Customer Reviews

Overnight

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

How do I love this book? Let me break it down:

The first striking and delightful thing about this book is the prose voice -- well, all of them, really. The Overnight opens and closes with manager's POV, but the bulk of the novel is comprised of individual chapters presented through the eyes of specific employees. All the expected personality archetypes are present -- and I say that as someone who lost a couple of years working in a bookstore. You've got your ambitious suck-up, the fussy mother-hen children's section director, a single mom who took the job in part for flexibility's sake, an antagonistically gay man, a grouchy feminist who objects to her perceived corporate serfdom, a sleepy half-competent stoner ... etcetera, etcetera.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear Campbell had been following me around during the years I worked at McKay's. We even had a temperamental elevator, too. Holy moly. The man is a spook.

The second surprising and impressive aspect of the story is how utterly painful it is. The conflicts are so real, and so well-drawn, that I cringed away from them. They itched. I found the plight of dyslexic but dedicated Wilf to be particularly angst-inducing; I've always had a hard time with numbers the way he has a hard time with letters, and it's both humiliating and infuriating. Also beat-your-head-against-a-wall accurate: Connie's persistently regenerating typos. Oy. The head hurty.

The third noteworthy and laudable characteristic of The Overnight is the creep factor. It sneaks in slowly, but certainly. It's always present in that frustrating way that could, in a pinch, by logical people, be explained away by weather or human incompetence. This is the thing -- the story does not rely on stupidity. The Texts employees are rational people (more or less), and they respond to the swelling threat with appropriate actions. The real narrative coup is that Campbell creates a credible threat that overwhelms the staff members despite their competent handling of the situation. It's a tough line to walk -- and it's one that is rarely skirted well.

I've read a bit of complaint here and there that the first half of the book is boring, and I understand the criticism but I disagree with it. The first half is spent establishing (a). character development and (b). the undercurrent of threat ... and while it isn't as action-packed as the second end, I felt that the writing style itself carried me through the slower sections.

Campbell could be composing ad copy for sports socks in his sleep and I'd still hang in there for the ride. He writes with exactly the kind of dexterity that I aspire -- someday, in my finer moments -- to get near enough to tap with a ten-foot pole. The long and short of it is this: I loved this book. It's a polished little gem of fright and filth. It entertained me with its prose, it surprised me with its depth, and it unnerved me with its story.

Excellent stuff.

OK. All Right. There seems to be a gigantic split of opinion on this one. My opinion:

1. What you find fightening is as individual as what makes you laugh. Personally, this literally gave me nightmares. That hasn't happened since I was a kid. But I don't know what scares you: werewolves? vampires? final exams? IRS audits?

2. It must be admitted - Campbell takes an ungodly amount of time getting the book going. I enjoyed the shifting third person limited points of view. I also found some of it mildly funny, and the soap opera elements also interested me. But it is not remotely scary until over half way through. Be prepared for that, don't read it, or skip to the middle. You'll not understand the characters as well if you skip, but it may be the best way for some of you to read this.

3. The ending offers no explanations (although one is sort of alluded to earlier in the book). The fates of all the characters are not detailed, nor do we have a Monday morning wrap-up of what the world makes of what happened in the store overnight. I didn't feel that it needed that sort of ending, but you may.

4. The character of Woody is such an over-the-top American stereotype that it is somewhat distracting. He becomes in effect a secondary villain. I don't remember such scorn for Americans in previous Campbell novels. Post-Iraq War anger, maybe?

If you can deal with these caveats, buy this book and enjoy. Personally I loved it.

I love Ramsey Campbell's writing; like another reviewer posted, his writing style is so rich -- so laden with double meanings and horror (and sometimes humor) on almost every line -- that I would gladly read "The Ramsey Campbell Cookbook." (And indeed he DOES have a nonfiction book out: "Ramsey Campbell, Probably.")

