The BBC National Short Story Award 2021 - Toadstone
Toadstone is the story of a man who feels at odds with himself and returns home with the weight of a serious illness hanging over his shoulders. He is also a man who wants to escape the routines of his old familial life the expectations it throws upon him. The awkwardness in the family dynamic is palpable. It feels as if Rhodes has crafted this story for the reader to feel sympathetic and irritated towards his protagonist. The prose is skilfully jagged and cutting with enough depth to suck you in and not let you out until the end. For some reason, I would have been disappointed if there were no toads in this story, but thankfully (for me at least) they do feature – and they feel symbolic (I’ll stop there so as not to reveal any spoilers). There is a certain comfort in the story that I can’t quiet explain. This is my personal favourite. - Lee Mark
I’m an absolute sucker for weird, English, small-town traditions. Before I hot-footed it to California, I lived in the north of England for the first 30 years of my life, so I’ve seen my share of inexplicable but harmless ceremonies. Toadstone is a gorgeous story of a man in the middle of a health scare, going back to his hometown. Along with revisiting his former life, he participates in a yearly act that aids amphibian advancement. He also comes across a strange object, which may prove to be the cure to his health issues. Another fantastic story, and Rhodes has created people and places that feel very familiar to this expat. - California Reading
Toadstone is the story of a man who feels at odds with himself and returns home with the weight of a serious illness hanging over his shoulders. He is also a man who wants to escape the routines of his old familial life the expectations it throws upon him. The awkwardness in the family dynamic is palpable. It feels as if Rhodes has crafted this story for the reader to feel sympathetic and irritated towards his protagonist. The prose is skilfully jagged and cutting with enough depth to suck you in and not let you out until the end. For some reason, I would have been disappointed if there were no toads in this story, but thankfully (for me at least) they do feature – and they feel symbolic (I’ll stop there so as not to reveal any spoilers). There is a certain comfort in the story that I can’t quiet explain. This is my personal favourite. - Lee Mark
I’m an absolute sucker for weird, English, small-town traditions. Before I hot-footed it to California, I lived in the north of England for the first 30 years of my life, so I’ve seen my share of inexplicable but harmless ceremonies. Toadstone is a gorgeous story of a man in the middle of a health scare, going back to his hometown. Along with revisiting his former life, he participates in a yearly act that aids amphibian advancement. He also comes across a strange object, which may prove to be the cure to his health issues. Another fantastic story, and Rhodes has created people and places that feel very familiar to this expat. - California Reading
Nightscript 7 - The Delf
This story is one at first seeming easy to dig, easy to exploit, with its often lean and staccato or even shallow sentences like Hemingway and in direct contrast to many of the preceding stories in this book. But it got me in the end. Proved somehow my presumptuousness. I was initially bemused by its cough as weapon, that came out at me at the delf itself by the darkly shapeless representative of cough conspiracy in a wayside community on the mainland where the viral intensity is worse than from where he comes form, with all the ominous staccato aura of mask, taste and smell, a disarming narrative of a man come by ferry to give a lecture upon a theory of our current plague bordering on conspiracy, possibly a Jungian archetype repeating itself from 1666…. A story’s scrying that shook me proper darkly... - DF Lewis
Black Static 75 - The Stonemason
A man has been commissioned to create a sculpture in what seems to be Canterbury Cathedral. He has been working at it for a while but it is taking on a disturbing form against his will. Meanwhile, his home life is falling apart. He is estranged from his wife and a gland on their daughter's neck is swollen. He feels they are somehow related. What can he do. Seriously disturbing tale. - SF Revu
This is a M.R. Jamesian Cathedral story gradually morphing into an archetypal Black Static story, as if its pages and its side-images are equally and thickly narrowing and black-cloying it towards the cancer in the first story, not a talkative one, but one he is being paid to sculpt for hoisting on to the cathedral, but instead of creating the visualised image by chipping off lumps of stone it’s more like cleaning a monstrously feminine gargoyle that had always existed or, even more tantalisingly likely, the original cancerous lump his small daughter over whose treatment he and his wife have been agonising over. And both he and his wife are seen to become distanced, even in their bed, by the presence; in fact he even feels distanced from the other staff in the cathedral; he sees black shapes, not people. As perhaps we all do today. Even those together in current closeness. A widening cathedral close?
