Ghosts and Grisly Things

by Ramsey Campbell
TOR Forge 0312867573; $14.95

Enjoy a special Classic Return—and Happy Halloween!

This reprint of the Pumpkin Books (UK) edition might serve well as a textbook for a course in the art of horror, not least for the lessons it carries about style and language. The twenty tales presented here as "some fragments from a flaking brain" display a writer of the macabre at the top of his game, and a writer whose tales are sometimes a game he plays with his readers. Campbell's abilities are legendary, but his lessons may seem subtle sometimes, stumping the casual reader used to in-your-face horror (not that there's anything wrong with that) and unprepared for the atmospherics conjured up by style and language.

In the best of these tales, Campbell's focus is more the horror of what something is not than what it is. And therein lies the genius of this creator of nightmares, because we're so often bombarded with a catalogue of physical horrors that we forget the power the obsessions that take up residence in the backs of our minds can have. Indeed, at his best, Campbell narrows the focus of a story, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that threatens to stifle the reader right along with his often helpless or deluded protagonists.

Compulsion-ridden protagonists abound in Campbell's tales, and in this collection. In "Going Under," a newfangled cell phone becomes the compulsion that undoes a benefit walker in a crowded tunnel. In "McGonagall in the Head" it's the horrendous rhymes of grieving relatives that undoes an obituary writer. In the darkly comic but still grotesque "The Dead Must Die," a religious fundamentalist sees everyone who doesn't share his views as evil and requiring violent "salvation." In "The Change" a writer's obsession with lycanthropy affects his view of everyone.

Sometimes the evil does exist, as in "See How They Run," in which the condemned murderer Fishwick encroaches on the life of lonely businessman Foulsham, a story which also showcases Campbell's penchant for Dickensian character-naming. Or in "Through the Walls," hallucinogenics and the unspeakable merge—the line "His knife sliced a poached egg; yellow liquid leaked from its pupil(.)" showcases Campbell's skillful transference, turning the everyday into the grotesque or malevolent.

Comedy, albeit very dark indeed, is an underrated quality of Campbell's best offerings. In the humorous and absolutely unsupernatural "Where They Lived," the horror comes in the form of the Lunts, perhaps Britain's answer to the Ugly American. The drily comical "A Street Was Chosen" manages to tweak those of us who mistrust the government, industry, or the military—or anyone. In "Between the Floors," images familiar to convention veterans merge into another tale in which atmosphere battles the bizarre for domination, still producing the kind of "quiet horror" we might associate with Campbell if he wasn't prone to sneaking in the occasional shocker. "The Same in Any Language" makes the foreign somehow more frightening simply due to its foreignness, but ends on a superb nightmare image. There are very few missteps in this collection, but one is the anchoring "Ra*e," which though it is well-written almost to a fault, manages to telegraph its surprise conclusion much too early. But even the lesser tales bring something to the table in this fine dark fiction sampler.

Whether Campbell's characters face the real or the imaginary, there is much nightmare imagery layered between the tangible boundaries of his best claustrophobic constructs, and the journey is more often than not as rewarding as the destination. Ramsey Campbell's fiction, especially that which has come from his own life, connects with readers ultimately because it reaches and strokes the obsessive center we all strive to hide or suppress, but which rules our lives altogether too often.

(This review originally appeared in Cemetery Dance.)