Hollow Shores

by Gary Budden

Gary Budden s debut collection blends the traditions of weird fiction and landscape writing in an interlinked set of stories from the emotional geographies of London, Kent, Finland and a place known as the Hollow Shore. The Hollow Shore is both fictional and real. It is a place where flowers undermine railway tracks, relationships decay and monsters lurk. It is the shoreline of a receeding, retreating England. This is where things fall apart, waste away and fade from memory. Finding horror and ecstasy in the mundane, Hollow Shores follows characters on the cusp of change in broken-down environments and the landscapes of the mind.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, British Literature, Weird Fiction, Magical Realism, Horror

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Gary Budden writes fiction and creative non-fiction about the intersections of British sub-culture, landscape, psychogeography, hidden history, nature, horror, weird fiction and more.

His collection of uncanny psychogeographies and landscape punk, HOLLOW SHORES, was published by Dead Ink Books in October 2017. His dark fiction novella JUDDERMAN (as D.A. Northwood) is published in 2018 by the Eden Book Society.

He was shortlisted for the 2015 London Short Story Award, and his story ‘Greenteeth’ was nominated for a 2017 British Fantasy Award and adapted into a short film by the filmmaker Adam Scovell.

His work has been published widely, including Black Static, Structo, Elsewhere, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, Gorse, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

Praise for HOLLOW SHORES:

Here are punks, ghosts, vampire-hunters, ancient gods that hate to be neglected. Here is a country and a world teetering on the lip of apocalyptic void. And here are, too, insanities, desperate longings, great loves and rages and beauties. Completely absorbing.
— Niall Griffiths, author of Runt

I don't think I've ever read a collection of stories that fitted together so well before, with each one deepening the same themes to make a powerful reading experience about loss, and belonging, and growing.
– Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty

Quiet, unsettling, and at times, quite beautiful... The overall sense of dissatisfaction (though never angsty) and longing for an ineffable, unattainable ideal in our environmentally ravaged world was authentically and meticulously rendered.
– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

Budden’s writing is sparse, terse even, but perfectly suited to the landscapes of dislocation and alienation that are his natural milieu.
– Nina Allan, author of The Rift

Like some mythic counterculture coast; The Snow Goose on speed.
– Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Budden's work combines weird fiction, landscape writing, psychogeography and politics. The author calls it 'landscape punk' – an approach that embraces reverence of the British landscape, but rejects the conservatism often implicitly present in more traditional nature writing. In an article for The Quietus, he describes it thus:

Landscape punk is the abandoned shopping trolley sinking in the wet marsh of a designated nature reserve. It’s the sodden remains of a Winnie the Pooh toy floating face down in one of London’s canals whilst a hungover protagonist watches kingfishers and cormorants. It’s politicised, it embraces the weird, the horrific and the non-realist to try and get to some deeper truths about the insane world we’ve found ourselves.

The Hollow Shore, a recurring setting throughout the stories collected here, is a local term for a stretch of the Kent coast. (The phrase is one of many I was, during the course of reading this book, prompted to google, unsure whether or not they were real or invented by the author.) While this is a collection of short stories, it is intricately interconnected, packed with motifs. The protagonist of one story will turn out to be the partner or sibling of someone in another story. A group of friends, in particular a couple – Simon and Adrianna – appear again and again, but don't make the mistake of expecting their appearances to be in chronological order, or you'll end up thinking, as I briefly did, that their recurring presences are meant to depict alternate versions of the same life.

Hollow Shores is also intertextual, probably more so than I was able to recognise. The epigraph from Stephen Volk's Whitstable clued me in to the identity of the characters in 'Shell Grottoes': 'the vampire hunter' is Peter Cushing and 'the vampire' is Christopher Lee, at least I think. The writer C.L. Nolan – one of the things I was compelled to look up – is not real, but also not Budden's; he's the creation of another landscape punk writer, David Southwell. Personally, one detail I especially liked was the references to some of the anarchopunk bands, like Conflict and Crass, I so adored in my teens.

Stories like 'Saltmarsh' are near-ambient descriptions of landscape and lifestyle that set the scene for the rest. There are pieces of flash fiction, like 'Ren', 'Mission Drift' and 'Tonttukirkko', that briefly spotlight a person, place or moment in time. Several stories deal with itinerant lifestyles: characters at the upper age limit of the millennial bracket trying to find alternative ways around the problems of unstable employment and overpriced housing. In 'Greenteeth', for example, a couple have opted for a canal barge; the narrator contemplates 'the city's layers. What lies beneath'.

