From Publishers Weekly
British horror master Campbell (Told by the Dead) displays his gift for the unsettling in this collection of 18 recent short stories. The superlative title tale, in which guilt about a long-ago tragedy haunts the narrator, successfully transposes the understated terror of M.R. James to a modern setting. Digging Deep, about a man buried alive, will unnerve claustrophobes. Lovecraft fans will enjoy Raised by the Moon, in which teacher Bill Grant winds up stranded in a nearly deserted village. Forced to put up for the night with a gruff couple, Grant is troubled by disturbing visions of something under the water that may be linked to the blight on the area. Even in a relatively simple story such as this, Campbell shows a sure touch for evocative prose (The luminous reflection of the arc of cottages hung beneath them, a lower jaw whose unrest suggested it was eager to become a knowing grin). (Nov.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Already one of horror’s most gifted and fertile authors, Campbell is having a banner year. Spook City, a set of stories by him and fellow Liverpudlians Peter Atkins and Clive Barker appeared in September, and his latest novel, Creatures of the Pool, emerges at the same time as this collection of 18 more recent stories. The 18 cover the full spectrum of Campbell’s sometimes gruesome, sometimes more supernaturally inclined imagination. An old man mistakenly or deliberately buried alive by his children discovers his cell phone buried with him but can’t get anyone to believe his predicament is anything more than a Halloween prank. A music lecturer takes refuge from a gale in a Liverpool pub and gets lured into a fatal trap by the pub’s musically inclined patrons. In the title story, a teacher attends a party at a school he attended as a boy and encounters the ghost of a child killed in a tragic accident there years ago. As usual, Campbell remains at the cutting edge of the genre’s continuously evolving creativity. --Carl Hays
