Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell (2017)

Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell (2017): edited by Scott David Aniolowski and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. : Excellent tribute anthology paying homage to the lengthy career of horror master and noted Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. Stephen King compared the experience of reading Campbell to being on LSD way back in 1981's Danse Macabre. 40 years later, Campbell continues to write -- and he'd been published for 17 years before Danse Macabre.  

The editors encouraged stories reflecting on Campbell's different periods, from his early Lovecraftian pastiches to later forays into X-rated horror, kitchen-sink dread, psychological horror, and many other modes. 

A couple of humourous, meta-fictional stories break up the often grim proceedings, none grimmer than Cody Goodfellow's "This Last Night in Sodom." The title is a nod to Soft Cell, the only soft thing about the story. All of the stories are good-to-excellent. Steve Rasnic Tem offers the closest thing to a pitch-perfect exercise in emulating Campbell's mature style. Other stand-outs include stories by Thana Niveau, Adam Nevill, Lynda Rucker, and Michael Wehunt. Highly recommended.

Cutting Edge (1986): edited by Dennis Etchison

Cutting Edge (1986): edited by Dennis Etchison: Contains the following stories:

Blue Rose by Peter Straub; The Monster by Joe Haldeman; Lacunae by Karl Edward Wagner; "Pale, Trembling Youth" by W. H. Pugmire and Jessica Amanda Salmonson; Muzak for Torso Murders by Marc Laidlaw; Goodbye, Dark Love by Roberta Lannes; Out There by Charles L. Grant; Little Cruelties by Steve Rasnic Tem; The Man With the Hoe by George Clayton Johnson; They're Coming for You by Les Daniels; Vampire by Richard Christian Matheson; Lapses by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; The Final Stone by William F. Nolan; Irrelativity by Nicholas Royle; The Hands by Ramsey Campbell; The Bell by Ray Russell; Lost Souls by Clive Barker; Reaper by Robert Bloch; The Transfer by Edward Bryant; and Pain by Whitley Strieber.


Excellent mid-1980's original horror anthology edited by Dennis Etchison, one of horror's greatest short-story writers. Stand-outs include "The Monster," a rare foray into horror from Joe Haldeman (The Forever War, Forever Peace) that embeds its supernatural horror in Viet Nam. 

There's also a superior tale of religious angst and the common fear of getting lost in Ramsey Campbell's "The Hands." Les Daniels journeys into short fiction for a weirdly hilarious take on EC Comics-style ghostly vengeance, "They're Coming for You." Chelsea Quinn Yarbro offers a disturbing tale of disintegrating memories and consciousness in "Lapses." In all, a solid anthology with very few misfires. Highly recommended.

The Influence (La Influencia) (2019)

The Influence (La Influencia) (2019): adapted from the Ramsey Campbell novel by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech, and Denis Rovira van Boekholt; directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt; starring Manuela Velles (Alicia), Alain Hernandez (Mikel), Emma Suarez (Victoria), and Claudia Placer (Nora):

Available on Netflix, The Influence (made in Spain and thus really 'La Influencia') very loosely adapts Ramsey Campbell's superior late 1980's horror novel to decent effect. Some changes make sense either because there's a need for compression in a 100-minute adaptation of a 350-page novel or because certain things in the novel aren't 'cinematic.' Some of those changes may make one view The Influence as being derivative of Hereditary, though Campbell's novel predates that movie by 30 years.

Chief among these later 'cinematic' changes is the decision to have the malign, elderly Victoria on life support for the duration of the film. In the novel, she dies at the beginning. But I can understand the film-makers wanting to leave the door open for a physical battle between 'Good' and 'Evil' at the climax of the film and not simply a spiritual one.

There are other weird lapses that make me wonder about a longer cut of the movie. The disappearance of a major character goes almost unremarked-upon. The coda seems a bit rushed and implausible as one would imagine SOME further police investigation of the events of the movie.

A few moments of implausibility do jar one out of the horror narrative from time to time. I mean, can you really start a massive fire in your urban backyard in Spain and not arouse the attentions of the police and fire department? Because that is one seriously big fire that gets started about halfway through the movie. 

The direction is mostly assured, though, and The Influence has a lot of scares both intellectual and visceral. The actors are all competent, especially the child actor playing Nora. And there's a really nice design for a demonic figure, made more effective by the decision not to linger too long on it. Recommended.

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.

