Fellstones

For me this is middling Campbell, meaning it's still good but there's not a lot here that you wouldn't get from shuffling together bits of his other books. This specific combination of folk-horror and family-destiny-horror ideas does have some interesting bits; when you finally get a clearer picture of what the titular stones are all about and how they relate to this town's whole weird deal, that's not really a thing you've seen a million times before. What feels a lot more familiar to me is the way Campbell sets up each character to cause problems for the protagonist—whether they're occult conspiracy members, or his girlfriend, or people at his job—and forces virtually every bit of dialogue with them into a similar mold of "nobody show more listens to me and they deliberately misinterpret everything I say"; a little of that goes a long way for me, although I think the degree to which it bothers me here may be less about an excessively paranoid point of view and more about having to drag out the same conflicts long enough for the main plot to happen. show less

Paul, who fled the family who adopted him as they were too interfering, has his own life under another name. But his adopted sister, Adele, finds him and persuades him to see his parents once again. They live in Fellstones, named for the strange seven stones grading the village green. Soon, Paul is sucked back into coming back, while unbeknownst to him, his family is plotting something that has to do with him and the stones.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of Fellstones, the forthcoming book by the great Ramsey Campbell. All the horror tropes are there - the mystical seven stones in the village green, the close mouthed villagers who are harboring a secret, and the duped main character, who is slow to realize what’s going on. Yet show more there was, at least for me, no sense of dread or horror, while reading the book. I had to force myself to finish the book, which at times, just dragged. All in all, a decent effort.

My thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing an ARC of Fellstones. show less