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In The Rain With The Dead by Mark West
01/06/2006 . Source: Donna Jones 
pub: Pendragon Press. 272 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-9538598-5-1. Buy In The Rain With The Dead in the USA - or Buy In The Rain With The Dead in the UK  check out website: www.pendragonpress.co.uk
Jim and Nadia's relationship, as any teenage romance can be, is tentative and their new exploration of each other's friends and families just as tenuous. Playing with an Ouija board one night, with a couple they've grown to like, results in the worst possible outcome and from that moment onwards their relationship is on very shaky ground.
With the death of a friend in their adult life, Jim and Nadia get re-acquainted. Finding out that a love lost and then regained may well be better than when they were young and clumsy. Only their relationship faces a near impossible threat to overcome. Demons don't care about tentative relationships, only killing unmercilessly.
Maybe I shouldn't have held my breath for something to happen? Indeed, people would have seen my lips turn blue and my eyes bulge out of my head had they been watching! I did with this book and I've regretted it intensely.
'In the Rain With The Dead' is Mark West's first novel. It follows two teen-agers falling in love and making their way through the fumblings that tend to happen during this odd surreal time. Hailed as being 'One of the Brightest horror writers to come out of England since Clive Barker', I had to wonder how this can be cited, as this doesn't even come close to the Barker standard.
The writing was of a poor quality from the start. Clunky because of bad spelling and punctuation, basics that should be of a high standard to begin with. Okay, writers can make terrible spellers, but this is more than just a handful of mistakes. The novel does not show any grasp of basic sentence structure and mishandles 'imaging' as a common confusable with 'imagining' on a regular basis.
The relationship that develops with Jim and Nadia is not only shallow, but does not even show the results it was going for. Jim professes during the narrative that Nadia is the first real love he has had and the lust, while a part of it, is not driving him to his decisions. The problem with that is that they end up in a car at night having sex, not a month gone by after their first date, not even a fortnight!
There's an overall focus of attention towards erections. They tend to pop up every so often. When the demon is anticipating biting some woman's nipple off or dreaming about his next kill. Then Jim tends to get one every time Nadia is around. It's expected by the end of the book that, whenever they are together, he gets one. Remember, though, that this is genuine love for another person. Not page three titillation...
Emotive scenes, where the characters could reveal some depth to their personality, are instead replaced with sensations in the abdominal area. Warm fuzzies in the belly, stomach, gut. Oh and by the way, the demon has those, too. The rest of the narrative has this naivete.
There are no boundaries between characterisation. Each person adopts the same kind of language and thought process of the next, so the lines that should define them get muddled and serve no purpose. Frequently throughout the book, it seems to be a given that day-to-day life is a measure of the characters abilities to be just themselves, but it makes for dull, unimaginative writing that desperately needs a kick-start.
Dialogue rules in a show and tell of falling in love. It starts as a blow-by-blow account of meeting and getting to know one another. Very little dimension is added to the storywriting to make it either enveloping or good to read.
The storyline tries to emulate the 'Nightmare On Elm Street' films of the 80s and early 90s, but sadly it results in an over-used perspective of demonic evil and small town living. I was not surprised, partly because of the front cover, partly because of the way the book unfolded that an Ouija board was used as a set piece for the bringing of the unwelcome demon. Aggressive sex and cannibalistic behaviour don't serve the horror purpose that they should because eventually you get so desensitised by it you wonder what all the fuss is about. One killing after another to fuel the horror quotient rather than furthering the story.
The ending was the biggest disappointment of all. Nadia left dead in a pile of junkie needles and rat detritus was abysmal from the man who apparently loved her totally and without reason. He wanders off to find help and stares at the rainbow in the sky from the rain that is so important to the title. Come on, folks, even the again over-used carrying your loved one out no matter what state you're in would have been better than just leaving her there!
All the problems with actual writing and style could have been made inconspicuous by an attempt to make the story original and the characters believable. One-dimensional off-spring of one another don't make likeable people, they just fill the glaring white of an otherwise empty page.
A monotonal prose, worth avoiding.
Donna Jones
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