Misery and Other Lines by CC Adams
Publisher – Sinister Horror Company
Published – Out Now
Price – £11.99 paperback £1.99 Kindle eBook
Welcome to Halloween in the capital.
No matter where you need to get to, whether you're going out, going somewhere, or going home, London Underground is at your disposal. Teeming with passengers, just like you; many of them masked, made up or in costume to celebrate the Hallowed Eve.
But some of them are different; sly and sinister. Wearing masks of humanity. Or, sometimes, no mask at all.
Keep your wits about you, watch your step, and maybe you'll survive the night.
Maybe.
The London Underground is from my Northern perspective fascinating. Not just as evidence of what large rail infrastructure projects can do (ahem) but when I get to visit that it’s a place where time and space get warped. You go deep into the earth; follow magical lines and can end up in a few minutes very far from your last destination. It’s a maze of strange names; hassled commuters with its own customs that look at us tourists with a mixture of apology and snobbishness as we don’t yet know the travelling rules. In Fantasy its has inspired tales like Neverwhere but CC Adams has in their mosaic horror novel Misery And Other Lines creates a fun Halloween treat for readers to approach with care and mind the gap.
It's Halloween and people are leaving work for home or going out on the town. The Underground is as usual the place many people go to get to their destinations but this time we have added trick and treaters in costumes. Well… we assume costumes…. We meet a man who seems to lose track of time and ending on a strange deserted station with someone who resembled his girlfriend. A busker who finds an interested bystander offers her a friendly arm but not one she will forget in a hurry. An ailing passenger will create issues for one bystander and sometimes snakes will talk to you suggesting murder.
What is really enjoyable is Adams has created an array of ordinary people about to meet unearthly sights on their commute and Adams has a fine approach in taking the ordinary and subtly shifting it towards the spookier side of life. Here the rules about avoiding the stranger’s glance on the tube; our fear of the strange person getting on or those snaking corridors is exaggerated and turned into with each chapter something deliciously nasty. As the story moves on we start to see some characters cross over into other tales and a bigger story starts to emerge. What slightly gets in the way is that each unlucky guest star broadly has a very similar arc – get on underground, visit train and experience strange events. While each threat and character is different the format gets a little repetitive before starting to merge with other stories. Ideally a little more variety in who the people and the situations may have stopped the feeling of the same format. I think I would recommend this be treated more as a short story collection with a few gaps in between your reads just to avoid that feeling.
Adams is an author who relishes a horror tale with bite. These lines are not safe and there is no guarantee of a return ticket for many of the unlucky commuters but for readers they may find this is a more Halloween treat to savour than a trick to avoid.
