A Scent of New-Mown Hay
A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn
210 pages
Horror / Eco Horror / Cold War Horror
April 1958
Not the usual suspect…
This book was a pick that I noticed while shopping at Re-Read Used Books here in Ottawa. I’d never heard of the title before, and while a white book with a pastel-colored print of spores didn’t really catch my eye, that it was horror and a classic and that I’d never heard of it did.
The price was right as well because it was clearly marked as a collectible and because I’d never heard of it; 6 dollars worked for me.
I’m always trying to find titles or authors that are from that era before I started reading in the ’80s that aren’t the classics and usual suspects like Frankenstein and Dracula, Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft so I just bought it, and I’m really glad that I did because upon reading the jacket I realized it was cold war horror and that always intrigues me coming from North Bay Ontario where we always had just an extra notch of higher terror level related to the Cold War as kids.
By way of The Last of Us…
As I began reading this book, I realized it was written in that really interesting style of transcontinental British noir war intrigue, the proper sort of style.
Now I’m no English major so it’s hard for me to describe what this is but it is from an era where people spoke more commonly in received pronunciation on tv and Britannia still ruled the Seas and our airwaves here, the Red Scare was extremely real and back to the land was in full swing.
I think that this juxtaposes really nicely with the recent interest in Eco horror alongside very famous stories like The Last of Us. That game I’ve not played, but I’ve seen it played several times as my husband is a fan.
We watched the miniseries together, and I had, through osmosis, already understood the story so I knew what was to come and was very pleased with the story. I’d also read The Girl in the Creek by Wendy Wagner and love eco-horror like The Ruins by Scott Smith.
If you’ve ever watched the old horror film Shrooms, this sort of speaks to “Mysteries of the British Isles” meets “terrible fungal invaders”.
What really intrigued me while reading this is that the fungus that this and The Last Of Us are based on is real and this is a sort of thing that people suffer from called Madura Foot so looking up pictures of the fungal infection that this book is based on we’re just horrific and really helped.
I’m shocked that this was never made into a film and it was shopped around there were posters made of A Scent of New-Mown Hay and I think it would have been a good film and have it been made it would have been remade by now especially with the craze of fungal infections and zombies and such this is a sort of perfect Soldier Story too if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
I can’t believe it wasn’t made into a film and it’s time and I really hope that with the Valancourt reissue of this book that it garners the right sort of attention or maybe it reviews like this and it would be made into a film because I think it could be modernized and be a very hard-hitting show, especially in this weird tense new cold and hot war that we’ve got going on right now.
From the Valancourt edition:
With a plot featuring Cold War intrigue, Nazi mad scientists, and a pandemic that threatens to destroy humanity by mutating people into fungoid monsters, it is easy to see why A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958) became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and an instant science-fiction classic. After a British ship’s crew and a remote Russian village are wiped out in mysterious and horrible fashion, General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence sets out to investigate. As the plague spreads to England, Kirk’s frantic search leads him from the desolate tundra of Russia to the ruins of a Nazi camp, the site of unthinkable wartime atrocities. But who is responsible? Is it a Soviet experiment gone horribly wrong, the work of a depraved madman, or something else entirely? And can it be stopped?
The Theme and Setting
The story takes place in the UK and partially in Russia and it is mahogany offices, guys in black suits, speaking in clipped tones to one another and bossing their secretaries around sort of film there’s a lot of that so if the procedural of war is not interesting to you at least the settings and characters may be because there is a little bit of a near quasi psychic wife helps move the plot along so that’s one thing but yeah it’s basically from City to city across the UK and a little bit of pastoral Countryside.
The Characters and Writing Style
Aside from the quasi-psychic wife that seems to be a little bit of a hippie because I thought younger generation right that is coming up post World War II it’s basically a lot of men in black suits I picture you know they are described well the characters in this although near the beginning and somewhere in the middle there is a female character that is described as Old Maud and I found it just insane that they would basically call this woman in who seem to be celebrated and very knowledgeable extremely skilled but the scene would cut as she came in to tell them what’s what.
I found that incredibly sexist and they do it twice where they’re calling a woman into their man cave to sort out and tell them how to go forward in the face of an extraordinary enemy or a terrifying puzzle but they cut away and she never speaks a word on the page. Just wild to me.
There are other female characters and one interesting female character that takes care of an elderly man in a wheelchair that is part of the story and there is of course psychic wife but otherwise like it is very much a man’s game which it definitely would have been in 1958 that was who was in Parliament who was calling these shots we had not had many women world leaders since the time of queens and princesses and in this modern era at the time it was just no place amongst the cigar chomping men for women. Like we were still decades from the first woman prime minister.
Now when I say Cold War, we can’t allow the Red Scare to overshadow all of that. We had the actual involvement of German scientists who were part of the creeping terror many felt.
There was no telling where they had fled to. MKUltra and Operation Paperclip were no more well-known than Skunk Works so we have the benefit of history working against the modern reader here. This might have been a very scary idea and not the topic of common news, like it is on so many television shows and podcasts today.
The writing style is not a far cry from James Bond stories or Robert Heinlein, or even Ray Bradbury with that very clipped, very lean, very structured format. There is quite a bit of dialogue and things end with exclamations or right oh and there’s a chap and there’s a lot of stiff upper lip kind of tone to a lot of what they’re talking about even though they may talk about spreading illness a devastating new biological weapon things that would be shocking and terrifying but not one of these men are shocked nor terrified.
Now, speaking of the level of horror within this. We can’t assume or expect some of the modern tropes to be present in this.
We haven’t experienced that horror boom of the 80s, and we’re relying a lot more on what’s not on the page and the unexplained or undescribed to terrify people. It has some sort of Hitchcock-ish trappings of relying on being unnerved through literary tension devices.
which do work very well so when we meet the thing on the doorstep from time to time within this book while it’s not fully described we have what has been fed into our imagination with mentions of these fungal infections with mentions of war-torn villages and it is extremely effective however subtle.
A Scent of New-Mown Hay itself becomes almost a beacon to the reader, and by the time we realize the full impact of the title, all hope is nearly lost.
By the time that we have a sort of full frontal horror going on, I can see how this would have shocked and scared audiences, and I’m still again surprised that we hear little more about this book.
An under-sung classic…
As mentioned, I think this would be a good addition if you are a fan of The Last of Us, be it the game or the miniseries. If you are into Cold War horror which I can’t really think of much more of it but I would really like to read more of it aside from like you boat Terror right and Intrigue on the on the sub Seas but I think that as far as an Eco horror meets Cold War era horror, this is one of the very few titles I’ve ever seen that really straddle that.
Or if like me you’re just looking for some under-sung classics of horror that take place in that weird Gap where men’s Adventure and science fiction seem to reign supreme and horrid kind of taking a back seat I think that this is a really nice addition to that. I recommend the Valancourt edition, not that this is very hard to find, but they always do put out a good book.
They have a good background usually when they’re forward and they have a very good eye for design and pagination so their books are just very well put together. As is this story and plot there are some sort of red herring taking place in the plot but it clips along it’s an enjoyable read it’s intriguing it has moments of horror has moments of terror and it can be very grotesque if like me you look up pictures of this specific fungal infection?
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Typical Books 403 – Review – A Scent of New-Mown Hay