Book Review: The End of the Line edited by Jonathan Oliver

Book Review: 'The End of the Line' edited by Jonathan Oliver

 

3 / 5 Stars

 

I don't usually review sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books published after the early 1990s, mainly because there are websites and blogs that do this and do it well.

 

However, several years ago, after claiming I violated their 'community standards,' amazon removed 13 years worth of my reviews. So I figured I might relocate some of those eliminated reviews here at the Por Por Books Blog, rather letting them dissolve into the nothingness of the Aether.......... 

Nowadays I find that most Americans aren't very familiar with the artist George Tooker (1920 - 2011), but back in the post World War Two era he was one of the most prominent artists in the USA. 

 

Perhaps the most famous of his works was The Subway (1950), which shows commuters gripped by existential dread while negotiating the dehumanizing corridors of a subway system: 

The Subway by George Tooker (1950)

Likely taking inspiration from Tooker's sensibility, ‘The End of the Line’ (Solaris, 2010, 358 pp., cover by Luke Preece) features 19 stories all centered on the theme of modern underground transportation as the setting for supernatural encounters. All stories originally were written for this anthology, and, as most of the contributors are from the UK, there is an emphasis on the subway and rail systems of that country.

My thoughts on the entries:

The best story in the collection is Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Lure’ which is not a horror story per se, but rather, a Hitchcockian tale about a young British man who, during a year abroad in Paris, encounters a mysterious and alluring older woman. The story is carefully crafted to deliver a subtle, but powerful, ending. 

Also earning high marks is Simon Bestwick’s ‘The Sons of the City’, a clever updating of the 1973 film Death Line (aka Raw Meat). Al Ewing’s ‘The Roses that Bloom Underground’ is a neat effort at placing a Lovecraftian netherworld within the confines of the subway system.

‘In the Colosseum’, by Stephen Volk, brings graphic sex and violence to a tale of the London CCTV system and decadent voyeurs. It’s splatterpunk stylings give it genuinely disturbing character, that is otherwise absent among the other entries in ‘End of the Line.’

More restrained, but also effective, are James Lovegrove’s ‘Siding 13,’ about the physical horrors of a too-packed subway car, and Mark Morris’s ‘Fallen Boys,' which eschews the subway system altogether and instead places its action within a creepy old mining tunnel. 

Paul Meloy’s ‘Bullroarer’ brings satirical humor  to the story of a downtrodden subway rider who gets a unique chance to rebuff his tormentors.

Natasha Rhodes also injects sardonic humor into ‘Crazy Train’, about an LA rocker who finds himself traveling the city’s subway system in the company of a spooky Goth Chick.

 

Otherwise, the bulk of the stories in ‘End’ settle for Tooker-esque themes in which riders find themselves transported to unsettling stations or stops that lie outside the boundaries of the ‘real’ Underground. There is a emphasis on alienation and unease, rather than frank horror. These entries by John Probert, Rebecca Levine, Jasper Bark, Conrad Williams, Pat Cadigan, Adam Nevill, Michael Marshall Smith, and Christopher Fowler all are competently written, but not particularly memorable. 

Inevitably, Ramsey Campbell makes an appearance; here, it’s ‘The Rounds’, about a man who believes he is witnessing suspicious behavior in the Underground. While Campbell has in some respects curtailed the florid nature of his prose style, his story’s oblique ending gives it a flaccid character, and suffers in comparison to the more assured denouements provided by his fellow authors. 

Another contribution, Joel Lane’s ‘All Dead Years’, tries to emulate the descriptive prose approach used by ’vintage’ Campbell and writers like Dennis Etchison and Charles L. Grant. But while ‘All Dead Years’ starts off promisingly, it loses momentum and sputters into an unsatisfying ending.

 

Gary McMahon’s ‘Diving Deep’ with its Antarctic locale, represents one of the more imaginative entries in the anthology; unfortunately it, too, suffers from too vague a denouement.

In summary, like most horror fiction anthologies, ‘End of the Line’ has a few real gems mixed in with some 'average' entries. I'm comfortable with giving it a 3 of 5 Stars Rating.