JUMP CUT
Helen Grant
(Fledgling, £10.99)

Crieff-based Helen Grant, praised for her Young Adult fiction, is also something of an MR James fan. She contributes regularly to a newsletter dedicated to the master of weird fiction and recently wrote a short story for an anthology referencing one of his most famous works. Jump Cut is a superb homage, transplanting the essence of his eerie sensibilities into present-day Scotland, a context in which it works startlingly well. It’s a brooding, suspenseful novel with strong gothic overtones, but its central conceit is both a recognisable nod to one of James’s most disturbing creations and, when one encounters it, something that feels utterly original, unfathomable and creepy as hell.

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Theda Garrick’s husband of three years has perished in an accident, and after seven months of mourning she feels the time has come to start moving forwards. Theda, whose father named her after the silver screen vamp Theda Bara, is a writer and film buff with a particular interest in The Simulacrum, a lost 1929 film by the pioneering female director Lillian Velderkaust, of which no copies or even scripts survive. It’s the Holy Grail for film historians. The 104-year-old Mary Arden, its star, is the only living connection to The Simulacrum, and she has granted Theda a rare – in fact, unique – interview.

The Herald:

Theda drives north to Arden’s Scottish home, the Art Deco mansion Garthside House, surrounded by a sprawling estate, to be greeted by a stern, formal housekeeper, Mrs Harris. Mary Arden has laid down strict conditions for the interviews. Theda will be granted an hour’s access to her per day, and she will stay at the house for as long as it takes for the task to be completed. In Hannibal Lecter-ish quid pro quo fashion, every crumb of insight Miss Arden drops about the making of The Simulacrum must be matched with a confession about Theda’s relationship with her late husband. Arden is a cruel, twisted interrogator, skewering Theda with her own doubts and regrets in a form of psychological torture designed to test the grieving widow to her limits.

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Left to her own devices for the remaining 23 hours of the day, Theda wanders the lonely grounds, feeling the stark isolation of the place and noting that there’s something out of kilter about the house: “a faint sense of unreality”. And her nerves are shaken even further by the nocturnal prowler in the mansion’s corridors who rattles the handle of her (locked) bedroom door almost every night.

But, like an antiquarian on the trail of a rare manuscript, Theda is determined to battle through, kept going by the tantalising possibility that an actual copy of The Simulacrum may still exist, and may fall into her hands. Every day, Mary Arden reveals more about the making of the film, and how the love of director Lillian Velderkaust for her sweetheart Hugh Mason compelled her to experiment with a kind of filmmaking never attempted before.

Already, I’ve said too much. Jump Cut has to be experienced, preferably alone, after dark and with the curtains closed. From its grey, oppressive opening, with an almost catatonic Theda being gently ushered towards her husband’s final resting place, Grant builds up a sense of creeping dread that noticeably darkens once she is installed in the eerie, quietly decaying Art Deco house, where she will be forced to confront memories she has tried to bury deep inside herself. Theda’s predicament is a fiendish trap devised by a sadistic genius, and when it snaps shut it’s a moment as shockingly effective as any cinematic jump-scare.