The Concrete Grove by Gary McMahon - Review

Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Think of dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else, a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove. It knows where you live... 

Gary McMahon's chilling horror trilogy shows us a Britain many of us will recognise, while whispering of the terrible and arcane presences clawing against the boundaries of our reality! Book One in the Concrete Grove Trilogy.

I was always going to find this book an interesting read. I spent the first 23 years of my life on an East London estate, akin in many ways to the North of England one McMahon describes in The Concrete Grove. In fact, during that time I lived on the 19th floor of a tower block very similar to the derelict Needle that lies at the heart of this book's setting. From the moment I heard about The Concrete Grove, I was intrigued to see where McMahon would take his idea for a series of horror novels set in such a location.

Well, what he has done is to create an updated version of those earlier tales that suggest our pagan forebears were aware of hidden primal forces. That ancient rites, particularly those involving ritual sacrifice, were practised to appease or control such forces at specific locales in nature, nodes of power, such as those marked by megalithic stone circles or groves of ancient oak trees.  Some of these ideas may seem a little dated in the light of contemporary scholarship, but they were very much in vogue following the release of books such as Sir James Frazer's massively influential anthropological treatise, The Golden Bough, published in 1890. This in turn had an influence on many of the great writers of supernatural fiction working at the turn of the last century.

In the Concrete Grove, these influences are given a contemporary face by placing the primal power node at the centre of a modern council estate. So that here we have the inhabitants of a fractured urban community sowing seeds of despair in a place of ancient power. Needless to say, the fruit of these seeds are shown to be of a particularly malign and twisted nature.

Of the characters in the book, some are of the twisted type, and some are merely broken. One, a young girl named Hailey, is in reality neither, and she becomes a kind of portal through which the primal power can manifest most acutely. McMahon is known for his horror, but in this book there are definitely aspects that could be considered urban fantasy, calling to my mind Clive Barker's vision of the Dark Fantastique; a comparison I have made in reference to McMahon's writing before. These are particularly visible in the passages that focus on Hailey.

Hailey, together with mother Lana and a man named Tom, form the principle characters in the story. Both Tom and Lana are in desperate circumstances for different reasons, and their meeting excites a potentially dangerous passion. I very much enjoyed this attraction between the characters, because it generated light, and a tragic optimism, to contrast the characteristic gloom. Regardless of these brief moments of hope, the pacey narrative is marked by the constant sense of threat and of worse terrors to come.

Concrete Grove is - typically from the work of McMahon that I've read - unremittingly bleak for the most part. There are also some scenes of sexual violence, not overly explicit, but enough that some readers may be uncomfortable. I found this bleakness for the most part to be entirely justified, however, and I found the setting to be realistically portrayed. There is also black humour here, which provides a subtle change of tone in places. I will never look at a sea cow in the same way again, that's for sure.

In horror, the Gothic tradition often requires that the setting be as much a character as the main players, and that is very much evident here. The depiction of the Grove as a physical entity, with the sentinel menace of the Needle looming at the centre of concentrically arranged streets, is very effective.

McMahon continues to lead the charge of new British horror writers, alongside the likes of Adam Nevill, who are both acutely aware of the historical foundations of their craft, and the horrors that often manifest in our own time. With his latest, he offers both a mythically inspired vision of contemporary urban horror, and an update on classic themes in supernatural literature. It sure is grim in Gary McMahon's North, but entertaining and moving too. If you like your fiction dark, you will be hard pressed to find a more enjoyable vision of "Broken Britain" than The Concrete Grove.

The Concrete Grove
by Gary McMahon
382pp, published by Solaris Books, £7.99 UK/$7.99 US/ $9.99 Can

Available form the Book Depository, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and all leading book retailers.

For more information on Gary McMahon, visit the author's website here.

The next novel in The Concrete Grove Trilogy, Silent Voices will be published by Solaris in March 2012.