Ramsey Campbell

I've been reading Campbell's books for nearly as long as he's been writing them, and out of the several horror traditions that he's spent the most time on, the Lovecraft-homage stuff has usually been the least interesting to me even though I get why it's impressive. So it was a surprise for me to find that his most blatantly Lovecraftian book in many years is also really distinctive and effective, and feels like a fulfillment of several parts of his career. It's unusual for being the start show more of a trilogy, and also for being in a way the closest thing he's done to a Stephen King plot: a group of childhood friends, in a semi-autobiographical setting, one of whom wants to be a writer, discovers a supernatural menace that has to be repeatedly confronted across multiple generations. That sounds like It (and a little like Revival too maybe, with its resurrection-obsessed clergyman) but this is still unmistakably a Campbell novel, with his precise tone and heavy atmosphere evoking post-war Liverpool even more vividly than before (in a mostly anti-nostalgic way), and his characters don't go in the directions you might expect if you're a King reader. His idea of the antagonist is especially fascinating to me, because we don't just have a cosmic-horror force and a creepy guy who is its agent—we see that guy gradually feeling his way into that role, making it up as he goes along, and eventually creating a family so that he won't be alone in it. There are many hints of some apocalyptic stakes, but at this point the conflict is more of a personal one, and (again unusually for Campbell) the main character has a pretty clear grasp of what's going on. I was totally involved; I did end up feeling like the rest of the series didn't quite live up to this, but I think it's well worth reading on its own. show less

One of my enduring failures in life is that I am unable to not finish a book that isn’t worth reading. There is something in me that compels me to keep going, even when things are bleak indeed. I can probably count on one hand the number of books I’ve abandoned in the last ten years.

Unfortunately, Inconsequential Tales is not among the abandoned books. I admire Ramsey Campbell quite a bit, so when I see his name on a book, I’m apt to pick it up, which is how this collection of short show more stories wound up on my bookshelf. I assumed, upon reading the introduction, entitled “Truth or Consequences,” that Campbell was being overly modest in describing the tales contained in the book as unworthy of any reader’s attention. Alas, he was entirely accurate in describing the stories as “misshapen creatures of my superseded mind.”

The stories in Inconsequential Tales date from the early years of the author’s career, and are perhaps therefore interesting from a scholarly perspective. One can certainly see how Campbell developed as a writer over time, learning to leave out extraneous material, use adjectives more judiciously, and build an atmosphere before letting the bogeyman out. One can also draw the conclusion that straight science fiction wasn’t Campbell’s forte; though the florid prose of some of his horror might make one conclude, if one had only these stories to go on, that horror wouldn’t be his métier, either. Oddly, during these same years, Campbell was also writing some of his best stories, which are collected in Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991. It seems Inconsequential Tales is comprised of those tales deemed unworthy of the earlier, and much better, collection.

If you are such a fan of Ramsey Campbell that you need to own everything he has ever published, then this is a book for you. Otherwise – well, let’s just say I’m glad I took this book out of the library, rather than purchasing it. show less

I haven't read a Ramsey Campbell in many many years, and I had forgotten how excruciatingly British they are. So while the protagonist is surrounded by odd noises and furtive movements and strange behaviours, the real creeping horror is the collision of manners, the pettiness of officials, the animosity of girflriend's parents, the toxicity of his relationship with his own parents, all fueled and exacerbated by misunderstandings, farcically embarrassing incidents, and the overspilling of show more repressed rage and frustration at what turns out to be wrong targets. Ramsey Campbell's everyday horrors are the horrors of social cringe. Of course there's also delving into the history of a forgotten silent movie star with an unsavory reputation and the protagonist's ongoing obliviousness to, or denial of, the fact that weird and strange and terrifying things are subtly warping his world, and the dysfunctional nature of his everyday world and the supernatural creepiness are melding and mixing until it's far too late to do anything about it, if there ever was something that could have been done about it. show less

I've had mixed experiences with Campbell. His short stories have occasionally been brilliant, but more often obscure or underwhelming. Nonetheless, the best of his work has been sufficiently intriguing for me to seek out the bulk of his work in the hope of finding something similar.

This was my first novel of his and I'm happy to say that it's excellent, a masterful slow-burning work that ranks alongside the best in the genre. Like a lot of his short stories, there's a certain off-ness to show more the prose that works very effectively to unsettle and dislocate the reader's senses. Campbell uses the novel length format to ramp this up to almost unbearable levels and there were times when I began to feel genuinely uneasy; a sure sign of a great horror novel.

There are only a couple of things that stop this from being a five star novel. First, the work is a little too slow and subtle at times, at least for this reader. Secondly, Campbell makes no attempt to draw the reader in. You need to work and be committed to get the full effect. Not necessarily a criticism of the work as a whole, but I put a lot of stock in readability and Campbell lets me down a little here. show less