Ramsey CampbellReviews

Absolutely phenomenal folk horror in disguise. Runs by its own logic set that reveals itself to be wild and creepy in ways unexpected. Great protagonist who we know inside and out by the books conclusion. Deserves to be brought back into print, time to seek out as much Campbell as I can find.

Although this started with some stories, which I think could’ve been handled better, it finished with a real couple of belters. I think Campbell is best when he is writing folk horror and he is meticulous dreams sequences. Don’t be put off by the first few stories in this, they do get better and although I would say the quality is inconsistent, there’s more here to like than not. Probably not his best work, but still not bad.

A collection of the author's short fiction ranging from his early efforts in the early 1960s to mature work of the early 1980s when this collection was published. The earlier, very Lovecraft influenced, stories are rather clumsy pastiches and didn't really hold my interest, but the later work where the name checking of standard Lovecraft entities recedes into the background and only minor references are made, such as to books from the Mythos which people come across, are much more successful.

The final story in the book, 'The Voice of the Beach', is influenced by Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' as Campbell acknowledges in his introduction to the collection where he says that he attempted in it to return to the aims of Lovecraft who was a great admirer of Blackwood's story. As in the best of Campbell's fiction, it is unsettling and disturbing, with things only half seen or sensed providing the chills. Mainly due to such later tales, my rating is raised to a respectable 3 stars.

Rather bleak even for a novel by this author, this deals with the plight of literary agent, Barbara, whose husband was killed while working abroad. His death brought on labour, but she and her daughter survived and all seemed well, until she decided to go back to work in London - and her daughter was snatched from nursery while in the care of others. The woman running the nursery fetches a psychic round against Barbara's wishes while the police are still searching, and the woman has just told Barbara that her daughter is gifted but those who have her must be prevented from corrupting that, when a policeman arrives. A child's body, which cannot be identified due to gunshot wounds, has been found. (The book was written in the late 1980s or so, therefore there is no DNA testing which could perhaps prove otherwise).

Nine years later Barbara is trying to rebuild her life and has a tenuous relationship with a man who is divorced but trying to see his daughter despite the mother's opposition, when she starts to receive phone calls from a girl who claims to be her daughter, who would be around 13. And so starts a wild goose chase where Barbara is sent from place to place, even to Scotland, in order to meet her daughter who somehow is never at the hinted at locations. Meanwhile, others who are drawn into Barbara's quest find they have a very short life expectancy.

The book begins with a prologue where a man visits a murderer on death row in the 1940s, posing as a psychiatrist, in order to question him on why he carried out a barbaric torture and murder of his victim. Eventually it is revealed that this man was the founder of a cult, one built on the idea of torture and murder in order to somehow feed a force from beyond. This is as far as the slightly Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos parallel goes, but Barbara comes to believe that this cult has her daughter and there is a deadline to rescue her, as children are fully initiated into the cult at age 13.

The atmosphere of the story is well conveyed: urban decay, noise pollution, filth and rubbish abound and are well evoked. The cult thrives in such settings. However the ending is distinctly weak: I found it unconvincing firstly that the dead father manages to manifest to his daughter in time to reawaken her conscience when he has failed to do so for the past 9 years and secondly that the daughter does completely change her mind so conveniently and spectacularly. So on balance I can only rate this as an 'OK' at 2 stars.

This early novel of the author's is an exploration mainly of one character's delusions and homophobia, which lead him into murder. Given his hallucinations, which include the idea that the people on TV are watching him and the radio is either passing coded messages or listening to him, it is clear that his mental state is due to the illness known as paranoid schizophrenia. The general decay of the urban setting, and the claustrophobia of being trapped on a soul-less high rise housing estate, together with a dysfunctional upbringing - Horridge's drunken father was directly responsible for the accident which left Horridge with a lifelong problem with his leg - has tipped the character over the edge, as gradually becomes clear, and after reading about some well publicised murders, his delusions start to coallesce around the unfortunate inhabitants of an older house, some distance from the housing estate, which has been divided into flats.

