All God's Angels, Beware!

In these ten stories, Crisp takes us from the spectral purlieus of the ghost of a suicide, searching in vain for a mortal confidante on a hilltop over a provincial town (‘Troubled Joe’), to the future melancholy of a world in the early stages of human immortality, where a holographic environment is taking over the natural and man-made world (‘Karakasa’), to the despairing confession of a photographer who tries to capture the spirit of a secluded village, only to understand too late that the spirit is a mutating and contagious plague of fear (‘Ynys-y-Plag’), and on through a variety of intimately portrayed settings, both familiar and fantastical, to a final cri de coeur with the novelette ‘Suicide Watch’, in which, against the background of the doomed, anxiety-drenched present age, one suicidal loser attempts to save another. Bookended by tales of suicide, Crisp’s fourth collection of shorter fiction expands on his previous work, such as the cornerstone collection of twenty-first century weird, Morbid Tales, to go both wider and deeper. Varying his stylistic palette to include the dream-like science fiction of ‘Karakasa’, the twisted naturalism of ‘Asking For It’ and the sentimental whimsicality of ‘Italiannetto’, Crisp simultaneously intensifies the confessional tone of many of his earlier tales, here present throughout, and with ‘Ynys-y-Plag’ brings us perhaps his most chilling depiction of supernatural evil. A shapeshifting collection, by turns humorous and bleak, otherworldly and mundane, All God’s Angels, Beware! will appeal to all those readers who are as eager to explore the obscurer recesses of the imagination as they are to fathom the darker depths of the human heart. If H.P. Lovecraft, Mishima Yukio and Philip Larkin put their heads together to create a new genre, the result might be something like this.