REVIEW OF THE BELLBOY BY SEREGIL OF RHIMINEE
The Bellboy was published by Zagava in 2018.
Information about Rebecca Lloyd:
Winning the 2008 Bristol Short Story Prize for her story ‘The River’, Rebecca Lloyd, a writer and editor from Bristol, UK, was shortlisted in the 2010 Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea, an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street was published by WiDo Publishing.
Information about The Bellboy:
In 1932, young Walter Matthews finds life in Battersea with his sneering father and simpering mother close to unbearable. His only solace is his passion for all things Egyptian and his adoration for the manly figure of Howard Carter, whose splendid discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb is constantly in the news. When he starts work as a bellboy in the Maydor Superior Hotel in Central London, Walter’s life brightens, and when he befriends Lady Fergus Mantel-Jefferson, a recluse living on the top floor of the hotel, his life positively blossoms, for by the most wonderful good fortune, Lady F was friends with Mr. Carter in Egypt, and Walter is dizzy with excitement at the chance of knowing more about his hero’s life. Unable to tolerate his father any longer, Walter persuades Lady F to house him in her suite while he looks for a room, which he eventually finds. But, on the morning he tells the old lady his news while admiring an alabaster statuette once belonging to Howard Carter, his world changes abruptly and all that glittered before him, his bright future, his hopes and plans, disappear before his very eyes.
REVIEW: THE BELLBOY BY REBECCA LLOYD
Rebecca Lloyd’s The Bellboy is a beautifully written and compelling piece of harrowing literary horror fiction. Readers who love deep and gradually unfolding horror stories will immensely enjoy this novella and will be captivated by it.
Before I write anything about the contents of this novella, I’ll say a few words about Rebecca Lloyd, because it’s possible that she may be a bit unknown author to many readers. Rebecca Lloyd is the author of such books as Mercy and Other Stories, Jack Werrett The Flood Man, Oothangbart: A Subversive Fable for Adults and Bears and Seven Strange Stories. Mercy and Other Stories was a World Fantasy Award nominee in 2015.
I consider The Bellboy to be a gem of a novella that should be seeked out by horror fiction aficiniados and connoisseurs, because the story is something different. Once you begin to read this novella, you won’t be able turn your eyes from its pages, because the story pulls you in and you’ll find yourself incapable of resisting the temptation to find out what happens to the protagonist.
The Bellboy tells about a young man, Walter Matthews, who has found a job as a bellboy at the Maydor Superior Hotel in Central London. Because Walter has been fed up with living in Battersea, he is excited about the opportunity to work at the hotel. Soon, he finds himself looking after Lady Fergus-Mantel-Jefferson, Lady F., who is an old recluse living on the top floor of the hotel. He befriends the old lady and finds out that she has met his hero, the Egyptologist Howard Carter who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. As he gets to know the old lady, he persuades her to house him in her suite for a few weeks while he looks for a room. When he finds a room and tells about it to Lady F. while admiring an alabaster statuette that once belonged to Howard Carter, his world changes in abrupt way and all of his hopes and plans are crushed…
This gracefully unfolding story is fascinating, immersive and touching yet unsettling in the best possible way. The quiet and underlying viciousness that can be found beneath the surface creates a thrilling sense of strangeness, which is at its peak during the terrifying climax of the story.
When I began to read this story, I was immediately taken by the characterisation and the author’s way of emphasising the foreboding atmosphere by writing about how Walter gradually becomes drawn towards Lady F. despite knowing only little about her.
The characterisation is excellent and impressive. The author takes her time to introduce Walter Matthews to her readers by telling about his life, feelings and hopes. She gives her readers an intimate and intense look at Walter’s inner turmoil and lets them get to know everything about Walter.
Walter Matthews is a well-created and realistic protagonist. His life is unbearable in Battersea and he often fantasises about the Battersea Power Station exploding and killing certain people, but not his mother. His relationship with his father is distant and troubled – his father is awful and mean to his mother and he can’t stand him and his behaviour. The only thing that brings him pleasure is his passion for Egyptology and all things Egyptian. He is especially interested in Howard Carter and knows many things about him.