Most of the novel is told from Horridge's point of view though the viewpoints of the various people he ends up stalking - and worse - are also utilised. Most of these are sympathetic characters which makes their fate all the more disturbing. There are some truly horrible images - a metal bird in particular - and, as usual with this author, the characters stumble into peril after mutual misunderstandings and failures to communicate over a slow but inexorable build-up.

The use of schizophrenia and its disordered thinking as the motive force for a serial killer made a good change from the usual ice cold sociopath. Possibly this was influenced by the author's own life, given the account in this edition - I read an abridged/edited version of the novel some years ago, but this restores the original text and a previously excised chapter, adding also a short story and an introduction where the author describes his dysfunctional upbringing to which he credits his ability to write disturbing fiction. That gave an interesting insight into not only this book, but others, such as Obsession which I read recently, where the mother of one of the characters disintegrates mentally due to a form of senile dementia. The only thing I wasn't keen on about the present book was the character of Peter, although I can see, especially from the introduction, that he is supposed to be an annoying drug besotted layabout, but for that reason I rate this as 4 stars.

The premise of this novel is simple: a group of four teenagers, all with what seem insurmountable problems in their home life, fill out and sign forms which have been sent anonymously to one of them - from someone who claims to be able to solve their most pressing problems in return for something they do not value. Then those forms are snatched by the wind and blown out to sea, and soon afterwards events occur which seem to be in direct relation to the problem they each described. The trouble is, in some cases that solution is fairly horrible - especially in the case of Peter's slightly senile grandmother.

Move forward 25 years to the, in some cases, unsatisfactory adult life each of them has built and the problems start coming home to roost - because the things they didn't care about at the time, such as reputation or success in business, start to be destroyed. There is a creepy atmosphere to all this, although the only overt supernatural element is the return of Peter's grandmother who is bent on revenge. The most horrific part of the story is probably the portrayal of senile dementia/Alzheimers in the character of the mother who sets about systematically destroying her daughter's reputation as a doctor and even trying to get her put into jail for drug dealing (which she is not doing). The story does succeed in creating sympathy for at least three of the four, although I found some difficulty relating to Peter who is the most damaged of the grown characters. For that and the occasionally too over the top aspects I would rate this story as 4 star.

This is the story of the disintegration of a relationship between father and daughter, and its descent into insanity and horror, with supernatural elements woven in. I found it rather a disappointment after some of Campbell's other novels, especially since the setting - a block of flats created from the derelict remains of an old building which had a past as offices and before that a lunatic asylum - and the cast of newly arrived flat owners did have potential. However, the involvement of the other characters is perfunctory and they hardly figure at all in the story.

The behaviour of the sixteen year old daughter who is aware of the psychic disturbances in the building is characterised well, with the allowance that this was written well before the use of internet, mobile phones etc, so her attempt to research the history of Nazarill, as the building is known, has to rely on secondhand bookstalls and the willingness or otherwise of a history teacher. But the father's disintegration as he becomes increasingly like an abusive former governor of the asylum comes across as so over the top at times, it cannot be taken seriously. Even at the time this book was written it is also unlikely that every adult - with the exception of someone who runs an "alternative" shop and is soon encouraged to leave - demonises the girl for using the odd rude word and approves of her being beaten.

The ending is truly horrific, but inevitable given what has gone before, although there is a slight ray of hopefulness in her ultimate fate. But if the ghosts of former inmates were looking to her for release from their imprisonment, it seems unlikely that they would terrorise her in the way they do. That, and the attempt to shoehorn too much into the story - the former inmates were also descendants of witches who used to worship on the hill where the house is built - rather muddles the story, so for me this only merits 2 stars.

