Ghosts and Grisly Things

Ramsey Campbell, Ghosts and Grisly Things (Tor, 1998)I sometimes wonder where books get their titles. In this case, I have to lay the blame on some copy editor at Tor who hadn't even bothered reading the manuscript, or at best skimmed it a tad. There's the odd ghost in this collection of stories, and a grisly thing or two, but anyone who's read Ramsey Campbell before should be well aware by now that the horror which Campbell makes his stock in trade has far less to do with such external fear-inducing stimuli. Stephen King writes in the opening pages of Cujo about how our fears change as we grow older, how the monster in the closet becomes the horror of not knowing how you're going to pay the rent on time. Within that perspective, Campbell is very much an adult horror writer; while his characters find themselves in widely disparate situations doing widely disparate things, the horrors that plague them are usually those who invoke the same fear as not knowing whence the rent check. And perhaps this is why Campbell has yet to find the audience in America that King and his monsters or Koontz and his aliens have found. When the monster is something other than the average Joe (even if he's a serial killer or some other damaged version of humanity, he's still "other"), there's a cushion of safety against which the reader can lean. When the monster is a guy on a cell phone ("Going Under"), a return to one's hometown ("Welcomeland"), or the banal passengers you're stuck with on the train ("Missed Connection"), you can't help but identify. We've all been there and done that.Campbell is probably better known as a novelist, but he's published a number of collections of top-quality short stories. Add this one to the list. He's the grand master of writing the type of horror that has fueled the recent careers of such lights as Kathe Koja, Lucius Shepard, and Patrick McGrath; fans of such writers should have no problems glomming onto what Campbell's doing, and those few who haven't discovered him yet deserve to. ****

As you'd expect from Ramsey Campbell, GHOSTS AND GRISLY THINGS includes the most chilling, well written, powerful, and haunting horror tales you'll find out there today. While I don't think this collection of tales ranks with his best (eg, the horror masterpieces DARK COMPANIONS and THE HEIGHT OF THE SCREAM; both of which deserve to be considered as modern-day masterworks of the horror tale comparable to the best of M.R. James, Shirley Jackson, Fritz Leiber, Robert Aickman and H.P. Lovecraft), it is nonetheless one of the strongest collections since the Campbell retrospective ALONE WITH THE HORRORS.The two vaguely positive reader reviews preceding this one just don't come close to doing justice to this book. It appears that the extraordinary, though often subtle, power of this collection of stories has eluded both reviewers. Furthermore, despite their claims to the contrary, there are no tales within concerned with vampires, classic horror creatures, or necrophilia (which one reviewer mistakenly claims to be the subject of "Through the Walls").It's fair to say that many readers, especially those only used to very straightforward, more mainstream horror writers like Dean Koontz or Stephen King, may not get the full impact of a typical Campbell tale on the first reading. Campbell's style is unique, natural, and evocative--though free of the pretentious, heavy-handed flourishes that some writers seemingly confuse for a style. His technique can also be extremely subtle. Readers accustomed to the more in-your-face attempts at shock that pepper mainstream fiction might not even pick up on some of the more suggested elements in his work.Campbell is not a writer who heaps redundant detail upon the reader. He often says much in just a few words--thus igniting the reader's imagination, rather than swamping it with excess and irrelevancies. His writing frequently captures the elusive and ambiguous feel of nightmares. The horror of his tales never feels obvious or familiar, unlike the stock villains and unimaginative ghoulies that too much modern horror writing relies on. His demons are enigmatic; they arise inexplicably, like incarnations of the ingrained violence or decay of a haunted landscape, or the manifestations of one's worst fears. His imagery is often grotesque, and sometimes stomach-churningly gruesome, but always conveyed with the flair of a master artist: capturing images through an elegant prose as fluid as the strokes of an Impressionist painter, rather than heaping overheated writing upon itself in some desperate effort to summon a response in the reader.At the same time, Campbell's fiction is rooted in a thoroughly convincing and unsentimental realism. His characters and their relationships, and his settings, from run-down urban backstreets to sunny and remote countryside, ring true in a manner horror fiction rarely even aspires to. Only once such a solid foundation has been established does the nightmarish begin to intrude, as it does with

Ramsey Campbell is more known for his novels such as SILENT CHILDREN and NAZARETH HILL. Still his previous anthologies have been well received (see ALONE WITH THE HORRORS: THE GREAT SHORT FICTION OF RAMSEY CAMPBELL 1961-1991 AND STRANGE THINGS AND STRANGER PLACES). So for Mr. Campbell to provide his audience with twenty tales that vary in terror (and quality) is not surprising. The subjects deviate from modern day scenarios to homage to classic horror creatures. Not for everyone because Mr. Campbell's writing often lives up to his title, the stories are creative, quite depressing, yet often humorous. The stories diversify between physical horror (ask the charity runner, the vampires or the other alleged creatures of the night) to psychological terror (talk to the mother avenging her daughter's murder). All the stories are good, but the best contain characters forced to challenge real or imaginative phantoms. Hopefully readers will not have to wait five plus years for Mr. Campbell's next anthology.Harriet Klausner