Lady Fergus-Mantel-Jefferson, Lady F., is an old woman who has lived for many years on the top floor of the hotel. She is an interesting person, because she’s a recluse who has not come out her room for ages and lets the bellboys take care of her needs. Those who work at the hotel think of her as a bit strange and mad.
The friendship between Walter and Lady F. is handled well. I enjoyed reading about how their friendship developed and how much Walter enjoyed hearing about what Lady F. told him about Howard Carter and her twin sister.
In this novella, Rebecca Lloyd paints a believable vision of what life could have been like in the 1930s. She pays attention to many things, and she writes atmospherically about the hotel, its staff and people who stay there. Life at the Maydor Superior Hotel has a dark and secret side to it that is revealed to the readers in tiny bits and pieces throughout the story. What goes on in the hotel in the Fitzgerald Room and what kind of life some of the people live is steeped in shameless debauchery and discreet secrecy.
One of the reasons why this novella is excellent can be credited to the author’s beautiful literary prose. Her prose is elegant, evocative and nuanced. She effortlessly infuses her story with a haunting atmosphere and creates an uncanny feeling of something not being quite right.
The Bellboy is slow-burning horror goodness from start to finish and the atmosphere intensifies towards the end as the author reveals what kind of fate awaits Walter. It showcases that the most horrifying things can happen when you least expect them.
The ending of this novella is stunningly effective, because what happens comes as a total surprise and the events are genuinely unsettling. I can guarantee that the harrowing ending will cling to your mind, because Walter has made plans and has hopes, but something happens to him and all of his hopes and plans are taken from him in an instant.
I can recommend this novella to readers who are familiar with stories written by Michael Wehunt, Livia Llewellyn, R.B. Russell and Joel Lane. If you’ve enjoyed what these authors have written, you’ll love Rebecca Lloyd’s story.
If you love beautifully written horror fiction and appreciate what pleasures literary horror fiction can offer to readers, you should seek out Rebecca Lloyd’s The Bellboy immediately, because it’s something unique. I can honestly say that this novella is one of the best literary horror novellas I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, because it’s simultaneously beautiful and harrowing.
Highly recommended!
https://www.risingshadow.net/articles/reviews/937-review-the-bellboy-by-rebecca-lloyd
REVIEW ON THRESHOLDS, THE INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY FORUM
By Mel Ulm:-
I find posting on collections of short stories very challenging. The temptation of most seems to be to rave on in a sentence or two in metaphor laced lines that have little concrete meaning on a few stories then generalize on the book. To me this is not really the proper respect due an artist who might well have put decades into a book you can read in a few hours. It also does not give thoughtful readers much insight into whether or not the book is for them or not. My attempted method is to talk in some detail about enough of the stories to give a feel for the people, plots, and themes you will encounter. Then I will conclude with my suggestions as to who should read the collection.
My bottom line on The View From Endless Street is that it should be read by all lovers of superbly crafted stories that exemplify the Frank O’Connor vision of the best of all short stories as vehicles to speak for the voiceless, the marginalized and the left out. There are lots of ways to be left out or marginalized, one way is poverty and many of the people in the collection are below middle class standing. I think The South of England, the locale of the stories, is meant to stand for a place left out or forgotten in the boom years of London.
“The River”
“The Island swayed gently on its outward journey and Grandpa lay languid in the midst of it. As I watched the beautiful serenity of the floating trash, I felt awe, if awe is a solemn kind of thing that reaches deep inside you”.
The lead story in The View From Endless Street is sad, joyous, despairing and a beautiful way to begin this wonderful collection. Set in a small town in England, it centers on a young woman and her grandfather. The grandfather loves to spend his time fishing for eels. She has to watch him as recently a big eel almost pulled him in the water. Some of the eels are huge, four foot long and a foot in diameter. The grandfather, maybe he knows his days are numbered, is sort of watched over by his as he has seen better days. The river is very dirty and there are floating islands of trash. To some they are trash but under that we see an ancient fisherman’s floating grave. I totally love these lines.