The Pretence (2013) by Ramsey Campbell

The Pretence (2013) by Ramsey Campbell: According to a New Age cult dubbed 'The Finalists,' tonight is the last night of the world. But that won't stop Paul Slater from flying home from his ailing mother's rest home to see wife Melanie and children Amy and Tom. And the world isn't going to end just because a cult says it is. And Paul does make it home.

While the philosophical backbone of this novella is the nature of belief, it's the increasingly fragile and desperate hold Paul Slater has on his family life that supplies the emotional engine of the whole thing. There are explanations for what happens as the story proceeds, but none of them could be considered authoritative. 

The enigmatic nature of the narrative echoes some of Robert Aickman's more mysterious stories, though with some decidedly contemporary imagery. Cell phones and texting assume a great amount of importance as the novella proceeds; so too do Slater's musings on the nature of digital information as a reduction of the mediated universe to a fragile and infinitely malleable storm of bits. Love may keep a person grounded, but what happens when the idea of ground gives way? Recommended.

House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill

House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill: Adam Nevill explores the shadowlands between mental illness and the supernatural in disturbingly effective ways in this horror novel that also involves a whole lot of taxidermy and a battalion of creepy dolls and marionettes and puppets and old people.

Catherine is a 38-year-old antiques appraiser with a history of mental problems dating back to childhood when she was abandoned at birth, adopted, and then narrowly avoided being abducted. Or perhaps "spirited away" would be more accurate. After a violent meltdown in London, she's found some peace working for an eccentric antiques dealer and reconnecting with a long-lost boyfriend.

Alas, things will begin to go horribly wrong on the day her boss sends her to a preliminary meeting with ancient Edith, who owns The Red House, near Hereford. Nothing sinister in that name, is there? 

The Red House contains the life's work of post-WWI taxidermist and puppet-maker M.H. Mason: massive, exquisitely detailed tableaux of animals recreating WWI battlefields, strange dolls, and child-sized puppets of unusual design. None of it has ever been sold. If sold, the collection could bring in millions, though Catherine believes that perhaps the material should go to museums instead.

However, once Catherine enters the world of the Red House, Edith, and her laconic housekeeper Maude, events start to get a little odd. And progress towards greater oddity and horror. 

Catherine believes her mental state to be precarious, fragile, easily disturbed. As strange things begin to happen, and as the fugue states of her childhood and early teenage years suddenly return, she believes that the cause is interior to herself. To survive the mental barrage, she believes she must acknowledge that her problems are the problems of a diseased mind and cling thus to reality.

Of course, if these things are not the products of a diseased mind... well, that could be a problem for someone who fears the consequences of believing in many of the things she's experienced since she was a little girl, in Hereford... disturbingly close to The Red House for a couple traumatic years of childhood, she soon realizes.

Neville's portrayal of a mind besieged from within and without by the seemingly impossible reminds me a lot of many horror stories and novels by genre great Ramsey Campbell. An extended sequence in which Catherine attends a puppet show in the small village near the Red House is the most Campbell-like thing in the novel, a masterpiece of horror achieved through environmental description and the accumulation of disquieting details, partially glimpsed.

The character of Catherine has been a problem for some reviewers of this novel. I find her a compelling figure. Her mental problems are sympathetically and convincingly portrayed, as is her lonely battle to remain sane in an increasingly tilted and sinister world. Also, those goddam puppets are terrifying. Highly recommended.

Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors (2017) by Adam L.G. Nevill: containing the following stories:

• On All London Underground Lines (2010): A bad day getting to work on the London Underground gets progressively worse. 
• The Angels of London (2013): Some cheap apartments come at a great cost. Manages to be both cosmically and normatively creepy. The characteristics of the apartment super will be reprised in No One Gets Out Alive, though not the actual character. He's a stunning bit of punk-Dickensian grotesquery.
• Always in Our Hearts (2013): Some cab drivers are jerks. Almost an EC Comics Revenge story.
• Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) (2017): Sometimes a zoo is not the zoo you expect. A fine Robert Aickman homage.
• The Days of Our Lives (2016): A really bad relationship.
• Hippocampus (2015): Something is wrong with the container ship.
• Call the Name (2015): A really solid H.P. Lovecraft homage using the lens of some contemporary thinking on evolution.
• White Light, White Heat (2016): A dystopic look at the politics and economic of publishing. 
• Little Black Lamb (2017): Murder sites and a dandy nod to Ramsey Campbell.

