I’ll confess, first, to being a bad fan. Coming late to the joys of buying ’stuff’ online, I failed to follow Ramsey Campbell into his wilderness years. For those of you who don’t know, these came in the late nineties when falling sales for horror and some tough times for Campbell in particular ended with him moving (presumably on editorial advice) more towards psycho-thrillers and away from the wonderful brand of psychological and ancient horror which had made him one of the most cherishable of British authors of the 70s and 80s. The move didn’t work, and Campbell found himself without an agent in the UK, his novels only available on import. I hadn’t taken a great deal from the novels he’d penned leading up to this moment – The Count of Eleven (1991), The Long Lost (1993), and The House on Nazareth Hill (1996) in particular – and didn’t have the motivation to seek out those that followed. So it goes, I suppose.
Not that I was over the moon about this – for a long time I’d felt (as many others do) that Campbell was amongst the very top rank of modern horror authors. Classics of the uncanny such as Incarnate (1983) and The Hungry Moon (1986) remain favourites, but there’s a fantastic amount of equal quality in his canon – Cold Print (1985), a collection of his Lovecraftian tales, remains the closest a modern author has come to true cosmic horror; his ‘chapbook’ of short stories, Scared Stiff (1987), finds the perfect marriage of sex and horror and presents it in an uneasily subtle fashion that contemporaries such as Poppy Z. Brite could never manage. Of the novels, The Face That Must Die (1979) and Obsession (1985) – or, to use Campbell’s preferred title, For The Rest of Their Lives – find acute horror in the most mundane of settings. Then, of course, there’s his fantastic run of award-winning short stories – maintaining a consistency of vision over the years possibly matched only by JG Ballard. Indeed, in many ways, Campbell shares the same truth and honesty when exploring his psyche that Ballard had, a quality that set both far far ahead of their genre peers.
Although I feel that Campbell is more than capable of writing fine novels with no supernatural element – indeed, The One Safe Place (1995) was one of the better mid to late-nineties efforts – it still gave me great cheer to hear that he was returning to horror with The Darkest Part of the Woods (2003), a tale of old evil with much in common with his 1998 novel Ancient Images. It was a strong comeback, playing to Campbell’s strengths and history. He followed this with The Overnight (2004), which drew on his experiences working in Borders during the lean spell mentioned above. The Overnight contained several scenes of slow-burning and subtle terror, although it was somewhat hindered by its large cast, although it’s a testament to Campbell’s writing that he managed to handle such a cast without the reader ever feeling too lost.
Secret Story (2005) came next, a story of a short-fiction writer using his own serial murders as material and what happens when the local arts scene decide to adapt one of the tales. Intended, I assume, as satire, Secret Story’s paragraphs were packed with puns and wordplay, similar to the earlier Count of Eleven. Campbell’s always been good at playing with misunderstandings and double-meanings, and they work well over 30 or 40 pages, but over a whole novel it can get a little wearing. Despite some nice gibes at certain Liverpool art scenesters, Secret Story’s characters were too broad to ever come to life, and the final act descended into a domestic, almost-Coronation Street version of torture porn. It has its fans, but it felt like a mis-step to me, one which I’d hoped he would recover from.
The Grin of the Dark (2007) was almost a recovery. The first two thirds of the novel were fantastic, with one set-piece – a protracted walk through a dark park towards a mysterious circus then the surreal show itself – vintage Campbell. The novel also brought elements of the horror story rushing up to date, finding unease in such modern frustrations as online arguements with faceless know-it-alls (yes, I’m aware of the irony here… but, hey, the name and the picture are on the blog). A bizarre visit to a porn studio in the States harked back to the sexual terror found in Scared Stiff, and the central story was compelling. Unfortunately, the final twist felt tacked on and came almost from nowhere, ending the novel on a bit of a bum note, but there was more than enough there to suggest that classic Campbell was right around the corner…
All of which is a very epic way of saying that I was quite eagerly awaiting Thieving Fear, his latest paperback from Virgin Books. For a while it looked like Virgin could be the saviour of mainstream horror publishing in the UK, not only publishing Campbell but bringing Thomas Ligotti’s work here finally (I’m not a fan, but it was good to see such a strange and singular author on the shelves in Waterstones). Unfortunately, it also meant the publication of Adam Nevill’s Banquet for the Damned, a novel which tries to hard to be well-written that it ends up in terrible knots, and now Virgin have kicked the whole enterprise in the head. Thieving Fear is due to be one of their final horror releases.
To say that Thieving Fear is a slow burn is something of an understatement. Following a camping trip plagued by bad dreams, four cousins find themselves under attack by the supernatural presence of a long-dead warlock (the classically named Arthur Pendemon). The attacks take the form of waking nightmares, each cousin falling into a version of their greatest fear. One loses his way, quite literally unable to find his way around his house; another, the artist, loses his senses. A slow claustrophobia comes over another. To explain the nightmare of the fourth cousin would be to ruin the one moment of genius – a play on a characters perception of herself and others perceptions of her – that Campbell manages. The issue is that each one creeps on the character so slowly, that it feels like almost 150 pages or so have passed before anything of note occurs. While this is undeniably a brave move by Campbell, it doesn’t quite come off, and although the finale – a descent into the warlock’s buried house – is genuinely creepy, it feels rushed. An appealingly ambiguous epilogue ends the novel strongly, but it ends up feeling like you haven’t had a whole lot for your £7.99 or so.
What worries me about this novel is the heavy reliance on wordplay and puns Campbell’s prose has. This has always been a factor of his work, and it often works very well. But in Thieving Fear it feels as if every single exchange between characters hinges on a misunderstanding, no one seems capable of communicating with one another. In interviews, Campbell has expressed his love of these games, but when every character uses them and speaks in the same way, it leaves them sounding one note and lacking any individual characteristics. I feel the same way when I watch some of Joss Whedon’s work – when everyone’s a smart-arse, no one is.
Campbell has always been quite vocal in his annoyance with the changes editors have wrought on his books, but now it feels like he could do with being pulled back from the onslaught of puns. Thematically, they don’t fit with the book and often it feels like show-boating, an insecure writer trying to convince the reader of his quality. It’s unnecessary – Campbell does what he does, often, fabulously well. He has nothing to prove. All he has to do is write with eyes away from the market (referring to The Count of Eleven, Campbell once mentioned that he was asked to turn a minor character into an American because ‘Americans like to read about Americans’ – almost every novel since has featured a prominent secondary American character) and with confidence in his own, decades-honed abilities, and horror will one day have another masterpiece to join its ranks.
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