“The River” is a great story, about aging, love across generations, finding meaning where others cannot. It connects the mundane debris of poverty to ancient warrior rituals in a very powerful close to the story.
“Castle Street in June”
“He’d come to know finally he’d never had anything to lose from the start and the thought was a strange and bitter irony that would never leave him”.
“Castle Street in June” centers on two very alone people living on a run down Castls Street. One of the things Lloyd does with a subtle brilliance in her stories is to show us the hidden similarities between seemingly unlike persons. Teresa has been badly at sea since her long time life companion passed away after a long and lingering disease of the blood. She is terribly isolated and has, in an acute device from Lloyd, the visibility in the neighborhood of a very old elm tree. To her, a water meter man is cherished company. In the old days door to door salesmen would call and have tea but even they no longer come. Lee has returned, alone, to the street of his youth. He too walks the streets to know purpose. Lloyd gives us the freedom to wonder where he was all the years he was gone. Both feel there is no meaning left in their existence. They cross, not strangers in the night, on Castle Street.
This is a beautiful story about the missing from social media modern life people, the kind of people Joyce and Chekhov wrote about when they helped shape the modern short story.
“The Women”
“After Patricia left, Mother began to to howl, a wild noise so drawn out and haunting that Charlie left home without his coat.”
“The Women” centers on a grown man of somewhere in an unspecified middle year and his mother. It is just such an intense tightly written story that I find it hard to write about. Partially this is for personal reasons. Charlie takes care of his mother, both are what I will call for lack of a better term delusional. It is very hard to tell what actually takes place in the story and what is conjured up by dark involuntary memories. As the story opens the mother is telling her son about two women, I could not quite tell if they were real or not, that visit her and drink her whiskey and eat biscuits with her. They may be real people who are preying on her. Charlie changes the locks in the house so the women cannot get back in and they do not return, though they may try to open the door with their old key. We don’t know as we are seeing the event partially through the son’s perceptions. The son does have a job, working at a warehouse. His biggest preoccupation is his collection of Confederate Soldiers. He longs to get away but guilt and maybe his knowing he needs the relationship as much as his mother does keeps him there. There is a lot of depth of understanding of the mutual dependency that can develop under the circumstances in which Charile and his mother live. We also learn a lot about what it is like to be poor, old or mentally dysfunctional in south England.
“Raptor”
“Raptor” is a very interesting story. It has significant similarities to the other stories I have talked about but it is also very different. The lead character in “Raptor” is not really in poverty as are the characters in the prior stories I talked about. He owns an aviary and has several of his employees are falconers. Falconing is by and large a rich aristocrats story. Seven years ago Violet walked in and Robert hired her. Over the last seven years she has borrowed about £500,000 from him, claiming her father is a fabulously wealthy man who will soon settle a fortune on her. There is a well of loneliness in Robert that makes him want to keep believing this absurd story and keep loaning Violet money, to the destruction of his business.
There is much to think about in “Raptor”. Why does Robert want to help Violet? Why is she his seeming only relationship? What is the real history of Violet? why does Robert keep seeing her even after she is exposed as a thief and a fraud?
“The Balloon”
“The Balloon” has three characters. An elderly widow with swollen legs who owns a novelty story, a decent young man who is in her place installing new carpet and the carpet installer’s girl friend. We learn about her in conversations between the other two characters. She is is an artist. She makes paper mâché. She has yet to make a sale. She sees her boyfriend only when she feels like it and seems to use her so called creative nature as an excuse for selfish behavior. A funny and sad catastrophe occurs when the man’s surprise gift of an engagement ring goes very agley. The conclusion is very visual and I enjoyed imaging it. The old lady gives him some good advise as the story closes.
