Institute’s body will discover a competitor for its rung at the top of the evolutionary ladder. A parasite is spreading through the baron’s castle, already a dark pit of secrets, lies, violence, and fear. The two will make war on the battlefield of the body. Whichever wins, humanity will lose again.
WHY?
The castle feels like it could spread throughout reality, past the pages and through our eyes, or throughout the world Ennes themselves create. All ideas, in the end, are leeches; imagination itself exists by way of its parasitism. It’s pieces like these that remind me how important ideas are—they make up the substance of reality, from institutions to beliefs to the very moralities we desperately need.
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RSL
RSL a writer and academic of weird, absurd fiction, and his AHRC-funded PhD focusses on the mental health benefits of the Weird to marginalised identities in online spaces. He is also an associate editor with Haven Spec magazine. You can find him at @RSLjnr on blsky, and his work published in CHM, Vastarien, Nightmare, and Apparition Lit.
