Horror clichés on the mask, but something else hiding behind. (Mr Bad Face - Mark Morris)

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	Mr Bad Face - Mark Morris
Date:	19/04/01 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: takes a clichéd plot and delivers something unexpected.

Disadvantages: pop-culture references sometimes leave the book in danger of disappearing up its own backside.

It has been observed for many years now that the written Horror genre is not in too healthy a state, and to be honest few of the many massive and massively-pretentious volumes currently crowing the literary ghetto known as the ‘Horror section’ in the bookshops of Britain look capable of changing this situation for the better.

On the face of it, Mark Morris’ fifth novel ‘Mr. Bad Face’, is set to be little better than average for the genre, featuring as it does a plot which is essentially so bog-standard it’s a cliché: children commit some malicious act in their youth, and years later their actions come back to haunt them. Has anyone read ‘It’, or seen ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ or even ‘Scary Movie’? Then you’ll most certainly know what I mean.

There are, however, several key aspects of this novel which ensure that it maintains a degree of distinctiveness and which make it worth reviewing this book as an individual item, and in fact both of the major such elements are related to each other: firstly, the book is set in Britain and contains characters which are British; and secondly, the book allows the plot to develop at a nice, relaxed pace while allowing the various characters time to react and develop believably.

I say that these two points are inter-linked because, as you may notice, all of the horror examples I gave above, and in fact many of the thriller-horror novels and films of this type — and, moreover, much of the horror genre in general — are American. The fact, therefore, that characters within those books rarely seem genuine to me is possibly, therefore, because American characters are likely to react differently in many situations to their British counterparts, and I naturally associate myself better with the latter due to my own nationality. (Of course, it could just be down to bad writing in these cases, but that would seem to be
a case of insulting the Americans rather than simply recognising the differences between our cultures; I prefer the latter).

What this novel has, therefore, is a similar plot to many others — but it is the difference of execution which makes it worth reading. The devil, therefore, is in the detail!

The book starts with a prologue set during World War II in which Straker, a machine-gunner inside an RAF bomber, is badly burned when the last engine of the plane he is in, having been hit during the bombing run, cuts out just prior to landing and the plane crashes and explodes. It then cuts to the present, where a young girl, Chloe, has just received a mysterious gift of a poster, left in a tube beside her school-desk. Accompanying it is a note on which is written TO CHLOE. FROM AN ADMIRER. AND NOW IT BEGINS.

And begin it does; Chloe is murdered brutally only days later on her way back from school, and the terror, as it were, has begun.

Mr. Bad Face is a novel possessed of quite a cast of central characters: Tim, Chloe’s brother; Oonagh, a traveller (not gypsy!) girl who befriends Tim at school after he defends her from bullies; and, more to the point, Eric, Tim and Chloe’s father, and Jackie, Eric’s ex-wife, who were two of four children who burned down the house of the local ‘bogeyman’ [Straker], and upon whom, it is believed, Mr. Bad Face is now exacting his revenge from beyond the grave.

As well as these, there are a number of other characters who have largely supporting roles, but who nonetheless are used as viewpoint characters enough times that the reader has a chance to begin to empathise with them: Annette, Eric’s current wife and mother of Chloe, who is reduced to an almost catatonic state by her daughter’s murder; Farrington, the police inspector put in charge of the murder investigation, a woman who feels that she is most definitely working in a man’s world and
is consequently very defensive about her work; and Andrew Dullaston and James Keeve, the other two members of the childhood gang, who have each not seen any of their former friends for years (Dullaston, however, is murdered reasonably soon after his introduction into the book as a character proper, a fact which I don’t think will come as too much of a surprise to anyone reading the book).

So what is happening to this group of characters, huddled together through bewilderment and fear, stalked, threatened and bereaved? Is there a rational explanation — a madman on the loose, perhaps — or is this a case of the supernatural, the disfigured Straker come back from the grave to take revenge on those who killed him and their families and friends?

As I stated before, all of this is, on the surface, pretty standard stuff. Now that the basic plot has been exposed, however, I hope to be able to elaborate more clearly on some of the vital differences between this and something far more generic.