“The View From Endless Street”
The title story, “The View From Endless Street” echoes many of the themes of the collection. The central character, Ronnie, lives in a council house. Like other men in some of the stories, he has kind of an arrested emotional and social development. He has an assigned social worker so maybe there is an impairment in his mentality that requires this. The dominant figure in his life is his deceased mother. He often thinks back to a brief relationship he had in his teenage years with a neighbor girl, Lilly May. He has stayed on Endless street all these years just so he can once and a while see her from his balcony. She never moved. Ronnie got away with something terrible long ago. Just another denizen of Endless Street.
I greatly enjoyed read the stories in Rebecca Lloyd’s The View from Endless Street. There are twenty stories in the collection, each one very interesting and acutely perceptive. The people in these stories are those left behind in the boom years of London, they don’t read George Eliot or Proust, consume coffee costing three pounds a cup at Starbucks, most probably don’t even have Twitter accounts. They are the voiceless marginalized people that some of the greatest of all of the world’s short story writers have taken as their subject matter. By this I mean writers such as Mansfield, Chekhov, Joyce, R. K. Narayan, and Frank O’Connor. This collection needs to be read slowly. I read about a story every three days so I could let a story sink in before I began the next one. Some I read several times.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/ShortStoryForum/permalink/1958868027485159/
Mercy and Other Stories
Tartarus Press
UK Hardcover First Edition
ISBN 978-1-905-78461-5
Publication Date: 03-23-2014> Date Reviewed: 01-03-2015
Reviewed by: Rick Kleffel © 2015
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REVIEWS FOR: THE VIEW FROM ENDLESS STREET
Review by Philip Clement, Neon Magazine 2014
Publisher: WiDo Publishing | Author: Rebecca Lloyd | Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | More:Goodreads
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| More:The View From Endless Street is a quiet collection that demonstrates Rebecca Lloyd’s talent as an observational writer. The full gamut of witty and perceptive character sketches contained within its pages is capable by turns of painting the murderer, the fire eater, the eel farmer and the homeless. Together they evoke the macabre and the fantastic in their presentation of isolation, heartbreak and loss.
He singled one of them out and glowered at her, rubbing the burning torch over the flesh of his belly and licking his lips. The cool look she returned hurt him, and for a moment, he lost concentration and burnt his flesh on the hot wire. The world had changed… the fact of it left him in a state of bewilderment that frequently turned to fear…
Powerful imagery is intermingled with an inherent eccentricity and together these conjure stirring and memorable scenes from the lives of a series of dispossessed and dislocated characters. Throughout the collection, these characters play out their life stories against their romantic and familial counterparts; Lloyd cleverly interposes their sense of status quo by introducing them to their binary opposites. In “The Snow Room” a brother and sister obsess over their personal insecurities, unaware of the gulf that is opening between them; they exist eternally trapped by their need of each other.
After their mother died, they’d talked from time to time about one of them moving out, but neither quite knew how to go about it. Janet suspected that if somebody had ever chosen either of them as a lover, the lucky one would have moved out quickly and left the other in the creaking flat without remorse. Luck of that magnitude, though, was wildly unrealistic as they were not beautiful.
This passage is typical of the brilliance of this collection. Lloyd constantly underwrites herself, imparting knowledge as though it were fact and then dashing our hopes immediately. Indeed, this passage also elucidates a further theme that preoccupies the collection: that of personal loneliness. In each fiction characters regress and act against change. Rather than documenting the careful reconstruction of the aftermath (as is popular in short fiction currently) Lloyd makes the brave decision to tackle the moments leading up to the action. The View From Endless Street details the deep breath taken by those with little strength for the mighty and noble deeds of the novel and is masterful in its sensitivity.
“Cheerfully alone? I’ve never heard of that. I’m cheerful because of you. Because we’re together, and safe.”
The View From Endless Street builds its tension like a comic telling the darkest of jokes. The glee with which Lloyd reveals the inevitable twists curls across the page with all the qualities of banker’s saccharine grin; these are wily fictions that wryly reveal the reader’s prejudices and punish them for their snap decisions – especially in the wonderfully off-kilter “Don’t Drink the Water”, in which a husband’s chauvinism threatens to cost him more than just his wife while on holiday in Turkey:
“I need a drink.”