“And this thing, he knew now, had never known sunlight or warmth, had never known touch or intimacy or love.” - DF Lewis
A stonemason works on a statue in a church, and as his work progresses, he increasingly feels watched by a malevolent presence, while the statue he is creating never seems to take the shape he wants it to have. Rhodes’s story is a masterfully written piece of horror, weaving together the stonemason’s memories and past with the craft of shaping stone. I love the atmosphere of dread that permeates this story, and the way the darkness deepens as the tale is told, tightening the vise on the reader bit by bit. This is my kind of horror, tying together an already present internal darkness with external terror. - Maria Haskins
Black Static 56 - Border Country
Danny Rhodes is fast becoming a firm fixture at Black Static; ‘Border Country’ marks his fourth appearance in the magazine, and in it, he gives us a tale filled with quiet dread which expertly weaves together folk legends of witches, an attempt at a father/son bonding camping trip, and bitter, family disintegration. And although the final lines are perhaps a little too ‘on the nose’, it’s still a hugely atmospheric, melancholic work which plays out with perfect pacing and prose. - This is Horror
A deceptively plain narrative, as deceptive as its moving wood. It packs a punch when the various simple emotions mix Into a complex gestalt of real or self-manufactured hauntings and subtle threats leading to an eventual growing dread of a father for the safety of his small son, a dread to echo that in the previous story between a father and small daughter.
All of this is skilfully accentuated by the atmosphere of the downtrodden camping-site together with our sense of the guilt and despair attaching to the father’s thoughts about his broken marriage to his son’s now remarried mother. - DF Lewis
Speaking of fatherly anxiety, Danny Rhodes’ Border Country has single father Rob takes his young son, Max, for a weekend camping trip at the old, dilapidated site of Ridge Farm. Once a well-managed campsite, the farm has fallen into a disrepair that mirrors the perennial apathy of its owner following the death of her son.
Death, in fact, seems to surround the place – in the flower-laden memorials next to the entrance’s treacherously winding road and the nearby cave wherein a supposed child-killing witch was summarily executed by ancient townsfolk.
Throughout his tale, Rhodes paints a strong image of Rob – a devoted father, but one who still struggles with the existential elements of his relationship breakdown even if he tries not to show it to his son. Almost mirroring Rob’s internal struggle, the environs of Ridge Farm are a marred landscape – still appreciable in their natural beauty but nonetheless a tarnished representation of what once was before the human contingent withdrew the offer of maintenance. This being a horror story, things obviously don’t work out very well for Rob and Max… and Rhodes’ final punch proves a devastatingly bleak crescendo for the quietly gripping anxiousness that permeates his tale. - Dread Central
Danny Rhodes is fast becoming a firm fixture at Black Static; ‘Border Country’ marks his fourth appearance in the magazine, and in it, he gives us a tale filled with quiet dread which expertly weaves together folk legends of witches, an attempt at a father/son bonding camping trip, and bitter, family disintegration. And although the final lines are perhaps a little too ‘on the nose’, it’s still a hugely atmospheric, melancholic work which plays out with perfect pacing and prose. - This is Horror
A deceptively plain narrative, as deceptive as its moving wood. It packs a punch when the various simple emotions mix Into a complex gestalt of real or self-manufactured hauntings and subtle threats leading to an eventual growing dread of a father for the safety of his small son, a dread to echo that in the previous story between a father and small daughter.
All of this is skilfully accentuated by the atmosphere of the downtrodden camping-site together with our sense of the guilt and despair attaching to the father’s thoughts about his broken marriage to his son’s now remarried mother. - DF Lewis
Speaking of fatherly anxiety, Danny Rhodes’ Border Country has single father Rob takes his young son, Max, for a weekend camping trip at the old, dilapidated site of Ridge Farm. Once a well-managed campsite, the farm has fallen into a disrepair that mirrors the perennial apathy of its owner following the death of her son.
