Muriel GrayRecensioni

Found this one hard going. Lots of over the top nastiness and very obvious developments: for example, you know from early on that the husky dog is not long for this world. Quite a nice twist that, in the flashbacks, the minister is not a bigot, is actually trying to help the native Canadians against the other white men, but there is also a lot of stereotyped stuff about native Canadians being alcoholics and wife/children abusers etc.

Very prevalent head hopping within scenes - an especially bad sequence is when two characters are skating downhill together and 'he' is a different one from sentence to sentence so it is almost impossible to understand - and a lot of characters who are set up to do something - the longsuffering resort deputy is a main one who keeps popping up - but in the end come to nothing (literally in his case as he's present at a scene of major mayhem but you don't even find out if he's killed). Another one is that the story starts with three railway man in a train together - a lot is made of one of them having had a bad experience before in the railway tunnel so you think he is going to be the hero and then he is completely dropped after the first chapter.

The conclusion is also very unconvincing - how on earth does the hero stay out of jail when there is no evidence of his innocence that would be accepted by any of the police other than the one who helps him and his family, but who is already marginalised by the other law enforcement officers. As I believe the US version was edited down from this UK edition I've read, I wonder what material was taken out and whether that would make it a better book, but as it is, I can't say I enjoyed it.

paperback

Not much in the way of frights but plenty of stomach-churning grue. When you get right down to it the subplot makes this more of a suspense/thriller novel than a horror story.

Ms. Gray used to be (is?) a television and radio presenter for the BBC. I remember her in the good old '80s on The Tube trying to make the likes of The Jam and Sigue Sigue Sputnik behave for British telly viewers. Anyway the multi-talented Ms. Gray turned her hand to horror novels for a bit and Trickster, the first, is probably the best of the trio she wrote. Muriel is from Scotland but that didn't stop her from taking on a novel set in Alberta, Canada and largely based around native Indian folk mythology and trying to make it all believable and entertaining. I thought at 707 pages this was going to get dull somewhere with all the minutiae involved but it never did. The suspense was maintained throughout.

The characters were where the writing excelled. The author presented great depth and empathy in a large cast of characters. The novel had a lot of flashbacks and these really presented a novel within a novel, particularly the 1907 interludes, were almost as important and suspenseful as the "main" contemporary story line.

I'm not big on North American bogeymen like the Wendigo but the adversary here, the Trickster, is every bit as menacing as Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror. The menace is of the older than old type so it predates all mythologies and is sort of susceptible to all sorts of exorcisms but in our modern scientific times few remain who know how to trick the Trickster so to speak. Sam Hunt, who denies his Indian heritage, is going to have to step up big time if anyone is going to get this thing back in Pandora's box. But he has his young son, an old drunk, his wife, and a skeptical police officer to help so this should be no problem. Oh and there is the blizzard of the century to deal with as well.

Well at least he has a better chance of getting the jin back in the bottle than Scottish preacher James Henderson does in 1907. Someone keeps letting this guy out!

Be careful with editions here. The icy cover is a greatly edited version of the novel. The real deal is the big fat green covered paperback.

I remember Muriel Gray presenting pop stars on The Tube (or "Tewb" as she says it) or Bliss on British telly in the 80s. She frequently had to take the piss out of an uncooperative Paul Weller or Martin Degville; people with a third of her brains. Then, being brilliant, she set her sights on writing horror novels.

Alright, it's just M.R. James Casting of the Runes with Muriel turning up the thermostat! All the fun is how Josh is going to his ass out of the shithole and guessing who passed him the runes. Along the way we get a fair amount of grue and creeps, a little sex, and a protagonist with a bunch of psychological and psychic turmoil. Oh, and whole lot of big trucks, red necks, and lotsa CB talk too.

A good fun read then into the bin.

‘The Ancient’ falls squarely into one my favourite sub-genres: Monster in a confined space. This time the monster is an Ancient Incan deity and the confined space is a cargo ship. The story is populated with a great cast: a kickass heroine who wouldn’t be out of place in a James Cameron movie, a drunk in need of redemption and a cowardly, scheming human villain who causes almost as many problems as the monster. Along the way are some great scary scenes, a tonne of gore, enough action to keep things satisfying, a smattering of humour and just the right mount of technical detail about life on a cargo ship (enough that you feel like you’ve learned something but not so much it gets boring). All of the above makes me really keen to read Gray’s other two novels (I had a paperback copy of her first ‘The Trickster’ for years but never quite got to it) and disappointed that she has only published three.

“Only half…was visible from where she waited, but it was enough to skin her soul.” (p.286)

I have to admit, Muriel Gray’s book The Ancient made my skin crawl more than once. This work is a creature fiction and an unsettling example of why some cultural differences should not be explored, let alone accepted.
Ester Mulholland’s intent is not to attract the attention of an ancient evil, but she does.
What made The Ancient so unique, other than the story is, all but the first three chapters take place on a cargo ship in the middle of the water, far away land.
Gray’s pace speeds the story along without cheating the reader out of any creepy details but leaves room for the imagination. A balance not easily mastered.
I highly recommend The Ancient to anyone who enjoys atmospheric horror, evil creatures and strong, well-developed characters. I do want to thank Glasgow’s Waterstones bookstore employee for recommending Muriel Gray’s work.

I just couldn't get into this. The writing was disjointed and juvenile. The worst part was how Sam, the native Indian, saw prejudice in everyone around him. I am not saying there was no prejudice in this book, because there was, but Sam really had a chip on his shoulder. For example, he and his son wave at a passing train. The conductor doesn't wave back. Sam immediately thinks that it is because he is Indian. He couldn't believe that maybe the train conductor was preoccupied with driving the train and didn't see him (which is what was happening). He only saw the worst in people and it got annoying since he was supposed to be the hero of the story. The story didn't hold my interest at all, so I decided to bail on the book.

Read in 25 hours, very enjoyable, made me giggle out loud, lots of picking fun at institutions, other walkers, categorising, but in a sympathetic way, demonstrating the irrelevance of some of this stuff when you just want to go for a walk.

This was an extremely absorbing tale.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as her other two Horror books. I think the setting of an oil tanker didn't really help; there are only so many ways you can describe metal boxes and bulkheads. Still better than a lot of supposedly scary books out there though.

Why DO the awful hoi polloi insist on intruding on our author's outings?? A snarky complaint, but not devoid of useful info.

Muriel Gray is an absolute scream as she doggedly proceeds to climb munros (mountains over 3,000 feet in Scotland), although she hasn't got a beard.

Josh Spiller is a long distance truck driver whose girlfriend is pregnant but has just told him she's not keeping their baby. After a furious argument, Josh heads out on the road and drives non-stop for 36 hours. In desperate need of a break, he pulls off the highway into the small mountain-town of Furnace. Looking for somewhere to park and rest, he instead finds tragedy when a prominent local politician pushes a pram directly under Josh's truck. Everyone in Furnace believes the baby's death is an accident and nobody can accept that Councillor Nelly McFarlane could be responsible for such a heinous crime. Even Josh begins to doubt what he saw... until he eventually leaves Furnace only to discover something scary is following him.

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