“Here you are then, drink this.” Sandy seized the bottle from the windowsill and threw it at the bed.
Jim picked it up and held it too the light. “Looks fine to me,” he said. “I’ll take my chances.” And opening the lid, took a long swig from it, watching his wife’s face closely as he drank.
Whether she be poking silent fun at the misfortune of an indecisive escapist or exploring the fraught gender-political landscape of the Middle East, Lloyd’s fictions are written in a sharp and precise prose that compliments the wry humour on display. Free from drab sentimentality, The View From Endless Street is an inspiring debut that is subtler than Pratchett, sillier than Dahl and truer than Carter – fair company for all.
* Phillip Clement studied English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Since he left there he has lived in a library, written short stories and reviewed books. Currently he is preparing to begin a PhD exploring themes of identity and self in fiction.
Review by Anonymous, Barnes & Noble website, 2014
The first story in this gorgeous collection from Rebecca Lloyd won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2008. Here’s a sample from ‘The River’:
‘There were afternoons when the tiny choppy waves that signalled the incoming tide were yellow ochre at their crests in the low sunlight, and the writhing valleys of water between them were a war of deep blue and silver.’
Each story in The View from Endless Street is crafted with these beautiful sentences, but also pitch-perfect dialogue and a slew of quirky characters. The stories explore isolation and heartbreak, longing and loneliness, obsession, and even a touch of the macabre. That last one is called ‘Shuck.’ and is one of my favorites. You should really check it out.
Review by Camus, Amazon website, 2014
Beautiful dark writing – “on a night when God’s eyes must have been elsewhere”
If you like short stories then you are in for a treat. Lloyd writes with sensitivity and compassion, even while her stories are sinister. Her characters are desperate and haunting. Her language is rich, textured and nuanced.
Some examples of her beautiful writing:
“The moon was hanging in the sky….like a moist, red grape.” “…he’d a funny hatched face as if he had fallen asleep on a candlewick bedspread” “…the water was dark, all its facets sombre, slate grey and rippling” “And as I watched the beautiful serenity of the floating trash, I felt awe, if awe is a solemn quiet kind of thing that reaches deep inside you.” “we have to live in the world as it is now despite the noise, don’t we?” “…as if there were ants carrying dead things back to their nest”
And many more. This captivating, delightful collection of stories which will leave you unsettled and thoughtful.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-View-Endless-Street-Stories-ebook/dp/B00JAOKZOI
Review by Nullimortalis Jan 17, 2014
Gone to the Deep by Rebecca Lloyd
“Men gone to the deep for love of her, straight into those waiting arms.”
With the same entrancing obsession as Harman’s insistent Voice of Nature and Hughes’ clinging Dreamhouse Passages, Lloyd’s genius loci of the matchmaking island men fishing for mainland women sensitively and stylishly builds and builds until the reader, like the two main protagonists, becomes a sort of rabbit in the ‘headlights’ of The Sea’s Nature, to such an extent, remarkably, that one feels almost filthy at the experience whilst simultaneously remaining awed at some sublime power beyond love and land-greed. Endless mourning, superstition, forsakenness.
Even the story’s opening paragraph is some strange mutation of the Jane Austen opening paragraph to her most famous fiction work. No mean feat that sexily touches as deep down as our own feet with a shoe-measuring shimmer.