Death, in fact, seems to surround the place – in the flower-laden memorials next to the entrance’s treacherously winding road and the nearby cave wherein a supposed child-killing witch was summarily executed by ancient townsfolk.
Throughout his tale, Rhodes paints a strong image of Rob – a devoted father, but one who still struggles with the existential elements of his relationship breakdown even if he tries not to show it to his son. Almost mirroring Rob’s internal struggle, the environs of Ridge Farm are a marred landscape – still appreciable in their natural beauty but nonetheless a tarnished representation of what once was before the human contingent withdrew the offer of maintenance. This being a horror story, things obviously don’t work out very well for Rob and Max… and Rhodes’ final punch proves a devastatingly bleak crescendo for the quietly gripping anxiousness that permeates his tale. - Dread Central
Black Static 53 - Tohoku
This, for me, is literature’s perfect storm about the tsunami when Akio lost his Mizuki, and where a shrine bespeaks of the thousands of others lost that fateful day. His diving and encounters with, inter alia, versions of DeMeester’s lost souls through the skin of the earth, almost with her light touch, but one that here hangs deep with grief. Also echoes of the blending of Charlie’s earlier breathing with the world’s breaths, including that of his lost wife, a Tem now as Time by dint of Akio’s finding a clock at the bottom of the sea where thousands of such connections perished on that single day. And Akio possibly finding Mizuki’s necklace is a resonating with Sharma’s earlier necklace conceit, thus lending even more strength to its presence in the Rhodes story of such poignant strength about a historical moment we all remember learning about.
- DF Lewis
An intense literary, ghost story, which is as much, if not more, about the processes of grief and misery, as it is about any potential haunting. There are some deeply moving scenes in this short story, all of which are delivered with clean, quiet, and subtle writing. It’s a beautiful work.
- This is Horror
A thoughtful and carefully crafted piece with a haunting sense of melancholy.
- Dread Central
Haunting.
- SF Review
This, for me, is literature’s perfect storm about the tsunami when Akio lost his Mizuki, and where a shrine bespeaks of the thousands of others lost that fateful day. His diving and encounters with, inter alia, versions of DeMeester’s lost souls through the skin of the earth, almost with her light touch, but one that here hangs deep with grief. Also echoes of the blending of Charlie’s earlier breathing with the world’s breaths, including that of his lost wife, a Tem now as Time by dint of Akio’s finding a clock at the bottom of the sea where thousands of such connections perished on that single day. And Akio possibly finding Mizuki’s necklace is a resonating with Sharma’s earlier necklace conceit, thus lending even more strength to its presence in the Rhodes story of such poignant strength about a historical moment we all remember learning about.
- DF Lewis
An intense literary, ghost story, which is as much, if not more, about the processes of grief and misery, as it is about any potential haunting. There are some deeply moving scenes in this short story, all of which are delivered with clean, quiet, and subtle writing. It’s a beautiful work.
- This is Horror
A thoughtful and carefully crafted piece with a haunting sense of melancholy.
- Dread Central
Haunting.
- SF Review
Black Static 45 - The Cleansing
Thematic darkness also bleeds its way across into Danny Rhodes’s The Cleansing, wherein a couple of young girls witness the gradual swallowing up of the block of flats where their families live. This time, an apparently malignant black substance appears to be spreading like a cancer throughout the blocks, overtaking the flats where friendly neighbours used to live and a cohesive community once thrived… and it’s rapidly making its way toward places still inhabited.
Rhodes does a very good job building a picture of his world – not far from many of the now run-down estates and council blocks that pepper Britain’s cities and suburbs – and setting his initial hook of the inquisitive girls heading into previously forbidden territory in search of something ‘disgusting’. It isn’t until the final stretch – and a visit to a missing neighbour’s home – that the true horror sets in, but the measured build-up gives plenty of coiled launching speed for the final run.
While its concern for the price of ‘progress’ and the disintegration of community feeds a very undemanding core allegory, The Cleansing is nonetheless a well written piece of work that feels right at home in this issue, eschewing bodily violence in favour of a creeping, crawling ‘other’ whose grip will assuredly change the world (on micro and macro scales) for the worse.
