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5.0 out of 5 stars
If you go out in the Woods today, you'd better not go Alone., October 24, 2004
"The Darkest Part of the Woods" is less of a return to form for British horror Grandmaster Ramsey Campbell and more of a homecoming jaunt to his old, familiar haunts: the dark thickets and menacing woodland traipses of Southwestern England, where the Elder Gods slumber beneath rotten standing stones, and hungry, withered things wait and watch for the innocent and unwary.
For those with the patience to penetrate its thickly forested perimeter and discover its mysteries, "The Darkest Part of the Woods" ultimately proves a darksome treasurehouse, and Campbell ratchets the atmosphere up from slight unease to soul-stifling terror. This is a tasty spiced October brew of ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties, but in Campbell's England there are no Saints left to preserve us.
"Darkest Part" starts with a peculiar kind of homecoming for the Price family. The mad patriarch Lennox Price, presiding over a circle of his fellow inmates in a Brichester madhouse, issues a mysterious summons to his estranged wife Margo, a London artist starving for inspiration; stoic daughter Heather, now a university librarian struggling with her listless teenage son, Sam; and Sam himself, still wrestling with what he thought he saw as he camped in a tree shelter one night, something so vast and shadowy that he lurched off the platform in terror and snapped his leg.
Lennox Price was formerly a brilliant toxicologist who came to the Goodmanswood in the Severn Valley to study a peculiar fungus in the depths of the forest. The most perilous Science has a habit of devouring the scientist, and Lennox promptly fell victim to the mind-warping hallucinogenic properties of the fungus he discovered, categorized, immortalized in print, and named; now he spends most of his days tittering and gazing across the lowering woodland outside the window of his sanatarium.
Price's "invitation" is rather sneaky: the family converges on the insane asylum---known as the Arbour---where he is imprisoned, after Price's doctor telephones Margo with the warning that Lennox and his band of followers have escaped into the woods that surround the madhouse. Lennox is a uniter, not a divider: his nocturnal flight into the woods even manages to call up the Price family's other daughter, the more whimsicial Sophie, from her mysterious travels in America. She arrives unannounced in Brichester days later, and bearing not a few secrets herself.
When I was in graduate school in upstate New York I lived in a cottage that backed up directly onto a deep, dark woodland. I remember resting my eyes for a few minutes from my studies, and gazing out through my study windows at the lowering trees; practically every day I would go for long walks in the wood, meandering walks for the most part, but walks that would unfailingly lead me to a sort of central circle of ancient, gnarled giants, which held court around a huge, venerable maple. That tree had presence, power, authority: I nicknamed it "Grandfather Tree", and it became a centerpiece of my private mythology.
I always found myself replenished, fortified, by these walks, but I never felt I had been alone in the lonely woodlands. On some nights, cast in a shroud of darkness by the New Moon, I unwelcome and would quicken my steps, as if intruding on some sylvan ritual, resented by the thick leafy groves and twisted, wooden sentries.
Woods have an atavistic power---even Campbell's besieged Goodmanswood, its territory threatened by a new highway bypass, has something cloaked within, something corrupt, hungry, growing and eager to push its tendrils into neighboring Brichester. This is what I mean when I say that Campbell has returned to his old haunts. The very best of Campbell's horror derives much of its magic from the juxtaposition of the teeming, seedy, guttering modern United Kingdom with the ancient secrets that sleep fitfully below its new glittering plastic, steel and neon surface of superhighways and strip malls.
Campbell is fascinated in the interplay between ancient and modern, between the horrible banality and tedium of contemporary life and the seething, soul-searing horror of the cancred tomb and unquiet grave. Campbell uses all the magic in his trunk to terrify the reader, and he is particularly intrigued by transformations. Can a family, ensconced in a nettle of horror and magic, ever truly be free of it? The neighbors, sensing the Price family drawn back to the haunted forest, turn on them, and yet what are the malformed, moon-pale heads peering up over log-piles and rock walls? What is the thing with burning hands and buzzing face that Sam glimpses in the woods? What of the elongated, pale "Sticky Man" the schoolgirls talk about in terrified whispers, growing taller and thinner with each full moon?
The less said about the plot here, the better: this is a novel bursting at the seams with ideas, and Campbell lures the reader deeper into this forest at twilight, ever more mazelike with each page, ever more engrossing and disturbing, with its increasingly stealthy, sinister, and sneaky tale of ancient sorcery that flourished in Goodmanswood---named after the "Tall Man" that would show lost travelers out of the wood, or in darker tales, draw them farther in---sorcery, and worship, and secrets ancient when Rome was an infant.
With that in mind, a word of caution: Campbell is no King or Koontz, and his terrors are subtle, almost reticent. A work by Campbell is a work of secrets cloaked in skin, bone, and earth, a work of layers, and it takes a while for "The Darkest Part of the Woods" to really pick up steam. Initially I was annoyed by its pace, and almost gave up on it.
How fortunate for me---and unfortunate for my sleep---that I soldiered on! Campbell an admirer of classic ghost-tale wrangler M.R. James, uses many Jamesian techniques and draws on the ancient power of his silent, looming woods to craft up some delicious, mortifying terrors. There are two sequences late in the book---one involving a confused pursuit through the forest, the other involving a spelunk into the sooty, twisting cellar of a ruin---that are among the most terrifying ever set to paper.
For all his deftness and misdirection, for all the creepy Autumn richness of this book, Campbell has written a work of sheer, skin-crawling horror. Like an October storm, "Darkest Part" starts up with a flurry of crinkled leaves, the kiss of a zephyr, the flash of heat lightning and the soft cough of far off thunder, and then---before you can get out of the way---you're caught up in the torrent and forced to seek shelter for the night in the forlorn cottage in the middle of the forest---in the very darkest part of the Woods.
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