Overall: Highly recommended collection of horror stories from Adam Nevill running the gamut from the gross-out to the cosmic and visionary, sometimes in the same story. His grip on setting and the vagaries of disturbed though often sympathetic personalities is sure throughout, and none of the horrors are stereotypical; rather the opposite. This is Nevill's second collection from his own imprint, bringing the stories he wants to have collected up to the present-day (as of 2017, anyway).

The Tindalos Cycle (2010): edited by Robert M. Price

The Tindalos Cycle (2010): edited by Robert M. Price, containing the following stories and poems:

• But It's A Long Dark Road (2008) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• Confession of the White Acolyte (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• Death Is an Elephant (1939) by Robert Bloch
• Gateway to Forever (1984) by Frank Belknap Long
• Juggernaut (2000) by C. J. Henderson
• Mind-Pilot (2008) by William Laughlin
• Nyarlatophis, A Fable of Ancient Egypt (2002) by Stanley C. Sargent
• Pompelo's Doom (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• Scarlet Obeisance (2000) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• The Death of Halpin Chalmers (2008) by Perry M. Grayson
• The Death of Halpin Frayser (1891) by Ambrose Bierce
• The Dweller in the Pot, By Frank Chimesleep Short (1990) by Robert M. Price
• The Elephant God of Leng (2008) by Robert M. Price
• The Firebrands of Torment (2007) by Michael Cisco
• The Gift of Lycanthropy (1979) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Horror from the Hills (1931) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Hound of the Partridgevilles (1999) by Peter Cannon
• The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Letters of Halpin Chalmers (1994) by Peter Cannon
• The Madness Out of Time (1986) by Lin Carter
• The Maker of Moons (1896) by Robert W. Chambers
• The Shore of Madness (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• The Space-Eaters (1928) by Frank Belknap Long
• The War Among the Gods (2008) by Adrian Cole
• The Ways of Chaos (1996) by Ramsey Campbell
• Through Outrageous Angles (1986) by David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Ronald McDowell
• When Chaugnar Wakes (1932) by Frank Belknap Long

Highly enjoyable, immensely long anthology of stories related in some way to HPL pal Frank Belknap Long's two major contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, the space-time bending Hounds of Tindalos and the malign, elephantine Old One Chaugnar Faugn. As is usual in a Robert Price anthology, the notes on the stories are lengthy and detailed in their contextualization of the various stories. 

As is also usual, Price has cast a wide net both before and after the publication of the pertinent Long stories. Thus we get stories by Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers that predate Long's work and stories and poems that go pretty much right up to the year of the anthology's publication. Price has an eye for historical curiosities. The three chapters included here from a shared-universe novel may not be good, but they're both fascinating and so far as I know never before anthologized. 

This is more an anthology for someone familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos than a casual reader, as some of those afore-mentioned curiosities are not particularly good. Long's own work is idea- and energy-charged when it's early work and enervated and disappointing when it comes from later decades than the 1920's and 1930's. 

Long was one of those pulp writers who was at his best in his youth -- it's not style that one goes to Long for, but the substance of his strange and cosmic visions. Well, and a bunch of people in a vintage car chasing an animated elephant statue around the Jersey Shore so as to save the world by shooting the elephantine god with an Entropy Reversal Cannon. 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.

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories:

The House of the Worm  (1933) by Mearle Prout
Far Below  (1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson
Spawn of the Green Abyss  (1946) by C. Hall Thompson
The Deep Ones (1969) by James Wade
The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973) by Ramsey Campbell
Where Yidhra Walks  (1976) by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.
Black Man with a Horn (1980) by T. E. D. Klein
The Last Feast of Harlequin (1990) by Thomas Ligotti
Only the End of the World Again  (1994) by Neil Gaiman
Mandelbrot Moldrot (2014) by Lois H. Gresh
The Black Brat of Dunwich (1997) by Stanley C. Sargent
The Phantom of Beguilement (2001) by W. H. Pugmire
 ...Hungry...Rats  (2014) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Virgin's Island  (2014) by Donald Tyson
In the Shadow of Swords (2014) by Cody Goodfellow
Mobymart After Midnight  (2014) by Jonathan Thomas
A Gentleman from Mexico (2007) by Mark Samuels
The Man with the Horn  (2014) by Jason V Brock
John Four  (2014) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Sigma Octantis (2014) by Rhys Hughes
[Anasazi]  (2014) by Gemma Files
The Wreck of the Aurora  (2014) by Patrick McGrath
Beneath the Beardmore (2014) by Michael Shea 

Omnipresent anthologist S.T. Joshi offers what seems to be his 19th Lovecraftian-themed anthology of the past five years. This one combines new material solicited for this anthology with little-reprinted stories of the past 86 (!!!) years of Lovecraft's influence.