- Dread Central
This clinging evocation of a cross-beat story depicts the entropy of a council estate being cleansed by what actually dirties it, like religions ethic-cleansing with spreading cancers of themselves into new (e)states – and just the mention of ‘Afghanistan’ in this text adds to such a phenomenon that the ageing residents of the estate flee. The story also resonates strongly with the Cataneo Gardner stories with the dark aura of young girls following toward ‘basements’. But, also, whether as a result of my capricious order of reading these stories or some deeper preternaturality, the immediately previous Murmuration ‘cloud’ and its various rogue implantings and almost cosmic entropy created by ‘man’ was a highly effective backdrop to this story’s so-called spreading state of ‘cleansing’… - DF Lewis
Thematic darkness also bleeds its way across into Danny Rhodes’s The Cleansing, wherein a couple of young girls witness the gradual swallowing up of the block of flats where their families live. This time, an apparently malignant black substance appears to be spreading like a cancer throughout the blocks, overtaking the flats where friendly neighbours used to live and a cohesive community once thrived… and it’s rapidly making its way toward places still inhabited.
Rhodes does a very good job building a picture of his world – not far from many of the now run-down estates and council blocks that pepper Britain’s cities and suburbs – and setting his initial hook of the inquisitive girls heading into previously forbidden territory in search of something ‘disgusting’. It isn’t until the final stretch – and a visit to a missing neighbour’s home – that the true horror sets in, but the measured build-up gives plenty of coiled launching speed for the final run.
While its concern for the price of ‘progress’ and the disintegration of community feeds a very undemanding core allegory, The Cleansing is nonetheless a well written piece of work that feels right at home in this issue, eschewing bodily violence in favour of a creeping, crawling ‘other’ whose grip will assuredly change the world (on micro and macro scales) for the worse.
- Dread Central
This clinging evocation of a cross-beat story depicts the entropy of a council estate being cleansed by what actually dirties it, like religions ethic-cleansing with spreading cancers of themselves into new (e)states – and just the mention of ‘Afghanistan’ in this text adds to such a phenomenon that the ageing residents of the estate flee. The story also resonates strongly with the Cataneo Gardner stories with the dark aura of young girls following toward ‘basements’. But, also, whether as a result of my capricious order of reading these stories or some deeper preternaturality, the immediately previous Murmuration ‘cloud’ and its various rogue implantings and almost cosmic entropy created by ‘man’ was a highly effective backdrop to this story’s so-called spreading state of ‘cleansing’… - DF Lewis
Black Static 38 - Passchendaele
This name resonates with the ‘passion’ of the earlier ‘passion play’ – the Passion of Christ or of a Saint who has the burden of his own pink coat of skin? This Rhodes story tells of a man, with a terminal illness, from a garishly-lit town in Sussex, who travels to an area of France where one of the massacres of the Great War happened – a war that started almost exactly 100 years ago – to run his last exhibition, this one delineating the course of that war. He stays with a married couple in the area, a couple who are on the point of divorce. He faces his own mortality as well the actual fact of such mortality for hundreds of thousands of innocent young men, now seen by him as ghosts in a truly spiritually attritional tale that will grab you out of your own complacency, if such you have. The man finds a photograph in a book, yes a photograph, of a cart and horse in this very area just before the war began and, in tune with the thematic fatefulness of the Hook story, it is as if it is another catalyst not for a series of single deaths but – as, I infer, a collective noun – a ‘generation’ of deaths…
But there is something far more specific to all collectivities, as each of us faces the dead body that we are about to become, like some solid flesh-corrupted ghost that one imagines, say, beneath the tarpaulin in the cart or like a dead body still haunted by some self-unforgiving past, the mother whom this story’s protagonist once had to care for? And there are other parochial matters in this story to dwell on, like the temporarily missing female half of the couple. And many other matters less parochial, too, to question about yesterday’s mass generation of unknown soldiers all with the collapse of their own individual puppet-strings, I guess, and today’s specific people, you and me, within a newly formed mass generation of deaths yet to come. And a “luminous-obscure” poem by Edmund Blunden for us to re-read - DF Lewis