A collection of short stories by one of the greats of supernatural and horror fiction, demonstrating his skill with the short form, and spanning the period from the start of his career until 1986 just before this collection was published. His fiction is always unsettling, and this does not disappoint, although the cumulative effect of so many stories did make some seem a little repetitive in theme and denoument. But there are some very disturbing tales here, and most have the characteristic build up of half-seen threat without gore. The exception is 'Again' which is a grand guignol tale and not the type of story expected from Campbell, though it starts in the usual way as a man, lost after taking a shortcut in the countryside, approaches a house to seek directions.

A lot of the stories have the theme of guilt and retribution for past crimes, but not all the protagonists or their friends have done anything to deserve what happens to them, making the stories all the more unsettling.

My personal favourites were a few of those which departed the normal setting of rundown inner cities. 'The Voice of the Beach' captures the uneasiness of Algernon Blackwood's story 'The Willows', where a vast and numinous presence, totally inimical to humanity, is intruding into our dimension from beyond. 'The End of a Summer's Day' is the horrific and cruel switch played on a young bride, while 'The Fit', set in the Lake District, deals partly with the awakening sexuality of a boy growing into adolescence and his reaction to his attractive aunt with whom he is spending another holiday, combined with the disturbing notion of a mad old woman who lives in a derelict cottage and weaves garments from her hair which she then presses on the locals who are too afraid not to accept them.

A good introduction to Campbell's fiction for anyone who has not read him before and a 4-star read, only lacking a full rating because of the above mentioned repetitiveness of some of the tales.

This is a collection of short horror and supernatural fiction published between 1980-89 and prefaced by a short introduction in which the author outlines the circumstances in which they were written. On the one hand, I admire the atmosphere and technique in which the very setting of the stories often contributes to a sense of claustrophobia, futility and ultimately inevitability of the protagonist's fate. On the other, reading so many over a couple of days does emphasise the similarity between some of them, and in the setting/characters, especially when two stories about teachers are set back to back, the first being far superior to the second.

The better stories in the collection evoke a sense of disorientation - 'In the Trees', for example, which well evokes the panic of becoming lost in a wood, especially when something unfriendly seems to be in there with you - or the sense of being controlled by adults and their not-well-understood own burdens as in 'Eye of Childhood'. One or two, however, seem so over the top - 'Playing the Game', 'The Other Side' -that they are in danger of straying into the arena of self parody.

Some are truly horrific - 'Another World' and 'It Helps if You Sing' being examples. I found 'The Guide' particularly affecting: this story in the style of M R James, and featuring a guidebook that James actually wrote, details a fate which is certainly undeserved by the lonely widower who explores a clifftop church rather reminiscent of the one in James' iconic story 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'.

Given that I found the collection rather uneven as suggested, I've settled on a 3-star rating.

It's obvious from the start that something is wrong with the small town of Moonwell, on the edge of the Peak District. Journalist Nick suddenly remembers he has been there and knows an American schoolteacher Diane who teaches there - but he had mysteriously forgotten and no one else he asks, including telephone enquiries, have heard of it. He sets out to see Diane, who had passed on misgivings about things happening in the community, and enroute finds himself driving into - total darkness.

Cut to what led up to this. An American evangelist and his cohorts arrived a few months previously and set about converting the town. All but a few sceptics, including the local vicar and Diane, became avid followers, but it is clear through disquieting incidents that an inimical influence from the deep pothole near the town is probably assisting this process and drawing some sustenance from it. Eventually, Diane hears the truth from an old resident. The inhabitants have carried out a kind of 'well dressing' with a flower figure on every St John the Baptist's day - apart from him, they have forgotten that the custom dates back to druid times and is to safeguard the locals from what lives in the pothole. By the time he tells Diane, it is too late to prevent the evangelist from descending into the hole to confront what he believes is the devil, with devastating consequences.

