THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Gary Fry

A short story that appeared this year in NIGHTMARE ABBEY #3, available HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE.

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“If that had been a gassy giggle, it surely couldn’t have emerged from anything that resembled a mouth.”

A horror story that might have got away from me, but I was somehow destined to return to my book-reviewing roots paradoxically to find myself reading this story (most of my previous reviews of this author are inexplicably rooted in my reading past and are linked from HERE), and this one is genuinely suspenseful, honestly and plainly horrific, with an evocative sense of place, in many ways unashamedly and gruefully what-it-is, perhaps echoing in some way my own journey from a grey financial humdrum job and bringing up a family in the 1970s and 1980s also somehow bringing me later to writing horror stories… but this adept tale is, of course, not about me nor my erstwhile situation; it is about someone quite different, but it is a sort of parallel, as the character diverts from a boring business meeting near Bradford (where I had a few business meetings myself!) and he eventually finds, in the area, the township where he was once a gauche youth in the first clumsy attempts of dating girls, and the place where one particularly coquettish girl used to live with her father, her house now derelict and haunted by old childhood games, and much more that comes through some telling slit in time  and place that we both fear and love. He sort of dared it to happen, although he was not the sort who could really dare anything.