My favourite story of the lot was 'An Exhibition', which is both mundane and wonderfully strange. A man and his father travel to what is only referred to as 'The Exhibition', where the protagonist finds his own face strongly represented, alongside objects and obsessions from his past. Check the details and the setting corresponds to the real Margate, the gallery being the Turner Contemporary, but it's described in terms that make it sound like both an alien landscape and any English town. Two of my other favourites, 'Up and Coming' and 'Coming On Strong', find characters caught in moments/phases they recognise as transient, feeling a sort of nostalgia for the present. 'The Wrecking Days' is the last story and acts as a superb epilogue, bringing all the threads of the collection together.

I love weird writing with a strong sense of place – it's one of the reasons I've become so enamoured of Nina Allan's work; she sometimes writes about the same part of the world, with the Romney Marshes featuring prominently in The Race. This book also reminded me a lot of Lucy Wood, especially her most recent collection The Sing of the Shore, with its allusions to folklore and arcane local knowledge.

When I finished Hollow Shores, I went back and reread the story that made me buy it in the first place, one not included here: 'Where No Shadows Fall', Budden's contribution to Tales from the Shadow Booth Vol. 1. Aside from 'The Wrecking Days', I don't think there any individual story here wowed me like that one did. Yet I found the collection as a whole hugely impressive. Reading this I feel I have never known a place intimately, and it makes me jealous and awed.

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[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interconnected stories of British punks/friends some of whom yearn to leave London for rural areas. Quiet, unsettling, and at times, quite beautiful.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally I don’t really like short stories and when I read a collection, they don’t end up on the blog as I tend to find writing about them boring, but there are exceptions and Hollow Shores is one. The reason why I liked it is because the topic appeals to me.

The collection consists of 22 interlinked short stories, some are fiction, some anecdotes, some true and all are about the esoteric aspects of England – be it stories about the coast , a piece about the Guillemot or looking at Stonehenge at sunrise. There’s a mixture of fact and myth. In a way it’s a sort of diary where the narrator focuses on different era of his life via the weirder side of England, the culmination being the Hollow Shores, a kind of epicentre where magic and nature combine. What links these stories is a guide on the esoteric side of Kent, something which changes the narrator’s life.

In all an interesting collection and definitely worth looking into if you’re a fan of pastoral fiction crossed with new weird.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I've come to the following conclusions about Gary Budden:-

He really really really loves London!
He likes hardcore punk/metal and live gigs.
He has a thing about parakeets flying overhead!
He fears change!

This book was strange, one minute I would really like it, then the next it got on my nerves. I always get the feeling that Budden is trying to be too clever for his own good. The characters in this offering are related in an attempted subtle but ultimately all too obvious way. The same characters reference fictional publications and works that have come up in Budden's other work (again trying to be clever, see!)

The stories feel a little contrived and overly orchestrated.

The positive things throughout the stories are the physical descriptions of London and the South coast shoreline. These invoke a real sense of the place, the sights, sounds, smells.

I just don't know, Budden doesn't quite hit the mark here for me.

[Dan Coxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly brilliant debut collection from Gary Budden, can't recommend this enough. If you've read any of his stories before, you'll know to expect a combination of psychogeography, nature writing, folklore, weird happenings and punk pride (no, really). If you haven't read him before, then you should. What really impresses is the way in which this collection hangs together as a whole - more than just a collection of stories, but looser and more fragmented than a novel. Personal favourites are 'Spearbird' and 'Breakdown', but it's honestly hard to choose - so many good stories here. Grab yourself a copy.

