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Ramsey Campbell

The Parasite Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1989

by Ramsey Campbell (Author)

3.3 397 ratings

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Twenty years after a game of Ouija ends in a ten-year-old's disappearance, Rose Tierney discovers that she has developed psychic powers that enable her to see into the future and travel without her body, but that make her vulnerable to an evil force. Reprint.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tor Books
Publication date

January 1, 1989
Dimensions

4.5 x 1 x 7 inches
ISBN-10

0812516680
ISBN-13

978-0812516685
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books (January 1, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812516680
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812516685
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.5 x 1 x 7 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,549,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,308 in Ghost Fiction

Customer Reviews:
3.3 397 ratings

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Ramsey Campbell

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Ramsey Campbell (born 4 January 1946 in Liverpool) is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. Two of his novels have been filmed, both for non-English-speaking markets.

Since he first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today", and Robert Hadji has described him as "perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition", while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Jamiespilsbury (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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I've heard good things about Ramsey Campbell's novels

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2018

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I've heard good things about Ramsey Campbell's novels, so I decided to try The Parasite. This story was a good one, but it was very slow-moving at times, and I had to force myself to continue. The suspense picked up about 2/3 of the way through, and the novel ended well.

Some of Campbell's writing was a bit wordy, and I felt he was a bit excessive on setting the scenery. I appreciate an author who will be descriptive in the details of the story, but this book was so overdone it stalled the pace of the tale. I'll still read more of his works, and hope it turns out better next time.

6 people found this helpful

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Lillith

Starts Slow, but Wait for the Reward

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2018

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This novel starts out a little slow, and it was a bit more difficult to settle in to this novel than I prefer, but you will be rewarded if you stick with it. The author truly loves his metaphors, personifications, and similes. Most of the time, this style attributed to the rich and vivid descriptions throughout the book, but sometimes it was just...irritating. Sometimes, I would rather just have "The grass was crusted with white frost" instead of "The grass looked senile with frost." In fact, most of the time I am really not that terribly interested in exactly what type of fog is obscuring the landscape and how the fog moves and what color it makes everything. Sometimes, I am content to know that it is foggy and not read through a full page of description about it. But I digress.

This book was written in 1980, so it does have a bit of an...older style to it, not quite as fast paced and contemporary as many might prefer. I think it adds to the suspense, though. You have to wait, you're not immediately gratified, and I found that near the end of the novel I didn't want to put the book down. And yes, it's kind of creepy.

If you want a creepy, suspenseful read not lacking one bit in description, this may be your novel.

15 people found this helpful

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Scott E. Amundsen

Ramsey Campbell Does it Again!

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2013

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Having been introduced to Ramsey Campbell by Stephen King in his seminal work on modern horror DANSE MACABRE, my first choice was the novel that King discussed: Campbell's debut novel THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER, an incredibly disturbing book that is as weird as its title suggests, and is an even more auspicious debut in my opinion than King's CARRIE. And that's saying a LOT.

So I was anxious to read more of Campbell, so I finally got my hands on a copy of THE PARASITE. And I was not disappointed. Campbell still writes that cool, icy prose line that was so distinctive in THE DOLL, but he takes even more chances with this book. I won't say it's better than his first novel, but it's different. In much the same way as King's first three novels, all great, were all quite different from the other two.

Using real-life horrors from the past in horror fiction is always a risky business. In this case the horror in question is the Holocaust, barely thirty years in the past when the book was written, and Campbell uses it in a particularly nasty and frightening way.

(I should note that by nasty I do not mean offensive; I don't think anyone will find what he's done here insulting or degrading.)

Risky as it is, the use of Nazi Germany by writers of horror fantasy is a fairly common practice; even writers as notable as Kurt Vonnegut and Ira Levin have prospected in that mine. Most of the books are perfectly dreadful, of course, but when a Vonnegut, a Levin, or a Campbell gets hold of this material, hold on; you are in for a fearsome ride.

Describing the plot is difficult because it is so minimal: the central character is Rose Tierney, a writer, with her husband Bill, of books about the cinema, and they are both also lecturers at the University. Bill's a major character in the novel, and there are about four or five others who are significant, but this is really Rose's story in much the same way as THE EXORCIST: the title suggests the central character is the priest, but it is actually the possessed girl and her desperate mother who are the center of attention.

In brief: As a young girl of about ten, Rose is dragged by some older friends to a makeshift "seance" in an upper room of an abandoned building. Something happens to her there, but we are not told exactly what.

Fast forward twenty years. Rose is happily married and happy in her job; her only regret is that she is infertile. Then she meets Diane, a woman whose interest in the occult begins to jog certain strange memories in Rose that she was not even aware she had. Her happiness is about to be shaken to its core.

The rest of the book is Rose's odyssey to first find out what is happening to her and then to try to do something about it. I can't say any more without spoiling it, but it's a page-turner par excellence; even when not much is happening I found myself glued to the story waiting for the next revelation.

