By the Light of My Skull (2018) by Ramsey Campbell

By the Light of My Skull (2018) by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

• The Words Between • (2016) : An homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari written for a theme anthology is both a chilling appreciation of that seminal horror film and a grim portrayal of a disintegrating mind.
• The Wrong Game • (2016) : A fictional Ramsey Campbell is visited by haunting memories of a 1970's science-fiction and fantasy convention.
• The Impression • (2014) : Perhaps the most overt nod to M.R. James sees an innocent bit of grave-marker rubbing unleash something on a boy and his grandmother.
• The Watched • (2014) : Sensitive, harrowing portrayal of a boy, an obsessed cop, and a stressed grandmother.
• Reading the Signs • (2013) : Don't get lost. Don't pick up hitchhikers.
• Know Your Code •  (2016) : A portrait of a couple in their 'dotage' also involves some of Campbell's love of wordplay and puzzles.
• Find My Name • (2013) : A satisfying nod to a classic folk tale pits a grandmother against a familiar foe for the life of her grandchild. Word play abounds.
• On the Tour • (2014) : A forgotten Liverpool musician becomes increasingly obsessed with the Beatles bus tour.
• At Lorn Hall • (2012) : A tour of an English mansion has no need for a tour guide when those headphones are available! A modern spin on an M.R. James set-up.
• Fetched • (2016)  (aka "Nightmare" 2015): You can't go home again. Or maybe shouldn't. Another story dealing with aging and loss.
• The Moons • (2011) : Children in the woods meet a helpful forest ranger. Though he does look peculiar. Very unnerving.
• The Callers • (2012) : Another reason to avoid Bingo with Grandma. Fine portrayal of young and old.
• The Page • (2012) : Campbell's homage to Bradbury also homages Philip K. Dick's conspiracies.
• Her Face • (2018) : Solid vignette about a child's fear of a corner-shop owner, a fear that only increases after her death. Another broken family.
• The Fun of the Fair (2018): A dive into his notes for the classic 1970's story "The Companion" yields a new story with few shared traits with the old story. Well, other than a fearful, lost fairground/carnival and a fearsome meditation on aging.

Overall: My favourite Campbell non-reprint collection of stories since Dark Companions in the mid-1980's. And Dark Companions was one of the ten greatest original horror stories ever. The stories are especially good in their characterization characters young and old, and in striking sparks both dark and light from these interactions. 

One of the important lessons one can learn from Campbell is that horror is at its most effective when it's not portrayed as some sort of supernatural revenge. One can find thematic reasons for the types of horror the characters face stemming from their personal histories, but there's no justice in real horror. It's an existential plague. 

That doesn't mean there can't be humour, lightness, or word play in a horror story. Or to riff on Campbell's love of word play, I'd say that his 50+ year career spent terrifying us makes him... an eminence grisly... !!! Highly recommended.

Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell

Born To the Dark (Book Two of The Three Births of Daoloth) (2017) by Ramsey Campbell: In The Searching Dead (2016), narrator Dominick Sheldrake told of his early teen-aged years in 1952 Liverpool. Along with friends Roberta (Bobby) and Jim, Dominick encountered increasingly weird occult occurrences, though by the end of the book he alone faced the final horrors. 

Now it's 1985 and Dominick is all grown up, teaching film studies at a Liverpool college, married, with a five-year-old son. But the son has a curious sleep disorder. A nurse recommends a new clinic specializing in successful treatment of this disorder. And Dominick finds himself plunged into new iterations of the horrors of the past.

Ramsey Campbell is at the height of his multitudinous powers in this, the middle novel of The Three Births of Daoloth. Narrated again at some time after the events of the novel by Dominick, Born To the Dark is cosmic horror amplified by Sheldrake's fears for his son, his friends, and his sanity. We view much of the cosmic terror through Sheldrake's son's descriptions of his dreams and the strange things and events lurking there. Somehow, this makes it worse.

Like many protagonists of horror novels, Dominick struggles to find someone -- anyone -- who will believe his story. And he also struggles with the consequences of telling his wife and others about the cosmic threat that seemingly only he sees: paranoia, abandonment, the threat of divorce, the threat of police action, public humiliation...

But this isn't simply psychological horror about an unjustifiably paranoid narrator. Something is coming, something worse than whatever it is that's already there. The novel climaxes with a lengthy journey into a place being undermined by an invading reality. And with a third book to go, there are (as Manly Wade Wellman once observed) Worse Things Waiting.

