Customer Reviews

Alone with the Horrors : The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961--1991

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I agree with Miss Jamesons report. I too was feeling disillusioned with the formulaic and frankly dull horror novels available in the stores (obviously not including Straub and King who i had read many years ago). I chanced upon this book, and having read the praise on the jacket took a risk on an author i had not heard of.

This book is extremely well written and makes a worthy contender as a modern day M R James. The stories are both subtle yet grotesque and shadowy. I cannot think of a bad story in the collection (a problem which many of Kings anthologies suffer from). The stories do not only deal with horror but themes of lonliness and urban despair. Also the english town settings add a feeling of odd normalcy against which the suggested horrors are sharply contrasted. I highly recommend this collection (which incidentally is terrific value) and urge fans of cerebral horror to seek it out.

Personal Highlights include 'The Man in the Underpass', 'Mackintosh Willy' and 'Out of Print.'

Among horror authors writing short fiction, I consider only Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti to be of importance in today's field. This book, which is a sort of career retrospective of Campbell's work, is an absolutely essential book for any fan of intellegent and moody horror. Campbell's style is at once clautrophobic and incredibly original. He is a master at creating uneasy, tense set-pieces, and even better at creating views of our world that are slanted in an undefinable yet vaguely grotesque manner. Campbell is subtle where other authors such as King are blatant and obvious; but this subtlety masks a cold calculation that is as eerily effective as anything I've ever read. Campbell is one of the few authors around today who is writing vital, important short horror, and this book displays his intense genius. An added plus are the atmospheric and intriguing illustrations by J. K. Potter

This book was like having all my Christmases come at once! My brother bought it for my birthday when i was feeling disillusioned with the horror genre. i had read loads of books by Kootnz, Laymon etc (obviously i read King and the classics ages ago!) and was hoping that if i got through enough of their books i might find one actually scary and worth reading. And then i dipped into this book. The value for money is unbelievable, for the small price of 5.99 you get almost every short story Campbell has written and whats more they are very scary. Favourites include The Hands, Hearing Is Believing...., there are too many to mention. His stories are eerie often in an ambiguous, odd way which heightens the fear. I cannot praise this book enough, it surpasses King's 'Nightshift' in both quantity and quality. It is a must-have for any horror fan.

I'm a high school English teacher who has been struggling with the task of implimenting horror fiction into the cirriculum. It has been hard to find the happy medium between the mastery of King (parents hate him)and the tradition of Lovecraft. On the occasion when I picked up Campbell's collection, I figured he would fall prey to the stereotype of another dry/strange English author. I was horribly wrong. Campbell's fiction is what keeps the horror genre alive. It's qualitative, wickedly penned, and highly imaginative. Up until Campbell, I was spending a great deal of time trying to find the type of horror that I wanted to read. I had even started writing my own stories to satisfy my need to be spooked. Campbell's short fiction is second to none! Try teaching "Mackintosh Willy" after your class finishes "Frankenstein". They will think it's like chocolate syrup on their ice cream!

What scares you?

Now: we're talking frankly. It's late. The bar is clearing out; the last call was heard an hour ago. You've drained your cup; the barge horn sounds, far away, on the river: it makes you lonely, makes you think of love lost, of options squandered. Now we're getting there, aren't we?

What scares you?

Let's walk down here by the river, let's talk in the damp and the fog. Let's talk about what the late, unlamented 20th century served up well-done and 24/7: alienation, doubt, fear, horror, and self-loathing.

That's what Ramsey Campbell writes about---or maybe "writes about" doesn't quite cut it, when we're talking about Campbell. Perhaps `conjures up' works better.

Terrorism, uncontrolled immigration, the neighborhood falling apart, your children stumbling in at 3 in the morning stranger and quieter with every furtive homecoming, basic civility torn to shreds, kids in hoodies whooping war-cries in the tube station while you keep your head down, hunker low, just trying to get home to save your strength for the next futile day.

Ramsey Campbell is a skald for this Age, with its vast slabs of ferro-concrete and cloned subdivisions and mass graves and ethnic cleansing and soul-numbing depersonalization.

He writes what he knows, and what he knows is 30 years of tilting back at stories that dug deep into the guts, the gruesome marrow, the bloody viscera, of a world bled white, drained of identity, stripped clean, standardized, strip-malled, paved, parking-lotted over.

And, oh yes, haunted.

Like "The Voice of the Beach", the story in which a writer's twitchy, nervous, newly divorced friend comes up to the beachside bungalow for a weekend, only to unleash a slumbering horror that threatens the writer's sanity---and has designs on the world. Or "The Show goes On" where a lonely shop-keeper discovers there are worse things than drunken derelicts in the decrepit theater next door. Or "Baby", where a vagrant finds the harmless little old beggar lady isn't so harmless at all, and what is that she's got in the pram?

"Alone with the Horrors" is, as much as a compendium of short, juicy, saucy, nasty horror tales can be. In short: Campbell is a kind of late 20th Century M.R. James, stripped of James's avuncular, scholarly coziness.

That in itself is not so surprising: James wrote in an England still at the height of Empire, whereas Campbell's Britain has been shorn of its global majesty and scalped of its illusions.

