Spider

"Patrick McGrath is a champion of Gothic fiction who I feel is grievously under-recognised by modern genre writers. We should be talking about his work a lot more than we do. Spider, which was made into a film by David Cronenberg several years ago, is about a man who has just come to live in a halfway house after being released from a psychiatric hospital. This is 1950s London. The house is situated relatively close to where he grew up as a child. He hears conversations and noises and strange sounds around him, but we’re never always certain they’re attached to the people he can see. Through his own writings, we come to understand what really happened with his brutal father and his protective mother, all as his interior architecture falls apart (an echo of Poe’s Usher ). This is much more psychological Gothic horror fiction than the previous examples. There are no real ghosts here, no malevolent forces. This is about the deterioration of a human brain. What struck me is how McGrath realises the Gothic setting using different tools. Instead of the old castles or the Spanish moss-covered oak trees we have here in the South, he turns 1950s London into a Gothic setting with his choice of descriptors. He calls up the scent of gasoline, the yellow fog that clings to everything like a caul, people eating jellied eels. With the proper delivery, mundane aspects of daily life can be turned eerie and threatening. I was excited to see that done, and to be reminded that it’s about atmosphere, not about specific atmospheric traits."