"The House of the Worm"  (1933) by Mearle Prout and "Far Below"  (1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson are both fine and essential texts that echo Lovecraft without necessarily occurring in 'his' universe. They're both stunners in different ways, stunners I don't want to spoil. "Spawn of the Green Abyss"  (1946) by C. Hall Thompson is a fascinating 'parallel' text seemingly inspired by Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth."

Of the later reprints, some are terrific and much-anthologized (pieces by Ligotti and Klein are all-timers). Some are terrific and under-anthologized ("The Franklyn Paragraphs" (1973) by Ramsey Campbell, though it really should be bundled with "The Truant" (1973)). Some are interesting, some are seriously wonky (I'm looking at you and your inter-species rape scene, "The Deep Ones" (1969) by James Wade). 

The original stories are mostly solid, though it's always a juggling act to combine a 'Best of' anthology with new material: it can sometimes seem like those old CD's and records that did so with 'Best of' material and 'Three new songs!', all of them sort of sucky. But there's nothing sucky here. 

I really like "Virgin's Island"  (2014) by Donald Tyson, a great slice of pseudo-documentarian horror that reminds one of Lovecraft without aping HPL's style. And it's set off the coast of the Atlantic Provinces of Canada! Gemma Files also adds some delicious CanCon, as Toronto rocks with an insidious alien attack. Michael Shea also delights with one of the hardest things to pull off -- a nod to HPL that's funny, revisionist, and sinister.

In all, a solid anthology with distinguished cuts from the past and present. The historical selections help push A Mountain Walked to highly recommended.

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 3 (2013)

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 3 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

The third and weakest paperback volume of the Collected Basil Copper does allow the reader of the previous two volumes to survey the writer in full, and here that writer is in decline but still intermittently strong and vital.

An Interview with Basil Copper by Johnny Mains.
Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 3) by Christopher Fowler.

• When Greek Meets Greek (1997): Vague, disturbing slow-burn revisionist vampire novella.
• Line Engaged (1999): We've seen the twist more than once.
• One for the Pot (1999): One of those 'The killer is really...' stories, short and mostly sweet.
• In a Darkling Wood (1999): Absolutely loopy period piece involving black magic in the 18th-century English countryside. The last 20 pages are weird but utterly unconvincing.
• The Grass (1999): A piece of juvenalia written when Copper was 14.
• Riding the Chariot (1999): Psychological horror flips over and crashes over the last few hasty, unconvincing pages.
• Final Destination (1999): Technically, the final line makes this horror story a 'Paul Harvey.'
• The Obelisk (1999): Unconvincing tale of invasion from an alternate Earth.
• Out There (1999): Until the last three pages or so, "Out There" is up there with Copper's superior, earlier stories along similar lines, "Shaft Number 247" and "The Flabby Men." The last three pages are startlingly rushed and ridiculous, but the rest of the story is very satisfying.
• The Summerhouse (1999): A creaky tale of a child's revenge on a father completely loses its way as the events are explained to us over the last couple of paragraphs.
• As the Crow Flies (2002): Mildly interesting tale of a crow that hates a guy, but so long.
• Poetic Justice (2002): Almost a story fragment about the evils of vivisection.
• Ill Met By Daylight (2002): Fun, M.R. Jamesian tale of a graveyard haunted by... what, exactly?
• Charing Cross-Dover-Charing Cross (2010): Very much a Twilight Zone fantasy of revenge.
• There Lies the Danger ... (2002): A real time-waster about rejuvenation treatments leads to a real dud of a final line. 
• Queen Bee (2005): Mildly interesting tale of a bee that loves a guy, or maybe hates him..
• Death of a Nobody (2005): Yes, another one of Copper's 'Paul Harvey' stories that eventually reveals it's about a real, historical personage. Zzz.
• Reflections (2005): There's an evil mirror in this overlong story about... an evil mirror that belonged to a real historical personage!
• The White Train (2005): Holocaust revenge story is very, very familiar.
• Hunted by Wolves (2005): Science-fiction background adds nothing to a story about a guy hiding in a tree from some super-wolves.
• Storm Over Stromjolly (2005): Dud of a revenge story... with a twist!
• The Silver Salamander (2005): Very slow thriller about a man, his mistress, her husband, and a piece of jewelry.
• Voices in the Water (2005): Fine, building piece is technically Lovecraftian in its monsters. Not a bad story to finish a career on.