[Ashley Stokes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very much looking forward to this debut collection and in no way was I disappointed, or comforted. This is a thought-provoking and insightful sequence of stories in which characters and compass points recur, accumulate, drift back and forth through sluices and conduits to the recent past and the deep past. The stories are not particularly plotty. Most of them are meditations or journeys, or meditations while journeying. The drama is inner. But, it's also outer. There's some evocative landscape writing here, and Budden obviously has a deep affiliation with the English coast and British wildlife. There's also some amazing London writing, too, and one story in particular, Greenteeth had for me intimations of The Wasteland, Ballard and Sinclair. The story Coming on Strong mentions the 'Apeman of Kent spotted in Tunbridge Wells', a subject close to my heart. A powerful and necessary collection, elegiac, ghostly, righteously angry and insufferably sad.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hollow Shores, by Gary Budden, is a collection of twenty-one short stories interlinked by people who, for a time at least, inhabit a stretch of the Kent coastline known as the Hollow Shore. The characters weave in and out of each other’s lives creating ripples whose effects are rarely understood by those involved. The place is walked through, escaped from and returned to. The stories are works of fiction but, as several of the offerings explore, although based on fact so are an individual’s memories.

The collection opens with Breakdown. On a cold, dark night a long distance lorry driver has a frightening encounter in the Black Forest of Germany. The reality of the experience is the effect it has more than the actuality of what is seen. The memory survives through the telling, the passing on to others who then appropriate the tale for themselves. Family history comes alive when it is retold, each version reflecting what is needed at that time by the narrator.

Saltmarsh presents the coastline through the eyes of a returner from London, who is walking the shoreline to meet an old friend. He is seeing the place afresh as he reflects on the direction his life has taken. His journey is not the seven mile hike but rather his ruminations along the way.

Further stories tell of a beached whale; of largely disregarded people who have become landmarks; of the spaces most will pass by without seeing. There are histories being made in the peripheries of each life lived.

Up and Coming expands on this theme. The protagonist is in a bar with friends waiting to attend a gig, observing those around him, realising that this moment will soon be a part of his past. He mourns the loss of a much loved venue, envies the young people who still have such memories to make. The author captures the judgements being silently made when others act in ways that differ from an individuals valued ideals. Impressions are often flawed, people’s intentions misunderstood. Despite time spent together few truly listen to what is being said, or seek out meaning behind silences. Later in life, when what was happening back then is discussed, there is surprise at what was missed despite being there.

The protagonists in these stories are mainly middle-aged so have awareness of time passing by. There is an undercurrent of regret, a longing for what can now feel out of reach. Relationships flounder as needs are neglected or missed.

Key characters recur in many of the stories set in different times and places. Told from varying points of view the reader gets to know these people, although in snapshots rather than fully developed, much like meeting old friends.

The writing is perceptive and pithy. From the title story:

“Julie left on Christmas Day. Married for three years, together for five. Upped and left with the gravy and roast potatoes still steaming on our clean new flooring, uneaten evidence of the final argument. What a waste of food.”

In this story the protagonist chats to a local drunk who comments about passersby, ‘They didn’t listen’ – who does? Eventually he must move back to his childhood bedroom, live with his Telegraph reading parents, listen to his mother update him on people he has no interest in. Yet he discovers that the town he was so desperate to escape from as a teenager now has a certain appeal.

The idea that people are rarely known even by loved ones is taken a step further in Mission Drift which features a man infiltrating a group of suspected activists by living amongst them undercover. Despite being a married father, he lives with one of the group and has a child with her. He wonders how many others are living like him, if he knows them without knowing.

I loved the language and mood of this book, the essence of life captured alongside the sense of place. From The Wrecking Days:

“The name came later, as we retrofitted chunks of our lives and tied them up with clever titles. We were underachievers with verbal flair, lyrical flourishes and a sharp wit, packaging our time into neat parcels. The wrecking days are, for most of us at least, safely compartmentalised, sitting in a past as unrecoverable as the eroding waterline of a home I haven’t visited in years.”

People inevitably change over time and so do places, but what is remembered is as fictional as perceptions of the present day. These stories succinctly capture the importance of life’s mundanities. They are incisive, intriguing and impressively affecting.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, dead ink.

[Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Budden's characters remind me of friends I grew up with in countryside towns. Refusing to be bound by provincial limitations, they put on punk shows above pubs or in living rooms. They joined protest movements at university, and subsequently struggled to build lives for themselves in big cities. They're older now and feel unmoored. These stories see them attempt to anchor themselves again via the natural world. But when they do they encounter unknowable folkloric forces - a giant the size of the country, a dark figure with a Tesco bag who stands motionless in the reeds, hidden zones with unwritten histories. Gary Budden's stories are well-crafted and have a keen sense of place. But it's his expert handling of concerns and lives so familiar to me that really draws me to his writing.

