Engines Beneath Us

by Malcolm Devlin

Rob is a Crescent kid. Born and raised in the sheltered circle of grey semis, built to house the employees of The City Works and their families. Under the eye of the reclusive Mr Olhouser, the residents of The Crescent go about their work, their lessons and their law, accompanied by the never-ending sound of The Works machinery deep under the ground.

When Lee Wrexler moves into The Crescent, he brings with him something dangerous from the outside. Not just a reputation for trouble, but an outside perspective that will show Rob that the home he always thought he had a measure of is a stranger and far more unsettling place than he could have imagined…

Malcolm Devlin’s Engines Beneath Us is a powerful and unsettling novella of how the individual spirit is crushed by the pressure to conform, from a contemporary master of weird fiction.

Genres: Horror, Contemporary

96 pages, ebook

First published April 16, 2020

About the author

Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, The Shadow Booth and Shadows and Tall Trees. His first collection, ‘You Will Grow Into Them’ was published by Unsung Stories in 2017 and shortlisted for the British Fantasy and Saboteur Awards. A second collection, also to be published by Unsung Stories, is due to be published in Summer 2021. He currently lives in Brisbane.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This unsettling story from Malcolm Devlin takes place in The Crescent, an unusual community on the edge of the city. Boys like our narrator, Rob, are raised to believe The Crescent’s insularity and odd customs are normal – not to mention the subterranean rumblings of ‘The Works’ – but the arrival of outsider Lee rips away the veneer. Devlin invents a fantastic world here, always holding a little back, which both underlines the weirdness of it all and cleverly exposes the gaps in Rob’s perspective. Eerie and powerfully atmospheric. (Really pleased Influx Press have reissued this – I’d tried and failed to get hold of its previous incarnation as a TTA novella!)

[Stephen Bacon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rob lives with his parents on The Crescent, a row of houses built to accommodate the employees of The Works and their families. Beneath the city, machines rumble and gears grind, a mysterious and persistent counterpoint to the lives of the residents. When Lee Wrexler and his father move into The Crescent, the dynamic of the street kids changes. Lee brings something from the outside, something that dares question the way of life that the families of The Crescent have taken generations to learn to accept.

This is quite simply brilliant, easily one of the best novellas I have read in many years. The characters are well-drawn and compelling, the childhood scenario familiar and engaging. But it's only when the weird aspect of the narrative is introduced that the sense of wrongness begins to infiltrate the plot, creating a haunting and memorable story. The subtle ambiguity and carefully disciplined level of exposition are pitch-perfect, and Devlin does a wonderful job of balancing the strange proceedings with the mesmerising sense of nostalgia. In fact, I'd welcome reading something of novel length set in this universe, such is the richness of the setup. I'd class this novella as essential reading for lovers of weird fiction and so it comes highly recommended.

[Alix · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creepy little story set in an insular city that took a direction I wasn’t expecting. The atmosphere builds slowly and while you get a sense of what’s really going on by the end, there’s still a lingering ambiguity that makes it all the more unsettling. That uncertainty adds to the horror. This short novella is definitely worth the read, especially if you’re a fan of urban horror.

[Tom]

Very clever twist on British folk horror that moves the narrator from outsider to a child well within the cult, the locale from the pastoral to the British inner city, and the villains from dangerous outsiders to impossibly vast and powerful institutions older than perceivable time. Reminded me of Robert Aickman and Anna Kavan's more straightforward material—recommended!

[Paulina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interestive perspective on a concept of an insular community that has something Weird™ going on. The story does a lot with very limited length but I do wish it was longer, since it leaves so many questions unanswered. It's really good at creating tension though.

[Priya Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with Malcolm Devlin's assured collection "You Shall Grow Into Them", "Engines Beneath Us" confirms what a talent he is. He opens doors on the strangeness we pretend not to see.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a kid i used to hang around the local park where there was a boathouse. The steps to the top of the boathouse were always locked off with metal gates, but at a certain angle standing outside you could see a trapdoor in the underside of the roof. We had our suspicions as to what went on there. Occasionally we'd pretend to be investigators and make notes of who was in the area. I remember once seeing a cigarette end on the stairs, on the other side of the locked gate. Then, I grew up, and what was once mystical was forgotten. If I think about it now, I realise everything could be explained away naturally. Of course.

"Engines Beneath Us" taps into a similar scenario. The kids. the long hot summer. The weird stuff which everyone takes for granted until you really think about it. But here, the oddness is real. There's no growing up and getting away from it - even if you think you've gotten away from it - because it existed and will call you back and no matter of maturity will change what you saw.

That's the best way I can describe this excellent novella. It's haunting and deliciously odd and compelling. Read it and find out for yourself.

