Mmmm... Pi (1998)

Pi (1998): written by Darren Aronofsky, Sean Gullette, and Eric Watson; directed by Darren Aronofsky; starring Sean Gullette (Max Cohen), Mark Margolis (Sol Robeson), Ben Shenkman (Lenny Meyer), Pamela Hart (Marcy Dawson), and Samia Shoaib (Devi): 

Darren Aronofsky's first feature should probably list David Lynch's Eraserhead as an inspiration in the credits, most noticeably in a stylistic sense. Its thematic concerns are different, however -- Pi is a puzzle story about stumbling upon answers to questions that probably should not be asked. 

Lead actor Sean Gullette is not the most charismatic actor in the world, which is something of a problem when doing a movie with so few even mildly sympathetic characters (see also Aronofsky's next film, Requiem for a Dream, which is what would happen if Trainspotting were run through a humour-and-sympathy scrubber). It's an enjoyable debut, but certainly not deep in any way unless you've never heard of the Kabbalah. Recommended.

The Last Voice They Hear (1998) by Ramsey Campbell

The Last Voice They Hear (1998) by Ramsey Campbell: Geoff and Gail Davenport are the proud parents of three-year-old Paul and co-workers on a British news show called The Goods, which exposes corruption and abuse at schools, workplaces and other venues. They live in London, England, though Gail is originally from San Francisco and Geoff from Liverpool. Gail's parents are about to visit.  

And Paul is about to get a phone call from someone he hasn't talked to in twenty years -- his estranged, older half-brother Ben, the product of terrible emotional and physical abuse from Ben's step-father (Geoff's father), Ben and Geoff's mother, and their grandparents.

And that phone call means the end to domestic bliss, as Campbell puts another happy family through Hell.

When they were children, Geoff tried to shield Ben from their parents' wrath whenever he could. But he was a kid, and he failed. A lot. And now Ben blames him as much or more for his woes than he does their late parents and late grandparents. But there's more. Over the last seven years, someone has been killing elderly couples in a particularly gruesome way, staging the bodies to make a comment about...something. 

Now Ben tells Geoff that he's the killer, and that Geoff has to play an even worse version of a bad childhood 'game' Ben cooked up in order to divine Ben's new identity, stop the killings -- and protect young Paul, in whom Ben is inordinately interested. And so we're off.

Ben's ability to operate freely, at least for awhile, is bought by threats against Geoff's wife and child -- terrible things are promised should Geoff bring the police into the loop -- but also by Geoff's own empathy and sense of guilt for Ben, empathy and guilt Ben has been using to emotionally leverage Geoff since childhood.

The novel doesn't waste much space hiding Ben's new identity from the reader. The Last Voice They Hear is a mystery about how people become the way they are, not who they are. Ben's treatment as a child and as a teenager is indeed awful -- but the mystery of why he blames Geoff more than anyone else informs much of the narrative.

Campbell deftly uses multiple third-person limited POVs to jump between first two and then three threads of the story to maintain suspense until shrinking the narrative back down at the end to one tense, focused final chase. Ben isn't sympathetic, but one feels pity for him throughout.

More importantly, while the novel shows Ben to be an extremely bright and competent killer, he's never shown to be a Lecter-style Superman. He has flaws, and his competence is ultimately as much a part of his psychic scarring as are his more pitiable traits. Geoff, as the nominal hero, may not be as interesting, but he's also flawed and almost fatally compromised by his desire to protect his family -- his entire family. It's his most decent, humane qualities that just might get everyone killed. Just as Ben wants it. Highly recommended.

Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998) by Ramsey Campbell

Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998) by Ramsey Campbell: A collection of excellent short stories from the 1970's, 80's and 90's by the world's best horror writer, Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. 

Both supernatural and mundane menaces threaten the characters in these stories, from a defunct factory town turned into an amusement park (!) to an ancient Druid holy site now located directly below an overpass. Campbell makes the decaying industrial zones and housing developments of modern England into a world of menacing and destabilizing forces.

Campbell has always been best at building terror out of slightly skewed perceptions of reality which build through the course of a story. As some reviewer or another once noted (probably Stephen King), it often seems that narrative voice and/or characters are tripping on something that no one should ever be tripping on; this occurs quite literally in "Through the Walls." Bad moments in tourism inform the worlds of "The Same in Any Language" and "Where They Lived."

An M.R. James trope that Campbell mastered very early in his career (he's been publishing since he was 16) involves slightly askew things glimpsed in the middle or far distance, things which at first appear mundane until one realizes that they keep appearing and disappearing as they (whatever they are) move closer and closer without ever being seen clearly. Do you want to see that strangely distorted human figure clearly? No, you do not, but some of the characters will, and they will not enjoy the experience.

The skewed perceptions of both "ordinary" people and people with mental health issues drive some of the horror as well. The narrator of "The Dead Must Die" is a murderous religious fanatic whose beliefs about blood transfusions and organ transplants are only a few beats off the Jehovah's Witness party line; the xenophobic senior citizen of "The Sneering" finds the supernatural infiltrating on his most basic fears for him and his wife. There isn't a weak story here. Highly recommended.