Overall: Lightly recommended, and best read after the first two collections.

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 2 (2013)

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 2 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

The second volume of PS Publishing's Collected Basil Copper is a solid effort with several stand-outs. Not as consistently excellent as the first volume, but well-worth buying for fine stories that include "The Flabby Men," "Shaft Number 247," and "Beyond the Reef."



Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 2) by Kim Newman.

• The Flabby Men (1977): Sinister post-apocalyptic tale shares characteristics with "Shaft Number 247" (1980) and "Out There" (1999). A combination of the Lovecraftian and the post-atomic mutant story.
• The Way the World Died (1978): Very minor sf story.
• The Treasure of Our Lady (1978): A throwback to tales of explorers searching for treasure in the jungle, unironically told. Wouldn't be out of place in a 1927 issue of Weird Tales.
• Justice at the Crossroads (1978): Ironic, non-supernatural tale of a 'real' vampire.
• Mrs. Van Donk (1978): Minor bit of Hitchcockian social satire/thriller.
• The Stranger (1980): A psychological horror story with a 'twist' you will probably see coming.
• The Madonna of the Four-Ale Bar (1980): See "The Stranger."
• Shaft Number 247 (1980): Copper's brilliant, vague novella written for Ramsey Campbell's New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. One of ten or at most 20 of the greatest post-Lovecraft Lovecraftian stories ever written. 
• The Candle in the Skull (1984): Fun, slight tale of a creepy child and Hallowe'en revenge.
• Wish You Were Here (1992): Excellent, slow-building ghost story doesn't quite have a workable ending. Still, the ride is a lot of fun.
• Better Dead (1994): A bit of marriage-based horror that satirizes the too-committed film buff (the title comes from Bride of Frankenstein).
• Beyond the Reef (1994): Neo-pulp follow-up to Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Fun stuff, though far better as an homage than as actual horror.
• Death of a Demi-God (1995): Weak, creaky story falls into the 'Paul Harvey' category enumerated in my review of Volume 1 -- Copper's 'Paul Harvey' stories eventually reveal that they're about a real, historical personage.
• Reader, I Buried Him! (1995): Fun little vampire story seems to exist for the sole purpose of its title's play on the last line of Jane Eyre.
• Bright Blades Gleaming (1995): Another 'Paul Harvey' story, intermittently interesting but with an extremely telegraphed ending.

Overall: Recommended, though the stories start to sag after 1980. 

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas

Haunted Legends (2010) edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, containing the following stories:

Knickerbocker Holiday by Richard Bowes
That Girl by Kaaron Warren
Akbar by Kit Reed 
The Spring Heel by Steven Pirie
As Red as Red by Caitlín R. Kiernan 
Tin Cans by Ekaterina Sedia
Shoebox Train Wreck by John Mantooth
Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai by Catherynne M. Valente
La Llorona by Carolyn Turgeon
Face Like a Monkey by Carrie Laben 
Down Atsion Road by Jeffrey Ford
Return to Mariabronn by Gary A. Braunbeck
Following Double-Face Woman by Erzebet YellowBoy
Oaks Park by M. K. Hobson
For Those in Peril on the Sea by Stephen Dedman
The Foxes by Lily Hoang
The Redfield Girls by Laird Barron
Between Heaven and Hull by Pat Cadigan
Chucky Comes to Liverpool by Ramsey Campbell
The Folding Man by Joe R. Lansdale 


An interesting idea for an anthology -- writers riff on personal, local, urban or even culture-wide legends -- yields mixed results. Many of the stories float away on New Weird tropes that include lack of closure, excessive cuteness, and excessive (indeed, obsessively so) obscurity. The best stories here offer up their legends, no matter how odd or obscure, straightforwardly. Some of the less successful stories remind one of Henry James' old dictum -- "Write a dream, lose a reader."

I inadvertently applied a 'Test to Destruction' protocol on this anthology as I set it aside for three months. Coming back to it, I soon discovered that I'd already read more stories than I believed: many of them had simply vanished from memory until I encountered them again. That's not an endorsement.

