by Gerald Kersh

Kersh’s Creatures.

Nightshade & Damnations is a prime collection for any Speculative Fiction reader’s shelf.

What a shame that Kersh could not be living and writing now. I think he’d fit in nicely with the modern mode of story and its practitioners of psychological, atmospheric darkness.

A clear, concise, no fuss writing style. Technique as subtle as the practiced Ju-Jitsu move that sweeps you into its easy hold, taking your momentum and intention, then using both for its own ends; whirling you about with swift and steady, expertly applied power till you end up on the mat, rumpled and just a little bit dazed.

In regards to plotting, Kersh seems to have had a mind like a steel trap.

Intelligent, metaphor enriched, abuzz with characterisation, this book is in fact, as with Kersh’s complete oeuvre, a midnight gallery of character portraits.

Gerald Kersh wrote and was published from the 30’s right through to the late 60’s producing hundreds of stories and around twenty novels. He lived a street level writer’s existence, and that reality informs his works.

English born into a Jewish family, Kersh had been a bodyguard, a wrestler (briefly), debt collector, picture theatre manager, cook, salesman and other things. He was in the Coldstream Guards during the Second World War and he and an unfinished manuscript of his were buried together by a bomb blast during the London Blitz. Kersh was resurrected, but the manuscript was not so fortunate. After that incident he carried a piece of his own cartilage around as a talisman, a memento of bad knees after his premature burial. He eventually swapped the gristle for an American’s Zippo lighter.

Kersh was reportedly a bit of a scrapper and had survived attacks by knife and hatchet.

He was a wanderer in the Soho of London. He wrote of crime and war and the streets, of real people. He wrote in the mainstream, he wrote of the comic, of science fiction, though it is, primarily, the pieces that he reeled in from murkier, colder flows that concern us here.

As well as being a short story writer and novelist, he wrote for radio and he co-wrote an Oscar winning screenplay about WW 2. But he was most highly regarded for his ability as a writer of short works. Kersh won an Edgar Allan Poe award for his novelette "The Secret of the Bottle" (aka "The Oxoxoco Bottle").

He, the imaginative source, uncredited, of the ventriloquist dummy episode in the classic British anthology film Dead of Night. Based upon his tale "The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy."

Now, without giving too much away, to the volume at hand...

The grim fairytale of "The Queen Of Pig Island" opens the set and contains a memorable quartet of unusual but quite human characters. "Frozen Beauty" is an ice rimed gem of a short from the Siberian Belt of Eternal Frost.

The cleverly understated "The Brighton Monster" and the quiet science fiction horror of the classic "Men Without Bones" (one of Kersh’s most reprinted tales) follow, this latter conveyed almost entirely in dialogue.

Kersh could be a literary cousin to Roald Dahl and his stories often contain characters with peculiar, even comical and ridiculous, names. Likewise, his story titles (the sometimes cryptic advertising banner for what’s inside the shop of story, the attraction’s marquee, the first hook), are, on occasion, intriguing. Kersh’s are like a spruiker’s call to a freak and geek show. As with the very nicely entitled "Busto Is A Ghost, Too Mean To Give Us A Fright!" A reality based, darkly comic, excruciating observation. Two tales for the price of one.

"The Ape And The Mystery" gives us Leonardo da Vinci and the secret behind That smile. "The King Who Collected Clocks," one of the two longest pieces in this collection, an historical intrigue with an S.F. element, is clockwork in subject and formulation. The Swiss variety, no two dollar mechanisms here. "Bone For Debunkers" is one in the, still imprecisely numbered and uncollected, series of stories featuring the roguish character Karmesin (in the projection booth of my mind I see Orson Welles in the part). It is a cryptographic pleasantry.

"A Lucky Day For The Boar" is a Poesque piece on psychological torture. Yet, it also smacks of Bierce. A very fine little tale.

Under another interesting title, "Voices In The Dust Of Annan," we find an S.F. Fantasy. Notable more for the style of writing than the tale itself. Like his novelette "Comrade Death" it is a reflection upon war. It too ably demonstrates the versatility of this writer. Lastly is the other long form piece here, also war related, and a Kersh classic; "Whatever Happened To Corporal Cuckoo?" A solid story hung on lovingly detailed and developed characters.

If you have not experienced this collection then, please, seek it out. It will reward your curiosity. Take this small tour of Kersh’s menagerie of the monstrous, the macabre and the marvelous. Good old fashioned story telling with a realist’s edge and a cynic’s good humour.

This is easily a one-sitting read. But to savour each tale is recommended.

Plus it has a nice little introduction by the editor, one Harlan Ellison. Yes, I said a little introduction.

If you’ve already made the fictive acquaintance of Mister Kersh, entered through the moth gnawed, dusty crimson curtains to his exhibition of the bizarre, then you don’t need Ellison nor I to tell you that this is a good one. If you agree then you are, in fact, Kershed.

You’ll have to trawl the second-hand bookstores or the Net for this beauty. The hour is long overdue for a "Collected Works" of Gerald Kersh’s short fiction. Lord knows there is enough good material for several large volumes.