[Philip Fagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not content with labels like psychogeography, hauntology, and folk horror, Gary Budden has the audacity to declare his own subgenre of "Landscape Punk." While I'm not certain this is the most accurate descriptor of what he is up to in his Hollow Shores collection of interrelated tales, I have to say that the work speaks for itself. One of the best collections by a young author I have had the pleasure to read in a long while. Highly recommended for readers of wyrd fiction, aging crust punks and new age travelers, and the left hand Brit lit tradition. Bravo Budden!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Middle-aged modern masculine saline melancholia.

Coming from a Home Counties estuary village and journeying in to London or hanging around near the river to induce an altered state of being. I felt that the author knows exactly how it is to have been born in the late seventies with punk as the basis of your attitude, ethos and politics. Mix in the solitude and reverence for salt marshes with its oystercatcher cries and knackered boats. I thought I was alone in a niche outlook on life. Not so it seems, there are evidently many more of us out there connected by the same zeitgeist and geography.

There was a lot I know that I didn’t join up from story to story. “The true tragedy of our lives is the knowledge we don’t know”. But I’m ok with that and can always read them again.

[Priya Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of lyricism and grace, this book is an exploration of the British landscape and psyche. It's natural history, a musical history, a social history, and something more- touching on the pagan and the hidden. It feels like it's written from a quietly emotional place, each story adding another stratum to Gary Budden's interlinked characters, making the final story a powerful end to a unique collection.

Think of the city in layers. Too often measured in urban sprawl, width, diameter. Rarely in depth, in height. The vertical, the submerged, and all those bits inbetween. I live in a sunken city, a place interstitial with coots and cormorants and rats. Not Top-London or London-Under. Lomdon-in-between, neighbour to Canada goose and heron. But even here, we're fighting for space.

There is London, its streets and bookies, pubs and gastropubs and caffs and bakeries. There is Top-London; the glassy point of the Shard, the thrusting glass cocks with cute names that hide their malice, the chimneys at Battersea, the upper reaches of the beautiful brutalist blocks, and the ever-present cranes. There is London-Under, a realm of Roman relics and burnt soil where the trains rumble, commuters crush and I'm sure troglodytes gather in forgotten tunnels performing rituals to obscene gods.

My London-in-between- there are so many - is the canal network, fighting mildew in winter, coaxing cherry tomatoes and herbs from plastic pots come summer. Sunken veins just below the dirty streets. pleasant remnants from an industrial past that helped ruin the world.

[Abi Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think about this book a lot.

[Dom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hollow Shores comprises of a collection of short stories seemingly unconnected at first read, but entangled together in their relationship with a mysterious place called the Hollow Shore. These collections of stories feel so relatable, it’s almost as though they were memories of my own. Budden crafts a vivid reality of living in the UK through his remarkable descriptions of landscape, wildlife and urban sprawl.

The tales are told with underlying melancholy, a sensation that feels as though it has been hiding within myself and released through these stories. His writing is eloquent in a sense that the emotion of description can be interpreted both as dismal and beautiful, perhaps both simultaneously. I think Budden finds beauty in the mundane, and his retelling of these stories are beautifully relatable. His grasp on collective British psyche, the intricacies of sub-culture, and his ability to draw the reader into the common sociological issues prompts a strong personal response.

Strong and frequent references to drugs and alcohol ingrain their prevalence in today’s society - especially here in the UK. They symbolise a retreat from normality and an antidote for gravitating towards the void. You get a sense early on that the stories may be interconnected, however the end of the book confirms this with subtlety and the true power of the shore is revealed in an unforgiving way. It’s not a place, but its a dimension, a headspace, a place in society disconnected from societal pressures and one where you truly feel alive.

[queerdo · Rating 4 out of 5]

some stories were more literary than others. but it was a really good read that felt like i was stretching some muscles. i had fun trying to map the characters & narrators out too, the who’s who & when.

glad to have read brown’s ironopolis so recently, as it dovetails nicely with the peggy powler atmospheric sort of lore. i’ll be bumping gareth rees’ terminal zones up a few notches on my tbr, given his mention in the author’s note.

[Chris Bookley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fragments.

[Cristiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Contrived, overwritten, ultimately dull, stories. DNF.