Rees, Gareth E
Entry updated 7 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes" in Acquired for Development By ... (anth 2012) edited by Gary Budden and Kit Caless. The tales assembled in Terminal Zones (coll 2022), several of them set in the Near Future, radiate a very contemporary sense that to write Horror in SF is to cast the gaze of the story futurewards, where something not easy to contemplate awaits. "We Are the Disease" (in The Shadow Booth Vol II, anth 2018, edited by Dan Coxon) traces for instance the course to inevitable disaster of a research ship entering Arctic waters, which have begun to sporulate with fungi that ingest the all-too-ready, all-too-human crew: the world awaits.
Rees's nonfiction, mostly learned excursions into liminal regions of Britain, is a significant contribution to the kind of psychogeography that Iain Sinclair (in particular) has evolved in his anatomies of London and elsewhere. Of these books of travel to lands within, perhaps the most original is Car Park Life (2019), whose narrator traces his course deeper and deeper into as seemingly networked labyrinth of car parks whose post-Brexit message seems to be that we are lost in a jungle; the book has been likened to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1925). Almost everything Rees publishes, fiction and nonfiction, is sensitized, usually in specific terms, to a planet and its inhabitants suffering from Climate Change. [JC]
Gareth E Rees
born UK
works (selected)
- Terminal Zones (London: Influx Press, 2022) [coll: pb/Devin Malcolm as Vince Haig]
nonfiction
- Marshland (London: Influx Press, 2013) [nonfiction: pb/]
- The Stone Tide (London: Influx Press, 2018) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Car Park Life (London: Influx Press, 2019) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places (London: Elliott and Thompson, 2020) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds (London: Elliott and Thompson, 2024) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry