PS Showcase #1: Sanity and Other Delusions: Tales of Psychological Horror by Gary Fry

The first of PS Publishing’s new Showcase range, Sanity And Other Delusions by Gary Fry is a collection of short stories which explores the human mind, takes the reader on a journey through the seemingly mundane, and forces them to face those nightmarish fears that keep us all staring at the ceiling after the lights have gone out. From a fear of dying alone, to the paranoia that others are conspiring against you, Fry’s psychologically astute observations are set against a backdrop of familiar English towns and family situations which are easily recognisable.

In Stephen Volk’s introduction, he says “Fry understands if it’s our life’s work to understand ourselves, it’s also the scariest and dirtiest place to rummage…” These words prepare the reader for the sinister tone of the stories contained within the collection.

The opening story is “Beggars Belief” in which Jeff—overworked, underappreciated, and living in an unhappy marriage—clings to small comfort in the idea that his life could be worse. His sanity begins to unravel with the discovery of a suspicious receipt among the company accounts and further deteriorates as the story unfolds. Wholly disturbing, this dark little tale resonates with you long after you finish reading the final chilling words.

Next up is “The Indelible Strain Of Company.” This story keeps the reader guessing until the very end. It may seem like an entirely predictable ghost story, and perhaps it is, but a second reading had me wondering if I had underestimated the depth of it the first time around.

Geoffrey Mansfield returns to the hotel he and his late wife stayed at on holiday the previous year. Throughout the trip, he seeks oblivion in alcohol and solitude anywhere he can find it, but strange occurrences won’t allow him to relax. As a simple haunting story, this would probably be the weakest tale of the collection, but read as an exploration of a shattered psyche, it is a very well written, multilayered piece.

“No Oil Painting” is an exploration of man’s obsession with appearance as a measure of the value of the individual. A teenage boy, Philip, attributes his struggle to find his own identity to the fact that he’s never been evaluated by a member of the opposite sex. His mother is recovering from plastic surgery which she underwent with encouragement from his father, despite his father’s insistence that physical appearance doesn’t matter, and when Philip encounters a spirit who begs him to help her to establish her own identity, he tries to do so by placing emphasis on her physical appearance.

Profound and thought provoking, this is at once touching and disturbing with a suitably obscure ending. Fry’s real talent lies in the creation of convincing characters with real problems that we can all identify with, and these fears are conveyed outwards in a way that can become contagious if we let them. “No Oil Painting” is a perfect example of this.

Fry explores the fear of death and terminal illness in “It Can Also End At Home.” George Murdoch subsidises his living by seeking out rare and valuable books from charity shops, buying them for pence, and selling them online. The reader feels a growing sense of discomfort as Murdoch’s sense of guilt, both for this and an earlier sin, weighs heavily upon his mind and body. The story grows ever more sinister as Murdoch begins to receive angry emails from people claiming to be customers, and he eventually comes to realisations about the importance of fulfilling commitments.

Murdoch is both irritating and sympathetic. The predicament he finds himself in is one which many readers would be able to empathise with, and Fry’s ability to twist these real-life scenarios into sinister horror stories make them all the more memorable.

“The Familial” is probably the best story of the collection. Fry takes the details of a familiar, everyday family set-up and creates a disturbing story with an abstract, but superb, ending which may just leave you feeling a little queasy.

Richard Keane’s father died when he was five or six in a car accident; his mother has always been a little vague about the details. When he is ten, she meets and marries Arnold Mock—the “black-and-white man” as Richard thinks of him, because he resembles an old photograph. This is a direct comparison to the colour picture of his real father which he keeps tucked in the pages of his favourite book. Relationships between the three are complex and difficult, and tension festers and escalates as Richard grows older, culminating in a life changing episode as he enters adulthood.

“The Familial” is a story about relationships at its core, about how people relate to one another and how, when communication and relationships break down, people can get very hurt.

The final story of the collection is “Projecting Malice.” In it, we meet Bernard, a paranoid schizophrenic, who has just retired and moved to a house in the country with his wife, who is working out her final week. But a week of solitude feeds Bernard’s paranoia, and old wounds caused by an affair Alice had a decade earlier begin to eat at him. When he starts to hear voices on the other side of the walls of his secluded home, Bernard becomes preoccupied with dark thoughts and ideas until he has become so consumed by them that his mental health has completely deteriorated. This is a well written story with a mounting sense of tension culminating in a cold, cliff hanger of an ending.

Publisher: PS Publishing (Oct. 2007)
Hardcover price: £10.00 [$20.00USD]