With Deepest Sympathy

The snow is falling off the trees, steadily breaking up and melting to reveal sludge and ice.  I've been sat indoors though, Snuggie on, cosy and warm in my bedroom in Lancing and reading a book.  What better way to banish the winter blues, and what better way to add an additional chill to winter than by reading a horror book?


I must confess, I'm not normally the greatest fan of horror, or at least it's not my first port of call when it comes to fiction, televised, printed or other.  Sometimes the ambience is swapped for blood and gore, sometimes it's too predictable to scare, and often it's a combination of the two.  Part of the trouble perhaps is that you know you're in the horror genre, and with that comes expectations.  There are a finite number of ways a scenario or story can end within the horror trappings, and so predictability sets in.  There are ways out of this of course: generate an effective mood, make us care about the characters, call our bluff, and so on.  Indeed, the horror I've enjoyed in the past chiefly orbits round these three things.  I was very much hoping for more of this and less of the dull when reading the horror anthology With Deepest Sympathy by Johnny Mains, one of the latest releases by Obverse Books and their first step away from Iris Wildthyme territory.
     To begin with, full disclosure: I was asked by the author to review his book.  This doesn't mean that I will be biased towards it though.  I assure you that these are my own, independent thoughts and critical musings.
     With that out of the way, the book.  Promising us 'fourteen tales of the odd and twisted', With Deepest Sympathy manages to steer away from the conventional by and large, and when it doesn't, the tales are saved elsewhere.  Mains's greatest achievement, in my opinion, is his superb grasp of character.  With some stories lasting but a handful of pages, he runs the risk of giving us little to latch onto beyond disturbing elements or fragments of unease.  Instead, over the course of two or three pages, we get fully formed and developed protagonists.  Put simply, you know exactly who the characters are, their motivations, their attitudes, how much they deserve their (usually grizzly) fates.  Better still, he largely avoids reverting to stereotypes or two-dimensional ciphers.  Even when we're only getting a glimpse into characters' lives, Mains injects these fragmentary narratives with depth and pathos.  It's a testament to this success that I look at the stories 'The Spoon' and the titular 'With Deepest Sympathy', running to two pages and fifteen pages respectively, and I feel I know the characters in them both equally as well.
     Do the stories lapse into predictability?  Sometimes.  This comes back to the horror genre though: there are but a finite number of options for the characters' fates.  It does perhaps rob the opening story, 'Reconvened: The Judge's House', of a little of its punch, but then again the entire story here is predicated around events being akin to Bram Stoker's 'The Judge's House' and, again, we know the characters well.  See also 'Gun Money' perhaps, where again we can see the ending coming, but there's a lot to invest in all the same: the little details of how the protagonist robs and how careful he is in his thievery.  These are definitely the least successful entires for me though, and it's perhaps a shame that it opens with one of these stories, but different strokes, different folks, and all that jazz.
     The best stories for me are the ones that took me completely by surprise.  I've already mentioned 'The Spoon', which is short, quirky and kinda hilarious, but we've also got 'The Bag Lady', which is brilliant, 'Jesus Wept', which feels borderline poetic in parts, the outright grim 'Life through a Lense', the revenge-themed 'Stour Bridge' and the aforementioned 'With Deepest Sympathy', which is another good example of foreseeable endings not mattering when you've arresting characters and details elsewhere, which this story is littered with.
     'Odd and twisted' indeed, With Deepest Sympathy is perfect reading to accompany the winter chills.  It takes a successful step away from predictability for the most part, pushing the horror genre into different paths, be they grizzly or haunting, funny or grim, sometimes all four. Here's to anthology number two: may it be equally as successful.