As to the good...

• "The Folding Man" by Joe R. Lansdale is brilliant, weird, gory, and absolutely of a piece with Lansdale's often brilliant, weird, and gory writing career. 
• 
  
• "Chucky Comes to Liverpool" by Ramsey Campbell takes on censorship in a riff on real-world events in his native Liverpool. 
• 
  
• "The Redfield Girls" by Laird Barron is a subtle and disturbing tale of a real lake in Washington State, with real events mixed in with the fictional ones. Caitlin Kiernan, Gary Braunbeck, and Jeffrey Ford also do commendable work here. 
• 
  
• "For Those in Peril on the Sea" by Stephen Dedman misses by that much -- that much being a developed ending rather than a sudden shift into a coy truncation of the story. 

For two bucks, Haunted Legends was a good buy. At full price, though, the book should be avoided -- the best stories are all available in other, better collections and anthologies now. Lightly recommended.

Where Furnaces Burn (2012) by Joel Lane

Where Furnaces Burn (2012) by Joel Lane, containing the following stories:

A Cup of Blood (2004), A Mouth to Feed by (2008), Beth's Law (2009),  Black Country (2010),  Blind Circles (2004),  Blue Smoke (2012),  Dreams of Children (2012),  Even the Pawn (2012),  Facing the Wall (2004), Incry (2011), Morning's Echo (2010), My Stone Desire (2007),  Point of Departure (2012), Quarantine (2012), Slow Burn (2012), Stiff as Toys (1998), Still Water (2007),The Hostess (2010), The Last Witness (2010), The Receivers (2002), The Sunken City (2012), The Victim Card (2004), Waiting for the Thaw (2012), Wake Up in Moloch (2012), Winter Journey (2008), and Without a Mind (2012).  

Winner of the 2013 World Fantasy Award for best collection, Where Furnaces Burn is a story cycle from the late and much lamented Joel Lane, England's horror-poet of the industrial, rusting North where much of this book is set. Where Furnaces Burn follows the police career of its first-person narrator in and around the Manchester area.

Lane tended to avoid long short stories, preferring to write short, dense works that nonetheless generally worked as stories and not as fragments of vignettes. That's true here -- though the stories form a larger pattern, they also for the most part stand on their own.

Here we deal again and again with horrors rising out of industrial decay, poverty, and modern alienation (and the protagonist may be the most alienated of them all). Lane's prose is superbly suited to his interests -- poetic at points, grim, and pragmatically matter-of-fact even in the most poetic moments.

These are supernatural stories, mind you, not simply hardboiled excursions into Northern English crime. Ancient horrors adapt to the modern world; new horrors are born. Lane's spiritual forebears include American Fritz Leiber, whose 1940 short story "Smoke Ghost" invented a new way of evoking the horrors of the industrialized world. They also include Ramsey Campbell and his groundbreaking 'kitchen-sink' horror that began in the late 1960's. 

It's all disturbing, sad, and often strangely moving. But Lane also conjures up some fearsome horrors, whether newly minted or ancient and adapting to the Brave New Decaying World. It's brilliant stuff, and a fitting coda to a great writing career. 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.

Dark Entries by Robert Aickman

Dark Entries (1964/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "The School Friend" (1964); "Ringing the Changes" (1955); "Choice of Weapons" (1964); "The Waiting Room" (1956); "The View" (1951); and "Bind Your Hair" (1964); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Ramsey Campbell: This is Faber and Faber's reissue of weird-fiction master Robert Aickman's first solo collection of short stories, novelettes, and novels. See also my parallel review of Aickman's The Unsettled Dust.

Aickman amazes insofar as it's very difficult to distinguish between stories written in 1950 and stories written in 1979: his style and subject matter emerge seemingly fully grown and developed. Obviously, they didn't really -- Aickman started publishing in his 30's, after years of work on his art.

For all the strange and disturbing mystery of Aickman's stories and the cool, detailed nature of his prose, Aickman nonetheless often took tired horror tropes and rendered them fresh and new by re-investing them with that unexplained mystery rendered so cleanly and clearly that one feels as if one has simply missed an explanation somewhere in the story: Aickman doesn't create mystery with obfuscations of prose style. You're watching a magic trick performed without smoke and without mirrors.

Take "Ringing the Changes." It's a zombie story. But what a zombie story! Or "The School Friend": is it a Jekyll and Hyde story? Sort of. "The Waiting Room" seems like a traditional ghost story until one gets to the ghosts, whose behaviour is both inert and cosmically threatening. "Bind your Hair" makes witchcraft scary and mysterious. 

