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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,
By Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Doll Who Ate His Mother (Paperback)
Clare Frayn was giving her brother a ride home, on the night someone ran in front of her car and caused the accident. Her brother died instantly. Funny thing was, they never found his arm. Funnier than that - though Clare isn't laughing - is that the man who ran in front of her car seemed to be disappearing around a corner shortly after the accident, carrying something looking suspiciously like an arm...A couple of months later, popular exploitative true-crime writer Edmund Hall contacts Clare for help in researching his latest book, "Satan's Cannibal," about the man he is certain was responsible for Clare's brother's death. When a young boy, Hall went to school in Clare's Liverpool neighborhood with a creepy kid named Christopher Kelly. Kelly was a ghoul, who eagerly attacked and ate living small animals - and even badly scared the school bully, by nearly biting off his nose. Clare and Edmund play amateur detective, with a few friends, to track Kelly down. Of course, with that much attention coming his way, it can't be too long before Kelly turns the tables, and comes looking for them... This was Ramsey Campbell's first novel, and it still reads quite well. It's more a crime story than anything else, sort of an odd and eerie "day in the life" of an unsettled and unsettling shadow-crawler of a man. Balancing the psychological and possible supernatural aspects is what makes Campbell's story so compelling - that, and his fascinating characterization of a truly bizarre criminal. The book reads like a good episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and is surprisingly mature for this kind of material. It may well have partly inspired Thomas Harris' more famous Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon especially - though it isn't quite as good, just along similar lines.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Unique but frustratingly bland and cold,
By Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Doll Who Ate His Mother: A Novel of Modern Terror (Hardcover)
Stephen King heaped praises on this, Ramsey Campbell's first published novel, and I have tried to discover what he saw in it; after two readings, I still can't warm up to this book. Part of the problem is Campbell's prose style-his dearth of emotion makes the Liverpool setting of this drama even more colorless and empty than his characters. King has said Campbell's characters see the world in much the same way that an addict on an LSD trip does-if so, it is a bad trip indeed. I hate to keep citing King here, but one other thing he said about this novel that fits it perfectly is that some may feel as if Campbell has, instead of having written a novel, has grown one in a Petrie dish. This is exactly how I feel about Campbell's writing. These characters are not real at all; they are hollow husks of humanity blown aimlessly in the wind with no more than one or two ideas driving whatever they happen to do. Even when the passionless author tries to take us inside their heads, it is impossible to connect to them because their very thought processes are both mechanical and somehow wrong. I would sometimes get lost in the middle of a paragraph because Campbell would throw in a sentence or observation that made entirely no sense at all. Often, I felt as if sentences must have been left out, or even more frustrating, reassembled so that he was commenting on things before he even described them. I know many readers hold Campbell in high regard, and I will not attempt to judge his art based on this one novel, but this novel just did not work for me. Campbell supposedly attempted to create a new type of horror story here. It's certainly unique; I know of no other writer I could compare Campbell to in terms of his writing style. The monster here, though, is basically just a cannibalistic, irrational killer of the type we have seen before. I grant you the story starts out promisingly, with Clare Frayn's brother Rob being killed in an accident and having his arm taken from the scene by an unknown young man. Clare, by the way, has a disturbing bevy of emotional problems all her own. Then a writer comes to town with the idea of writing a book on this "cannibal," claiming to have known him back in school. He, Clare, a fellow whose mother was a victim of the killer, and a weird actor who says his cat was killed (and presumably eaten) by the killer set out to find him. This task is made much easier by the fact that the writer knows who it is (based on some pretty shotty evidence, I say). The only gripping part of the narrative, in my opinion, comes when the group locates the killer's grandmother and hears from her lips some of the details of the psycho's birth. The identity of the monster comes as no surprise whatsoever, and the conclusion is basically just weird. Personally, I just don't see a lot of merit in this novel, and it fails to produce any kind of monster different from what I have seen before-it's just harder to see through Campbell's murky prose.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ice, Ice Baby!,
By Steve Donovan "Steve" (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Doll Who Ate His Mother (Paperback)
The previous reader is correct - this novel is as cold as ice. This is one of the reasons why it works so beautifully as horror.
I re-read this book shortly after reading Whitley Strieber's `The Hunger' and the comparison was stark. `The Hunger' was all over-heated prose, melodrama, tortuous explanations, and in your face - "Lookee here!". Strieber tried to get inside the head of all four main characters and, as a result, we didn't really get inside anyone at all. Campbell, on the other hand, knows that a whisper is much more sinister than a foghorn. His prose is more surgical and precise. He gives us just enough of what we need, and lets our imaginations do the rest. And he evokes Liverpool, in its shadowy "sodium glow", absolutely perfectly. Dark and creepy. Lovely!
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