Passchendaele is an appropriate title, and theme for a story given the centenary of the commencement of the first world war and I have to say, given my own obsession with that particular period in history, I was very much looking forward to reading it. I have to say the story wasn't what I was expecting but that in no way affected my appreciation of it. I liked it very much. The main character is Hewson, a museum curator, visiting the Ypres area in preparation for a new exhibition. Whilst there, he begins to experience strange phenomena, sights and sounds that suggest the landscape around him is haunted - and with its history how could it not be? It's a subtle, atmospheric and poignant story that beautifully captures the horror and waste of the Great War - Anthony Watson, Dark Musings
Danny Rhodes’ “Passchendaele” is an oddly mournful and nostalgic tale, centred around the battlefields of World War One France, now returned to picturesque farmland. It is a darkly beautiful story, with an awareness that the truth of things, of what has gone before, is never very far beneath the surface - Matthew S. Dent
This name resonates with the ‘passion’ of the earlier ‘passion play’ – the Passion of Christ or of a Saint who has the burden of his own pink coat of skin? This Rhodes story tells of a man, with a terminal illness, from a garishly-lit town in Sussex, who travels to an area of France where one of the massacres of the Great War happened – a war that started almost exactly 100 years ago – to run his last exhibition, this one delineating the course of that war. He stays with a married couple in the area, a couple who are on the point of divorce. He faces his own mortality as well the actual fact of such mortality for hundreds of thousands of innocent young men, now seen by him as ghosts in a truly spiritually attritional tale that will grab you out of your own complacency, if such you have. The man finds a photograph in a book, yes a photograph, of a cart and horse in this very area just before the war began and, in tune with the thematic fatefulness of the Hook story, it is as if it is another catalyst not for a series of single deaths but – as, I infer, a collective noun – a ‘generation’ of deaths…
But there is something far more specific to all collectivities, as each of us faces the dead body that we are about to become, like some solid flesh-corrupted ghost that one imagines, say, beneath the tarpaulin in the cart or like a dead body still haunted by some self-unforgiving past, the mother whom this story’s protagonist once had to care for? And there are other parochial matters in this story to dwell on, like the temporarily missing female half of the couple. And many other matters less parochial, too, to question about yesterday’s mass generation of unknown soldiers all with the collapse of their own individual puppet-strings, I guess, and today’s specific people, you and me, within a newly formed mass generation of deaths yet to come. And a “luminous-obscure” poem by Edmund Blunden for us to re-read - DF Lewis
Passchendaele is an appropriate title, and theme for a story given the centenary of the commencement of the first world war and I have to say, given my own obsession with that particular period in history, I was very much looking forward to reading it. I have to say the story wasn't what I was expecting but that in no way affected my appreciation of it. I liked it very much. The main character is Hewson, a museum curator, visiting the Ypres area in preparation for a new exhibition. Whilst there, he begins to experience strange phenomena, sights and sounds that suggest the landscape around him is haunted - and with its history how could it not be? It's a subtle, atmospheric and poignant story that beautifully captures the horror and waste of the Great War - Anthony Watson, Dark Musings
Danny Rhodes’ “Passchendaele” is an oddly mournful and nostalgic tale, centred around the battlefields of World War One France, now returned to picturesque farmland. It is a darkly beautiful story, with an awareness that the truth of things, of what has gone before, is never very far beneath the surface - Matthew S. Dent
Crimewave 12 - Dodge County
“His dark secret” was not to divulge his financial debts to the girl he wants to marry; so, another story with a tankful of denial. A car with a tankful drained, too, it seems. A fateful journey on Route America, an emotionally draining story as his splay of fateful choices fan out exponentially … Whether to submit to the temptations of eternal guilt or give up the girl he loves and remain true to his inborn standards of morality? An anguished dilemma, a fascinating story with a scene that meaningfully echoes Cooper’s earlier gory ‘tussle’ between a corpse and the living or the soon not to be living… - DF Lewis
