Customer Reviews

NAMELESS

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

 

 

THE NAMELESS is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect horror novel I've read.

The way I see it, the horror novel is a tough medium to do good work in. Part of the problem is that the novel format tends to encourage excess: excessive, clumsy writing; excessive elaboration; and excessive explanation. This excess works against a horror story, because the more we know and understand the horror, the less fearsome it is--the dread of the unknown, that gaping abyss in our awareness within which all our worst, most irrational fears take root, is a fundamental component of terror. Unfortunately, works that engage the reader's "dread of the unknown" are few and far between in these days of generic horrors, when formula plots and plain, nuance-free writing sell well, and exaggerated shocks are the closest things to true scares most writers strive for.

So thank goodness we have writers like Ramsey Campbell, and novels like THE NAMELESS.

Almost two decades after I first read it, THE NAMELESS is still one of the most frightening, perfectly constructed horror novels I've ever read; a gripping tale full of mystery, human drama, and shadowy spine-chilling terror provoked by horrors known and unknown. For sheer scare power, THE NAMELESS ranks somewhere near Campbell's best works, novels such as INCARNATE and THE INFLUENCE, and many of his great short stories.

The story is the stuff of nightmare, a parent's uncontrollable nightmare worse than anything a conventional thriller could offer, growing darker, more horrific and bizarre as it progresses. It seemed young widow Barbara Waugh suffered a mother's worst nightmare when she learned her 4-year-old only child, Angela, had been kidnapped. This trauma was compounded soon afterwards by the discovery of a little girl's savaged corpse, mutilated beyond any hopes of identification yet clad in Angela's clothes, which led Barbara and the authorities to believe Angela had been brutally murdered. (As you'd expect, Campbell imparts these tragic scenes with an exquisite, mature sensitivity, unsullied by the mawkishness and false sweetness of sentimentality.) Then, nine years later, just after Barbara had come to terms with her grief, she receives a mysterious phone call at her office: A voice like a young girl's repeatedly calls her "Mummy". And it soon becomes clear that her nightmare is only just beginning.

As it turns out, Angela is still alive, and she's in the hands of a ghastly cult: an arcane, nomadic group made up of people who've abandoned their names and their individual identities. Even worse, these nameless, faceless conspirators are in thralldom to some terrifying supernatural force, capable of manipulating physical objects, be they living, dead, or inanimate, like obscene puppets. As one character explains with chilling simplicity, "The bad got into things and made them move."

It's testimony of Campbell's finely-honed storyteller's instincts that he handles the supernatural aspect of THE NAMELESS in an allusive manner, keeping it a mystery that hovers darkly in the wings; never diminishing its persistent unspoken menace by spelling it out in obvious terms or by allowing it to dominate the story. This obscurely sinister supernatural threat, this unknown terror, lends the scariest scenes in the book their disturbing power.

With his inimitable style, Campbell draws readers into the heads of his characters, and so we experience the terror along with them. This technique works to remarkable effect in THE NAMELESS--we follow the protagonists around the dark decaying interiors of empty houses abandoned by the cult, looking for clues as the surroundings stir with silent threat. At times the terror is almost claustrophobic; the dread of the unknown becomes palpable. And we're with Barbara every nerve-jangling step of the way, right up to the story's devastating conclusion.

But the real triumph of THE NAMELESS is not just that it's a very scary book, a dark horror tale that makes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT look like pleasant holiday footage. Rather, it is that in this book Campbell combines scary supernatural horror and a compelling tale of personal tragedy and obsession even more successfully than he did in his superb earlier novels THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER and THE PARASITE. Readers and horror fans alike are encouraged to seek out and read THE NAMELESS prior to seeing its recent Spanish film adaptation, LOS SIN NOMBRE. By all accounts, the film bears only passing resemblance to the book, and lacks both its depth of character and its supernatural terrors.