The characterization of Dom and the other characters is sharp, the mood and description unnerving throughout. As in many of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal tales of cosmic horror, Born To the Dark gives us a protagonist who continues to attempt to stop a rising tide of horror that is almost certainly beyond his powers to stop. Yet he persists. Highly recommended.

The Searching Dead: The Three Births of Daoloth Book One (2016) by Ramsey Campbell

The Searching Dead: The Three Births of Daoloth Book One (2016) by Ramsey Campbell: The great Ramsey Campbell looks both forward and backward in his newest novel: forward in the sense that he's writing something new for him (a bildungsroman and a trilogy of which The Searching Dead is Book One), backward in the sense that he's returned to the Lovecraftian themes and creatures of his earliest published work back when he was a teen-ager (!) in the early 1960's with a collection released by the Lovecraft-centric Arkham House.

The Searching Dead is also a retrospective narrative. And it may turn out to be a Künstlerroman -- when the first book ends, it remains unclear as to whether or not our narrator will become a writer. He's still in his early teens.

Our first-person, teen narrator, Dominic Sheldrake, lives in 1950's Liverpool. A recently widowed neighbour starts acting strangely several months after the death of her husband. So too her dog. The neighbour initially praises the new Church she's joined, as it's allowed her to contact her dead husband. Soon this doesn't seem like much of a bargain: the woman starts behaving erratically. And Dominic starts to be convinced that something follows her around, something insubstantial that nonetheless has the power to attach itself to things living or dead and reshape them to embody its form.

Dominic has also just begun his year at a new school, a private Catholic boys' school, along with his best friend Jim. The third member of their childhood trio, Roberta/Bobbie, is still around as well. But puberty has started changing things for the three. And age has its other effects -- the imaginary trio of child heroes Dominic writes the adventures of in his notebooks, heroes who are even named after Dominic, Bobbie, and Jim, no longer have much allure for Jim and Bobbie. They're becoming kid's stuff.

As Dominic finds himself pulled into the increasingly strange events surrounding his neighbour, he discovers a connection between her and the oddest of his school-teachers. And the oddness of that school-teacher becomes more and more pronouncedly odd the longer and closer Dominic looks. Jim and Bobbie come along for the ride, for awhile. But everyone grows up, and the exploits of pre-pubescent detectives are invariably fictional. Which is too bad, as Dominic has stumbled across events that would probably require the combined efforts of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Harry Potter gang to combat.

Dominic is a poignant, self-critical narrator, letting slip hints of what's coming (something dire) from his retrospective position. Campbell does a fine job situating his narrator in that liminal zone between child and teenager, with the attendant confusion amplified by the awful events into which Dominic finds himself being pulled. Dominic wants to believe in a world in which teen detectives save the day. But that belief stands revealed as a fictional conceit as the events of The Searching Dead unfold.

The evocation of a specific place and time helps make The Searching Dead one of Campbell's strongest novels. Post-war shortages, the continued existence of entire unoccupied neighbourhoods of Blitzed houses, the arrival of the first neighbourhood televisions just in time for Elizabeth II's coronation, the street parties that accompany that coronation, the day-to-day school activities of Dominic and Jim -- all these are beautifully and complexly depicted. And there's a sad and tragic scene in which the Liverpool police return a woman to the husband she's fled because clearly the husband knows best and the woman has no right to run away with her child from an upstanding male citizen.

We end with a scene that suggests mounting horrors to come while satisfyingly bringing to a close the first part of the story. The sinister, cult-like 'religion' of The Searching Dead seems entirely plausible. Its rituals make almost more sense than those of 'real' religions. Something is coming, something even the trees fear. Something else has already arrived. Its work is not yet done. Highly recommended.

Think Yourself Lucky (2014) by Ramsey Campbell

Think Yourself Lucky (2014) by Ramsey Campbell: One could see this as the third novel in Ramsey Campbell's Internet Trilogy, though no such thing has ever been codified. The uber-veteran Liverpudlian horror writer understands the New Media better than a lot of young punks a third his age, possibly because he always connects what can happen on the Internet with what has always happened in the unmediated real world.

There's an occasionally melancholy, occasionally slapsticky, and always observant feel to this novel. Travel agency grunt David Botham has a job made recently more difficult because of the end of his relationship with his boss. His current girlfriend, a cook, is having boss problems of her own at work. And Botham's recent verbal outburst has attracted the attention of the leader of a local Liverpudlian writers' group who thinks Botham's verbal talents suggest untapped potential as a writer.

