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| Published by Mythos Books, 2007 |
Canada exists in that hazy place where England and America meet, and is constantly pulled by both of those powers — its nationality tied to the former, its geography tied to the latter. It is therefore somehow appropriate that Richard Gavin is Canadian, as his fictional world explores interstitial places, only his are blurred places between darkness and light, between wakefulness and sleep. Places where, for a brief moment, one might catch a glimpse past the mask of this world to the darkness that seethes beneath it.
These two worlds — the surface and the hidden, the reality and the sub-reality — exist at once, yet the nightmare landscape has no direct roots to any single place. Thus, though many of the tales included in
OMENS take place ostensibly around Toronto, Canada, they in fact happen anywhere and everywhere. The real world signposts are merely decorative; the truth lies somewhere else.
This book marks Richard Gavin's second collection. The first,
CHARNEL WINE, from Rainfall Books, was a sampling of the best of his early work, and though that volume was well-received, it still bore the marks of a voice still maturing, one still trying to pull itself out from beneath the shadow of its influences.
OMENS, by contrast, is a much stronger, and much more cohesive, collection.
Gavin dedicates the book to
J. P. Drapeau and
Errol Undercliffe. If these names sound familiar to weird fiction aficionados, they should. The first is the name of the mysterious figure in Thomas Ligotti's "The Journal of J. P. Drapeau", the second, the writer who perishes in Ramsey Campbell's "The Franklyn Paragraphs". Right away, by suggesting the two greatest influences upon his work, Richard Gavin acknowledges his origins and his intentions to move past them. But these names specifically seem to have another meaning, one more in keeping with the themes central to
OMENS: "There is a solitary truth," Ligotti's Drapeau narrates, "which, whether for good or ill I don't know, cannot yet be expressed on this earth." And Campbell's Undercliffe espouses a similar view when he leaves this life with the following: "No longer could I trust the surface of the world." In each case, we are shown the basic premise of Gavin's collection: that beneath this world lies another, truer, world. A world we might only see if we are extremely lucky . . . or, as is so often the case, extremely unlucky.
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