The book features a large cast of characters though for the most part they are kept distinguishable. There are some truly horrible villains, including the husband and wife who run the school and browbeat the older children. Before long, they become sworn enemies of Diane who had been trying to shield the children from them. The evangelist and his converts are the worst kind of religious fanatic and have no genuine Christianity, with their scapegoating of non believers. The creature in the pothole enjoys manipulating the foibles and flaws of human beings with devastating consequences, as when it influences the father of a vulnerable boy, Andrew, who is supposedly backward at school but is probably that way because of his truly dreadful mother and his father's neglect. As with other Ramsey Campbell stories, the innocent suffer and the most helpless and pitiable characters become victims. The evocation of the darkness which descends on the community, literally as well as figuratively, is excellent and very spooky, as are the descriptions of the minions of the evil force. And the characterisation of the moon as a sentient horror is also very effective.

The slight detraction which holds back the book from a 5-star rating is that the end is rather contrived as there is no real build-up to the way Diane is able to pull things out of the bag in the climax. Plus the whole missile base angle, which is worked into the book from early on and which seems to be leading up to possible worldwide apocalypse caused by the creature which feeds on death and souls is rather quickly dropped. He admits in an afterword that this was because he couldn't work out how to get all the characters necessary to the base - probably because he had made it impossible for anyone to leave the town and therefore written himself into a corner. The epilogue is interesting though and gives a bittersweet ending to the survivors' emotional and spiritual journey.

Interesting first volume of a anthology of short stories in the horror field, representing the best known horror writers of the late 1970s/early 1980s. Most of the names you would expect are present, including Ramsey Campbell himself who also edits the anthology, Robert Aickman, Dennis Etchison, Steve Rasnic and Graham Masterton, but also some writers who straddled the fantasy field also, or are better known for their fantasy, such as Tanith Lee and Lisa Tuttle, and Joan Aiken in the children's fantasy/historical field. Some 'obvious' ones are missing, such as James Herbert, Stephen King and Guy N Smith, for example, but maybe they are in volume 2.

Given that Campbell excels in the unsettling creepy end of the horror spectrum that is mainly the tack here. Certainly not the gross out gore fest that some anthologies become, and that's my preference.

The ones I found most effective were Lee's 'Room with a Vie' which takes its premis to the logical conclusion, Joan Aiken's 'Time to Laugh' where a young schoolboy burglar gets more than he bargains for, Russell Kirk's 'Watchers at the Strait Gate' where a priest is asked by a tramp he has known for years to hear his confession, and Campbell's 'The fit' which nicely combines the growing pains of an adolescent boy with the tale of a weird old woman who is terrorising his aunt.

Volume 2 of the 'New Terrors' horror/dark fantasy anthology, published in 1980. This contains more of the output of those active in the field at the time, plus authors who are normally classified as science fiction writers. Stephen King appears in this - it seems that the US edition of these two books has a different lineup and his story is in the US volume 1 - but neither volume contains the best selling British author James Herbert, maybe because he wasn't one for short stories.

As the book description doesn't list the stories, I've included them here:

Christopher Priest - The Miraculous Cairn
John Brunner - The Man Whose Eyes Beheld the Glory
Robert Bloch - The Rubber Room
Giles Gordon - Drama In Five Acts
Jack Sullivan - The Initiation
John Burke - Lucille Would Have Known
Rosalind Ashe - Teething Troubles
R. A. Lafferty - The Funny Face Murders
Marianne Leconte - Femme Fatale
Stephen King - Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game
Greg Bear - Richie by the Sea
Margaret Dickson - Can You Still See Me?
Dorothy K. Haynes - A Song at the Party
Felice Picano - One Way Out
M. John Harrison - The Ice Monkey
andrew j. offutt - Symbiote
Charles L. Grant - Across the Water to Skye
Kathleen Resch - The Dark

Priest's story reads more as an alternative universe tale, with its background of an archipelago of islands, and one particular island near the mainland former capital city, a capital largely deserted since the onset of the 'war' against unspecified enemies. The narrator has to revisit the island for the first time in years, having been a childhood visitor to an uncle, bedridden aunt and girl cousin of much the same age. The uncle and aunt now having died and the cousin moved away, it falls to the narrator to clear out the uncle's remaining effects, at the seminary where they lived, a place similar to a Catholic seminary although it isn't clear if the religion is Christianity as we know it. I won't give away the big twist, but it is a story about sexual dysfunction and the unreliability of memory. I realised afterwards that it is one of the author's stories about this alternative world, and was included in his 'The Dream Archipelego' collection.

