Ashes

by Philip Hemplow

Patricia’s life has fallen apart. Her son, Noah, is in a Russian prison, framed for a crime that he didn’t commit. Her husband has abandoned her, and mounting legal costs have left her broke. In desperate need of funds to pursue Noah’s appeal, she takes a job supervising the renovation of Gaunt House, an Elizabethan ruin on the North York Moors. When a corpse and a diary are discovered in the rubble, she begins to investigate the house’s tragic history—and finds that the past, and the dead, are closer than they seem.

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 13, 2014

Reviews

[Doug Bolden · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that I've spent the better part of a week, now, trying to figure out how to write this review says, I think, something about Ashes: Hemplow's short cosmic-horror-splashed haunted-place novel [say that three times fast]. I am just not sure what. Part of me wanted to start with a question about the Horror Zeitgeist that can fashion a ghost tale out of a genre notorious for being the-other-supernatural. Part of me wanted to dive right in with some comment about the novel's relevant-to-current-events vibe—from international relations with Russia to e-cigs. Part of me just wanted to blink twice and have a review written. All three parts are going to be a tad disappointed.

First off, the book is good with great moments—immediately coming to mind is a scene involving brood parasitism into which I had trouble not trying to read too much. It also does well by characters [including a wonderfully understated "love story"], mostly with the pacing, establishing a sense of unease, and being very even handed with its cosmic-sprinkles.

In the first portion of the book, most of the first half, the driving horror and unease is almost entirely down to Patricia—Ashes' protagonist, hired to renovate a house destroyed by fire centuries ago—and her desperate, life-wrecking desire to get her son, Noah, out of Russian prison [Hemplow feeds details about why Noah is in prison throughout, so I'll avoid saying why he is in...]. She is steadily losing cash and possessions just to keep up with the bribes and the legal fees [which is another word for bribe, in this case]. She has become estranged from her husband because she feels he is not passionate about their son's defense. She even takes the job central to the novel's plot to raise more money, entrapping her in its embrace.

And all of this suffering is highlighted by Hemplow's refusal to allow communication with Noah. Noah is a cipher, a lacuna, a blank spot in a book where he is arguably the second most important character. Despite being the driving force in her life, he is less real to Patricia on the everyday side of things than the Other-Worldly Things haunting her, except to what degree she creates Noah in her life, investing her ideal of him into her struggles and her suffering. Even if this book had been half-as-good as it is, Hemplow would deserve some notice for his handling of the [lack of] mother-son relationship and its ironic turn into a mother-[mother's-idea-of-]son one.

It would be wrong, I think, to refer to the struggles of her son and herself as "cosmic horror", but in a lot of ways, such a lacuna, such a fear, feels exactly like the heart of cosmic horror. The uncaring universe is represented by uncaring, questionably-motivated bureaucrats who does not entirely grasp the language, the emotion, or the mindset of those they impact; whoses face you can only imagine on the other end of a phone line. One does not need the Necronomicon to tell you the face of dark gods, here, you can imagine them in the description of a horrible jail cell miles and miles away.

As the book continues, the other horror increases in intensity, and the Noah-centric elements take longer and longer stints in the back-seat—I will assume this is a conscious decision—and the beat flips more and more to the well-known rhythms of a haunting: found artifacts, the living-in-a-new-place vibe, the inner-struggle-meets-outer-struggle, the contemporaneousness of the past and present. Though Hemplow does not spruce up the haunting genre greatly, he has moments where hints of other wrongness peak through—the brood parasite scene, a scene with a breakfast egg gone wrong, the odd phone calls linked, ostensibly, to the other half of the horror—that add dark spice to its flavor. He grasps the elements well and his prose is well structured.

That is, until the book hits a section of plot nearing the end. To understand it as a problem, you must first understand it as a success: having floated up a few disparate elements—the haunting and the son-in-Russian-prison story arcs—Hemplow intertwines them more and more into the double-helix of Patricia's life as a downward spiral. She has stacked her dominoes too precariously for too long, except, as the pieces tumble, they collapse fast and hard, occasionally feeling a tad teleological. As the twin-headed horrors of her life spirals into a hydra, the tension pops a bit hard, too orchestrated to continue the book's disturbing dissonance, a harsh note only showing up again at the foreshortened end, which I enjoyed exactly for its abrupt paean to madness and despair left rough.

All in all, a good book, as I said, with moments of true greatness driven by a repeated refrain of inviting death into your heart and into your home [the road to Hell, they say...]. While the cosmic-sprinkles are maybe too few to fully recommend it on that dime, the intersection between them and the more traditional haunt has some mileage and makes for an interesting juxtaposition.

