‘Last Love’ first appeared in Uncertainties, Volume 1 – August 2016

“…that in the last moment in extremis lay the greatest expression of life.”

When I first saw the title ‘Uncertainties’ for these two anthologies, I assumed a sense of the traditional supernatural, the uneasy, the questionable nature of ghosts, even an arguable homeliness or comfort of the odd MR Jamesian pastiche/tribute or quiet horror. Indeed I am already sure there are fine examples of such sensitive weird and atmospheric fictions within these anthologies, but I now realise that the ‘Uncertainty’ possesses also a more serious, dangerous, challenging or brave quality.

This story about Gerry, at first, I thought seemed arguably an expanded examination of the rationale I inferred above at the end of the Hayes story but now with someone being used in the ritual who, I guess, might have appeared in a Spielberg film with a red coat or wearing a red mackintosh in ‘Don’t Look Now’, and in many ways it may involve that rationale, but a rationale with the proviso of the protagonist’s various denials about what he is doing or feeling, influenced as he seems to be by the backstory of his very negative parents, and his own search for the tipping-point of existence, by chasing the noumenon of self. A catharsis, a purging. An adumbration of condemnable acts – but without live people involved in such acts by their becoming Gerry’s own self-fiction about them? There are some scenes in this remarkable story that you will never forget, I suggest, the ‘sculpted’ burial and unburial of a surrogate ‘objective correlative’ in the wilds of nature, the glimpses of this ‘objective correlative’ with its mother, discrete drops of rain (or seconds of time as a discrete entity) into a well-defined area of paranoia, “the greatest jolt of connection”, “It made the eyes appear almost completely black, at odds with the ghostly skin surrounding them, otherworldly in an intense, erotic way.” Desire and thirst for knowledge as two sides of the same coin. A fisherman with a tug on the line – like this rambling attempt at dreamcatching this story? A “grasping imagination.” A “vast oblivion.” “…no revealing of the irises.” The crowding in of Gerry’s mother and father.

I keep my powder dry about this remarkable work.

– nullimmortalis, Des Lewis

There’s a nasty undercurrent to John Kenny’s ‘Last Love’, the tale of child murderer Gerry who is seeking a truth about the nature of death and regards his murders as an experiment, and thinks that his victims are a price worth paying. Ultimately this turns out to be either a case of revenge from beyond the grave or, if you prefer a more prosaic version, a man driven mad by guilt. What elevates the story above this common or garden scenario is Kenny’s depiction of Gerry, the unsettling details that he gives and the insights into the mind of somebody who is totally insane by any normal standard. One could even argue that his experiments are simply a means to excuse and aggrandise more base instincts, that he is at heart simply a paedophile. Whatever interpretation you give,  and for all his talk of showing reverence to the dead children, it’s hard to read this story without feeling somewhat soiled by time spent in Gerry’s mind, but at the same time it’s a character study that is intensely felt and absolutely fascinating.

– Black Static, Peter Tennant