John Brunner's story is also part of a larger collection apparently: the character called Secrett who meets the protagonist for a chat in a pub and fills in more details about a Greek island the protagonist recently visited, is a recurring character in other stories by Brunner. Here, Secrett visited the island in the late 1940s and was befriended by a Greek Orthodox priest, Costos. They both became too interested in a ruined shrine near the extinct volcano, and started transcribing rock carvings there, bringing Costos too close to the secret of the supposed saint who had used that cave as her hermitage.

Some of the stories are self consciously experimental such as Giles Gordon's and R A Lafferty (having read Lafferty in the past, its standard Lafferty) and don't really appeal to me. Femme Fatale is translated from the French so I don't know whether the original is the same, but comes over as an excuse for sexual sadism. Some are fairly average including the Stephen King which hints at something - the presence of the chrome ornament and the customised car seems to be hinting possibly that someone was responsible for a long ago crime - but doesn't deliver, or ramble on too long such as the final vampires in New Orleans story. 'One Way Out' has an interesting build up but the resolution doesn't work for me.

The best stories in the collection are more along the lines of traditional ghost stories: 'Lucille Would Have Known' is about the emerging tensions between a group of middle aged people who go on touring holidays together, after the death of their leader who is gradually revealed to be a bit of a bully; 'A Song at the Party' has a nicely macabre recursive theme where each increasingly older woman tells the young girl protagonist to go and ask her (old woman's) mother; and 'Teething Troubles' is quite an interesting update on the M R James idea of a tale told after dinner by a group of university academics, only spoiled slightly by its weak ending.

This is a psychological 'horror' story rather than the supernatural type that makes up the majority of Campbell's work. An ordinary but rather irritating man who continually cracks jokes, suffers misfortune and, due to his obsession with numbers, is drawn into a spiral of criminal behaviour as he tries to head off the bad luck that he believes is due to a chain letter that he sent on - basically, if the recipients failed to act, he thinks bad luck rebounds onto him. It does become fairly repetitive and you also need to allow for the dated setting - video rental shops, old style computers - though he deserves credit for having the protagonist's wife as a self taught IT instructor given the usual stereotype of IT personnel. Not his best sadly.

Loved it right up to the end. Not that it was a bad ending but after such an epic buildup I just didn't think the ending lived up to it. Good but not among his best.

Ramsey Campbell's books are one of its kind. The Lonely Lands also fall into the same category. At first, the plot would not at all feel appealing but slowly and slowly the interest develops. The book paints a vivid picture of our society that pokes its nose everywhere. But, the climax felt satisfying. There were moments when the pacing was uneven. But, the intricate plot twists need a reader's full attention to grasp the story. This book will keep you enthralled from start to finish, leaving you wanting more from the author.

Another great collection from Martian Migraine Press. Chthonic's theme is tales involving the earth and what lurks beneath the surface. As is common with a Martian Migraine collection, this theme can be stretched pretty far in its interpretation, but in wonderful way. Like 'Resonator', this collection gels around its theme extremely well. Ranging from firmly 'weird' stories to more straightforward horror and science fiction, I did not find a single weak entry.
The expected Lovecraft inclusion is 'The Rats in the Walls', for the uninitiated that's the one with the famously badly named cat. Though on this upteenth reading it strikes me that the cat is treated a bit as a protagonist/hero, alerting the humans to danger, accompanying them in trying to investigate and stop it. Which made me reflect on it a bit differently.
I particularly loved John Linwood Grant's WWI period piece, Orrin Grey's 'Hollow Earths', and the deeply weird and nonlinear 'Some Corner of a Dorset Field that is Forever Arabia' by David Stevens, but as I said, there is not a weak entry in here.

