Mutator (Book)
Gareth Jones
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Written by Gary Fry
Published by Darkfuse
A somewhat Lovecraftian horror from beyond the stars is unleashed on rural England’s Yorkshire Dales in Gary Fry’s sci-fi/horror novella Mutator.
Having just moved into his beautiful new country home along with his devoted beagle, Damian, recently retired university professor James is looking forward to settling down to his new stress-free existence. His expected serenity isn’t quite to be, however, with the discovery of a hidden laboratory beneath the cottage housing all manner of incredibly strange research tomes and custom stargazing equipment.
This, coupled with the whispered rumours regarding the activities of the home’s previous owner, operates as prelude to the arrival of a strange silver ball that comes crashing from the sky in the dead of night to punch right through the ground and into the lab.
Seemingly summoned by the apparently dormant equipment beneath James’ cottage, the hieroglyphics-covered ball houses a particularly slimy passenger – one that defies all physical laws of Earth’s organic creatures and will soon be making its presence known in stupendously gory style.
Mutator is a short tale, clocking in at 18 short chapters, but a thoroughly engrossing one that you’re pretty much guaranteed to devour in a single sitting. Fry focuses most heavily on his protagonist, James – a learned man with much prestige, and many a credential, under his belt who simply can’t help himself diving headlong into the mystery of the ball and the research undertaken by his house’s previous occupant. James’ lower-class origins form a strong part of who he is: rightly proud of his wealth of achievements in the face of inherited adversity, but still grounded enough to respect his origins.
A particular little moment in which he plays up on his tellingly working class accent in order to have a little fun with the reaction of his newly acquainted, horseback-mounted toff of a neighbour is wonderfully played, and Fry continues to capitalise on little elements such as this in a manner that ingratiates us very, very quickly with the protagonist and his protective canine companion. Thusly, much of the fear in Fry’s tale is generated as James takes it upon himself to dig around in the darkness beneath his abode, following trails of slime and impossibly large tunnels created by God-knows-what as he attempts to get a proper look at the thing that crawled from this interstellar ball.
When the creature is revealed, Fry’s imagination and prose conjures those aforementioned popular Lovecraftian images of insectoid physiology grimly combined with a wealth of slime, deadly pincers, a greater cluster of eyes than could ever be thought necessary for such a being and an expanding maw capable of reducing animals to little more than quivering piles of macerated meat and bone in mere moments. Most surprising, though, is the direction in which Fry sends his tale when the inevitable hunt and confrontation with the beast begins. As James’ vengeful, shotgun-toting neighbour determines destruction of the monster as the only course of action, the professor begins to overcome the overriding terror of the situation insomuch as to consider the wonder of a creature whose physical skills of adaptation and evolution are truly something to behold. And so the stage is quickly set for a denouement which sings not of the more common fear of the unknown (and resultant drive to destroy the ‘other’), but a healthy reverence and, indeed, respect for it and all that it may teach us – even if, of course, it could quite easily have any of us as its next meal in a heartbeat. It’s a refreshing finish that offers much more than the basic ‘beat the monster’ ethos, and one that, in its final moments, sparkles with that same personal sense of awe and wonder found when man turns gaze to the stars.
If anything, Mutator‘s largest failing is its length. It’s very well paced, yes, but over too quickly. Widening the scenario and giving more room for each of his characters to breathe – especially the secondary ones – would have served Fry very well here. There are certainly the makings of a novel-length tale, which would likely have been eaten right up by aficionados of monster fiction and creature features – more carnage, more investigation, and more characters are things that Mutator cries out for, but doesn’t exactly need considering it already works as well as it does. That’s reader’s gluttony talking, perhaps, but it’s disappointing to see the scope that could have been employed here and wasn’t.
Still, maybe we’ll see the return of the professor and his trusty beagle in future tales. That certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.
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