These are great, mid-career stories from one of weird and horror fiction's prickly, mysterious greats. Highly recommended.

The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman

The Unsettled Dust (1990/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "Bind Your Hair" (1964); "No Stronger Than a Flower" (1966); "Ravissante" (1968); "The Cicerones" (1967); "The Houses of the Russians" (1968); "The Next Glade" (1980); "The Stains" (1980) [Winner, 1981 British Fantasy Award] ; and "The Unsettled Dust" (1968); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Graham and Heather Smith: 

The Unsettled Dust is a bit of a curiosity in Faber and Faber's recent four-volume reissue of Robert Aickman collections as The Unsettled Dust is a posthumous reprint collection that duplicates one story from both F&F's Dark Entries AND The Wine-Dark Sea reissues ("Bind Your Hair") and two more from just The Wine-Dark Sea ("The Stains" and "The Next Glade"). Given that the F&F volumes are now the only Robert Aickman short-story collections available in mass-market editions, little or no duplication among collections would be ideal.

Nonetheless, any in-print, readily available Aickman is good. He's the master of a fairly rarefied type of ghost story, one for which he preferred the term "strange story." His stories will enthrall a (relatively) small readership. Most of Aickman's stories are too subtle for most readers, leaving them unmoved and confused as to Aickman's importance. And that's fine. He's one of the Boss Levels of horror/weird fiction. 

Those who like him, like him a lot -- but not liking him doesn't make one a 'bad' reader. Indeed, Aickman's hypercritical views caused him to dislike or dismiss many stories and writers considered by many (including myself) to be classics and masters -- almost the entire oeuvre of M.R. James, much of Henry James, all of H.P. Lovecraft, to name three writers whom Aickman found seriously wanting. So if you find Robert Aickman seriously wanting, you're just following in the footsteps of... Robert Aickman.

The stories here are mostly excellent. The one misfire is "No Stronger Than a Flower," a strange story about female vanity that seems both dated and obnoxiously sexist. But that's more than offset by the strange and disturbing wonders of such stories as "The Cicerones." That story is almost a short model of the Aickman approach: the events of the story are rendered clearly and precisely, but no emphatic explanations are offered as to why things are happening. It's immensely disturbing. So, too, "The Stains," in which horror, romantic rapture, and erotic fixation combine in a story about a recently widowed man who falls in love with... well, that's a good question.

In all, this is probably the best Faber and Faber volume to introduce yourself or others to Aickman, covering as it does more than a decade of Aickman's best stories. And when you've read them, please explain to me what the Hell is actually going on in "The Stains." Or "The Cicerones." Highly recommended.

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971 (2014): edited by S.T. Joshi: Essential, informative, and educational reading for any reader of horror, and especially for those who admire both H.P. Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell.

August Derleth was a fantastically important editor and publisher in the realms of the weird. He kept H.P. Lovecraft in print, in book form, for decades until the rest of the world started catching up with the Cthulhu Mythos. And he also published the first book by Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell after Campbell started corresponding with Derleth back in 1961.

In 1961, Campbell was 15. His first collection -- The Inhabitant of the Lake -- would come out from Arkham in 1964. And while the precocious Campbell's early works would be Lovecraftian pastiches not-dissimilar to some of Derleth's own work, Campbell's growth curve as a writer was startlingly steep. By the late 1960's, his voice was uniquely his own and he'd helped pioneer a new approach to visionary horror.

Derleth and Campbell carry on a lively, wide-ranging correspondence for ten years, though the last three years are a bit spotty because many letters have gone missing. While thoughts on horror are the main attraction, Letters to Arkham also offers a glimpse into the cottage industry that was Arkham House. We also learn just how prolific Derleth was as a writer. And a lover, though some of that may be taken with a grain of salt.

As Campbell notes in his afterword, he was something of a fan-boy in his early letters. But that element gradually slips away, leaving the reader with a dialogue between two friends who never met in person. Their debates on the merits of everything from Peter Sellers to Samuel Beckett are lively and fascinating. Derleth functions as a mentor figure for Campbell throughout their correspondence when it comes to writing and, more generally, living. 

And we find out that Derleth took to the Wisconsin woods where he lived every May to collect morel mushrooms. Thousands of them, their number dutifully reported each year. Fungi from Wisconsin. How Lovecraftian is that? Highly recommended.

