Tomato Cain and Other Stories
by Nigel Kneale
Comma Press, Hardback, £14.99

THE effusive blurbs on the dust jacket and opening page of this book suggest it prefigures Nigel Kneale’s classic TV dramas, such as the Quatermass serials and The Stone Tape. Frankly, this is a bit of a stretch.
 
Few of Tomato Cain’s stories are overtly science fictional or supernatural: the dominant mode is realism with a weird edge. To interpret this work in terms of Kneale’s future career, which centred on his knack for blending the scientific and supernatural, is to do it a disservice. Instead, the 33 tales of this unnerving but entertaining anthology, originally published in the late 1940s, should be admired in their own right, for their variety, insight, and deftly realised sensory textures.
 
Kneale’s stories are strong on atmosphere, plot and characterisation – and the best of them pack a raw emotional punch. For example, the claustrophobic and shrewdly constructed Oh, Mirror, Mirror begins in ambiguity about the circumstances and nature of the narrator and resolves into a truly frightening situation.

Jeremy in the Wind concerns the skewed perceptions of a man with an unusual “friend”. A folksy style of narrative address masks a developing sense of psychopathy, revealed in increments. A genuinely chilling tale, its stark and memorable imagery is a hallmark of Kneale’s short-form writing.

I came across Minuke in a ghost story anthology in my early teens. I have never forgotten its central events, motifs and power to unnerve. The author takes the well-established trope of a desirable new home with a poltergeist problem, and wrings from this unpromising material a fresh and authentic sense of dread. Minuke, a near homophone of “my nook”, typifies an aspect of Kneale’s storytelling: amid the clamour of chaos and horror, there are grace notes of wit in the narrative voice.
 
An out-and-out comedy, Clog-Dance for A Dead Farce relates the travails of a theatrical troupe on a provincial tour. It starts with shrewd observation and builds inexorably towards a moment of pure slapstick. Events, locations and people are deftly sketched, while the narrator’s evocation of the relationship between actor and audience is weird, funny and utterly convincing.

In Enderby and the Sleeping Beauty, an RAF maintenance engineer based in North Africa in World War Two discovers a building buried in the sands of the Sahara, encounters a beautiful mythic archetype and – shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark – undergoes an ordeal involving ancient mechanical booby traps. On one level, it’s a straightforward story of supernatural adventure, on another it’s a poignant study of the collision of the enchanted and the mundane.

Several stories draw on the quirks, landscapes, superstitions and social mores of Kneale’s childhood on the Isle of Man. A couple are atmospheric but inconsequential; the rest are smartly sardonic or disturbing.  

Tomato Cain is a complete collection of Nigel Kneale’s short fiction – and it will leave you wishing he’d written more. Weird, funny and ominous by turns, it is always original and always specific. It is a fine collection of stories.