REVIEWS FOR: MERCY
Review by Peter Tennant, Black Static, 2014
Characters apparently talking at cross purposes, along with scenes where we can only guess at the context, are common traits in Lloyd’s fiction, devices she uses to wrong foot the reader before the gleeful reveal. Both are at work in ‘The Careless Hour’, where we expect the worst from Michael’s conversation with his female visitor, as overheard by neighbour Whitey, but the truth is even more strange, with the revelation at the end of this delightful story bringing a wry smile to this curmudgeonly reviewer’s face. …Lloyd is a new writer to me, but one I am delighted to have made the acquaintance of, and in publishing this collection Tartarus provide yet further proof that the strange tale is in a robust state of health.
http://ttapress.com/1790/new-from-tartarus-press/
Review by Randolph Carter, GoodReads, 2014
Ms. Lloyd delivers a solid batch of weird tales and strange stories, from the traditional ghost story to the truly strange. Many of the stories have an abrupt ending but it still doesn’t leave the reader high and dry. These leave an ironic taste that even says, enough said. One of the longer stories already appeared in Strange Tales Volume IV.
REVIEWS FOR: HALFLING
Review by Cat Rrar
New for January 2011 this is an adorable story aimed at the younger confident reader (9+). Danny is a young carer looking after his wheelchair-bound dad. He is learning with difficulty what it is like to have to be grown up when you are only eleven. Into his life comes Vaquita, his neighbour who everyone thought had left four years previously but who is in fact a halfling – half woman half porpoise – who longs to get back to the sea. Can Danny help and what will it mean for his own difficult life?
Your heart aches for Danny as he tries to understand his life in the context of his class project about the community and the realisation that he is a young carer. Vaquita’s story adds a touch of mystical. The writing will appeal to younger readers and mixes fact with fiction. Different. Sensitive, uplifting and very special
Reviews for: Strange Tales: Volume IV
As with previous volumes in this World Fantasy Award–winning series, this anthology of 15 new stories features the work of some of the best and brightest of the publisher’s roster of talents. In “The Secret Passage,” Rhys Hughes blends rococo fantasy and unexpected horror in a tale about a visionary who succeeds beyond his wildest dreams—and worst nightmare—in building a house from the design of a fourth-dimensional tesseract. Rebecca Lloyd’s “Gone to the Deep,” one of several dark tales that grow out of troubled marital relationships, tells of a former fisherman lured from his wife by the siren song of a creature that embodies the awe and mystery of the sea. Angela Slatter’s “The Badger’s Bride” is a charming period fantasy about a young woman who discovers the truth of the magical content of a book she is hand-copying through its impact on an animal in her care.
A number of the selections are surreal accounts of strangers traveling in strange lands, among them Mark Francis’s “For a Last Spark of the Divine,” in which a vacationer in India encounters the god behind a garish idol, and Andrew Hook’s “Drowning in Air,” about a visitor to a volcanic Japanese Island whose residents all wear gas masks. In her preface, Parker observes that “the number and quality of submissions… made the job of choosing the final selection even harder” than for previous volumes. The stories selected for this volume attest to the diversity and imaginative possibilities inherent in the strange tale.
SINGLE SHORT STORY REVIEWS
Gone to the Deep by Rebecca Lloyd (in Strange Tales Volume IV)
Review by Nullimmortalis in DF Lewis Dreamchatchers (Gestalt Real-Time Reviews)
“Men gone to the deep for love of her, straight into those waiting arms.” With the same entrancing obsession as Harman’s insistent Voice of Nature and Hughes’ clinging Dreamhouse Passages, Lloyd’s genius loci of the matchmaking island men fishing for mainland women sensitively and stylishly builds and builds until the reader, like the two main protagonists, becomes a sort of rabbit in the ‘headlights’ of The Sea’s Nature, to such an extent, remarkably, that one feels almost filthy at the experience whilst simultaneously remaining awed at some sublime power beyond love and land-greed. Endless mourning, superstition, forsakenness.
Even the story’s opening paragraph is some strange mutation of the Jane Austen opening paragraph to her most famous fiction work. No mean feat that sexily touches as deep down as our own feet with a shoe-measuring shimmer.
Contaminator by Rebecca Lloyd (in Dead Souls, Morrigan Books 2009)
Review by Mihai
While he makes his way into the underground station a man witnesses a random act of violence. This is a short, but powerful story, where Rebecca Lloyd manages to inflict panic, terror and a claustrophobic feeling in its few pages.
