As ignited by the above red flag or ribbon…
THE JUDGMENT by Tim Cooke
“The fields in front of the house were empty, but for the odd lump of machinery — a brown tractor engine, for example, its rusted metal tubes embedded in the soil like roots.”
With a ‘symbol of imbalance’ above, these roots of a two-stroke diesel engine with spokes if not wheels seem to seek out some guilty sinkhole in the narrator’s mind or, more literally, to reach what I see as a mansion with its own “wool loft” as echo of a courtroom rather than what is called here a ‘house’ to which he has recently resorted with his small daughter, connected somehow to the advertised public attractions of ghost hauntings in the nearby coaching inn that looked more like an actual mansion, I guess, whereto we are led to believe he had just taken her for lunch away from this house. A self-infliction that makes more significant the dialogue with the daughter not being in real speech marks. A work of intense unspoken spookiness under siege by infused darkness.
“It really was too big for us. I took the plate and mugs to the sink…”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/tim-cooke/
Following the two near-house sinkholes and a moor in accompanying Nightjars that I reviewed in the last couple of days HERE … a secret cellar in a nearby shed that hid what secrets?
SIGNALS by Amanda Huggins
“…a David Bowie album at a volume which wouldn’t offend…”
A story of an adolescent girl and the successive darkly characterised male neighbours of her and her mother next door, signals from on Highcliffe to down under by Dipper, men who worked in secrets and, yes, signals in nearby Government establishments, and involving a ham radio, not a cylinder crystal set with wire whiskers, I guess, that trawled the mostly hidden voices of the world, and there is a model train and train tracks and of what may be called doll figures in what I infer is a miniature waiting-room beneath the shed…
There is much of suspense here within the plainly no-nonsense but somehow allusively evocative narrative, sown with what these days are often called red flags when we talk with a doctor, but not in this story for a train stopping, but as a lost girl’s red ribbon…