Impressão Fria é um conto de terror e fantasia urbana pertencente ao mythos do Lovecraft, porém, escrito e floreado com características narrativas e ambientação própria de seu autor: Ramsey Campbell.

Pode-se dizer que Campbell joga em casa, escreve um personagem fastidioso, com segredos sujos, em sua própria cidade-ficticia-suja-e-fastidiosa, Gloucerstershire; cheia de becos estreitos que dão em ruas ocultas, bares auspiciosos com personas enigmáticas e bibliotecas obscuras que não são o que parecem ser.

No entanto, mesmo que com um setting praticamente perfeito, — o que não deixa de ser méritos do autor, é claro — o conto é razoável para bom, não mais que isso. O interessante foi observar sua abordagem, onde o protagonista e sua perversidade — observada nos livros que ele procura, e que adianto, não são de ocultismo — tornam-se cruciais para o desfecho do conto.

É diferente de muitos outros autores que já li e que abordam o Mythos; não há o excesso de horrores indescritíveis do Lovecraft aqui, e em vez do horror cósmico, o que corta a história é um taciturno niilismo, como diz uma outra resenha; é mais Thomas Liggoti do que Lovecraft.

A ambientação também difere de um Ashton Clark Smith, das raízes em cultos antigos do Howard e até da abordagem cíclica mais recente feita pelo Alan Moore do Ciclo (como o próprio H.P chamava inicialmente)

Apesar do terror praticamente nulo, o que eu trato como um ligeiro ponto negativo quando leio qualquer obra nesse molde, não há como negar que o Campbell ao menos tenta colocar seu tempero próprio na abordagem desse universo. Ele se afasta do pastiche e ruma ambientes e narrativas mais modernas.

Uma história de horror, um protagonista com preferências estranhas, um cenário bem escrito e o desfecho dentro de uma livraria. Não lhe tiro o ponto de que ele fez um conto extremamente "gostável"; para mim foi bom, só bom.

Veremos os próximos.

I had an incredibly hard time getting into this one, in large part due to the sheer number of characters. The first chapter sucked me in with the elderly couple at the center of the book, but then seven new characters (their newly arrived family) all arrive on the page at once. It was, to be honest, near the halfway point of the book when I was absolutely clear on who everyone was in relation to the others (who was whose father/mother/wife/husband/son/daughter), and while some few of the additional family members had distinct personalities, they were for the most part only defined by age and relationships. This made it tough to get a handle on any of them and keep track or engage with the story at large as it moved forward since, in most scenes, a majority of the main characters were on the page. The elderly couple stayed distinct throughout, although the woman and the other women in the book got very little attention by way of development. Thus, it was left to the plot to pull me along...and by the halfway point, it did, but when I think about the book as a whole, the end result is that this work just wasn't as engaging as the other works I've read for Campbell. I think it could have done with a lot more editing and/or a smaller cast of characters.

Not a bad book, but definitely not one I'd recommend to readers who aren't already fans of Campbell unless they're looking for a very specific sort of read.½

I liked the part where nothing happened for 280 pages and then everything that did happen was really stupid and happened for no reason.

a hit and miss collection of Campbell's early work

This is actually my first Ramsey Campbell book, and I know. What took me so long, right? That being said, I was a little disappointed. I thought, as an established author, this should have been better—I mean, am I the only one who is going to address the number of typos, particularly in The Guy, where double quote marks stood in for apostrophes? And it happened a lot! I mean, come on. I"m not the best at knowing what"s right and what"s wrong on the page, but when it"s as consistent as that, it"s pretty annoying...

