Cold Print

Ramsey Campbell was a boy who loved Lovecraft's works and started to write stories set in Lovecraft's world of Elder Gods, zombies and ancient powers. While he went off to create and write about his own horrors and world this book, Cold Print, is many of the short stories he wrote based on Lovecraft's universe. But he just didn't copy old stories and monsters that Lovecraft designed. He expanded on the myths and legends, adding his own creatures, worlds and images, giving us more without taking away from the mystery and delight of the unknown darkness that swam just beyond our sight. I bought the book for one of the short stories, The Insects from Shaggai, but found all the stories worth reading. Mr. Campbell not only builds on the works of Lovecraft but also starts to use his older stories as history to create the foundation for other stories. New or used, this book is a great find.

Ramsey Campbell's stories are an important contribution to the development of the mythology begun by Lovecraft and continued by Derleth and others. Rather than pastiche well-developed Lovecraftian entities and places, Campbell takes the core ideas (ancient survivals, subterranean catacombs, monstrous gods of old, etc.) and builds a parallel, contemporary mythology of his own. This one is set in the forests, lakes, and beaches of Britain, different books of horror such as "The Revelations of Glaaki", and different beings of power, such as Eihort and Y'Golonac. Campbell's tales are inherently Lovecraftian, but the different context creates a new flow to the stories. Lovecraft's back-atmosphere is Puritan New England; Campbell's back-atmosphere is Celts and Druids - the same, but different. Lovecraft looked at the pre-modern with both deisre and horror; Campbell makes you look at the modern in the same way. I think that he particularly inspires a certain revulsion to the body (think "Before the Storm" and "The Faces at Pine Dunes"). The works included here are some of Campbell's best, and have certainly been drawn on most heavily by others writing in the Cthulhu mythos. The list includes "The Insects from Shaggai", "The Inhabitant of the Lake", "Before the Storm", "Cold Print", "The Tugging", and "The Faces at Pine Dune." I was disappointed to see that "The Franklyn Paragraphs" was not included. Much of Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraftian fiction is being reprinted by Chaosium, but it is done, unfortunately, in a piecemeal fashion. This is probably the best collection that you can still find.

Cold Print contains a number of stories based on and influenced by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. I find Campbell unique among those writers who have followed in the footsteps of the master of the macabre, and the author's introduction to this volume of short stories is quite illuminating. Campbell based much of his early work on standard Lovecraft themes and styles. Over time, however, he found himself rather frustrated with the types of Cthulhu Mythos stories being written by modern writers, feeling that most of them dealt far too much with the genealogies of the old gods lying outside space and time and concentrated far too much on exaggerations of the writing style of Lovecraft. His insights give me a much greater appreciation of the later works collected here, particularly The Voice at the Beach, of which he seems to be the most proud. Campbell most appreciates Lovecraft's ability to suggest far more than he showed, and in his own emulation of this central theme his later works strike some, such as Lovecraft authority Lin Carter, as insufficiently Lovecraftian. While other writers have expended a great amount of effort filling in the gaps of Lovecraft's list of monsters and otherworldly forces, Campbell has tried to dramatically expand the original vision of the Mythos.The progression of Campbell's writing is easy to discern in these pages. The oldest of these fifteen stories, dating back to the 1960s, are grounded in the traditional Lovecraftian universe. What you find here are dark, corrupted churches where dark deeds have shunned the light of Christianity, ancient, reptilian gods buried deep in the ground struggling to reemerge with the help of frightening acolytes, lives preserved for hundreds of years by means of secret rites best left undiscovered, frightening journal accounts of hideous revelations leading to the ultimate sacrifice of those who stumbled upon ancient knowledge accidentally, a plethora of references to dark tomes such as the Revelations of Glaaki, and explorations of obscure references to the insect-beasts from Shaggai and entities such as the blind god Azathoth and Daoloth, the Render of the Veils. Eventually, the stories began to change as Campbell sought new inspiration from the Mythos in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the Pictures Are These, for example, is not a story at all, but rather a description of a number of dark sketches drawn by the author in his youth. The Tugging is built around the sharing of dark dreams by father and son, and an esoteric calling from the dream world that determines the protagonist's thoughts and movements. The Faces at Pine Dunes remains firmly entrenched in modernity, as a young man seeks to understand his parents' incessant traveling and, more importantly, their decision to remain outside the dark woods of Pine Dunes; the story's culmination before a bog from which a gurgling, mud-drenched entity emerges betokens a human's return to that which lies outside more than an invasion

Ok so Campbell has been described as M R James for the nineties but his Lovecraft is pretty good too. Actually this book makes a great introduction to Lovecraft whose prose can often be quite dense and off putting for the beginner. Campbells tales are hit and miss but mostly hits, especially the eerie 'Inhabitant of the Lake' which definately got my pulse racing. Alot of the stories are set around the same area, the rather creepy town of Brichester (fabricated) which adds a nice touch of familiarity. Ok so his descriptions can often make you leap back into reality with a smile on your face due to their excess but this is lovecraft territory and Campbell adds this well-written and often terrifying novel to the genre. Nice one!

What do I like about this book.Well to put it simply the tales.Or should I say the ideas and how he puts them across.Ok so the monster's description's are lacking but you try to describe(or spell) an amorphous gelatinous blob with the odd tenticle and see how you fare.Each tale is different but sticks to premise that the people in the tales all die,or some run screaming and die.Or run screaming and end locked up in a padded cell.Though surprisingly a few do survive but none are left unchanged,some times both mentally and physicly.Such as Roy leakey who "became like them".One tale has a bit of a ironic streak in it (to me any way!),which is the Will of Stanley Brooke.The essential tales to read are The Insects from Shaggai,The Inhabitant of the lake,The Moon Lens,and Cold Print. All right,with those essential Mytho's tale's I'll just cheack my many misspelling's(not too many this time)then leave you.