Review - The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World - Gareth E. Rees

The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World by Gareth E. Rees

Published by Influx Press 

(March 2018 - available for Pre-Order now)

‘The problems started the day we moved to Hastings…’

When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend’s tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?

The Stone Tide is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world. (Taken from thebBlurb)

Gareth Rees has moved to Hastings. His house is a mess. He is haunted by the half-remembered death of a childhood friend, the gradual disintegration of his marriage and inexplicable attacks by seagulls. Hastings is the last stomping ground of Aleister Crowley (noted dark magician and self-publicist) the Piltdown Man hoaxer and John Logie Baird. What links these three figures with Gareth Rees and his adventures in Hastings is an intricate and heart-breaking puzzle that teeters on the edges of sanity.

This is a deeply personal piece of work. Like Marshland before it, this is a life, a landscape and a mind examined. It is one that is at once totally unique but also strikingly familiar, he appears to have captured what it is to be trapped inside your own obsessive patterns of thought, but, thrillingly (and reassuringly) he is able to navigate a way out of the maze.

My own study is a little bit like Gareth Rees house in the Stone Tide. I plan to put up shelves, get a desk I can work at and buy a swivel chair that doesn’t keep descending when I am in the middle of a fruitful sentence. But my own procrastination and imagination get in the way. The machinations and misfiring synapses of my tired brain hold sway and construct a more vivid narrative than the one the real world offers. I am often sideswiped by my own obsessions and unwanted thoughts that gain weight and resonance by the very fact that I try to avoid thinking about them. Rees does not do that, he opens the haunted music box of his brain and lets us in, capturing the nature of memory, obsession and dream perfectly. His work tears open the mind and exposes its vulnerabilities, nightmares and delights. The process of engaging with our own personal events and tragedies are bound up not only in our bumbled memories of the past but also in fiction, history and dream. This is the world that Gareth Rees invites us to explore.

We move seamlessly between his personal present and past whilst occasionally shifting into real and imagined history. Each element of the journey - whether it be exploring Hastings, re-imagining the final days of the deeply pretentious Crowley, Rees’ own fevered remembrances of a lost friend or the utterly painful examination of a failing marriage and the dreamlike powerlessness to stop it – lays bare the complexities, flaws and delights of the human condition.

There is a real heady rush in sifting through Rees memories and experiences. He allows us into his home, into his imaginings and his mind. He pulls apart his own inner and outer-life to enable us to examine our own.

Although The Stone Tide is set in Hastings, raising this town on the edge of the world to a mythical status through Rees’ esoteric exploration of its past and present; this book is ultimately about living. Whilst this is an exciting, fast-moving mix of travelogue, reminiscence, occult adventure and urban wyrd; in reality this is a deeply personal, profoundly moving and truthful autobiography. Highly recommended.

Chris Lambert

The Stone Tapes - Avebury

The Stone Tapes - Avebury - Available to buy as a digital download from Bandcamp here.

Was this sent to me in the post or did I discover it in a cavity between the two damp granite walls of a forgotten stately home? Did I, driven by the impulse of a voice within me, frantically tear it from the mud and sod of a field deep in the heart of the West Country? Was I surrounded by ancient stones that seemed to sing out to me when touched or gently caressed? I am uncertain. Is this a genuine recording created using up to date digital technology or are they the sounds captured in the lusum magnetite of the dank walls, playing back when the atmospheric conditions are just right? There is an uncertainty here. This uncertainty is frightening and this fear is rich and sublime.

I listen again to ensure that it is not simply my own imagination or a half forgotten dream, but there it is; the voice in the static, the seemingly innocuous information about Avebury, the snatches of phone conversation with one voice strangely distorted. Is it deliberate? I don’t know. But I am unsettled, I am frightened and this fear is alive and immediate. But I welcome this and I stroll towards it all, arms wide.

In West Kennet the ritual has begun and my head spins, half formed voices dance out at me from within the ether, the whirling electronic dervish excites, inviting me to join the dance but I must not. I must resist. I take shelter in the lychgate, the rain pummelling down all around me and for a moment all is calm.

The rain stops and I venture towards the Owl and Druid Stone. I know I should not touch it but my hand is pulled forwards. The voices and tones thrust into me like lightning into bark. I am among the petrosomatoglyphs, the damp and the drip, the indistinct. The sound grows, it ululates through me as I spin, the light between the stones scratching at my retinas with every pass. My feet leave the ground, stray ends of grass tickling at my bare feet as I rise a narrow herepath before me, made of silver and granite. On closer inspection the path is festooned with tiny carvings, myriads of spirals, symbols, laughing mouths. The mouths move and speak and sing and question and grin. I am lost. I fall.

Reality seeps in. A voice clear and distinct on the end of a crackling line gives thanks. But, it flits away and deeper voices and drifting tones chant around me.

A cry. Someone is lost. But how can you be lost if you stand in one place? How can you be lost if you have not moved from the centre of a field? The sound builds, a low hum, growing. Reassuring dots and bleeps try to break through, but something is crawling in the dark. Something is in the way. I cannot move.

I am overtaken. I should not have listened to the Stone Tapes for madness seeps through. Sometimes we look to deep into the dark, sometimes we travel too far.

I have removed the headphones but Avebury is still within me. The sounds among the stones are sounds among the synapses. The stones are seen when I shut my eyes, when I blink, when the sunlight scrapes across the iris, the stones creep through into the dark.  

Do not listen.

Do not listen.

Do not lis

Do not

Do

Sink. Tread. Spin.

Let it in. Let the stones in. Let them all in.