The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane (2006)

The Lost District and Other Stories by Joel Lane (2006): containing the following stories: The Lost District  (2001); The Pain Barrier (1994); The Bootleg Heart (2000); Scratch (1996); Coming of Age   (2003); Mine (2006); Prison Ships  (1998); Like Shattered Stone (1994);  Among the Dead (2005); The Window (2001); The Quiet Hours (2006); Exposure (2001); The Outside World (1995); The Country of Glass (1998); The Night That Wins (2005); Against My Ruins (2004); The Only Game (2006); Contract Bridge (1996); Beyond the River (2004); The Plans They Made (1997); The Drowned (2002); Reservoir (2006);  An Unknown Past (2002); and You Could Have It All (2006).

The late Joel Lane, gone too soon at the age of 50 in 2013, was one of a handful of horror's finest modern short-story writers. Many of his stories were set in and around Birmingham, England. These stories presented a bleak, nightmarish, and very human universe of the lost and disconnected, generally trying to reconnect to something through sex, drugs, or alcohol.

And Lane really could be a short-story writer with the accent firmly on 'short' -- The Lost District and Other Stories brings together 26 stories in less than 200 pages. That's a lot of stories. Gratifyingly, none of the stories are hyper-short 'Flash Fiction,' and none of them are fragments or unfinished-feeling vignettes. They are actually stories, though often with equivocal endings.

Lane often deals with body horror, though generally in a subdued manner. When he does move into the graphically grotesque, as in "Coming of Age," the results are extremely disturbing given his general reticence when it comes to graphic violence. Otherwise, the horror and the weird intrude on the world in more muted ways, often leading to a final stinger of sentence.

In some cases, as in the title story, horror itself remains almost hidden. "The Lost District" could just be a standard-issue remembrance of things past. But if so, why the disquieting background of decaying Birmingham? And why the feeling that the civic 'renewal' that 'loses' that old district is some sort of malign, organic urban process and not simply a case of bureaucratic planning? 

There's more than a hint of Ramsey Campbell in Lane's focus on urban and suburban English horrors, but there's also a more inchoate, almost miasmic sense of decay that recalls early J.G. Ballard in its emphasis on unexplained, gestating decay. Striking stories of disquiet, beautifully and sparsely told. Highly recommended.

Ancient Images (1989) by Ramsey Campbell

Ancient Images (1989) by Ramsey Campbell: Probably the sleekest, most thriller-like novel in the prolific Ramsey Campbell's catalogue, Ancient Images is a story of detection with occult elements that begin to dominate as the novel progresses. 

It's 1988 in London, England. Metropolitan TV film editor Sandy Allan witnesses the baffling, apparent suicide of her friend and mentor, a film historian who had just announced that he'd secured a copy of a long-lost 1938 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi British horror film. But the film isn't in Sandy's mentor's ransacked apartment. 

In order to help deal with her trauma, Sandy uses the mentor's notebook to reconstruct a list of people to contact for information about the film. She takes holiday time and with the help of an American film writer sets out to see if she can track down another copy of the film.

Her quest takes her across much of England. Many of the actors and production staff remain alive 50 years later. Not so much the director, who died in a car crash mere days after the completion of filming.  

Campbell does such a fine job of describing the fictional film that one starts to wish it were real -- if so, it would be one of Karloff and Lugosi's finest on-screen team-ups. Along the way, Campbell deals with anti-horror, censorship crazes in Great Britain in both the 1930's and 1980's. The English peer responsible for the initial quashing of the film invoked the good of the British people back in 1938 as to why this horror film -- and horror films in general -- shouldn't be allowed in Great Britain. In 1988, the 'Video Nasties' censorship hysteria is in full-blown inferno.

But Sandy won't be dissuaded, despite increasingly weird goings-on, the mysterious death of her cats Bogart and Bacall, and a growing sense of being followed. Campbell has noted that Sandy is perhaps his least tortured, most 'normal' protagonist. This aids in the generation of suspense -- she's not the sort of Campbell character who would believe in even the possibility of the supernatural. All those times she thinks she sees something at the edge of vision -- well, they can be explained away. Can't they?

Its likable, uncomplicated protagonist and its detective-thriller architecture make Ancient Images Campbell's most accessible book to non-horror readers, in my humble opinion. It's a terrific ride with a tense climax. Highly recommended.