Like many people, I mostly knew Nigel Kneale as a just a TV writer. I say “just” there specifically to mean “that was the only medium I knew him to write in” rather than to imply that TV writing is somehow lesser than prose writing. I loved Quatermass in particular, and hadn’t seen anything that he’d written that I didn’t like. I was delighted, then, when one of my very best friends gifted me Tomato Cain and Other Stories, which is a collection of Kneale’s short fiction.
Much of his work here is just as good as anything he wrote for TV and there’s a huge variety in the types of stories too. A couple of them are dark retellings of fairy tales – one where a downed military pilot finds an old structure that brings to mind the people frozen in place in Sleeping Beauty, another takes inspiration from Snow White and sees a bitter older woman convincing a young girl in her care that she is ugly.
You’ve got some classic horror in there too, with a story called Minuke that is essentially about a haunted house. It’s very much the type of story that most horror fans will have consumed before, but not only is it a really good version of it, it’s also a relatively early one too, so it deserves praise and recognition for that.
Others have a kind of dark whimsy to them – specifically a story about a taxidermist who heads to the local pond to capture frogs for his projects (which involve posing them as if they were little people). In the end he meets an hilariously ironic fate. Another one of them deals with a child who appears to befriend a scarecrow, but the scarecrow is alive and quite clearly not a scarecrow, but you don’t really know what is going on as you only see from the child’s perspective.
Some of them are quite rooted in reality too and just deal with human dramas – usually with a fair amount of tension. One is about a man in a chip shop who knows his wife is being unfaithful. Another is about a man doing the best he can to avoid having an emotional response to his mother’s death (and succeeding for the most part). It’s nice to know that each story could be about literally anything. One of the most distressing stories, about rats, is also one that isn’t completely outside of reality.
I’m not sure which my favourite of the bunch was. It might be a story that deals with the end of time itself, but from a very mundane perspective. It was really quite chilling. Though there are lots of great ones – including a sad story from the point of view of a ghost, and a story about a guy who cons a bunch of people to the detriment of us all (a story for our times).
Funnily enough, it was probably Tomato Cain itself which I found the least interesting – which was a loosely comic story about how a man got the nickname “Tomato Cain” but even that was still mildly enjoyable. Nothing in here is bad, but overall it is a fantastic collection of stories that’ll often make you laugh, and consistently make you uneasy.
Rating: 8.7/10