But then that's an editor's job, so maybe I should cut Campbell a little slack. Maybe it's just the edition I happened to read, who knows? And then I reminded myself that this is a series of shorts from Campbell's early career, and I have to admit that there’s a clear voice and style that reflects real talent. Even if they are sometimes hard to follow or seemingly cut short at the end. It could also be, in part, to my limited exposure to British writing. But not by much.

The germ of an idea that inhabits each story is pretty brilliant in most cases. The Enchanted Fruit is delicious except for the ending that felt incomplete. Made in Goatswood, Concussion, The Stocking, Sentinels, Second Staircase—all worth discussion within the realm of literary horror.

This book was not an enjoyable read for me.

An interesting Lovecraft Ian tales from the monumental Ramsey Campbell. This centres around a folk horror ritual that occurs in Derbyshire. It was initially an incredibly evocative, Macon or Blackwood type piece. Unfortunately, it’s took the form of an adventure film in the last third. I felt that this week in the pram eyes of the whole venture. I also feel that Campbell’s An interesting Lovecraft Ian tales from the monumental Ramsey Campbell. This centres around a folk horror ritual that occurs in Derbyshire. It was initially an incredibly evocative, Macon or Blackwood type piece. Unfortunately, it’s took the form of a adventure film in the last third. I felt that this weakened the premise of the whole venture. I also feel that Campbell is better when describing the set up rather than When the creature finally emerges. Good but can be missed if one is not a Campbell completist.

I have read many of Ramsey Campbell's books and have never been disappointed. This was certainly no exception. Set in 1950’s England, it centers around a young boy, Dominic Sheldrake who attends a Catholic school, and his two best friends Jim and Roberta, "Bobby". Dominic is a young writer whose stories includes his two best friends in a series of adventures. He calls them "The Tremendous Three". These friends play right into the role of detectives and not just on the pages that Dominic writes. The conflict starts after Dominic discovers that a teacher at his school, Christian Noble, has formed his own church declaring that he has the ability to bring back the dead. Dominic persuades his friends to help get to the bottom of Noble’s activities. Not an easy task as he must do this while dealing with lots of backlash from his strict Catholic teachers and parents. There is also the start of budding romantic feelings toward Roberta, whom he and Jim are beginning to notice is developing into more than just their friend. He also works through insecurities over his budding writing career and how others do, or will, perceive it, all while struggling with the realization that his faith in God is starting to wane. However, he is not stopped from seeking answers, particularly after discovering that his teacher, Christian Noble has been including his two-year-old daughter in his dark and questionable activities. As with anything that Ramsey Campbell writes, the descriptions are eerie with a constant sense of dread right around the corner or in the next paragraph. These characters are so real to life and so much more can be read between the lines as on them. I thoroughly enjoyed this nightmare tale and have ordered the next book in the series, Born to the Dark

Slow Burn Horror...............

Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell gives you a taste of Lovecraft horror. For the first half of the book, the plot moves slowly. But after that it felt like watching a horror movie. Sandy Allen's character makes a drastic development from the beginning to the end. It is my first time I have read a book by the author. And, I must say that I am really impressed with his writing style. But the book is not for beginners, as the language is little bit difficult. But, a perfect one for horror lovers.

I would like to give 4 stars to the book. Thanks to Netgalley and Random Things Tours for providing me with an opportunity to read and review the book.

urban-fantasy, horror, suspense, thriller, supernatural, 1980s, British, film-industry, twisted,****

This is a reissue of a much earlier book of traditional horror.
The story is creepy, chilling, ghostly and scary. There is the sense of horrors lurking everywhere in the strange yet outwardly idyllic village of Redfield. The whole is centered around a lost film starred by the giants in the field of 1938 horror films but goes way beyond that. Excellent book for fans of the genre!
I requested and received an EARC from Flame Tree Press via NetGalley. Thank you!