Effectively scary can only describe this supernatural tale of a woman's quest to find her supposedly murdered daughter which leads her into a cult activity that may or may not exist. Ramsey Campbell succeeds in topping himself with this one. Everything about THE NAMELESS is highly impressive: from its multi-dimensional protagonist to its perfect plot pace, to its many edge-of-your-seat atmospheric moments. His prose is as gripping as the dark presence looming over the heroine. The ability with which he uses his narrative is reason enough to pick this one up. One word, one sentence, says so much. THE NAMELESS should definitely be on top of everyone's reading pile.-----Martin Boucher

I had high hopes for this novel. Ramsey Campbell, a master of psychological horror, seemed poised to add some uncharacteristically tangible frights and perhaps even it a bit of good old-fashioned gore to this particular work of fiction. The concept is far from original-cult activity at its most disturbing-but I anxiously awaited the results of the author's decision to really get his hands dirty this time. The book crawled along in places, but intermittent moments of foreboding kept my optimism intact as I continued my quest to reach what I felt would be the shocking conclusion. Sadly, all of this great buildup essentially came to naught in the form of a sudden, anticlimactic, depressingly disappointing ending. This novel proves that where there's smoke, there is not in fact always fire. I actually felt cheated by the seeming rush job of an ending here, and I can only look back with regret at the high hopes I associated with this book as I made my way through it. After the complete absence of tension or excitement at the end, one is left with a number of unanswered questions and a small set of characters who apparently served no purpose whatsoever in the narrative. It is as if the author suddenly decided at the last minute that he just didn't care anymore.

Perhaps the term "the nameless" makes you think of unimaginable entities out of space and time with revoltingly indescribable features; it certainly brought a Lovecraftian connotation to my mind initially. In terms of this novel, though, the Nameless are a cult who forego all earthly experience (such as names) in service to their cause. It remains unclear, but there goal seems to consist of gaining power for themselves and presumably opening the door for something evil, I suppose, to manifest itself. All I really know is that they were obsessed with torturing their victims and offering them up as sacrifices to nefarious agents (or so we are told but never really shown). There is some type of nonhuman agent associated with them, but I never really learned what it was or why Campbell thought it needed to be included in the first place. This cult had kidnapped Barbara Waugh's beloved three-year-old daughter, leaving behind an unrecognizable dead body which was naturally determined to be that of a murdered young Angela. Nine years later, Barbara suddenly begins to receive mysterious phone calls from someone purporting to be her long-dead daughter. Desperate to find out the truth and to rescue her daughter if she is in fact still alive, the distraught mother embarks on a frantic search for the group's whereabouts, assisted by her boyfriend Ted and a young reporter looking for her big break. They pick up rather easily on the trail of the cult and seem to always be a few days behind it as it moves around. But just who is chasing whom here? The Nameless have designs on Barbara herself, and they know that her obsession with finding her lost daughter will lead her to them. Some but by no means all of my own questions about Angela's real story are answered in the end, but they are less than satisfying.

Ramsey Campbell is certainly a talented author, but he seems to have misfired on this comparatively early effort. He never goes as far as the storyline would seemingly require him to go here, and this retreat from the abyss he has spent so much time constructing damages the novel's effectiveness and appeal a great deal.

Ramsey Campbell is what you might call "Horror's best kept secret" ['cept, there was never any INTENTION to keep him secret!], or a "horror writer's horror writer" [if you check out the back covers of his books, you find the likes of Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Peter Straub all but falling over themselves, trying to out-do each other in praising him; a phenom. I've only ever encountered elsewhere with Wm. S. Burroughs, whose books feature the likes of Joan Didion & Anthony Burgess, praising HIM to the High Heavens], but: the fact remains, he simply makes most "horror" practitioners NOWADAYS [Eli Roth, are you reading this? CAN you read?] look like the pansy-ass, sadistic little Nazi wanna-bes they truly ARE -- closer to a Mengele-meets-Pavlov frappé than capable of anything Hawthorne, Poe, or Bierce ever came up with.

(Hmm ... I'm digressing a LOT in this review ... better "wrap up" before I lose my audience ...)

