Download Beyond Here Lies Nothing: The Concrete Grove Trilogy djvu

Like the two books before it, Beyond Here Lies Nothing is a super page turner that's dark, delicious, and evil. The characters are all wounded in some way, which totally works with the material. This book will intrigue and also repulse and entertain all at once. Love this author, and this trilogy is some of the best new horror I've read in some time. Get all three! To describe this guy's work is like trying to describe what floats around in the ether. This is the kind of horror McMahon writes.

Have to say I did not like this book. Was just boring an uninteresting to me. I would not recommend.

It is going to be hard for me to review and recommend this third instalment of what has become known as The Concrete Grove “urban horror” trilogy, especially as I generously awarded the previous two books (The Concrete Grove and Silent Voices) 5 stars, but I just did not enjoy this conclusion.

Perhaps I could not take any more of the squalor and urban decay that Gary McMahon describes so vividly “The Concrete Grove was a joyless estate. Apart from the poverty and the criminality that bred here, there was another layer of darkness that could be sensed rather than seen.” Maybe it was the result of reading this book over a bleak and depressing English xmas weekend but if truth be known the simple fact was I found the latter half of the story and the horror described disjointed, confusing, boring and was pleased when my read was complete!

If we remove the horror and look at the human element then the real essence of what the author is trying to express can be seen. The Grove is a place of no hope a place where the inhabitants expect little and receive less. Each day is a challenge of survival in a concrete jungle where the past times of alcohol and physical violence are an everyday occurrence and the hope to find or retain a job is non-existent.

Mark Price is returning to The Grove to research a book and attend a funeral. DI Craig Royle is haunted by his failure to solve the disappearance of “The Gone Away Girls” and the violent death of Simon Ridley, his wife Vanessa has departed due to his depression and alcohol consumption. The sad skeletal figure of Abby sits alone in “The Unicorn” hoping that drink and frequent lovers will help her forget the disappearance of her daughter and the violence of a previous partner Erik Best

Because The Concrete Grove is a place of last resort, no hope and urban decay it is quite understandable why this dystopian landscape is an attraction for evil “He’d never discussed his suspicions in public, but he knew that there was something deeply wrong with the fabric of the Grove. Too many bad things happened; there was a lot of darkness under the skin of the estate. Royle didn’t believe in ghosts, or magic, but he did believe that a place could be wrong. Some places attract darkness, and this was one of them”

The myth of Captain Clickety became colourful local urban legend in an old children’s skipping song but he was a lot more than that being based on a plague doctor called Terryn Mowbray who lived in the area at the time of the Black Death! Mowbray disappeared in the in the centre of the Grove and it is his return and presence that forms the central uneasiness at the heart of this story. If we add to this mix a flock of hummingbirds, an army of part men part scarecrows (balanced on broom handles!)...perhaps you begin to see my concerns........

It also irritates me to find grammatical errors in a paperback edition that I paid full price on Amazon UK and this comes down to lazy and bad ( or indeed no?) proof reading by publishers. On page 18 towards the bottom it states....”I wish we hadn’t been so stupid. If I knew what was going to happen”.....this should read “I wish we hadn’t been so stupid. If I had known what was going to happen” and on page 21 near the top it says....”He just led the way to the car, walking slowly to enable to other man to keep up.”....should of course read...”He just led the way to the car, walking slowly to enable the other man to keep up.”

Finally, and I may be wrong on this (and if I am someone let me know and I will remove from this review) but....at the start Mark Price has arrived to pay his respect to Harry Rose and meets his brother Victor Rose.....but about 100 pages later Victor Rose suddenly has a name change and is known as Vince Rose (page 139) with no explanation from the author...is this a mistake? am I going mad?

I struggled with this book, the image and scenes of decay were very well described but the storyline lost me midway and failed to recapture and enthral as the earlier parts of the trilogy had done.

It would perhaps be more accurate to call this 'The Concrete Grove Series', as opposed to Trilogy as the publishers do; each book is almost self-contained, featuring its own separate characters. But in a very real sense this is a trilogy, and superbly structured. I waited until a few weeks before the publication of this final instalment before reading the first two: reading it as one 1100+ page novel was a mesmerising, immersive experience, with the seeds sown in the first two parts coming to fruition in the third's climax.