[Ross Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a sucker for Weird Communities stories and this is an absolute cracker. Devlin paints a vivid picture of the community, populates it with rounded believable characters, and never falls down the trap of over explaining the cause of the weirdness. A fantastic novella.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird folk horror in a british urban setting. At first I was worried it was a touch short but no need to be longer, its exactly as long as it should be. If you like weird fiction or folk horror you'll probably like this.

I disagree with people who say it needs to be longer. The mystery and ambiguity adds to the horror. You get given just enough information, well paced.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's been such an interest in folk horror in recent years but the focus always tends to be the rural. Engines Beneath Us brilliantly demonstrates that urban communities are every bit as apt to hold their own strange secrets and traditions. I love how the story starts by surfacing memories of a British inner city childhood and then, in the telling of what happened to the narrator's incomer friend, Lee, exposes the layers of weirdness that lie beneath it. And the weirdness is....very weird.

A strange, tragic story. Reminiscent of some of the best of the British 90s slipstream writing, of which publisher TTA Press was at the heart.

[Polwanderer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like an adult version of The Night Watchmen, Tim and Hidden People, or the books of Alan Garner, this was wonderful. Those books were amongst the earliest fantasies I read as a child and showed me a hidden world. This did the same for my cynical adult self.

[Sarah (Nocturnalbookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

ending fell flat I feel but it literally did make my heart race at some point and I love that

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENGINES BENEATH US
By Malcolm Devlin

“We took care of the city, we took care of Mr Olhouser, and he took care of us.”

When I was a small boy in the 1950s, and often put to bed too early, I created in my mind or BY my mind a hub outside the working class house where we lived near the recreation ground or green, a hub in the pavement that reached beyond itself into a machine room below our terrace of houses from where I could control somehow the roots of my downtrodden background in what then seemed a communication with the rest of the world, where I seemed to work at these things, as perhaps this novella’s Mr Olhouser worked. I have since related my memory of that hub to the then future Internet. Now the memory has darker roots, those relating, in this novella itself, to when my own, as well as Rob’s, Dad’s “overalls smelt of iron and oil and earth.” So reading this just now has taught me a lot, as well as hinting to me why my story ‘A Halo of Drizzle Around an Orange Street Lamp’ in the Big-Headed People book was written, a story wherein a night picnic was arranged on the green whereon these houses bordered… and why the events of that night were later recorded in the Family Bible …But this novella varies it: “A circle of orange streetlights against a velvet blue black sky; the thin white halo which surrounded The Works. The street was still and Old Elsie had gone.” You will never forget Old Elsie, the bag lady, as described by this novella, as told by the story of Rob, as narrator, and of another boy who comes anew to the Crescent called Lee. And The Works as a sort of hub of the Crescent (part of today’s working class or gang-controlled streets), a hub for the city with machines throbbing below: The Works that are sometimes more like mining or hawling rocks, rocks grinding together. My Welsh forebears were coal hawlers and miners. Miners of mine. And the tunnel-back two up two downs or back lane houses, even semi-detached, reflecting each others’ interiors, housing insidious cultures that do more good than harm, I now hope. A culture like today’s coronavirus (that orange drizzle and halo mentioned above!) and we surely need Mr Olhouser’s ‘tonic’ (“clawing at my lungs, reaching deep inside of me.”) even more! Notwithstanding the teeming mice and their pink squirming young. Rob’s encounter with the true nature of the Works and wondering if he shall ever meet Lee again, as he now sometimes does or does not, in later life. Headstrong and crime-sneaky Lee, in those boyhood days, with his comic heroes and rumours of what he had once done to his Mam, Lee who then tempted more than he should have done vis à vis Mr Olhouser. Childhood seen from a distance, it says somewhere here. Even a taste for opera in the case of Rob’s Dad. Lee’s narration about following some strange antics by Old Elsie are melodramatic info-dumps of dialogue, but is he acting, speaking by rote, pretending, still tempting the untemptable? Slow and quick at once. The city that is older than the law, hawled by such Crescent forces. Fragments re-jigsawed from those lodged in deep memory. Someone elsewhere in this novella has a metaphor about jigsaws, that I cannot find now, but this ostensibly was beyond what such a humble working-class mind might have thought of. But it was part of the hawling beneath her feet, I guess, making such humility the greatest wisdom of all…the greatest gift of wisdom from among many such in this bespoke haunting novella. Bespoke for each reader. I have merely told you mine. My mother, too, when I was that child with whom I started this review … “She’d set a fresh glass of tonic on the cabinet. She told me I should stay in bed, and she reached across to feel my forehead, as though either of us believed I might have a temperature.”

“The day resumed as though it had stopped to watch me fooled.”