Like the amiable, almost-accidental serial killer of Campbell's The Count of Eleven, David is something of a repressed soul. Various factors involving his (still living) parents and assorted childhood experiences have led him to keep pretty much everything in, all the time. And the writers' group guy seems to be right -- indeed, David's near-hysteria at someone suggesting he try writing and publishing confirms this fact very early in the novel.

But it's the Internet Trilogy, isn't it? While The Grin of the Dark explored the conspiracy theories and strange online feuds of the Web and Seven Days of Cain explored online dreams of wish fulfillment erupting into the real world, Think Yourself Lucky examines the ways in which the anonymity of the online world can encourage a person to say and electronically do things far too vile for the real world.

David discovers there's a blog with a name seemingly plucked from a phrase he uttered during his verbal rant. And the blogger has begun to recount terrible acts of revenge on people for even the slightest of slights or accidents. For instance, the blogger describes severely crippling a man who had inadvertently caused him to scratch his car. That man is David's neighbour, and the car that got scratched is David's.

Think Yourself Lucky works as a character study of someone who's almost morbidly withdrawn when it comes to honestly expressing his emotions. It bears some resemblance to Stephen King's The Dark Half. However, Campbell's characters are both more finely drawn and a whole lot funnier than King's. And the relationship between the mysterious blogger and David is a more complex one than that between the writer and his doppelganger in The Dark Half. 

The blogger has a certain amount of right on his side, though not when it comes to the apparently injurious and homicidal acts he says he commits. If there actually are injuries and murders committed by this blogger. This is very satisfying fare that rings changes on the long-standing horror trope of the Doppelganger or the Other. Recommended.

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell; illustrations by Randy Broecker: containing the following stories and essays (dates are first publication, not composition):

1. The Stone on the Island (1964): Campbell begins his transition from Lovecraftian pastiches to his own style of horror here, as he mixes an idea from M.R. James, a Lovecraftian island, and his own experiences at work. 
2. Before the Storm (1980): Written in the 1960's, the story again shows Campbell mixing cosmic body horror and his own Lovecraftian deities with the daily grind at an office.
3. Cold Print (1969): Campbell's first truly great short story by my reckoning. A quest for a particular form of (perfectly legal, now anyway) pornography by a Physical Education teacher takes him to a bookstore he never, ever should have gone into.
4. The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973): Fun, disturbing metafiction about a mysteriously vanished horror writer.
5. A Madness from the Vaults (1972): Really a deft riff on the sort of stories Clark Ashton Smith used to write, set on an alien world and involving all-alien characters.
6. Among the pictures are these: (1985): Campbell describes a series of sketches he made back in the 1960s. Interesting.
7. The Tugging (1976): Campbell suggests that this is a too-literal interpretation of the Lovecraftian chestnut about the "stars being right" to bring back certain deities. I like it a lot -- it may be literal, but the images are grand.
8. The Faces at Pine Dunes (1980): A great, great story. Its imagery climaxes in something deeply disturbing and chilling; its 20-year-old protagonist is sympathetic and carefully drawn.
9. Blacked Out (1985): Fun scare is, as Campbell notes, Lovecraftian primarily because it appeared in his previous Lovecraftian collection Cold Print because the editor wanted to include at least one previously unpublished story. Rarely has a Campbellian protagonist had a more emblematic last name.
10. The Voice of the Beach (1982): Maybe Campbell's crowning achievement in writing a Lovecraftian story without any recourse to all the machinery of Lovecraftian terms for 'gods' and creatures and menacing books. It most resembles Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The imagery and situations are sinister, horrifying, vague, and often uncomfortably vertiginous and hallucinatory.
11. The Horror under Warrendown (1995): Very funny pastiche turns a famous English children's book series into a source of cosmic body horror.
12. The Other Names (1998): Very solid combination of a sensitive character study and a Lovecraftian menace.
13. The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash (2010): Funny, satiric examination of one very bad Lovecraft fan.
14. The Last Revelation of Gla'aki (2013): Campbell's return to his Lovecraftian god Gla'aki manages to be both disturbing and weirdly soothing at points -- and it does a better job of showing why people might find comfort in the embrace of these terrible 'gods' than any story I can think of after David Drake's brilliant Lovecraft-meets-Joseph-Conrad novella "Than Curse the Darkness."
15. The Successor (First draft of Cold Print) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
16. The Franklyn Paragraphs (First draft) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
17. Mushrooms from Merseyside (2015): Campbell's often hilarious salue to Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth sees the writer summarize all of his Lovecraftian fiction in a series of... limericks.
18. Two Poems by Edward Pickman Derby (2015): Interesting early poetry.
19. The Horror in the Crystal (Story fragment) (2015): 1960's fragment; interesting.
20. Rusty Links (Essay) (2015): A snarky Ramsey Campbell from the 1960's.
21. Lovecraft in Retrospect (Essay) (1969/1994): A very pissy Campbell from the late 1960's gets critiqued by the lovable Campbell of the 1990's.
22. On Four Lovecraft Tales (Essay) (2013): As good an explanation of Lovecraft's strengths as a writer as you'll ever read, this essay really caused me to re-evaluate certain aspects of Lovecraft's work. It's a concise piece that explains how much more complex Lovecraft's style and structure were than he's generally given credit for from even his greatest admirers.
23. Afterword (Essay) (2015): Campbell contextualizes all the pieces in the book. Invaluable, but I want more!

