Silverweed Road

Silverweed Road on the Corvid Estate in Kent is an estate agent’s nightmare. It’s the sort of place that makes homes in murder-ridden Midsomer look easy to sell by comparison. Retired DCI Jim Heath blames the road for bringing his policing career to an end, but despite that, he hasn’t lost a professional interest in the place, and his commentaries weave their way between each of the loosely linked short stories in a collection that lurches from the macabre to the grisly and back again like Dr Frankenstein’s creation careering around a dimly lit castle leaving mayhem in its wake.

Each story is prefaced by the relevant house number in this mock-Tudor suburban horror show, starting with No 31, where a man obsessed with his prized raspberry canes exacts a grim revenge on the jackdaws he blames for ransacking his garden and his greenhouse. No 25 is used as an artists’ retreat, but there’s something sinister lurking in the depths of the swimming pool and also in the nearby woods. No 17 is home to a greedy and unscrupulous antiquities dealer who bites off more than he can chew when he tries to cheat what he sees as a pair of local yokels out of a valuable gold ring bearing Anglo-Saxon runes. No 4 houses a man who is convinced that he can use the language spoken by cuttlefish to communicate with them and constructs an enormous tank for his prize specimens.

Outside No 10, a shrine of flowers around a lamp post marks the site of a fatal accident and even the suspicious DCI Heath is hard put to find the connection between this and a series of other fatal crashes in the area, but maybe he just wasn’t looking hard enough. A darts player living at No 16 loses his competition mojo, but finds it restored after making a fatal pact with a mysterious stranger. The hospital porter who lives at No 30 lives a strange – and partially furry – double life and No 15 houses the workshop of a celebrated latex model maker who takes exception to his greatest creation being spurned by a film company in favour of CGI effects.

The perfect murder is hard to carry out and even harder to get away with, but the owner of No 41 seems to have managed it, although bringing his wife’s ashes home and keeping them on the mantlepiece might prove to be a mistake. To round off the Kent version of Murder Mile, there’s No 22, a house that people leave, but no one ever seems to enter.

There’s plenty of nasty goings-on in Silverweed Road but not a lot of subtlety. The short stories brought together here don’t lurk behind you or at the edge of your vision – instead, they get right into your personal space and smack you in the face with a dismembered hand still dripping with its owner’s blood rather than tap you lightly on the shoulder and then scurry away.

There were only two I had any real liking for, which out of ten isn’t a particularly high score. The first was Darts with the Devil (No 16), mainly because it’s always entertaining to see yet more ways in which bargains struck with Old Nick can go horribly wrong – remember, the Devil is never a gentleman, no matter what he might claim. The other was The Vanslow Fox because it’s simply not possible to dislike a werefox. Or maybe I just like bushy tails …

I ended up concluding that I prefer my tales of the supernatural with less blood and gore, more subtlety and a lot more atmospheric scene-setting. For me, these were simply horror stories without much substance. A linking narrative from a retired copper isn’t enough for me to file horror next to crime on the bookshelf.