These Things That Walk Behind Me By David Surface – Book Review

The writing is crisp and confident and creates a real sense of atmosphere. Much of this is achieved by the use of sound; a subway suicide is heard, not seen in When the Circus; the hammering of the construction company in Little Gods to Live in Them and of the mysterious man rescued by the sailors in That The Sea Shall Be Calm are harbingers of the horrors to come,

These Things That Walk Behind Me by David Surface – Book Review

These Things That Walk Behind Me is the new collection of short stories from David Surface and is published by Lethe Press. I was a huge fan of David’s first collection, Terrible Things (and also his novel Angel Falls which he co-wrote with his wife Julia Rust) and so was looking forward to this new book very much. Sometimes too much expectation can result in disappointment but this most assuredly wasn’t the case here and These Things That Walk Behind Me delivers fourteen highly accomplished stories of weird fiction.

The title of the book is hugely evocative,

Conjuring images of entities lurking on the periphery of our vision, more likely than not with malign intent. Which is absolutely the case in the story which gives the collection its title. These entities are visible to Dean, the story’s narrator, courtesy of a kind of second sight, a “gift” which ultimately leads to a stay in a psychiatric ward wherein he discovers the true nature of the apparitions.

The germ of the idea for the story came from a personal experience of the author and this practical application of the “write what you know” tenet applies to a number of the other stories in the collection too, most notably The Armor of Light which uses David’s childhood memories of his father, who was a priest, to great effect. (Although it’s to be hoped that the supernatural prowess of the son in the story – as ambiguous as it may be – is fictional rather than based in reality).

His father (or that of the narrator…) also makes an appearance in The Devil Will Be at the Door, possibly the most “traditional” of the ghost stories on display here, featuring as it does an actual haunted house. The priest/father character in this story provides a prologue of sorts, rather like John Houseman in John Carpenter’s The Fog, setting up the haunted house motif for the rest of the story.

Whilst that story is (partly) about facing up to the past –

confronting childhood fears specifically – the opening story in the collection, Give Me Back My Name, features a character desperate on hiding his. It’s a mysterious story which deals with the subject of honesty within relationships – and the consequences of the lack of it – but also notions of identity. Loss of identity, of an awareness of oneself, is at the core of The Man Outside, the shortest of the stories in the collection but one which provides a real emotional punch.

Familial relationships, specifically parent/child dynamics, feature heavily. Most notably, this is seen the final story of the collection, The Skin You Were Born In, which, amidst its Sun Dance-esque rituals, is at heart a coming of age tale but one which breaks the mould of that particular trope by focusing on the emotions and innermost thoughts of the parent in the father/son relationship under scrutiny.

The fears expressed in that story are about what kind of man the son will become, the doubts the father has as to how well he has prepared him for his adult life. (Those preparations taken to extreme lengths it has to be said). This fear of being a bad parent is shared by the protagonist of Where The Monsters Are Lonely, adolescent guilt making him amagingly over-protective towards his daughter.

Lost River Boys examines the impact of every parent’s worst fear:

losing a child. The disappearance of a group of boys in caves next to the titular town at first brings the community together as they perform acts of remembrance but soon, as in all the best small towns, a dark secret begins to emerge…

Maya, the protagonist of Angelmutter, sees herself as a bad parent, even considers that her rescuing herself and her baby from an abusive relationship is an act of kidnapping. It’s to the author’s great credit that, when Maya pulls into a lonely gas station to seek help, the story goes in a completely different direction to that which readers might have been expecting.

The story veers towards the Cosmic come its conclusion and the same can be said for Little Gods to Live in Them, a Corporation Imposes Itself on Small Town With Horrific Consequences ™ story which put me in mind of King’s Needful Things and much of the early work of Bentley Little. Cosmic awe is even more apparent in the denouement of That The Sea Shall Be Calm, a slice of historical horror (which is a massive plus for me) which is presented as a series of diary entries from a scientist on board a sailing ship in the nineteenth century and which uses a figure from German nautical mythology to great effect.

Monsters are staples of Cosmic horror of course and a story which overtly features one is How The World Works.

By his own admission, David has created very few monsters in his fiction – but when you’re as skilful at creating horror through atmosphere and suggestion you don’t really have to I guess – but this one is a corker, and with a very inventive raison d’etre.

The story, as many in the collection are, is told in first person, which of course raises the possibility of an unreliable narrator especially given the bizarre nature of the tale. (It might also explain an anachronism I think I spotted). It also features a relationship where one member is slightly in awe of the other, regarding them as much cooler. A similar dynamic is to be found in When the Circus in which country boy Danny moves to New York and encounters the ultra-cool mentor Lenny who, it seems, is the font of all knowledge. I think this may be my favourite story in the collection, containing as it does an urban myth created especially for it by the author which allows for some startling imagery. 

The imperative “don’t look!” has been employed effectively in tales of the fantastic from the legend of the gorgon to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark – and much in between – and it has a significant part to play here too.

And it’s one I’ve ignored whilst writing this review obviously.

Looking into the stories is all part of the process, discerning meaning and themes, allusions and metaphors. Which is very much part of  the joy of reading David’s stories that are constructed in such a way as to invite analysis and interpretation. The stories in These Things That Walk Behind Me are, on the whole, apolitical, the main focus lying more in the relationships we form with each other (and the stories we tell to maintain them).

It could be argued that the aforementioned The Skin You Were Born In has a political subtext in the way it addresses the patriarchy and also, to some extent, the right to be who you are irrespective of societal pressures, but the most overt political message is to be found in Small Black Eyes Like Stones which has as a main character an actual patriarch; entitled, arrogant and racist – an encapsulation of the worst of us, the frighteningly large number of individuals who now exist within society and whose votes are sought with zeal by the populist politicians who dominate the political landscape these days.

I loved this collection. The mark of a good story is that it has you thinking about it long after you’ve finished and that’s absolutely the case with many of the tales in These Things That Walk Behind Me.

The horrors here are, on the whole, subtle –

creating a sense of unease and, as mentioned earlier, open to different interpretations. (The story notes at the end of the book are very informative it has to be said).

The writing is crisp and confident and creates a real sense of atmosphere. Much of this is achieved by the use of sound; a subway suicide is heard, not seen in When the Circus; the hammering of the construction company in Little Gods to Live in Them and of the mysterious man rescued by the sailors in That The Sea Shall Be Calm are harbingers of the horrors to come, so too the sounds of an intruder in These Things That Walk Behind Me; the screams emanating from the haunted house in The Devil Will Be At The Door are terrifying, as are the wailing of tormented souls heard in… well, that would be telling. Much better to find out for yourself. This is a collection I highly recommend.

These Things That Walk Behind Me by David Surface

So strange stories, yes, and dark, too. Stories with fine prose and sympathetically drawn characters give them an emotional heft and resonance not always found in this fiction stripe. Stories that follow you. Stories that cannot be easily forgotten because they haunt you. In These Things That Walk Behind Me, David Surface crafts haunting stories where the familiar succumbs to the strange. Each tale builds an eerie sense of wrongness, where something unsettling stirs beneath the surface, growing more intense with every page.

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