Customer Reviews

Demons by Daylight

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Shaking off his Lovecraftian roots, Campbell wrote these stories to bring horror fiction into the present day--tales where nightmares happen in everyday life, though perhaps only glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye. Campbell realized that the old techniques of elaborately building up suspense had lost their force, and instead used understatement and misdirection to scare the reader before they realized they'd been scared. I know this is an overused word, but this book really is a masterpiece, and well worth tracking down if it's out of print.

It's a shame to see DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT out of print - Ramsey Campbell is one of the more successful followers in HP Lovecraft's footsteps and certainly a successful author in his own right. I believe that it was August Derleth who encouraged a young Campbell to refine his talents and publishing his first work, "The Church in the High Street." Campbell, for a while, played the Lovecraft game with secret deities, horrors from beyond, and ancient things waiting. Campbell was able to take elements from the Lovecraft canon and reshape them into something of his own, something more British maybe; COLD PRINT collects more of these stories, also THE INHABITANT IN THE LAKE. DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT has less of Lovecraft and more of James; the banality of evil and all that. I'll list the contents of this collection:

Potential

The End of a Summer's Day

At First Sight

The Franklyn Paragraphs

The Interloper

The Sentinels

The Guy

The Old Horns

The Lost

The Stocking

The Second Staircase

Concussion

The Enchanted Fruit

Made in Goatswood

3 dollars! Every horror fan should own a copy of this book which is a perfect introduction to Campbells quite dense, detailed and inherently eerie style of writing. If your bored with King and want to try something new you could do MUCH worse then spend a few precious dollars of this collection od subtle horror stories.