Ramsey Campbell

'The Grin in the Dark' is less a horror tale than a novel of unease. From that perspective, the three pages of closely set third part endorsements give the wrong impression on this occasion.

The tale uses the conceit (known to us from Japanese horror) of a creative medium - the cinema shorts of a disturbing lost silent comedian - that infects the minds of others.

There are strong elements of the gothic, the occult and Kingian coulrophobia and the whole novel leaves us with a lingering sense of show more disorientation but it is primarily a dark fantasy about modern life.

The rule is no spoilers. Not too much can be said except that the internet plays a major role as do a series of paranoid experiences with authority and with our complicated culture of automated responses.

Is our hero mad, drugged or the victim of dark forces? The doubt is maintained and Campbell sets the whole in a family structure that is superficially stable but riddled with misunderstandings.

It has to be said that Campbell writes well and he delivers more than the genre expectations we pay for - the human dynamics and characters are well done and assist the sense of Simon's and our alienation.

Alienation requires something to be alienated from. The family and society are portrayed as always just off normal in a way that it is hard for us to put our finger on. This takes great creative skill.

If it has a meaning as a novel beyond the thrill, it lies in a solitary male's alienation from the world, the 'victim' of unseen forces in a world where other men have become uniforms or strangers.

At times, it is oddly restrained - thrills are held back where a lesser writer might have reveled in them. Nothing quite comes to the sort of negative resolution we might expect until it has to.

The 'family life' always makes Simon the outsider, one felt to be an outsider, whose emotional reality depends on the whim (freely provided it would seem) of one self-sufficient woman and her young son.

The effect of the comic's material on Mark (a seven year old) gives us an example of Campbell's restraint. It would be obvious to place him in danger. He is in danger but it would seem no more than others.

This is a world closer to Ligotti than Lovecraft but without the former's relentlessness. Campbell's world is really just our world seen through a distorting prism on the edge of being 'true'.

If you are overweight and sensitive about it, you might find this story just a little offensive because fat people are quite clearly associated with a bigger meme - descent into mindless conformity.

Unusually, though, mindless conformity is associated with hilarity - not the usual combination - so that this represents part of the disorientation we feel. It seems we laugh together ... we are 'canned'.

Campbell's world (in this story) is a world where the individual finds himself constantly coming up against the Clausewitzian friction of a system that is always breaking down at the margins.

This breaking down seems to be something we simply put up with - increasingly with laughter, whether at our situation or because the situation is laughing at us and we just join in with it.

As part of the world, he (and we) are also always breaking down at the margins. The inhabitants of this world end up all looking much the same, obese and eternally grinning.

This laughter is the 'grin in the dark', an aimless, general laughter that comes when we have turned into roly-poly conforming creatures of what it is that lies under all things, something very primitive.

Campbell takes us through the process of discovering an existential discomfort - one is reminded of Roquentin staring at the tree in Sartre's 'Nausea' - but without any philosophical resolution.

It is important that Simon is ordinary, bright enough to be a graduate but not bright enough to see his own predicament clearly. Our ordinariness is in the face of things and people becoming things.

This is a book reasonably put on horror shelves but not one that seems prepared to reach too deeply into the dark night of the soul - as we say, it is a novel of deep unease about the world we thrown into. show less

This is a brilliant horror novel, one of Campbell's best. It's a chilling story about the quality of dreams and hallucinations, and it explores the idea of "unreliable reality" to great effect, in a way that Philip K. Dick would've admired. As with most of Campbell's novel-length work, it's a slow-burn story, building a sense of creeping dread and unease throughout, increasing incrementally until it reaches its conclusion. Highly recommended.

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

Ramsey Campbell's relatively recent (2020) novel of the occult is a slow burner and it is no worse for that. It is almost gentle in its exploration of nature magic invading a middle class family in the English North West.

It sits at the very edge of the recently fashionable folk horror genre but translates it back into urban Liverpool, getting to the root of what folk horror meant at its peak - urban middle class fear of nature and the natural. Its climax is in a Cumbrian valley that might show more never have seen human feet.

The bulk of the novel is about three generations of a family. The occult initially intrudes only slightly and indirectly. A creepy girl friend appears to the son of the narrator, a man soon out of his depth but driven to save his son from the uncertain fate that this creature may have in store for him.

This half-broken family of artists, accountants and academics is embedded in the classic English middle class inability to get beyond petty micro-aggressions. The men seem weaker than the women (the abiding curse of English culture today) and the women are stubborn.

The novel starts with the obsessions of the wild card in the novel - that of a well regarded surrealist artist, aunt to the narrator, who got in over her head under the influence of a creature who seems to be the same as the one that appears in the life of the son of her nephew.

The strong role given to the narrator's son and his new friend gave us a brief sense of it being a Young Adult novel but it is not. It is actually a fine novel of manners in which Campbell is at his best in introducing the occult not as 'shock and horror' but as an insidious possible alternative reality.

The elemental - perhaps the sort of spirit associated with faery, perhaps something even darker and never fully explained - is ambiguous in itself, transgender to some degree, and possibly to be sympathised with a little as something that simply wants to grow and survive at human expense.

Campbell's restraint is what matters here. In fact, everything is restrained - the paranoia, the horror, the process by which the elemental outplays the narrator and exploits adolescent desire. This restraint matches the closed-in psychological inhibitions of the family and its misunderstandings.

Perhaps there would be no chance of the story if the narrator was a bit more clever in understanding his situation and more determined to reveal it but it is true to the man's character. Such a man would never have married his negative ex-wife if he had been other than he was.

How he resolves his own weaknesses (including the caution that probably saved him from the fate of aunt and son in not pursuing an obsession with a 'work' as magicians might term it) to become a potentially self-sacrificing hero in order to save his son represents the trajectory of the novel.

The aunt who inadvertently triggers the horror and who appears to have killed herself or perhaps been murdered in the last stages of a previous elemental emergence may be the only truly free spirit in the family (although her grand nephew has potential which the elemental seeks to exploit).

The sub-text here seems to be that being a free spirit or being interested in desire is dangerous and that, when obsession appears, the normality represented by family simply cannot cope. Our narrator had once been close to obsession and so understands it well enough to take a threat seriously.

What takes time to engage with becomes worth, with time, persisting with. We see here the irruption of the fantastic and weird into normality and normality's blindness to the irruption. There is no need for too much horror when the purpose is evidently unease, disquiet and paranoid anxiety.

Campbell has, over many decades, matured into a very fine novelist who should be taken more seriously by mainstream critics and allowed out of the box of genre horror. To convey so well middle class family life and its compromises and limitations through an occult tale is itself an achievement. show less