The Uglimen

By Mark Morris

2002

First Published

3.84

Average Rating

148

Number of Pages

4H31M

Audio Length

The Uglimen by Mark Morris (PS Publishing, £8.00, 144 pages, limited edition signed, numbered, large paperback, also available as limited edition signed, numbered hardback, priced £25.00, published 2002.) One hole in the market that PS Publishing amongst cover scanothers are filling is the publication of stories that are too long to fit in most magazines or anthologies but are too uncommercially short to be published as books—long novellas or short novels, depending on which side of 40,000 words their wordcount falls. At around 45,000 words, The Uglimen falls into this literary Bermuda you'd imagine that to be published it would normally have to accrete subplot sufficient to double its length, which may well not be to its benefit. As it stands, it's a short tight horror tale, lean of fat and efficiently told though hardly groundbreakingly original. A short prologue is set in 1969 Los Angeles. Charlie and Doug are at the airport waiting to board the flight home to England. They're nervous, jittery, desperate to escape quite what, we won't learn until later. Flash forward to 2001. Rob Loomis is told by his mother that his father has hung himself. But who is the man Rob sees at the funeral? And who is the man who phones him to tell him the Uglimen are coming? The answers to these questions take Rob and his girlfriend Jessica on a journey which tells him plenty of things he didn't know about his own past. And there are a few twists before you get to the end. The Uglimen themselves, members of a self-mutilating religious sect, are kept much in the background, as hired muscle for the real villain of the piece, and to add to the atmosphere of threat Morris builds up. They could perhaps be made more of, as "religiously-inspired fanatic" is the sum total of their characterisation. — Infinity Plus

Avg Rating

3.84

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

26%

4 STARS

47%

3 STARS

16%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Mark Morris

Author · 44 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Mark Morris became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, Toady. He has since published a further sixteen novels, among which are Stitch, The Immaculate, The Secret of Anatomy, Fiddleback, The Deluge and four books in the popular Doctor Who range. His short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the highly-acclaimed Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries, for which he won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. His most recently published or forthcoming work includes a novella entitled It Sustains for Earthling Publications, a Torchwood novel entitled Bay of the Dead, several Doctor Who audios for Big Finish Productions, a follow-up volume to Cinema Macabre entitled Cinema Futura and a new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light.