ALAN FRISWELL: Reviewing Richard

GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND
By Richard Freeman

For those of us who grew up in a more imaginative age, a milieu of late-night horror movies, classic Dr Who, M.R. James’s ghost stories at Christmas and pre-digital special effects, the modern landscape of horror/fantasy entertainment seems watery and bland, a seemingly endless canvas of washed-out CGI animation, unimaginative storytelling, and ghastly teenage vampires that ‘sparkle’.
Richard Freeman believes that he might just have the antidote, and he might just be right.

Although new to fiction, Freeman is the author and co-author of five factual works on cryptozoology, or the study of mystery, or ‘hidden’ animals, either thought extinct, or completely new to science.

Freeman is also one of the zoological directors of the CFZ, or the Centre For Cryptozoology, and has travelled the world in search of giant snakes, dragons, monster fish, Nessie herself, and the Orang-Pendek, a jungle-dwelling cousin of Bigfoot.

Freeman’s influences are nothing if not eclectic, ranging from Jon Pertwees’ Dr Who, Japanese monster movies, the tales of M.R. James, Hammer Horror and the stop-motion marvels of Ray Harryhausen. Added to this, is his life-long fascination with the mysteries of natural history, inspired by childhood visits to museums filled with mummified spiders, taxidermied snakes, and the bones of animals 100 million years dead.

Freeman has channelled his influences into his new work; his first fictional outing, GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND, a collection of eighteen horror stories in a selection of styles, ranging from the almost poetic, to horrifically violent.

In this, a whole catalogue of monsters, spirits, hypnotic serpents, bloodsuckers, man-eating plants and Freeman’s favourite creatures, dragons, are presented in a fairly unrestrained attack on what Freeman sees as the boring, homogenized environment of horror/media ‘entertainment’, that has seen Harryhausen’s monsters replaced by computerised cartoons, and Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing turn into Buffy.
As you read through the varied tales, it becomes evident that Freeman is a very clever writer indeed; seemingly able to switch styles, so that when appropriate, his prose is subtle and mannered, rather like that of M.R. James, but when delicacy will not do the job, Freeman will suddenly launch into the reader with the same violence as typified the more sensationalistic writers of the 70’s, such as James Herbert and Guy N. Smith.

Freeman emerges from this as a true original, a writer who captures the style of many—James, Machen and Blackwood particularly spring to mind—while imitating none of them, creating his own unique vision and perspective. Perhaps like Algernon Blackwood, Freeman often invokes an atmosphere of the ‘sentient’ land, a truly wild wood, upon which we encroach at our peril. Hopefully, there will be more tales from Freeman, who with this first book has already become one of Britain’s great new horror writers.

Here then, is a book of mythological wonders, cryptozoological terrors, and the real fear of what might be lurking just behind the next tree.

Brilliantly illustrated by Shaun Histed-Todd, GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND is a wonderful reminder of horror’s ‘golden age’ for those of us who were there the first time, and for younger readers, a terrifying education in what real horror and fantasy were all about.