Overall: The stories are great, the non-fiction pieces are great, and the illustrations by Randy Broecker are extremely enjoyable and often very much 'Old School' in an early 20th-century pulp magazine way. Highly recommended.

The Horror and the Trauma: Holes for Faces (2013) by Ramsey Campbell

Holes for Faces (2013) by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

"Passing Through Peacehaven" (2011) "Peep" (2007)
"Getting It Wrong" (2011)
"The Room Beyond" (2011)
"Holes for Faces" (2013)
"The Rounds" (2010)
"The Decorations" (2005)
"The Address" (2012)
"Recently Used" (2011)
"Chucky Comes to Liverpool" (2010)
"With the Angels" (2010)
"Behind the Doors" (2013)
"Holding the Light" (2011)
"The Long Way" (2008)


Excellent collection of horror stories from the 21st century, with the venerable Ramsey Campbell -- first published in the early 1960's by Arkham House -- demonstrating that he's still a master of both terror and poignance. Many of these stories deal with the effects of childhood trauma as remembered and re-experienced by an adult. Sometimes the antagonist is a supernatural menace, though in many of the stories, the problem could actually be a delusion. Throughout the stories, Campbell's often near-hallucinatory descriptions of people, things, and events keep the level of unease high. 

The stories also deal with children facing supernatural and non-supernatural terrors, perhaps none more acutely than the increasingly confused 13-year-old protagonist of "Chucky Comes to Liverpool." Here, his mother's involvement in a community campaign against horror movies -- and her obsessive 'protection' of him from all evil media influences -- causes major psychological problems. It's a fine story that works even better if one has read Campbell's essays on some of the censorship 'debates' he attended during various English campaigns against horror movies, including those focused on the Chucky movies..

The effects of old age are the focus of several stories, sometimes aggravated by those recurring childhood traumas, sometimes twinned with a separate character facing new childhood trauma. There are parents inflicting psychological traumas on their children. And there are trains and train stations. Seriously. 

Sometimes the train is the problem, sometimes the station, sometimes both... and sometimes not being able to find a train station leads one into dire supernatural peril. Given the focus on (as the back cover says) "Youth and age," the emphasis on trains and train stations, on arrivals and departures, seems only natural. There may be non-human and formerly human monsters throughout the collection, but they're mostly seen only in vague half-glimpses of terrible import. Their occasional complete manifestations, when they come, can be shocking, but it's the reactions of the various characters to the supernatural, or the seeming supernatural, that makes the stories so strong. We may not all meet ghosts, but we all know guilt and fear and regret. Or a hatred of Physical Education classes. Highly recommended.

The Influence of Anxiety

Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell:
Star Books edition (1975, identical to 1973 Arkham House edition): Potential  (1973); The End of a Summer's Day  (1973) ; At First Sight  (1973); The Franklyn Paragraphs  (1973); The Interloper  (1973)   [as by Errol Undercliffe ]; The Sentinels  (1973); The Guy  (1973); The Old Horns  (1973); The Lost  (1973); The Stocking  (1968); The Second Staircase  (1973); Concussion  (1973); The Enchanted Fruit  (1973); Made in Goatswood  (1973).

Jove/HBJ edition (1979): omits The Second Staircase and The Enchanted Fruit; adds The Last Hand (1975), The Telephones (1976), and Reply Guaranteed (1968).

The great Ramsey Campbell's writing shifted almost tectonically between his first and second collections. And all this shifting, which took place over a decade, occurred before he was 25. Demons by Daylight is that second collection, in slightly different forms for its British and American paperback editions (Arkham House originally published it in hardcover in 1973).