This book:

(1.) Is scary as all-git-out;
(2.) Accurately limns the modern-day society we live in (like Stephen King, often credited from bringing the Horror genre from its ghettoization in the realm of "the Catholic" to the realm of "the Protestant"), and PROCEEDS from THERE, rather than trying to back-end or jury-rig a "scary story" that bleeds over into (all-but-inevitable) story-ruining implausibilities;
(3.) Get the "LURE" of such cults (over-organized religions; the Cult of the Nazis; "Satan"-worshippers; etc.) so UNCANNILY right that there isn't a WHOLE lot of reassuring space left in the reader's psyche after you finish the book and return to "daily life" . . .

REMEMBER, KIDS: "It's only a SCARY STORY..."

As a big fan of Horror Literature and more specifically of Ramsey Campbell I couldn't skip this book. I had just read "The Parasite" and loved it so I had great expectations for "The Nameless".
It's not a bad book, the story is catching and it is a page turner as you get more and more curious to find out more about the cult and about Angela. However, when you get to the end of the book you are left wanting more as the author does not offer enough details about the cult or about the powers that Angela is supposed to have or who was the girl that they shot so as to make Barbara believe it was her daughter and how and why Arthur keeps showing to Angela and Barbara.
I thought Ted's character deserved a little bit more development too. I found myself curious to know more about his personality and his motives since he has such a relevant role in the story. Also, it appears to me that some things are mentioned in the book just for the sake of being there as they lead to nothing and in the end there was no purpose to them whatsoever.
All in all I found this book to be just ok.

First let me say that you should ignore the rubes who have bashed this book for a reason i simply can't fathom. It's obvious that they have no idea what makes a horror novel great.

Okay let's discuss the story. It starts off with the abduction of a woman's child and than her apparent murder. Years later the mother of the girl recieve's a phone call from a girl saying that she's her murdered child. It all picks up pace after that.

Later in the book we learn about a cult that's members have no names (hence the title). The girl says she is living with them or that they are keeping her prisoner and only her mother can help rescue her. The cult worship some force or being that reminds me of one of H.P. Lovecraft's Old One's or nameless terrors. I can't reveal much more about the story because i do not want to ruin it for those who have not read it yet.

This book starts alittle slow and than like a cannon blast it explode's never leaving the reader time to catch his or her breath. The horrible deeds of the cult will shock and disturb you a great deal and if they don't your a sick person. This book is downright scary because of Campbell's ability to scare the living daylights out of us with his descriptions of the enviorments and the shadows and things half glimpsed before all goes dark. Pick this up and enjoy it as much as i did...i have to say though that the ending is very different and some may not like it but if you have read Campbell before you will be able to take it better than most.

When I brought The Nameless I thought it was
written by an author that I quite liked.
Then doubt crept in and I feared the
author was none other than RC who had
written The Doll who Ate His Mother.

After I confirmed my fears that it was
indeed the same author I dithered on
whether to read the book but decided
to give RC another chance.

It wasn't worth it! RC is very good
at describing things, so good in
fact that most of the Nameless
describes the countryside, houses
etc and maybe about a 1/5th of
the book has dialogue or
advancement of the plot. As Stephen
King put it in In Writing, description
is a tool that needs to be used
appropriately. RC seems to want
to describe everything not just
the important or significant things
and in this book he doesn't
move very much beyond doing exactly
that.

So if you like endless descriptions,
a plot that hardly goes anywhere
(except maybe in circles) than this
is your book.

But if you want a good horror novel
DON'T buy this book and don't
waste your time reading it thinking
that maybe in the next page- or the
next- or the next etc, that something
might happen and that you might
actually be rewarded for
plodding your way through The
Numbing! I fell into that trap
and by the end of the book I
was in horror at the fact that
not only had I bought the book
but that I'd also forced
my self to read it to it's
uninspired and unoriginal ending.

The Numbing!

What makes good horror? Well I won't claim to know
that as everybody likes a horror (or not) for his
or her own reasons, and we should respect other
people's right to have their own opinion with out
labelling them as 'country bumpkins'[dictionary
definition of a rube].

Having said that I *can* recommend Cold Print
by Ramsey Campell, an excellent read perhaps
because he can't ramble on endlessly in a
short story.

However for a truely good horror I suggest
Graham Masterton's Ritual- now there's a
book that's bound to make you squirm!

OUTSTANDING