The Count of Eleven
by Ramsey Campbell
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Description
Jack Orchard seems a normal family man - with a mild interest in numerology. He is now deep in trouble and he and his wife seem close to cracking when he receives a chain letter promising good fortune so long as he sends a copy to ten other people.Tags
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This is a psychological 'horror' story rather than the supernatural type that makes up the majority of Campbell's work. An ordinary but rather irritating man who continually cracks jokes, suffers misfortune and, due to his obsession with numbers, is drawn into a spiral of criminal behaviour as he tries to head off the bad luck that he believes is due to a chain letter that he sent on - basically, if the recipients failed to act, he thinks bad luck rebounds onto him. It does become fairly repetitive and you also need to allow for the dated setting - video rental shops, old style computers - though he deserves credit for having the protagonist's wife as a self taught IT instructor given the usual stereotype of IT personnel. Not his best show more sadly. show less
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Author Information
315+ Works 9,823 Members
John Ramsey Campbell was born January 4, 1946 in Liverpool, England. He is a horror fiction author and editor. At the age of 11 he wrote a collection called Ghostly Tales which was published as a special issue of Crypt of Cthulhu magazine titled- Ghostly Tales- Crypt of Cthulhu 6. He continued to write and later published his collection called The show more Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. At the suggestion of August Derleth, he rewrote many of his earliest stories, which he had originally set in the Massachusetts locales of Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth, and relocated them to English settings in and around the fictional Gloucestershire city of Brichester. The invented locale of Brichester was deeply influenced by Campbell's native Liverpool, and much of his later work is set in the real locales of Liverpool. In particular, his 2005 novel Secret Stories both exemplifies and satirizes Liverpoolian speech, characters and humor. John Campbell's titles include The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The One Safe Place , The Seven Days of Cain and The Last Revelation of Gla'aki. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Count of Eleven
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- Members
- 170
- Popularity
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.24)
- Languages
- English, German
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 1