Several of Campbell's stories explore the horrific potential of certain landscapes (sand in his short story "The Voice of the Beach", ice in MIDNIGHT SUN, urban blight in countless short stories). While THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS is set in an almost fairy-tale forest, THE OVERNIGHT is set in a more recognizable, more common, possibly more threatening setting: a brand-new outdoor strip mall surrounded by fields of boggy grass. I was worried at first that the bookstore setting would become self-indulgent (like any of Stephen King's novels with authors for protagonists), but the fact that the main characters work in a bookstore is almost irrelevant; the point, refreshingly to this reader if not to them, is that they're wage slaves and they may as well be stacking bricks. The first half of the novel is a dark satire of this kind of crushing work environment (similar to some of Thomas Ligotti's short stories in that vein). Campbell's novels often focus on a family, but he's obviously put his recent day-job-at-Borders experience to good use in depicting a different kind of group of people: coworkers. (Admittedly, the cast is so large I often had to flip back and forth to remind myself who was who.)

All this gradually and tensely builds to the second half where the novel turns explicitly supernatural in a, let's say, ruthless and expedient manner. Campbell is never "over-the-top" by any means, nor does he overexplain anything, but after his recent novels which kept death & mayhem to a minimum, it feels like a return to his more violent-horror-movie-ish style of the late '70s/early '80s (INCARNATE, THE NAMELESS, THE PARASITE). With so many different characters & perspectives, the novel could be criticized as being too much like a series of short stories, but they're GOOD short stories. It feels like it was as fun to write as it was to read, and the last few chapters are truly anxiety-provoking. Here's hoping it's optioned as a horror movie and Campbell is paid tons of money!

Ramsey Campbell's THE OVERNIGHT is sly literature. Make that 'Literature.' I puzzled over the dustjacket cover before I read it, and now I think it is grand.

The book was menacing and funny at the same time. It was a deer fly buzzing round my head that I kept swatting at and missing and still it would not let me be, teasing me with menace, whispering cunning little aside jokes that make me laugh in spite of myself.

The last chapter brought it all together for me, but this is not one I would recommend to my wife. She wants to know exactly what happened, and she would not think the plot moved quickly enough nor that the ending was clear enough.

And for you? Heck, I can't tell. As I say, the writing is excellent and the bookstore setting may appeal to you. Humor and metaphor glow softly in this foggy darkness like fireflies. The author worked for a while at Borders and he takes some stabs at Book Business Bureaucracy, but that isn't exactly what the book is about. And it is so ambiguous that, if you choose to read it, you will simply have to decide for yourself.

I enjoyed it immensely.

I'm now sending for his THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS which is extensively blurbed on the back of the dustjacket of THE OVERNIGHT.

In order to be horrified, a reader has to believe in the writer's concept of what horror is. The Overnight doesn't deliver anything much more spooky than Mercer Mayer's Nightmare in the Closet. It's a relief that he doesn't make the attempt, because vampires, werewolves, and the resurrection of the almost dead require a belief system I just don't have.

What Mr. Campbell did do in The Overnight, and did so well that I zoomed through his book with fascinated gusto, was create a new kind of terrifying universe: an American chain book store run on British soil by an American manager more horrible than any character Ann Rice has ever created. The guy is just too real, too awful, and too American. He makes his employees practe their smiles. He orders them -- and worse, in a nice way -- to keep their dead coworker's shelves neat and stocked as a new way to grieve. We are told by the inevitable well informed historian that the Fen has always been the site of acts of brutal violence. The creepy mud beings in the book add necessary pizazz, but the real violence here is the cheery marketing strategy practices by Woody the American on his grumpy parcel of Brits. Woody's pet on the staff is a nasty former school prefect who reminisces of his former torture techniques. This kind of violence to the individual is what this book is about, and it's a pleasure to watch Mr. Campbell unfold it so intelligently that we all feel we've been in that stored and worked with those people.

Just a note: Mr. Campbell has created a book with over a dozen characters, and he uses the very difficult technique of using each character's voice by turns. Use a cheat sheet to remind yourself who's the married one, who's the gay guy, etc.

