Incarnate

I don't usually read this sort of thing, and I still can't quite remember why I purchased this book, pigeonholed into the "horror" genre. But here is my experience: The characters are pasteboard cutouts in the worst sense, the philosophy or psychology presented to make it all plausible by the character Dr. Kent is inane and one has a sort of lost in a not-so-funhouse feeling through the reading of the greater part of it. And yet, despite all these literary shortcomings, despite the fact that I was almost certain that I couldn't possibly give this tripe more than two stars through the first 400 pages, the book works. That is, it achieves what I suppose to be its end - inducing a true sense of dread in the reader (or this one). The work is indeed creepy in that this sense of dread (clichéd, I know) truly doesn't creep up on one until the last 100 pages, before which one imagines one has been reading ungrammatical rubbish (Someone really must show Campbell when to use who and whom.) But, prospective reader, imagine this seed planted fairly early on in the book (p.135) blossoming - if that's quite the word - in your mind as you plough on - cluelessly, for the most part - through the rest of it: "She remembered asking Mummy what death was. It was like going to sleep and not waking up, Mummy had told her, which had sounded reassuring until Susan had realized that if you never woke up you might never be able to stop dreaming." I'm sure we've all had the experience of waking suddenly from a nightmare (which is what the book slowly becomes) and reassuring ourselves - as our pulse settles down - that the world remains more or less what it was before we drifted off. What if that simply never happened one night?

Being already a fan of Ramsey Campbell, I went into this book with high expectations. It's by no means a recent book of his, but I just now discovered it. Campbell does NOT disappoint. The story centers on five people brought together for an experiment in precognative dreaming. During the course of the experiment, they share a common, horrifying vision. The story then skips ahead eleven years to find all five of the subjects are beginning to dream the future again after years of suppressing their visions. Campbell's style is such that he can make the most fantastical things that happen to his characters seem perfectly common place. I found myself stopping and re-reading passages because I read right through them and then said to myself, "What did he just say?" and realize that something insane happened and Campbell never changed his tone. It can be unsettling sometimes, which is why I like Ramsey Campbell so much. All his books are like that. Incarnate ranks r! ight up there with his brilliant The Parasite and The Doll Who Ate His Mother. A good introduction to Campbell's style and a great story.