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.
Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990): adapted by John Esposito from the short story by Stephen King; directed by Ralph S. Singleton; starring David Andrews (John Hall), Kelly Wolf (Jane), Stephen Macht (Warwick), Vic Polizos (Hose Guy), and Brad Dourif (Exterminator): Singleton's only film-directing credit; he was primarily known as a producer on such projects as Pet Sematary, Clear and Present Danger, and... Juwanna Mann? Well, at least he had range.
Rats are a problem at a decrepit Maine cotton mill in both the superior short story and this inferior movie.
Stephen King observed that the movie dumped a lot of money into the Maine economy. That's high praise!
But it's an enjoyable piece of trash, with mostly decent acting (though Pennsylvanian Macht's over-the-top struggles with a Maine accent are intermittently hilarious). Brad Dourif has an almost entirely self-contained and pointless cameo role. But he's always good, even in this dog.
Director Singleton seems to have no idea how to create mood in a horror movie. The basements, sub-basements, and sub-sub-basements are unterrifyingly well-lit, and Singleton is no Kubrick when it comes to well-lit horror.
Pre-CGI problems abound with the rat actors as well. Real trained rats can't actually flood areas with people in them the way they do in the claustrophobic, rat-crowded story. So they instead put in appearances from time to time, looking unbearably cute. By the end, the movie seems to be about a heroic human saving a bunch of cute rats from a lifetime of servitude to a mean, giant rat-monster tyrant.
The giant rat-monster (you knew there was a giant rat-monster in this, right?), so effectively revealed in the short story, instead just keeps showing up throughout the movie. Apparently it has a clock to punch. As it seem to have free access to the upper levels of the mill whenever it wants that access, its Final Boss Monster status has been completely eroded by the conclusion, when we see it for about the hundredth time (subjectively).
Still, there are worse ways to spend 100 minutes. And the beefy, yelling guy with the high-pressure hose is an unintentional bit of exquisite comedy. Badly recommended (new rating!).