The voice is fully fleshed out, and the character reasonably complex, if potentially one-note. Though that is, in fact, the point of the piece, so it’s not problematic here, simply aggravating for exactly the reason it’s supposed to be. The protagonist’s passivity in the face of likely losing the relationship he’s found (or that, more accurately, found him), his willingness to continue drifting along until things finally break, and the situation in which he finds himself that forces him to take action, followed by a further inability to follow that up with action when, again, required is an exploration of the listlessness of the protagonist’s life; of his inability to act either to his benefit or detriment. The ending here, too—the kind of abrupt close without resolution—that bothers me in regards to earlier stories, in this instance is perfect in that it’s reflective of the protagonist’s unwillingness, or inability, to commit to anything - Michael Matheson, Chizine
Ethan Stone lives in Waupun, Wisconsin, and had been dating a girl in Milwaukee for a while. He has not been honest with her about his economic status. He is driving to her place on a sleeting Friday night when he stops to pick up a man hitchhiking. The man explains that he ran out of gas a little ways off and asks Ethan for a ride. Ethan agrees, the man puts his sports bag in the car and drives off. Ethan eventually discovers the man's secret and that's when his peril truly begins. Good story, but I will quibble about British words and phrases that wound up being spoken or thought by Americans - Sam Tomaino, Gumshoe Review
“His dark secret” was not to divulge his financial debts to the girl he wants to marry; so, another story with a tankful of denial. A car with a tankful drained, too, it seems. A fateful journey on Route America, an emotionally draining story as his splay of fateful choices fan out exponentially … Whether to submit to the temptations of eternal guilt or give up the girl he loves and remain true to his inborn standards of morality? An anguished dilemma, a fascinating story with a scene that meaningfully echoes Cooper’s earlier gory ‘tussle’ between a corpse and the living or the soon not to be living… - DF Lewis
The voice is fully fleshed out, and the character reasonably complex, if potentially one-note. Though that is, in fact, the point of the piece, so it’s not problematic here, simply aggravating for exactly the reason it’s supposed to be. The protagonist’s passivity in the face of likely losing the relationship he’s found (or that, more accurately, found him), his willingness to continue drifting along until things finally break, and the situation in which he finds himself that forces him to take action, followed by a further inability to follow that up with action when, again, required is an exploration of the listlessness of the protagonist’s life; of his inability to act either to his benefit or detriment. The ending here, too—the kind of abrupt close without resolution—that bothers me in regards to earlier stories, in this instance is perfect in that it’s reflective of the protagonist’s unwillingness, or inability, to commit to anything - Michael Matheson, Chizine
Ethan Stone lives in Waupun, Wisconsin, and had been dating a girl in Milwaukee for a while. He has not been honest with her about his economic status. He is driving to her place on a sleeting Friday night when he stops to pick up a man hitchhiking. The man explains that he ran out of gas a little ways off and asks Ethan for a ride. Ethan agrees, the man puts his sports bag in the car and drives off. Ethan eventually discovers the man's secret and that's when his peril truly begins. Good story, but I will quibble about British words and phrases that wound up being spoken or thought by Americans - Sam Tomaino, Gumshoe Review
Horror Library 5 - Follower
Stephen Morris wants to complete the "50 Peak Challenge" in one season, so he has come to climb up to Fell's Edge. A strange man appears some distance behind him and continues to follow Stephen, who finds this rather unnerving. Things get worse when Stephen stays the night in the shelter built for climbers and hears spooky noises right inside with him. Anxiety and distraction become additional enemies as they threaten Stephen's safety during his climb. There are some good details here, definite creepiness and solid suspense... - Lillian Csernica, Tangent Online
Stephen Morris wants to complete the "50 Peak Challenge" in one season, so he has come to climb up to Fell's Edge. A strange man appears some distance behind him and continues to follow Stephen, who finds this rather unnerving. Things get worse when Stephen stays the night in the shelter built for climbers and hears spooky noises right inside with him. Anxiety and distraction become additional enemies as they threaten Stephen's safety during his climb. There are some good details here, definite creepiness and solid suspense... - Lillian Csernica, Tangent Online
Rustblind and Silverbright - The Cuts
