The Northwich Horror - Robert Westall’s Monstrum Loci...

Robert Atkinson Westall, who passed away thirty years ago at the relatively young age of 63, is an author who is perhaps best remembered as a popular writer of fiction for children with many of his stories relating to his own childhood memories of living through WW2. His debut novel The Machine Gunners (1975) won him the Carnegie Medal and was later dramatized by the BBC in 1983. However, it is his darker, supernatural fiction that, in my mind, stands out as the acme of his craft as a writer.

My own first encounter with Westall’s work was his 1981 novel The Scarecrows (a title that won him his second Carnegie medal). However, unlike The Machine Gunners, the plot of The Scarecrows is distinctly supernatural. Simon Wood is a disturbed teen; his soldier father is dead and his mother is dating an artist whom she intends to marry. Their new home is in rural Cheshire and after Wood discovers a nearby abandoned watermill he attempts to summon his father’s spirit to aid him. But other malign forces centered on the old mill, intercept that plea and threaten the family. As a teenager, the story gripped me with both its mounting psychological tension and the creeping tide of a paranormal reality.

But Westall did not focus his talents solely on young readers. His uncanny tales for the more mature reader are certainly well worth a read. Outstanding examples are The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral and The Wheatstone Pond, both adapted into very good BBC radio dramas. And one of his short stories, St. Austin Friars, recounts the malign influence of certain ‘old’ families on the fabric of a fictional town, Muncaster, that reminded me more than a little of those with a touch of the Innsmouth about them... Westall would go on to pen a collection of supernatural yarns aimed at adults entitled Antique Dust, that would earn him, with their spareness and eerie suggestiveness, the well-deserved accolade as a latter-day M. R. James.

The seven stories in Antique Dust are, as the title suggests, antiques-related and are narrated by a dealer Geoff Ashden (Westall himself had dabbled in the business so he was working once more with the familiar).

Ashden, the protagonist, muses:

“Dealers are undertakers of a sort… When a man dies the undertaker comes for the body and the dealer comes for the rest. I deal in dead men's clocks, pipes, and swords. Passing through my hands they give off fear, joy, or loneliness. I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England.”

It was his referencing of my own natal county of Cheshire that added to my engagement with this writer’s supernatural works. Westall lived in Northwich, about 12 miles from where I was born and grew up. He even incorporated settings and places I knew well in his stories. And he transformed that familiar geography of Cheshire into a place where ancient and often evil things might walk when the stars were right (or wrong depending on your point of view), or especially when someone haplessly meddled with things that were just best left alone. Like Lovecraft, who set many of his tales in the familiar landscape of his own ‘Lovecraft’s Country’, Westall used his own locality as a geographic theatre of the strange. And echoing both Lovecraft and James with their ‘warning to the curious’, it was a heady notion to my teenage self. As much as I had the ‘Old Gentlemen from Providence’ in mind when I came to write The Horror Beneath, based in Cheshire as it is, there was more than a nod to the influence of the late, great, Robert Westall.

As a young reader, I had cut my literary teeth on science fiction and fantasy set in historically distant, alternative, or utterly alien realms. But Westall was a writer who, with a flourish of literary panache, revealed that even the familiar, the comfortably prosaic, might be transformed into a grotesquery where frightful things lurked. And as well as being a master of combining the ordinary with the extraordinary, Westall’s prose, his dialogue, and descriptive writing, are disarmingly believable and thus doubly immersive. And he invariably wrote about what he knew. For example, he was a branch director of the Samaritans for nearly ten years, a charity ‘helpline’ for those desperate and in need. Of course, the experience made its way into his fiction:

A voice spoke through the crackle. A female voice.

“He’s going to kill me. I know he’s going to kill me. When he comes back.” Geoff, who caught it from a distance, said it wasn’t the phrases that were awful. It was the way they were said.

Cold; so cold. And certain. It left no doubt in your mind he would come back and kill her.

Much of Westall’s work touches on that subgenre of Folk Horror. He conjured the Genius Loci but often subverted it into a Monstrum Loci, a resident (and often ancient) darkness that seeped through the veneer of twentieth-century modernity and plunged his protagonists into an engagement with the paranormal or downright alien.

The combination of those subgenres of Cosmic Horror and Folk Horror has been a staple of the weird for over a century now and what a tag team they are. Folk Horror has the earthiness of history, tradition and the layering of the familiar being revealed as something devilishly frightful, and Cosmic Horror pulls the rug out from under the protagonist’s (and the reader’s) feet with a glimpse at powers that neither notice nor care about humanity until they are foolishly prodded. Lovecraft and Machen both did it masterfully. When the ancient pagan beliefs of rural, backwater communities connect with the powers of an uncaring and indifferent cosmos you have an uncanny joining of ancient traditions and creatures from the Mythos. Chaos and madness are bound to follow.

Most of all it is the sharpness of Westall’s characterization that delivers the fatal blow of preternatural shudders. He was a writer of character par excellence.

His characters are believable, and, unquestionably ordinary folk, who are haplessly cast into a realm they had no idea existed. Moreover, the events play out, not on some radiation-blasted, distant world, but right here, right in the loam, the stones, the woodwork, the very fabric of the world that we inhabit.

Alas, many of his works are now out of print but they are still available from many of your favorite second-hand book dealers. I was fortunate to pick up half a dozen or so hardbacks of his works in a ‘bin sale’ at my local library, a bitter-sweet moment. It was sweet for me but bitter to think that these works had been selected for ‘removal’ and thus lessened the chance of their discovery by some other reader to access Westall’s ‘wyrd’.

His stories are, to put it simply, the manifestation of events where protagonists, who are believably just like you and me, find themselves plunged into the cataclysm of discovering a parallel world of unease and dread. That crafted suspension of disbelief in the things that are to follow is willingly made when turning the pages of a Westall tale.