The result is this little, delicious, noxious compendium of 37 tales penned by a master of understated terror from 1961 through 1991. Campbell is a chronicler, without rival, of the creepingly atrocious, and his rare arts are on display front and center in this tasty collection.

Let's talk about that, for a bit: let's talk about the way Ramsey writes. The vile, diabolic witchery in his pen. The amazing thing about Campbell's stories is the way the narrative plays a nasty little game of hide-and-seek with the subtext, the effect of which is to leave the reader feeling a little drunk, addled, kept off balance.

There are key themes in Campbell's stories that keep cropping up: in his earlier works, there is the theme of the sleeping, ancient Horror stirred up by the adventurous, the power-hungry, or the merely unlucky.

Then there are the monster stories, the spook tales: our hero, through curiosity, avarice, or thuggery, stumbles upon the spectral or monstrous, and is either hunted down or trapped, with nasty results. Revenants are frequent callers in Campbell's tales, and vengeance comes calling often, whether in the high mist-haunted fells of "Above the World", the playing fields of a boys school in "In the Bag", or---best of all!--up from a dark, bloody basement in "Heading Home."

And finally, as Ramsey grew into his craft, there are, increasingly, tales of interior horror, born of diseased minds and fostered in an England blighted by twisted modernity and rotting from within. "Boiled Alive" and "The Depths" are tales in which the central horrors are fueled by alienation, urban blight, and loneliness.

Things are happening in the dark, in the shadows, literally between the lines: reading a Campbell story is a peculiar, almost schizoid thing, where the lunatic darkness behind the story gibbers and capers and stalks the story, like some shrunken think lurking behind the hedgerows and waiting for the light to fad before it makes its mood.

Oh yes: Campbell is all about dark, twisted, malformed things waiting for the cover of night, or anonymity, to make their move. Campbell's stories are juicy little nuggets of pure, shrill terror, all the better in that each works like a nasty trap.

The horrors never come head-on, but move at an angle and often---very often---under cover of loneliness, paranoia, and alienation. By the time our subject realizes the horror is upon him, the jaws of the trap have snapped shut.

"Alone with the Horrors" is like finding a cave filled with pirate treasure, loot and plunder and doubloons, perfumes and spices and intricate carpets from the East---and just as you're about to dig into your hard-won booty, realizing something that stinks of death and pain, something fish-belly pale that flaps and crawls and whines, is very close to your face.

Speaking of which, now that we're down here beneath the bridge, with the damp river fog---I've got something to show you. Something sharp, and bright. No, don't be afraid---after the first sting it won't hurt a bit.

JSG

I picked up this book and read "In The Bag" straight through. In the story a school principle is haunted by a shadowy-faced man and the memory of the accidental death via suffocation of a childhood friend. Though a little trite it's interesting enough to hold your attention, then the ending hits like florid napalm. Suddenly your mind is opened up by a world that is unfixed, unsafe, crawling with horrors, and left to ponder an ending so terrifying, so bizarre, you cannot possibly imagine what bore it.

And that's just one story.

Like the dark fantastic of Clive Barker or H.P. Lovecraft, Campbell is an author who writes from a dangerous dimension that shimmies between this plane and the next, at anytime plunging normal lives into the fifth circle of Hell and caking them with layer upon layer of seething psychological excrement.

This is a Horror writer that should be viewed alongside the greats.

Like many of the reviewers in previous posts, I too was very bored with Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc. But when I found this anthology my interest in horror was renewed! Even though there will always be a place on my bookshelf for King and Koontz, I think the best horror writers leave more to the imagination without the blood and gore. Ramsey Campbell does this very well. You will not be disappointed if you buy this book. You'll get your money's worth!

I also recommend anything by M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, J.S. LeFanu, and Bram Stoker's anthology of short horror stories (I can't remember the title..sorry).

I bought this book on a whim, never having read anything by Ramsey Campbell before, and I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY with his writing style.

Campbell has a way of penning each of his stories in such a way that you literally feel like you're trapped in the story--trapped in a terrible nightmare that you can't wake up from! There is not a bad story in this book, and I soon found that I preferred Campbell over King and other hack-and-slash writers for two reasons: 1) There is not a lot of blood-and-guts gore in any of these stories, in most cases none at all, and 2) Campbell does not use a lot of four-letter words in his writings, something I found very appealing and refreshing. And yet every story is absolutely terrifying!

This collection is an absolute must for any serious horror fan. I highly recommend it to anyone who has never read Campbell before.

I love these types of horrors, this book is wonderfully written and provides page after page of chilling accounts. a horror I could really get into from first page to the last. I found to be very chilling and creepy and in likness to "12345 Are You Dead Or Still Alive?"

This is my all time favorite book. It is an anthology of several stories written by Ramsey Campbell from the sixties up to 1991. All of the stories are good but ones like Down There, Just Waiting, The Voice of the Beach, The Scar, and The Brood are truly brilliant. Mr. Campbell writes with a very surrealistic dream-like quality that is unique and compelling. There are Lovecraftian tales, ghost stories, and many that can't be put into any category but there own. Ramsey Campbell should be considered amoung the all time greats in horror fiction history, along with the likes of M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood. You can't go wrong with this book if you like horror.