Nameless: Froggy-Can

Effectively scary can only describe this supernatural tale of a woman's quest to find her supposedly murdered daughter which leads her into a cult activity that may or may not exist. Ramsey Campbell succeeds in topping himself with this one. Everything about THE NAMELESS is highly impressive: from its multi-dimensional protagonist to its perfect plot pace, to its many edge-of-your-seat atmospheric moments. His prose is as gripping as the dark presence looming over the heroine. The ability with which he uses his narrative is reason enough to pick this one up. One word, one sentence, says so much. THE NAMELESS should definitely be on top of everyone's reading pile.-----Martin Boucher

First let me say that you should ignore the rubes who have bashed this book for a reason i simply can't fathom. It's obvious that they have no idea what makes a horror novel great.Okay let's discuss the story. It starts off with the abduction of a woman's child and than her apparent murder. Years later the mother of the girl recieve's a phone call from a girl saying that she's her murdered child. It all picks up pace after that.Later in the book we learn about a cult that's members have no names (hence the title). The girl says she is living with them or that they are keeping her prisoner and only her mother can help rescue her. The cult worship some force or being that reminds me of one of H.P. Lovecraft's Old One's or nameless terrors. I can't reveal much more about the story because i do not want to ruin it for those who have not read it yet.This book starts alittle slow and than like a cannon blast it explode's never leaving the reader time to catch his or her breath. The horrible deeds of the cult will shock and disturb you a great deal and if they don't your a sick person. This book is downright scary because of Campbell's ability to scare the living daylights out of us with his descriptions of the enviorments and the shadows and things half glimpsed before all goes dark. Pick this up and enjoy it as much as i did...i have to say though that the ending is very different and some may not like it but if you have read Campbell before you will be able to take it better than most.

THE NAMELESS is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect horror novel I've read.The way I see it, the horror novel is a tough medium to do good work in. Part of the problem is that the novel format tends to encourage excess: excessive, clumsy writing; excessive elaboration; and excessive explanation. This excess works against a horror story, because the more we know and understand the horror, the less fearsome it is--the dread of the unknown, that gaping abyss in our awareness within which all our worst, most irrational fears take root, is a fundamental component of terror. Unfortunately, works that engage the reader's "dread of the unknown" are few and far between in these days of generic horrors, when formula plots and plain, nuance-free writing sell well, and exaggerated shocks are the closest things to true scares most writers strive for.So thank goodness we have writers like Ramsey Campbell, and novels like THE NAMELESS.Almost two decades after I first read it, THE NAMELESS is still one of the most frightening, perfectly constructed horror novels I've ever read; a gripping tale full of mystery, human drama, and shadowy spine-chilling terror provoked by horrors known and unknown. For sheer scare power, THE NAMELESS ranks somewhere near Campbell's best works, novels such as INCARNATE and THE INFLUENCE, and many of his great short stories.The story is the stuff of nightmare, a parent's uncontrollable nightmare worse than anything a conventional thriller could offer, growing darker, more horrific and bizarre as it progresses. It seemed young widow Barbara Waugh suffered a mother's worst nightmare when she learned her 4-year-old only child, Angela, had been kidnapped. This trauma was compounded soon afterwards by the discovery of a little girl's savaged corpse, mutilated beyond any hopes of identification yet clad in Angela's clothes, which led Barbara and the authorities to believe Angela had been brutally murdered. (As you'd expect, Campbell imparts these tragic scenes with an exquisite, mature sensitivity, unsullied by the mawkishness and false sweetness of sentimentality.) Then, nine years later, just after Barbara had come to terms with her grief, she receives a mysterious phone call at her office: A voice like a young girl's repeatedly calls her "Mummy". And it soon becomes clear that her nightmare is only just beginning.As it turns out, Angela is still alive, and she's in the hands of a ghastly cult: an arcane, nomadic group made up of people who've abandoned their names and their individual identities. Even worse, these nameless, faceless conspirators are in thralldom to some terrifying supernatural force, capable of manipulating physical objects, be they living, dead, or inanimate, like obscene puppets. As one character explains with chilling simplicity, "The bad got into things and made them move."It's testimony of Campbell's finely-honed storyteller's instincts that he handles the supernatural aspect of THE NAMELESS in an allusive manner

OUTSTANDING