A REVIEW OF DYING EMBERS BY M.R. COSBY

Among these ten short stories entitled Dying Embers by M. R. Cosby, there are apparitions, time warp occurrences and unspeakably horrible chimera-like creatures. Sometimes the stories have a slightly old-fashioned ring to them and this sense of a different age is echoed again in the names of some of his main characters such as Pendleton or Brentwood, further establishing the mood of the story. Some of Cosby’s writing does bring to mind the great author of things supernatural, M. R. James, and it’s clear that Cosby follows in this good tradition, yet his stories are set firmly in the present time with GPS devices, airports, and mobile phones. The stories about abhorrent half creatures, Building Bridges and La Tarasque, brought Lovecraft’s writing to mind, but not being an admirer of his work, when it came to reading Dying Embers, I was naturally more interested in Cosby’s creature-free stories. Although, of course, the increasingly vivid and horrific descriptions of La Tarasque in the story of the same name will delight some readers.

I sense that Cosby works out his storylines or plots well before he begins to write, although I did from time to time question aspects of the internal logic in some of the stories in this collection.  However, I appreciated his careful writing up of the stories’ settings.  Cosby pays attention to these and provides a solid and generously detailed environment in which characters stumble dangerously into the inexplicable and because the readers can ‘see’ the place they are in, we all the more fear for them. In particular the settings in Abraham’s Bosom and Fingerprinting are a joy to read, I confess here though, that having lived in Sydney as a child, aspects of Cosby’s descriptions are familiar to me so that I was able to be right there on the long walk with Merewether in Abraham’s Bosom – a story in which at times the very landscape appears menacing – and in the scorching wind-beaten car park outside the airport with Preston in Fingerprinting.

Cosby cleverly pulls the reader in and out of the discomfort his characters experience themselves – at first all seems well until some weird change takes place, and then once more normality returns. The author is skilled also at introducing delicate unsettling details such as the fact that in Fingerprinting, the voice on the GPS unit changes from female to male. Small details of that nature ramp up the tension notch by notch. That, and the spooky, tantalising conversation between Stella and Preston makes this particular story stand out in the collection.

In general, I think the best of Cosby’s stories are not the more fantastical ones such as La Tarasque, or Unit 6 – although here I laughed out aloud as the real nature of Mr Pritchard dawned on me and I read about his predicament at the end – but the stories that retain more of the recognisable world within them, such as the poignant The Source of the Lea and In Transit – perhaps his best story for not being in any sense ‘told.’ It is a matter of taste of course, but I find less extravagant supernatural tales more powerful as then there is much conjuring left to do for the reader. For example, in The Source of the Lea, a true creepy story of the supernatural masterfully told with its ‘old gate, damp and slimy’, a fine sense of otherness is established when Pocock says:- ‘That place seemed all wrong. I don’t know how, Fowler, but everything was a bit weird, like I was still looking through those grimy windows with dad’s binoculars. The trees seemed too high, their trunks too smooth, their shapes just not right. There was something about the shadows. And yet, at the same time, everything seemed familiar.’ And thinking about striking sentences, from time to time sentences in Cosby’s stories stand out for their poetic quality, for example, ‘… in which bizarrely proportioned sea creatures bobbed in slow motion to a cadence of their own’ and I’d have welcomed more writing at that level to add weight to the collection.

In Transit, is one of the most accomplished of Cosby’s stories, and this for its subtlety. Here  the wife’s anxiety is used to create the initial mood in a section of natural-sounding dialogue. Then what is happening to Pendleton, the main character, becomes slowly apparent on further reading, and the fact that he wakes up during his plane journey to discover everyone else has changed seats adds a perfect spooky touch to the tale.

In Playing Tag, Cosby builds up the atmosphere skilfully and the creepiness of the situation is soon evident. In this story there are some nice observations about family life and how an elderly man has to adapt himself to all the other members’ distractions and carelessness and later on, how elderly people are treated in general in the UK.  Again, this is written in a good old-fashioned ghost story style, and while it was very atmospheric, I didn’t entirely understand it. I must say though, that I was smiling broadly in recognition at the National Trust setting and the wonderfully spooky volunteers, because Cosby has written them up exactly as I experienced them myself in real life last year. Showing I think that us writers of the creepy stuff don’t really have to look too far afield for our material, and certainly not into other realms or dimensions.