Firstly, there is the excellent use of a multitude of viewpoint characters. The fact that Chloe, for the latter two thirds of the book the major murder victim around whose death the entire plot of the novel revolves, is, for the first portion of the book, a viewpoint character herself — and a well-defined one, at that — gives the killing itself a harsh, cold edge which is simply not present in those novels in which the list of victims is simply a roll-call of names. The fact that we follow Chloe about her daily business for several chapters, interspersed though it is with sections devoted to others, means we grow to like this character and actually feel her loss when she is killed in the way we should but so rarely do in a horror novel. In fact, we accompany Chloe right up to a split second before her gruesome death, hearing her internal justifications for making the decisions she makes which allow the killer to make his move R
12; innocent thoughts, since for much of the time she (and hence the reader) is not aware that she is even being stalked (and when she begins to suspect she puts the feeling down to childish fears right up to the moment where the killer steps out on her).

This is, in fact, just one example of Morris’ excellent use of viewpoint, his changing of this viewpoint between a series of equally well-developed and internally differentiated characters helping to bring the story into better focus. Almost all of the characters are sympathetic, but all of them are believable (Annette is the major character who I found unsympathetic; as a mother her shot-dead reaction to her daughters murder and the bitterness and devil-may-care attitude which characterise her for the remainder of the book were distinctly unhelpful and, to me at least, irritating, but the fact remains that this is how many people react to bereavement, and I hence applaud rather than criticise the author for the inclusion of this material).

Secondly, there is the fact that Morris seems aware of his use of cliché, and that he is fully prepared to take advantage of it. Rather than moving at breakneck pace through an extended series of set-pieces before [shock! horror!] de-masking the villain (as in a horror movie), and rather than having the threat of murder sit around like souse in the background of the novel with the characters just milling around doing very little (as I remember from my days of reading endless Dean Koontz novels), this book takes us through a series of set-piece events taken straight from the horror and thriller genres, and shows us how real people would react in the situations given. This is actually linked with my previous comment above, that in the use of well-developed characters and varied points of view with horror clichés, Morris manages to create a real picture of how a situation in which a group of people are suddenly ripped from normality and stalked ruthlessly wo
uld occur — a picture which is all the more horrific for its perceived reality.

A third point which I would like to draw attention to about the book is in its progressive outlook: several of the characters of the book are Travellers, and these people are portrayed with a realism for which the book should be praised across literature as a whole, and not just within the horror genre. They are not a group of villains eager to sweep into a community, take everything they can find and then move on, leaving nothing behind but litter and the locals’ bad memories. But neither are they an altogether perfect bunch (this may be horror, but it is no fairy story), and they certainly have their share of problems. This aspect of the novel obviously sees the author speaking out, from the heart, against something he very much believes in, and when compared with the sheer number of novels out there which are strictly by-the-numbers efforts, this is a breath of fresh air indeed.

If I were to criticise this novel at all, it would have to be for its author’s over-use of proper nouns for aspects of characters’ lives where they are not required. Rather than, for example, say that someone listens to some music at a certain point within the novel, we have to be told exactly WHICH music, in terms of the names of the bands, etc. Opening the book at random [honestly], for example, I find this:

[Tim is being questioned by his parents and sister about his new friend Oonagh]
… He reached for the remote control of the TV that Chloe had put on and pressed the Mute button in anticipation.
“I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition,” Tim said.[1]
Eric laughed at the Monty Python reference and offered a blood-curdling, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Now, by point [1] we are still on safe ground, and the conversation is flowing naturally. But on the next line the whole shebang is thrown
out of rhythm just because the author wants to slip in an oh-so-clever but nonetheless totally irrelevant cultural reference. Perhaps if the conversation had continued with Eric laughing and simply making his retort, I might have let it go, but as it is it seems that the author is attempting to convince all and sundry of his cultural education without having faith in his readership to ‘get it’. Perhaps, however, this is not so much the fault of bad writing as sloppy editing, since this is exactly the sort of thing which should be chopped out of a novel with a knife.

Despite this, Morris manages to create a novel which, whilst offering nothing original in terms of plot, delivers something decidedly left-field within its comforting “horror-esque” packaging. Given the current state of the horror field, Mark Morris is probably one of the few names worth watching, and it therefore does not surprise me to learn that this novel was nominated for the British Fantasy Society’s “Best Novel” award during its publication year [although it did not win].

On the front cover, Clive Barker states, “One of the finest horror writers at work today”. He may just be right.

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