[David Hambling · Rating 5 out of 5]

The haunted house story has a long pedigree, and the tropes are well-established – half-heard voices, poltergeist effects, an escalating series of events leading to The Awful Discovery – challenging any writer to inject freshness and originality. What makes Ashes such a pleasure to read is how Hemplow re-imagines the genre, and ambushes the reader with their own expectations. Shock and horror are here in spades.

Patricia is managing the rebuilding of a ruined medieval house on the Yorkshire Moors for an American client. Patricia’s son is in a Russian prison, and she desperately needs money to fund his appeal. As Patricia’s personal situation declines and her mental health spirals alarmingly, we also follow the parallel story of Elizabeth, the house’s last occupant, via her discovered diary – Hemplow gives us a note-perfect rendition of Tudor style, with a fine command of Shakespearean invective and attention to historic detail.
As the stories converge, the final horror turns out to be something much nastier than your average ghost, and Ashes builds to a suitably shattering finale.

Devotees of HP Lovecraft will enjoy the numerous references. Hemplow’s verbal panache and talent for winding up the tension make this a very superior slice of modern Mythos.

[Matthew Davenport · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fiction makes readers feel what their characters are going through. When an author can reach into a reader’s heart and pull at the same strings that his or her characters are going through, an author has done their job and done it well.

Philip Hemplow does just that with Ashes.


Ashes is a book about Patricia, an architect who is renovating an older home while trying to deal with a son locked away in a Russian prison. Brokedown Palace (the 1999 movie with Bill Pullman) is a great parallel to this story. Patricia’s son is locked away in a Russian prison for murder, but Patricia is stuck in the UK having to deal with corrupt lawyers and judges over the phone. They keep promising her that they can move his case forward if she could send more and more money.

The money has had its toll on Patricia, though.

Along with the stress of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars with no results, Patricia’s unwavering faith in her son’s innocence has cost her her marriage.

All of this is shadowed by the horrors that Patricia begins uncovering in the house she’s renovating. A few hundred years ago, a journal was written that detailed the strange happenings of the house. Upon finding the journal, Patricia cannot deny that certain things have been happening in the house that lead her to believe that the strange happenings the journal explained might still be happening.

This is a short read, but it covered so much ground. As a reader, I found myself pulled through sympathy with Patricia as well as riding the waves with her as the two worlds, the one from the past and the one that keeps trying to convince her that her son is a murderer, inevitably collide.

Ashes is a book about how hope can be a horror just as much as blood, gore, suspense, and thrills are. I can’t recommend this book more.

[Melanie Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do love a murder mystery, but this story somewhat confounded me. It felt to me, at times, that Mr Hemplow had swallowed a thesaurus such was his use of English. I read a great many books and like to think I have an extensive vocabulary. Mr Hemplow's lexicon is obviously far superior to mine, but just because you can replace an everyday word with one of of unusual or infrequent use, doesn't mean you necessarily should. I believe the term is sesquipedalian loquaciousness and very rarely does it enhance a story. Not only that, I found Patricia profoundly unlikable; arrogant, high handed and cold. So much so, that I really didn't care much what happened to her, Henry or Noah. The enjoyment in this book is derived purely from the narration. Diana Croft is charged with playing a London snob, a Russian lawyer, a York detective and an American celebrity wife to name but a few. I wonder if authors think of the enormous challenge they're setting these underappreciated and undervalued voice actors? As we have come to expect from Ms Croft, she pulls off all the accents with aplomb, turning in an Oscar winning performance. Bravo Ms Croft, you had your work cut out for you with this book!

[Mike Dominic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slow burn of a book with, I thought, too long of a build-up for its short length. The author tries to fit too much into the last 20 or so pages when the long process of setting up the conclusion required more fleshing out of the threat and the resolution.
There are some very good things in this book, enough to make me wish that there had been more of it. The "history" aspect was fascinating, especially in the use of "documentation", and there's good and unexpected use of the Lovecraft/Chambers/Bierce Mythos, with one strongly visual scene of action along the way.
However, the conclusion feels rushed, with some character actions being questionable, as if the author was rushing to get to the end and decided to force a quick dispatch to tidy loose ends.
It's a good book, and well written as far as it goes; it could just have used a little more meat in its latter third to make the payoff worth the build-up.

[Brittany · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting more of a ghost story. this is NOT what this one was about. more than half of the book was flashbacks from an old diary and renovation talk. also I hated that we were kept in the dark about why her son was in jail until the end of the book. the book really didn't get interesting for me till there was 36 minutes left
then it got sorta.... hmm.. messy. but still confusing. ending was left hanging... no closure.

this just wasn't my cup of tea.