Campbell went from being a very young (16!) and gifted writer of pastiches of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos fiction to being a still-young horror writer with a prose style and approach to the supernatural that was, even with this second collection, uniquely his own.

Cosmic horrors would still appear in Campbell's work, along with ghosts and monsters and homicidal maniacs. But the description would be disturbingly off-set from the usual -- Stephen King once likened Campbell's descriptions of reality as being almost LSD-derived in their disturbing, vaguely hallucinatory quality. Everything, even the most simple of objects, has been radically destabilized and gifted with malign life. Sometimes that malign life is subjective. Sometimes that malign life is objective. Sometimes the whole matter remains unclear.

Already at work in this collection is Campbell's wedding of horror and anxiety. That anxiety usually occurs within the minds of his protagonists, and finds some answering echo from the world around them. That answer may be supernatural. It may be mundane but horrific. Or the answer may be unanswerable as to its provenance: is it real or is it entirely inside the mind? Or is the 'or' really 'and'?

Take "The Telephones," for instance. The settings are mundane: a pub, the side of a highway, a succession of phone booths. But the protagonist seems to think he's telepathic. And he may be. But he's also in the midst of a personality crisis about his sexual orientation. And weird things are happening, ultimately never to be entirely answered. It's not a great story, but it's a very good one.

Or take "The End of a Summer's Day." The protagonist's anxiety relates to her belief that she's unworthy of the love and marriage she's found relatively late in life. There's a bus tour with her spouse. There's a cave. Something happens that may or may not be real. My take is that what happens is real, in a supernatural sense, but that it also preys upon the anxieties that could conceivably reflect an unstable mind that's actually invented everything that's happened. A certain portion of Campbell's fiction exists in this gap.

But there's also the windy, twisty supernatural, overtly deployed, to be dealt with. Demons by Daylight contains my favourite dual narrative in Campbell's body of work, "The Franklyn Paragraphs" and "The Interloper"  [as by Errol Undercliffe], appearing jointly under the title of "Errol Undercliffe: An Appreciation."

Campbell himself (well, a character called Ramsey Campbell) narrates "The Franklyn Paragraphs." That faux memoir deals with (fictional) cult horror writer Errol Undercliffe, his disappearance, and the Lovecraftian events leading up to that disappearance. "The Interloper," ostensibly a story by Undercliffe, mixes the supernatural with the anxieties and fears of teenagers as related to the world of adults and authority and their peculiar powerlessness against authority figures who are not what they appear to be. It's a great duo.

The collection begins to flesh out the fictional cosmos centered around the fictional English city of Brichester that would appear a lot in Campbell's work around this time. Brichester, modelled partially on Campbell's hometown of Liverpool, would eventually be superseded by the real city in Campbell's work, though his fictional towns and cities of Brichester, Goatswood, Temphill, and others would continue to appear right up to the present day. These are places in the Severn Valley you don't want to go. But it's great to read about them. Campbell's work would continue to grow and improve after this collection. Still, this is a delight, and a sign of things to come. Highly recommended.

Sins and Portents

The Long Lost by Ramsey Campbell (1993): Married couple David and Joelle Owain take a weekend trip to Wales from their home in Chester, a suburb of Liverpool. While David is of Welsh background, he doesn't speak the language -- really, they're just doing the bed-and-breakfast thing. But while hiking around, they find an abandoned village, and beyond the abandoned village, a small island that they can walk to when the tide's out.

And on the small island, a small house, and in the small house an old woman who seems somewhat addled and in need of help. And she says she's a distant relative of David's, and shows him a photograph that seems to confirm this. So after checking with local authorities, they take Gwendolyn back to Chester with them, and install her in a retirement home near their house.

Needless to say, bad things start to happen soon thereafter, for pretty much everyone in the Owain's social circle. But they seem to be doing the bad things themselves. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn (if you want to have fun, go look up the possible meanings of the Welsh name 'Gwendolyn' or 'Gwendolen'), while occasionally socializing with the other residents and with the Owains and their friends, mainly stays in her room and waits.

While The Long Lost is a tale of supernatural horror, that horror plays itself out in the terrible things people can do to other people, especially loved ones. And many of these horrors may simply arise from happenstance. In this way, The Long Lost is a companion piece to Campbell's earlier Obsession, in which the source of what seems to be evil turns out to be far murkier than either the reader or the characters assume. Where does sin come from, and how much blame does any person assume for being unable to resist it?