Danny Rhodes' 'The Cuts' sets off in a tone that might almost have tipped over into comedy as a petty bureaucrat from the Transport Department is dispatched to carry out an exercise in obfuscation to disguise a foregone decision in the cutting of a branch line. The character's self-aggrandising and narrow-minded reflections carry us deep into the Welsh hills where he is disappointed not to be met by a protest group against 'the cuts'. Instead, he finds himself projected into a nightmare. The slowly darkening atmosphere of paranoia makes this story work well. Along the way, Rhodes takes the opportunity to get in a few well-aimed digs at the politics of infrastructure depletion - Nick Jackson
An excellent horror story about a civil servant and what has happened in a small community. The author writes atmospherically about the happenings and surroundings. Frightening and very creepy - Rising Shadow
This tells of a civil servant – who is working on the Beeching cuts – travelling by train in North Wales in November 1963 to deal with each community’s objections. An atmospheric Horror story, an effective, stylistically secure nightmare that builds and builds from normal life to something very frightening… An effect similar to that of the accretive extrapolation of the earlier Geary Death Trains into a truly felt archetype – a gradual process like the self-seeking angst of the Hodkinson story – and again there are those ‘architectonic’ landscape layers, contrasting with Stratford just now where industrial land had turned to natural wetland, almost as if here in North Wales the process of direction is far more insidious than that… - DF Lewis
Perhaps because railways so often slice straight through the geography of a place some of these stories, such as The Cuts by Danny Rhodes, allow trains to function as time machines. They offer characters a chance to see the future or past of a place - Pauline Masurel 'The Short Review'
Danny Rhodes' "The Cuts" is a most perfect story. A briefcase-toting civil servant, an arrogant, pompous "characterless bureaucrat" working for the government, travels by train to Wales in November, 1963. He is sent there after the protests about the Beeching railroad cuts outlined earlier that year, but he knows that it's a done deal ("he had the figures in his logbook") and his journey is purely for show. When he stops at Rhosgoch, he is surprised that he finds no protestors there to greet him -- but what he does find is the stuff of nightmares. Not only is this story beyond good and highly atmospheric, it has the best and most fitting ending I've come across in a very long time - Oddly Weird Fiction
Danny Rhodes' 'The Cuts' sets off in a tone that might almost have tipped over into comedy as a petty bureaucrat from the Transport Department is dispatched to carry out an exercise in obfuscation to disguise a foregone decision in the cutting of a branch line. The character's self-aggrandising and narrow-minded reflections carry us deep into the Welsh hills where he is disappointed not to be met by a protest group against 'the cuts'. Instead, he finds himself projected into a nightmare. The slowly darkening atmosphere of paranoia makes this story work well. Along the way, Rhodes takes the opportunity to get in a few well-aimed digs at the politics of infrastructure depletion - Nick Jackson
An excellent horror story about a civil servant and what has happened in a small community. The author writes atmospherically about the happenings and surroundings. Frightening and very creepy - Rising Shadow
This tells of a civil servant – who is working on the Beeching cuts – travelling by train in North Wales in November 1963 to deal with each community’s objections. An atmospheric Horror story, an effective, stylistically secure nightmare that builds and builds from normal life to something very frightening… An effect similar to that of the accretive extrapolation of the earlier Geary Death Trains into a truly felt archetype – a gradual process like the self-seeking angst of the Hodkinson story – and again there are those ‘architectonic’ landscape layers, contrasting with Stratford just now where industrial land had turned to natural wetland, almost as if here in North Wales the process of direction is far more insidious than that… - DF Lewis
Perhaps because railways so often slice straight through the geography of a place some of these stories, such as The Cuts by Danny Rhodes, allow trains to function as time machines. They offer characters a chance to see the future or past of a place - Pauline Masurel 'The Short Review'
Danny Rhodes' "The Cuts" is a most perfect story. A briefcase-toting civil servant, an arrogant, pompous "characterless bureaucrat" working for the government, travels by train to Wales in November, 1963. He is sent there after the protests about the Beeching railroad cuts outlined earlier that year, but he knows that it's a done deal ("he had the figures in his logbook") and his journey is purely for show. When he stops at Rhosgoch, he is surprised that he finds no protestors there to greet him -- but what he does find is the stuff of nightmares. Not only is this story beyond good and highly atmospheric, it has the best and most fitting ending I've come across in a very long time - Oddly Weird Fiction