For anyone who may be interested this is my introduction to Kitchen Sink Gothic:
M. John Harrison used the term kitchen sink gothic in
association with Robert Aickman. After quoting John Coulthart’s description of
Aickman as having the “quotidian Britishness of Alan Bennett darkening into the
inexplicable nightmares of David Lynch”, he added: “I often return to BBC4′s The Golden Age of
Canals, which features Aickman as a broody, nerdy TE
Lawrence of the waterways, for its footage of decaying tunnel entrances,
drained locks & Kitchen Sink Gothic clutter embedded in wet mud."
Coined in the 1950s, Kitchen
Sink described British films, plays and novels frequently set in the North of
England, which showed working class life in a gritty, no-nonsense, “warts and
all” style, sometimes referred to as
social realism.
It became popular after the
playwright John Osborne wrote Look Back
In Anger, simultaneously helping to create the Angry Young Men movement. Films
included Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, The L-Shaped Room and The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. TV dramas included Coronation Street and East Enders. In recent years TV dramas that could rightly be
described as kitchen sink gothic
include Being Human, with its cast of
working class vampires, werewolves and ghosts, and the zombie drama In the Flesh, with its northern working
class, down to earth setting.
It’s an area of writing
that fascinates me, especially coming from a working class background and
having been brought up in a terraced street in a solidly Lancastrian mill town which
any viewer of Coronation Street would
recognise as typical of its type. My formative reading in weird fiction,
though, came from middle-class Americans (Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury and H. P.
Lovecraft) or from upper middle-class British writers like M. R. James,
Algernon Blackwood, the Bensons. etc. I always felt there was a place for
working class horror fiction whose characters were more than merely just comic
constructs.
For me, within the horror
genre, kitchen sink gothic is the antithesis of Jamesian or Lovecraftian
horror. There are no distinguished scholars. The settings are unglamorous, perhaps
unatmospheric in the accepted sense of the
word in supernatural literature.
And gritty.
I was reminded of my own
occasional leanings in that direction after someone reviewed
one of my stories (Dark Visions 1, Grey Matter Press, 2013):
"Scrap by David A. Riley could
easily have been a kitchen sink drama, depicting the lives of two brothers
growing up in a poverty-stricken council estate in England."
Shortly afterwards I came
across John Braine’s novel The Vodi,
listed by M. John Harrision as amongst his top ten novels: “Constructed round
the fantasies of a recovering tuberculosis patient, this novel was the defining moment of an as-yet-unreported genre,
kitchen sink gothic. One of my favourite books of all time, it doesn’t seem
to be in print with the rest of Braine’s backlist.” Fortunately, Valancourt
Books rectified this situation, republishing it in paperback in 2013.
In the anthology you are
now holding you will find stories that cover a wide range of Kitchen Sink
Gothic, from the darkly humorous to the weirdly strange and occasionally
horrific. I hope you find the genre as
fascinating as I do.
David A. Riley, 27th July 2015
trade paperback:
amazon.co.uk £8.99
amazon.com $11.99
ebook:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.com
Kitchen Sink Gothic includes:
1964 by Franklin Marsh
Derek Edge and the Sun-Spots by Andrew Darlington
Daddy Giggles by Stephen Bacon
Black Sheep by Gary Fry
Jamal Comes Home by Benedict J. Jones
Waiting by Kate Farrell
Lilly Finds a Place to Stay by Charles Black
The Mutant's Cry by David A. Sutton
The Sanitation Solution by Walter Gascoigne
Up and Out of Here by Mark Patrick Lynch
Late Shift by Adrian Cole
The Great Estate by Shaun Avery
Nine Tenths by Jay Eales
Envelopes by Craig Herbertson
Tunnel Vision by Tim Major
Life is Prescious M. J. Wesolowski
Canvey Island Baby by David Turnbull
