Book Review – August 2022

Maybe it’s the heat. This endless summer drought, longer even than the one we had last year, and the one before that. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun is bastard hot.

As I write this review the temperature outside is pushing 40C. Seen through my window, the grass of the neighbourhood lawns is crisp and Savannah yellow. A constant procession of blackbirds and sparrows swoop down to scoop up beakfuls of liquid from the seed trays full of water I have left out for them. Meanwhile, my news feed tells me that several of the rival candidates for the leadership of the Tory Party, our next Prime Minister, are vying with each other to convince their fellow MPs about how they will remove the ‘burden’ of net zero.

Each short story in this new collection by Gareth E Rees is set against the background of the global climate crisis. In the Britain of the near future the ice caps are melting, our coastline is eroding, the land is poisoned and our forests and heathlands are burning. In the best of these ten stories Rees’ prose, quite appropriately, sizzles.  Though it has to be said that the quality varies and some of the tales are more successful than others. But throughout Rees writes with passion and verve. But this is no scientific treatise nor work of polemic. Rees concentrates on what he writes about best, which is people. Throughout this collection ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary events.

Some stories in Terminal Zones could almost have been culled straight from contemporary news reports. In Tyrannosaurs Bask in the Warmth of the Asteroid a grassland fire threatens an East Sussex zoo park, while When Nature Calls tells of the last members of a coastal community clinging onto life and normality in their cliff edge home. Other tales are more fantastical. A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes imagines a troubled young man who falls in love with an electricity pylon. The Slime Factory reveals an abomination created in a Gloucestershire railway depot and Meet on the Edge suggests vampiric entities lurking in a B&Q car park.

But, in the hands of Rees, even these decidedly weird tales are deeply serious and utterly convincing, leavened in no small part by the writer’s humour, which is as dark as a Goth’s eye-liner. All of the usual Gareth Rees tropes are here: motorways, pylons, car parks, retail parks and abandoned industrial sites. The thing that is new, that is experimental, is the range of characters Rees creates, a whole world of them.  Some are more fully realised than others but they people his nightmares and, as a collective, they are the driving force behind these stories. He also wins the prize, in my opinion, for the best short story title of the year: My Father, the Motorway Bridge.

Gareth E Rees

Is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, based in Hastings, East Sussex. He’s the founder of the website, Unofficial Britain (www.unofficialbritain.com) and the author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). He has also contributed short stories to numerous anthologies of weird fiction and horror.

Terminal Zones

Gareth E Rees

Influx Press

October 2022

UK – £9.99 (paperback)