Speculative Fiction Junkie

John Langan

I've been in the mood to read some supernatural horror lately and thought I might have found just the thing when I stumbled upon Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters by John Langan. It turns out that I was only partially right.

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters is the first collection of Mr. Langan's short works of fiction to be published. It contains a total of five stories, four of which have previously appeared in various publications and one of which was previously unpublished.

Other reviewers have noted the allusions Mr. Langan makes to works by Henry James and other writers. I'm embarrassed to say that I've not read much Henry James and my interest in supernatural horror stories is relatively new, so I can't comment on these stories from that angle. My thoughts are based purely on my impressions of the stories as I read them, without being cognizant of their relationship to the work of others.

The first story in the collection, "On Skua Island," was one of the best in the collection. In it, some friends are telling ghost stories when one of their group tells the tale of an archaeological expedition he made some years previously to a remote island near the Shetlands. The narrator recounts the story of what they found there, what happened subsequently, and how he made it out alive.

Next is "Mr. Gaunt," in which a man discovers an audiotape left to him by his late father, on which the father has recorded the exploits of his brother and the latter's son. The son is told never to go into a particular part of the house but disobeys this instruction while his father is away. The result is that he discovers the truth about his father's servant, Mr. Gaunt...

The third story, "The Tutorial," feels almost out of place in this collection but was enjoyable nonetheless. It tells the story of a young man who runs afoul of his professor's sense of what proper prose is and is sent to a tutor and then to another. The story winds up being sort of a Kafkaesque tale.

Next is "Episode Seven: Last Stand against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers," a post-apocalyptic tale with an interesting structure about a pregnant girl and a young man trying to escape a pack of beasts hunting them.

The final story is "Laocoön, or the Singularity", which I found to be difficult to finish. It is the story of a recently divorced artist who works at a video store and one day inexplicably finds a statue of an alien in the trash. The artist decides to re-sculpt the creature's face, etc.

Mr. Langan is a great writer, but I'm still a bit ambivalent about this collection. Despite the quality of his writing, none of these stories except the first one is really scary at all, nor do they evoke the sort of ominous atmosphere that I think is such a vital part of supernatural horror stories. I'm looking forward to reading Mr. Langan's first novel when it is released, but I'm afraid this collection didn't leave that much of a lasting impression on me.

Rating: 7/10

The True First

Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was originally published by Prime Books in December of 2008.

[This review was not based on a review copy]