There are several lengthy setpieces of wrenching horror in the later stages of the novel, made more horrific by Campbell's skill at creating sympathetic victims and perpetrators. And as is perhaps proper in a novel dealing with Wales, birthplace of seminal, often mystical horror writer Arthur Machen, the climax of the novel is more of a mystery than anything that has come before as the mystic and the sublime move into the forefront. Those seeking horror with a clearcut resolution are warned to stay away. Highly recommended.

Adam Raised a Cain

The Seven Days of Cain by Ramsey Campbell (2010): Young Liverpool couple Andy Bentley and Claire are struggling to conceive a child. Andy works at his father and mother's photography studio; Claire works for a government-sponsored charitable organization that tries to provide homes and job training for the homeless. Things seem to be going OK, despite the fact that doctors can't figure out why Claire can't conceive.

Elsewhere, someone has murdered a playwright with the somewhat goofy name of Penny Scrivener in New York. One of Barcelona's "living statues" has been murdered in Barcelona; her name was Serena Paz. Soon thereafter, Andy begins getting emails about something he did in the past, apparently something awful, from an unknown sender with a flair for puzzles and word games. An old schoolmate of Claire's shows up outside her workplace, homeless, and very odd. A self-important writer shows up at Andy's studio, looking to get memorable photographs of himself, eventually offering Andy a chance for mainstream publication of his photos.

After 150 pages, one may think one knows where this novel is heading, but one really doesn't.

On the beach near Claire and Andy's house, the (real), and really odd Liverpudlian metal statues of the same figure repeated dozens of times, staring out to sea, sometimes seem to have one less member, or perhaps one more. On the horizon, giant windmills tilt at the sky, always intruding into Claire and Andy's perceptions of that environment.

Campbell's novels have often tugged and pulled at the nature of reality, perhaps most notably and successfully in Incarnate and The Grin of the Dark. Well, he's back at reality again, in a novel that functions as a sequel of sorts -- or perhaps more accurately a shared-universe tale -- as related to a previous but recent novel and a 40-year-old short story that turned out to have a concept within it that adapted well to the Age of Internet. Naming that novel and that short story would reveal too much, too soon of the novel's clever shift midway through, and knowledge of the two isn't necessary to enjoying The Seven Days of Cain, though that knowledge does add to the enjoyment -- and the level of existential disturbance.

The Seven Days of Cain supplies a lot of Campbell's trademarked description, both vivid and intensely allusive, that can sometimes make a story seem disturbingly dream-like, as background and midground and foreground collapse into one (the story does feature a photographer as a protagonist, after all). No one will be punished for anything resembling a "real" crime here, but punishment -- or judgement -- is coming nonetheless. Why and for whom? Read the emails carefully. Don't stand too long on the beach. Don't check your spam box too often. Highly 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.

Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell (2009)

Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell (2009): Gavin Meadows, self-employed as a walking-tour guide of historic Liverpool, finds out more about the city's long (founded in the 13th century) and somewhat bizarre (even in non-fiction) history as he searches for his missing father. 

Ramsey Campbell grew up in Liverpool, and a number of his previous novels have been set either there or in his early-career Liverpool stand-in, Brichester. Here, he visits all-out historical horror on his home, blending real and fictional in an unnerving, escalating fashion that builds upon the quasi-documentary accumulation of detail so central to H.P. Lovecraft's best work.

Campbell uses first-person narration here as he did in his previous novel, The Grin of the Dark. As first-person narration had previously been rare in Campbell's long-form output, I wonder if he had more ideas related to unreliable narration than The Grin of the Dark could profitably address. Gavin Meadows is much more reliable than the narrator of the previous novel, but we do get some (self-doubting) moments as Meadows tries to wrestle with whether or not what he's glimpsing is real or somehow an ongoing hallucination brought on by stress.

See, Liverpool was built partially on reclaimed marshland and, indeed, a reclaimed pool. Beneath the ground, ancient tunnels proliferate, some now being rediscovered, some still hidden. Above the ground, the rain seems to fall incessantly. And everywhere and increasingly, Gavin starts to see things that don't appear to be quite human, even as the police seem to take his father's disappearance lightly. And as Liverpool gradually succumbs to a rising damp, Meadows struggles to keep his own thoughts straight against the onslaught of historical facts that sometimes threaten to overwhelm his reason.

Long-time horror readers will recognize Campbell's nods to Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Festival", though this is in its own odd way a much 'gentler' story, or at least a more ambiguous one related to the malignity of Liverpool's 'other' residents. Still, if you're ever in Liverpool, you may want to avoid drinking the water. Or bathing in it. Highly recommended.