I see some reviewers have said that the book is too long for the story; the suggestion has been put forward that this is actually short story material bulked up to novel length. I do not agree: at 337 pages in paperback, the book is hardly all that long, and it's the "in between" stuff, the parts that some may regard as "filler," where some of the real shudders are to be found, as we learn things about Rose before she even has a clue.

The more Campbell I read, the more I like him. And it's impossible to compare him to anyone else, such as King or Koontz or his countryman James Herbert. Campbell's writings are unique; he goes places most writers would not and his narrative voice is unique in the history of literature of any genre.

First class. A must read.

42 people found this helpful

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Gwen's A. Reading

My new worst book ever written

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2018

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I made it to 15%. I'm actually impressed that I made it that far. It's that bad. The rules of writing, such as, "Show, don't tell " should have been followed more closely by Mr. Campbell. Below are some examples from the first 15% of the book. I cringe at the thought of what the remaining 75% held.
"There was room for little else but darkness thick as mud and in one corner of the yard an anonymous shrub starved and restless"
shrubs get restless? I thought that all shrubs were anonymous
"The dark closed around the young girl like the embrace of a fever "
"Beneath the lid of an overcast sky , a jumpy nerve tried to pluck at her lips "
" When she tried to stand up, her legs were water pouring over the edge of the couch "
"She heard a tap abruptly relieving itself "
"She felt the blanket pucker in her hands, and gape like ragged mouths "
"Wallpaper the color of old newsprint soaked up much of the brownish light ,which seemed thick as gravy"
"Cows were large pale standing stones ....gulls sailed down like flakes of the lonely full moon ,the river was a torrent of milk through which a luminous liner was gliding "
"Obscured by the frosted glass and surrounded by an aura of fragments of flesh, the woman seemed to be alone "
"A spark of migraine, pricked her vision a group of toddlers watched her their eyes painted into their sockets "
There are so many more examples.
I beg the author to find a good editor. Please? The 15% that I managed to get through was excruciatingly difficult.
I'm sure that there are plenty of people who like this type of writing, if you are one of those, I'm sure that you'll enjoy this story immensely. Me? Not so much.

18 people found this helpful

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Ronnie Tyler

Ouija board/Séance brings trouble.

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2019

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3.5 Stars, rounded up. Yes the beginning was slow, as many other reviewers mentioned, but not in a dragging or boring way, at least not for me. I enjoyed the descriptive Liverpool segments, the Mersey Estuary, the countryside, I like Campbell's way with those. The plot was a slow building descent into occult madness for Rose, the main character. I thought this book was a satisfying horror/supernatural read, with an appropriate pace and conclusion.

4 people found this helpful

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B. Lengden

Not quite the Ramsey Campbell I know.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2017

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I'm giving this 3 stars, as I wouldn't go so far as to say 'I don't like it', and having read 72% of it, I do want to find out how it comes out, and therefore do intend to finish it - but I'm finding it heavy going, hence why I'm taking a break from reading it, to write this review, lol.

I have greatly enjoyed Ramsey Campbell books in the past, but to my recall, this isn't his usual style at all. I love the colour purple, but not for prose! I mostly like long books I can 'get my teeth into', but this is so heavy on florid, often turgid description of the protagonist's sensory input (OK we get it - she's overwrought and hypersensitive, but enough already!), that I'm thinking, 'It's only 369 print pages? Feels like twice that, and I'm only 3/4 through.' The difficulty in identifying the speaker in some of the dialogue, mentioned by another reviewer, may be down to inexpert paragraphing when rendering into e-format; not so, the frequent, irritating need to read a sentence twice to decipher it.

Not sure why so little of Campbell's stuff is available in Kindle - or even still in print, apparently. Guess out-and-out 'horror' is out of fashion now.
Maybe it's because it's so different from his usual, that this one has been picked out for e-publication. However, 'approach with caution' would be my advice to fans of the 'traditional' Ramsey Campbell.

One person found this helpful

Dean Thornton

I'm pleased to see some of this authors' books, available on kindle!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2019

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I used to enjoy this author's stories, many years ago. It's great to see that they are now available to download onto a kindle. Looking forward to reading this e book. Thanks Amazon.

Irene S

Far to long to get to the point. At times felt like an endurance test. For such an imaginative writer with a good command of language, the word twighlight appeared far to many times in the book. A good read if you've got patience.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2018

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Far too long. Felt in part like an endurance test. Given the writers imaginative descriptive command of language, I was dismayed at the overuse of the word twighlight. When the writer hit his stride was not a bad read. Less is more.

soodio

Strange

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2018

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A bit too complicated for me and too much descriptive text. Too drawn out which spoiled it for me but I still wanted to know the ending.

g speight

ok

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2018

Verified Purchase

I like the occult but this did not ring true , so many unexplained happenings