Ice Age [Kindle Edition]

If you've read Iain Rowan's previous book, Nowhere To Go, you'll already be aware what a talented writer he is. If not, you're in for a treat.
Ice Age is a slim but potent collection of eight short stories, superficially horrors but actually far more disturbing. Rowan doesn't deal in schlock and gore, he's a much more considered writer than that. These stories are set in a painfully ordinary world, bleached out and suburban and perfectly safe, until Rowan twists them slightly, introducing a half-perceived something or an exquisite moment of impossibility.
Through The Window opens on a quiet residential road, outside a house with a broken window. Would you take a peek? And what would you do if the woman inside asked you to get her out? Rowan knows what you should do and he shows you the cost of it. It is an unsettling story, largely because of how skilfully Rowan builds the character of his protagonist, but also because it plays on deep, campfire fears. I won't give away the ending but you'll see, it does.
Similarly Driving In Circles gives us a recognisable situation to bring our own old anxieties to - we've all been there, an unfamiliar country road late at night, no lights, no other cars, just thousands of acres of crushing darkness and distant stars. In Rowan's world something stirs in the black fields, one those ambiguous impossibilities he's so good at, and it is genuinely disturbing to read. It will be even more disturbing tomorrow night, driving home through the unlit Essex countryside, I'm sure.
The title story Ice Age, by contrast, is about the shifting darkness inside. Coppard develops the flu the day his wife leaves him but when it breaks a chill settles in him which won't be warmed. He's convinced a new ice age is stealing up because it can't just be him, emotional pain can't be so completely physical can it? As an exploration of abandonment this story is very powerful, building to a terrible but inevitable ending.
Every story here is superb but special mention to Lilies, which opens the collection. Set in a nameless European city during wartime it follows Alex, a young man sent back from the front to work as a courier, but with the threat of returning hanging over him. The city is beautifully rendered, Georgian facades, rattling trams and bodies unclaimed in the streets, single white lilies left on them. Alex meditates on the suffering of the families who may never find them, but there is a war so it seems natural to us. Until Alex recounts the resurrection of his dead grandfather. If that sounds like a cheap trope I can assure you it doesn't read like one. With this story Rowan transcends the horror genre. Lilies is a piece of literary fiction and an excellent piece at that.
Ice Age is a deliciously unnerving collection, incredibly well written - Rowan is a writer in full and firm control of his voice - and one which you will definitely go back to time and again. I had high expectations after reading Nowhere To Go but Ice Age has actually surpassed it for me. It is a real gem.

Iain Rowan is a rising star of what's loosely termed the horror genre, though perhaps 'chiller' would be a more apt term for the stories in this remarkable collection. The collection is arguably linked by a common theme of loss and isolation - Rowan's protagonists are usually lost in some way; to society, to loved ones, to hope, to themselves. Thus in the first story, 'Lilies', the protagonists is a solder in a nameless city riven by what may be civil war. It rapidly emerges that the conflict is at least in part about conflicting attitudes to the dead, who in this world can come back to us - but only for a while. A similar war-torn cityscape, suggestive of the break up of Yugoslavia, features in 'Here Comes the New Way', with its bizarre religious cult, and 'Sighted', a tale of a sniper among ghosts. Altogether closer to home (which for Rowan is northern England) 'The Call' focuses tightly on a man wounded by bereavement who moves to the coast to try and forget his wife and child. On a headland path he meets an odd-job man who talks of the call of the sea. Descriptive passages of the fog-bound shore are as good as anything in the traditional English ghost story, but the conclusion is altogether more modern and ambiguous. Different again is 'Through the Window', a simple cautionary tale of a man who wonders about a woman who seems to be trapped in a derelict house. 'Driving in circles' has a nice, Twilight Zone feel, with a bickering couple realising that they have driven too far off the beaten track. A darker mood pervades 'The Circular Path', in which a man decides to investigate a childhood trauma and solves a mystery - unfortunately. But it's the title story - the last in the book - which stands out as a superbly-crafted tale on the borderlands of social realism. A man's conviction that a new ice age is coming is a powerful metaphor for the bleakness of a disintegrating life. The character's name is Coppard, a reference to one of the unjustly neglected masters of the English short story. I hope Iain Rowan gets the recognition that is his due.

I came across this collection whilst looking for a non-fiction Kindle book about ice ages. Obviously it wasn't what I was looking for but I like short stories so I bought it anyway. On the strength of it, I will very probably get Rowan's other collection. However, I don't think it's a 5-star book.

One minor niggle is the proof-reading. For example, "Piotr stood still, too far to do away to do anything other than watch."

Elsewhere, good stories are marred by cliche, and moments where the author is not living what he's writing. Take "He passed fingers of masonry pointing accusingly at the heavens..." I've seen variations of this line many times in small press magazines, and it doesn't mean anything! "Rumour spread through the city as fast as the fire." All well and good, but at this point the fire is NOT spreading whereas rumour is. And I wasn't sure I believed in the sniper in the nameless city at all.

After reading the first two stories, I got the idea that they would all end rather suddenly, almost arbitrarily, leaving the main issues unresolved. It turned out I was right, but that's not necessarily a complaint - far better to leave the reader wanting more. Some of the stories are all the more memorable for giving us a tantalysing glimpse, prompting us to wonder what happened next.

In recent years, authors have seemingly felt the need to stretch their slight ideas out to at least 400 pages, probably in response to their publishers' demands. If the appearance of the Kindle means we're going to get more choice, and that choice includes collections like Ice Age, with stories that don't outstay their welcome, then the future looks bright for readers.