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.
Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2015): As brilliant a new novel Canadian or otherwise as I've read in a long time, Experimental Film is also a dandy horror novel. It's an almost perfect expression of the sort of documentary approach to horror that H.P. Lovecraft codified. It's also a moving character study of its narrator and her troubled relationships with pretty much everyone in her life, but most notably her young, autistic son.
Lois Cairns has lost her regular jobs as both a film journalist and as a teacher of film at a Toronto diploma factory dedicated to film. But a freelance assignment to review the latest experimental offering from a pretentious, obnoxious film-maker ends up revealing to Lois what appears to be footage from an unknown, early 20th-century Canadian director that the pompous contemporary film-maker has interpolated into his own work. And so the detective work begins -- and the eternal quest for grant money!
Cairns' investigation soon suggests that the mysterious footage was filmed by the even more mysterious Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb. Whitcomb was the wife of an early 20th-century Canadian businessman. She vanished without a trace from a sealed train compartment in the 1920's, leaving behind only a film projector. Decades earlier, her only son had also vanished somewhere in or around the Whitcombs' house in Ontario's cottage country.
And we're off. Experimental Film does many things very, very well. Files' narrator earns our sympathy despite (and also because of) her bouts of self-pity, self-loathing, and nastiness. This sympathy comes in part because the narrator is intensely self-aware, and aware of her many moments of nastiness. She's also surrounded by keenly observed and rendered supporting characters, most notably a brilliant former student whom Cairns hires to work on the movie about the search for the movie and Cairns' autistic son.
The accumulation of documentary detail, and the details of the search for the lost movie or movies, all work very much in long-standing horror traditions. More importantly, they're expertly done in this novel. Files creates a convincing alternate history of Canadian film. And she does so in a gradually building horror narrative in which both sudden, almost epiphanic shocks and the creeping terror of the slow build are both given their moments.
Perhaps most rarely for a horror novel, Experimental Film is genuinely funny throughout. And it's not the tiresome horror humour of the Crypt-keeper and his ilk, nor the deadly jolité of many an omniscient serial killer or Joker knock-off. It's just funny -- sardonic at certain points, cynical about the art scene.
In all, this is a fine novel, and one that will hopefully win readers and appear on courses of study for years to come. It's also a hell of a travelogue for certain portions of Toronto. It even has a scene set in Sneaky Dee's. The only thing it's really lacking is a climactic appearance by the helpful ghost of Al Waxman. Highly recommended.
The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell (2012): Campbell's newest novel comes with what initially appears to be a fairly innocuous cover -- until you realize that it's impossible to duplicate what the person on the cover is doing with his hands. Unless, maybe, you're double-jointed. I didn't check on that.
At the taping of a British talk show much like The Jerry Springer Show, soon-to-be-30 Luke discovers that his father isn't really his father, and his mother isn't really his mother, thanks to DNA tests. His uncle seems to know something about this, but he dies of a heart attack before he can tell Luke much of anything. As Luke starts to delve into what his uncle knew, using that uncle's strange journal as a guide, more deaths and disappearances follow.
Luke's expecting his first child with his partner Sophie, a classical guitarist. Luke himself is a rising comedian who specializes in an act that's an odd combination of mimicry and commentary on the foibles and failings of people. Luke's always been a terrific mimic, and was incredibly precocious in a way that seems like a sly homage to the precocious, early-reading H.P. Lovecraft, whom Campbell emulated early in his own precocious writing career.
And Luke was plagued by nightmares as a child about vaguely human-shaped things creeping into his bedroom to watch him at night. Now the nightmares have returned. Soon, they're no longer nightmares: they're what Luke sees in the daytime.
In what is Campbell's shortest novel in decades, a fabulous blending occurs of some of his own mythologies (references to other Campbell works span almost his entire writing career, from "The Franklyn Paragraphs" of the 1960's through The Doll Who Ate His Mother of the 1970's to The Grin of the Dark from 2004) and an assortment of myths and legends about fairies in the British Isles. "The Kind Folk" is just one of the terms used by fearful people to curry favour with fairy, who were not traditionally known for their kindness.
Luke's quest is extremely personal, though there are potentially apocalyptic ramifications to his quest to understand his origins. His uncle mapped out hot spots throughout the British Isles where another world seemed to be leaking through into this one -- and when Luke visits these places, very odd things start to happen. And people other than himself start to see the figures from his childhood, and not simply in dreams.
It's a solid, understated effort from Campbell, one whose chills are often existential, and whether or not the myths and legends of Fairyland herein are 'real' or invented by Campbell, they possess the haunting quality of real legend. Highly recommended.