Set on a gritty, fictitious council estate known as the Concrete Grove, this is urban horror at its finest as the author explores poverty, violence and life on the lowest rung of the ladder, throughout which is woven, in subtle layers, supernatural events emanating from the Needle, a tower block at the centre of the estate's concentric, crop-circle like streets. There's a power there, a force that is trying to get through. And it's succeeding...

The Concrete Grove lies in the Northeast of England, a place that feels permanently shrouded in darkness, even when, as one character remarks, the sun shines hard. A joyless neighbourhood blighted by crime and a life on welfare. Grim and bleak are adjectives that easily spring to mind if I was to describe these books... but I'm wary of that, for they give the impression that the books are heavy going, turgid, something to be slogged through till the end. They're not. Indeed, I found them incredibly brisk reads, not least because of the momentum, the sense of purpose with which McMahon writes. The writer knows where he's going and he's going there at speed, with the reader hurtling along beside him.

The grubby setting is a large part of the books' power - think about it, how many books and movies have you read and seen featuring pristine suburban streets wherein the affluent middle-class are invaded by the supernatural? Exactly, but here McMahon presents what is already a tale of horror, that of debt, crime, welfare and low wages. To then add supernatural horror to that is salt to the wounds. How to react? Interestingly, many of the characters take it on board with grim-faced acceptance: what's one more horror, they almost seem to say, amid what I've already got?

'The Concrete Grove' tells of Hailey and her mother Lana... and the debt her mother owes to loan shark Monty Bright. Soon Tom becomes entangled in her life, offering the only light in her dark existence. But the dark comes anyway...

'Silent Voices' features three men, Simon, Marty and Brendan, to whom `a very bad thing' happened inside the Needle twenty years ago when they were kids, only they can't remember exactly what is was. They attempt to find out and discover that there is another world beneath the Concrete Grove, and that the Needle is the gateway...

In 'Beyond Here Lies Nothing' small-time reporter Marc Price visits the Grove for a funeral and also to research a book on an old case that happened there in the `70s. Marc quickly becomes ensnared in the life of a woman called Abby and her ex-boyfriend, a local criminal. Meanwhile Detective Superintendent Royle is obsessed by the recent event of four missing children, known as the Gone Away Girls, and how it relates to present, strange events...

The main characters, as I said at the beginning, are self-contained to each novel, but not only are events in earlier novels talked about by characters in later novels, but characters, too, overlap. For instance Hailey from 'The Concrete Grove' has a part to play for the three men of 'Silent Voices'. Monty Bright's sometime partner in crime, Eric Best, is Abby's ex-boyfriend in 'Beyond Here Lies Nothing'. So, yes, the books can be read as standalone horror novels, but read as one novel the connections and details and allusions make for a far richer reading experience.

In amongst all this are the layers of 'other' horror which McMahon weaves with such deftness as to appear organic, with the reader accepting them as utterly real the way the characters do. Tom's 'hounds of hell' that are no more than running shadows... Monty Bright's obsession with the history of the Grove and its hidden power as revealed in the scribbled margins of his dog-eared "Extreme Boot Camp Workout" manual and his collection of dead televisions... the mass of hummingbirds congregating around the tip of the Needle's tower... the scarecrows with photos of children stuck to their heads... Captain Clickety... the Slitten... the Underthing... the grove of oaks that once existed at the heart of the estate, and on another plane of space-time still do...

This, deliberately, is no more than a hint of the rewarding details these books have to offer. The characters are real, damaged, the horror of their lives enhanced by the horror of what the Grove housing project really is. These are ambitious, fearless books and highly recommended.

'Beyond Here Lies Nothing' marks the release of McMahon's seventh full-length novel since the publication of his first four years ago - but his 18th book, since the debut of his short novel/novella 'Rough Cut' in 2006. The rest consist of further novellas, five short story collections and two edited anthologies (this tally doesn't count the three short stories published as standalone pamphlets/chapbooks). A 6th collection of stories is due at the end of this month and his 20th book will be a novella called The End, due for release soon.

Of course, this is far from the end for McMahon; with twenty books to his credit in six years McMahon writes, constantly, and with passion and truth. Further projects have already been announced on his blog. Needless to say, this is a writer to watch.