... well, not enemies precisely, but if you estimate the intelligence level of the folks who've written one-star reviews here, you'll get the idea that this is not a horror novel for dummies. It is a sly, frequently very funny tale of paranoia and skulking dread in a modern "big-box" bookstore, and works very well as such. Not for those who need gut-piles and beheadings on every page, but far from "quiet" (i.e. boring) horror. If you appreciate brilliantly written, Lovecraft-tinged dark fiction, you'll appreciate THE OVERNIGHT.

Mr. Campbell takes his time developing the setting and the characters while sadistically reminding me of the worst of every terrible, empty working experience I've ever had. Very atmospheric and creepy. This was my introduction to Ramsey Campbell...I want some more.

I respect Ramsey Campbell. He is a master at his craft. I did not enjoy this book however. Structurally, dividing up the book between all the book store employees was interesting. Unfortunately, Campbell's characters are all a bunch of standoffish, snarky whiners who take jabs at one another at every opportunity. The conversations and dialogue is so ridiculously over-the-top "British" that it almost borders on parody. Here's my biggest complaint about the entire book, and how no one caught this is just beyond me: the store manager is American, newly transplanted from the States. He does not speak anything close to resembling American English. There is absolutely NOTHING that comes out of this character's mouth to indicate he is anything other than a lifelong Brit. Two recurring patrons of the store are obvious red herrings who meet a meaningless and 'footnote-esque' fate. After so many classic short stories by Mr. Campbell, which never fail to impress, this novel left me very disappointed. I feel guilty saying it because he is such a nice man, but pick something else by him instead.

I'm really trying to finish this book simply because it's not so engrossing that I'd ever miss my stop on mny daily commute. There is nothing scary about this book besides the day-to-day horror of working in a bookstore (of which I can speak first-hand). It drags so much you wish something awful would hurry up and happen just so you don't have to deal with such boring characters and lack of storyline any longer.

I haven't read much horror fiction in years other than to dabble in the genre via an occasional Stephen King novel, and even those have become rarer and rarer for me lately. But, on the other hand, I've found myself drawn more and more to books about books or bookstores so when I noticed that Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight was set in an English bookstore I grabbed it despite my general misgivings concerning horror novels. Frankly, they don't scare me anymore and I find myself laughing at the "horror" more times than not. In that regard, this one did not turn out to be the exception.

Ramsey Campbell has long been one of the mainstays of horror fiction with more than two dozen titles to his credit, such as The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Last Voice They Hear, Scared Stiff and Waking Nightmares. None are titles that would make me reach for my wallet but I was so intrigued by the fact that Campbell wrote The Overnight after having worked full time at the Cheshire Oaks branch of Borders for several months that I decided to give it a try.

Strange things began to happen at the new Texts bookstore almost as soon as its American manager opened it for business. An unusually dense fog settled over the strip center in which it is located and never lifted again, the computers seemed to have minds of their own (I know, Bill Gates, nothing so crazy about that), one employee suddenly lost the ability to read, books were found damaged on the floor each morning despite having been properly shelved the night before, a strange, chill dampness invaded the store and customers stayed away in droves.

Soon enough the new store is ranked as the very worst of all the Texts locations and Woody, the American manager, is told to expect a visit from corporate bigwigs who are flying to England to see the problems for themselves. In desperation, Woody schedules the entire staff for the all-night marathon shelving and clean-up project that brings the novel to its horrific climax. Although I found myself chuckling at the "horror," Campbell does provide an insider's look at some of the drudgery associated with working in one of the big chain bookstores, the constant rush to get new books out of the stockroom and onto the shelves, the never ending battle to get every book back to its proper place at the end of the day despite the best efforts of customers to misplace them, and dealing with destructive customers being chief among them.

If you enjoy horror novels, and if they really do scare you, this is one of the better written ones that you are likely to find. If you are more attracted to the novel by the bookstore setting than by the horror, you will have to judge for yourself whether or not, at 396 pages, this one is for you.