[Dawid Mruk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back at it again moi drodzy. Koncepcja jednolitego, kolektywistycznego osiedla stworzonego przez i dla podziemnego boga pracy i miasta? Banger. Aczkolwiek za małe rozwinięcie częściowo sprawia, że to raczej ciekawostka niż porywająca przygoda. Ale czasem ciekawostki są jak najbardziej mega okay, zwłaszcza dla powracającego do czytania białasa jak ja.
Podsumowując polecam dla atmosfery, ciekawego konceptu, tajemnice.
Odradzam za postacie, długość.
Elo

[Josie Jaffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utterly weird and gripping horror novella. The insularity of the world Devlin’s created is so compelling. It’s the kind of story you can’t put down because you have to keep digging until you get to the root of it, and happily it’s a short enough piece that you can comfortably gobble it up in one sitting.

[Dan Coxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent weird/horror novella from Devlin that strongly reminded me of Joel Lane's short fiction. Pacy, unpredictable and disturbing, it has an inevitability to it that drags you forward even as you go places that you have no desire to visit. Strange and mesmeric fiction.

[Sokorri Callede · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few authors can capture the imagination with so few words.
Behind this striking story, the mind remains imprisoned in unsettling mirages.
The sketch of a society that reveals abysses of strangeness and horror.
Brilliant.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in a fit of anticipation. Good stuff.

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Aaron Govey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too long of a short story, the first half was so dull and slow. The world building was lacklustre and constantly pulled me out of it with weird references to spiderman and super noodles.

[Inma leyendoyviajando · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Emily Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

just wow

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was terrifying! The 87 pages of this story really packed a punch, what a great read!

[Elijah Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

fun freaky urban weird !

[Austin Clowes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic little weird novella, totally drew me in to The Crescent. Fun, simple writing with some absolute banger lines and great narrative structure.

[Rob Noble · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He would look at me, then through me, then past me. He would smile sometimes, but it was a delicate thread of expression, too easily snapped and washed away.”

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully unsettling, conveying a lot of forms of horror in a short novella. Devlin is a writer I always want to read more from.

[Adam(ChaosOfCold) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Company towns fascinate me, after watching Halloween III at probably too young an age I’ve been enthralled by these micro-empires. And whilst they’re probably not all dystopian nightmares of control that is my head-cannon and you can’t change my mind.

With Engines Beneath Us, Devlin brings the silent violence and simmering secrets of a company town bubbling to the surface. For the residents of The Crescent, a tenement row that backs onto The Works(not the bookshop) the generations of families who have lived and loved in the shadow of the factory that powers the city at large know of the inescapable terror that dwells beneath them and the power those roots can have.

In this novella, we’re taken on a journey of what it means to live in the shadow of someone’s ambition, in the shadow of industry, and in this deeply British tale, the company town feels so tangible you could find yourself sauntering along the crescent without realising it. 

You see, life in the crescent is like anywhere else, parents go to work, kids run wild, and the thrumming of the factory becomes the pulse of life. It’s there, vibrating in your ears, in sync with your heartbeat. So what happens when someone new moves in? Or when you leave!?

Engines Beneath Us brings British folk horror, and urban terror together almost seamlessly and whilst I’d have loved more to sink my teeth into this morsel is just enough to build the unease but not too much it loses itself in its own horror.

For those who love Black Mirror, or anthology horror in general this is a clean vignette you’re sure to enjoy.

Thanks to Influx Press for the advance copy, Engines Beneath Us is out next week.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engines Beneath Us by Malcolm Devlin is a quiet, unnerving novella that sits somewhere between a coming-of-age story and weird fiction. It’s set in The Crescent, a housing estate built for City Works employees. We follow Rob, growing up in this oddly ordered suburbia, where the ground beneath your feet thrums with hidden machinery and everyone lives by unspoken rules.
What really stayed with me was the atmosphere. Devlin crafts a setting that feels both reassuringly mundane and oddly alien. The ever-present hum becomes more than background; it’s a symbol of the invisible systems shaping every part of life here. The unease creeps in slowly, subtly, and never quite leaves.
Narrated by an older Rob looking back, the story subtly shifts when Lee Wrexler arrives. A newcomer who perceives The Crescent with fresh eyes. Their friendship unfolds with genuine adolescent awkwardness and warmth, making the growing dread all the more effective.
The character work is fantastic. Rob’s innocent acceptance of the weirdness around him adds tension, while Lee gently pulls at the threads of the estate’s illusion.
Devlin’s prose is magical, richly evocative, never overstating the uncanny but allowing it to simmer just out of sight. The result is something haunting, unsettling, and beautifully understated. It reminded me of literary horror at its best—more about metaphor and atmosphere than outright shocks.
At a mere 87 pages, Engines Beneath Us is a slow-burn gem. If you relish eerie, thoughtful fiction, this novella is not to be missed.