Customer Reviews

Incarnate

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Being already a fan of Ramsey Campbell, I went into this book with high expectations. It's by no means a recent book of his, but I just now discovered it. Campbell does NOT disappoint. The story centers on five people brought together for an experiment in precognative dreaming. During the course of the experiment, they share a common, horrifying vision. The story then skips ahead eleven years to find all five of the subjects are beginning to dream the future again after years of suppressing their visions. Campbell's style is such that he can make the most fantastical things that happen to his characters seem perfectly common place. I found myself stopping and re-reading passages because I read right through them and then said to myself, "What did he just say?" and realize that something insane happened and Campbell never changed his tone. It can be unsettling sometimes, which is why I like Ramsey Campbell so much. All his books are like that. Incarnate ranks r! ight up there with his brilliant The Parasite and The Doll Who Ate His Mother. A good introduction to Campbell's style and a great story.

It's really too bad that Incarnate, as well as many other Ramsey Campbell titles, are out of print. This guy is good. I've read a handful of his work, and have never failed to be impressed. Now, he is not for everyone. He has sort of a dense way of saying things sometimes, and you'll find yourself having to reread a sentence to make sense of it. Some of this is the fact that he's British (I'm American), but that's not all of it. It's like HE knows what he means, but he doesn't say it clearly. That is his one downfall, but by no means a showstopper. While it was once an annoyance for me, now I just see it as a Ramsey Campbell quirk. That warning aside, this author is well worth reading. His novels are unique, eerie, and always contain twists and turns. You will not find a "typical" horror story by Campbell; it will be fresh and new. Incarnate got off to a slow start, but I knew from previous experience that the action would probably be worth waiting for, and it was. It starts with a flashback to a research experiment where 5 people who can "dream the future" are brought together. You're not real sure at the beginning what exactly is going on, or what significance any event has. But as the story unravels, bit by eerie bit, you find yourself drawn into the lives and fears of each character. By about 3/4 of the way through the book, you will have worked yourself into such a sense of doom and foreboding, that you may have trouble sleeping (I did)! I don't want to give anything away, because this book is worth reading all the way through so you get the full sense - and shock - of the surprises. The only reason I give this a 4 instead of a 5 is because of the previously-mentioned language style. Highly recommended!

This is my favorite Ramsey Campbell novel. It's about a group of people who were part of an experiment in prophetic dreaming. Eleven years after they were disbanded, disturbing visions start to crop up again. Strange things begin to occur and reality itself seems to be warping around the participants. I love the premise of this book with the whole prophetic dreams experiment aspect and in the hands of a master such as Campbell, what results is a wonderfully fulfilling journey into a bizarre realm where you can never be sure who or what are real and what consequences the experiments brought forth. I remember thinking this one over long after I finished it, and my appreciation for it grew even more as time went on.

I don't usually read this sort of thing, and I still can't quite remember why I purchased this book, pigeonholed into the "horror" genre. But here is my experience: The characters are pasteboard cutouts in the worst sense, the philosophy or psychology presented to make it all plausible by the character Dr. Kent is inane and one has a sort of lost in a not-so-funhouse feeling through the reading of the greater part of it. And yet, despite all these literary shortcomings, despite the fact that I was almost certain that I couldn't possibly give this tripe more than two stars through the first 400 pages, the book works. That is, it achieves what I suppose to be its end - inducing a true sense of dread in the reader (or this one).

The work is indeed creepy in that this sense of dread (clichéd, I know) truly doesn't creep up on one until the last 100 pages, before which one imagines one has been reading ungrammatical rubbish (Someone really must show Campbell when to use who and whom.) But, prospective reader, imagine this seed planted fairly early on in the book (p.135) blossoming - if that's quite the word - in your mind as you plough on - cluelessly, for the most part - through the rest of it:

"She remembered asking Mummy what death was. It was like going to sleep and not waking up, Mummy had told her, which had sounded reassuring until Susan had realized that if you never woke up you might never be able to stop dreaming."

I'm sure we've all had the experience of waking suddenly from a nightmare (which is what the book slowly becomes) and reassuring ourselves - as our pulse settles down - that the world remains more or less what it was before we drifted off.

What if that simply never happened one night?

After reading three other books of this author which I liked a lot, this was a disappointment. I must admit that I just didn't get the plot. For example what did Molly do to the policeman which made him confess the murder? And who or what was the always sleeping old women at Joyces' appartment. And so on... After 500 pages I'm still as unknown as after the first 100 pages. I give it two stars because it's nicely written. Some explicit and emotional scenes I liked a lot.