THIEVING FEAR by Ramsey Campbell

A brand new novel by British horror maestro Ramsey Campbell.

As the papers arrived beside her Charlotte saw they were bordered in black. She was about to take them when the person whose bones were digging into her left side did, and she noticed that his hand was covered more with soil than flesh.

The lift was so crowded that she couldn't retreat even an inch. She could only watch as he transferred the papers to his other shriveled hand so as to grasp her face and twist it towards him. When her eyes strained to look away he released her and gestured at the doors, scattering earth like black dandruff on the shoulders of the woman in front of him.

The lift shuddered to a halt and the doors staggered apart. Then earth piled in, flinging everyone helplessly together on its way to filling her eyes and nose and mouth. Her companion seemed quite at home in it, because his fingers wriggled worm like through it to fasten on her hand and pull her deeper into the suffocating dark...

Charlotte Nolan and her cousins may not have ended up in the jobs they hoped to have when they were teenagers, but they've made their way in life. Charlotte works for a London publisher, Ellen cares for the elderly, Hugh has left teaching to work in a supermarket while his brother Rory is a controversial artist.

Then more than their jobs begin to go wrong as something reaches out of the past for them.

What has it to do with the summer night they spent on Thursaston Common? If the dreams they had that night are catching up with them, how is the Victorian occultist Arthur Pendemon involved? Before the nightmare ends more than one of them will have to enter what remains of Pendemon's house and confront what still lives there in the dark.

Is it just me? Or does this seem as confusing as all other Campbell novels do to me?

Tony

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Reading:

The Spartacus War - Barry Strauss
Slow Death - Jim Fielder
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

What's confusing? The book description starts off with what seems to be a dream if that helps clarify things.

I'm looking forward to it. The past catching up with us is a theme of Campbell's and this one about kids spending the night in an old necromancer's house, then as adults finding that they may have to return sounds like good material for Campbell to work his magic with.

The big thing about Campbell is his prose and his vision.

He takes urban and social decay and makes it absolutely gothic. And the things that horror writers started taking for granted years ago he can can still make creepy: A dead tree, an abandoned home, or even the weather.

He also has a very nasty way with the supernatural and can dredge up some creepy nightmares frome the collective subconscious. Like in The Darkest Part of the Woods, which I thought failed as a novel, but had one scene with little girls scaring their parents with a story of a man hanging around the playground trying to intice them, a "sticky" man so skinny he could squeeze between the fence bars. After hearing that description the parents chalk it up to their children's imaginations, but we know the children saw it even though we didn't.

That's an example of two of Campbell's tricks. He lets us understand better than the characters how much danger they're in which for some reason creates even more tension than if the characters had all the facts we do.

And he gives us a second hand account of something terrible rather than showing us outright, letting our imaginations paint a creepier picture than he could.

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Well, there have been a couple of flipper babies...yeah.

I like Campbell enough to want to read a lot of his novels, and I still have to get my hands on his short stories.

I think of Campbell as a psychological horror master; I've always thought it harder to write something where you're not showing all the gore and have to work harder to make it really stick in the reader's mind.

A good example is The Darkest Part of The Woods: people bashed the hell out of it in reviews, and I thought it was both creepy and psychological in an intense way.

I look forward to his new work.

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"There's no law, no law anymore - I wanna steal from the rich and give to the poor."
~The Ramones~

I haven't had a chance to read him yet but I do have one book from him: The Overnight. I was curious about Campbell and picked up this book because to me it had an interesting synopsis. It's about a haunted bookstore. Anybody here read it? So far I've heard mixed reviews about it; lots of people loved it but an equal amount hated it. I'm planning on reading it this summer...

Cheers,
Alan

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For the latest information on my horror novel, Bitternest, visit www.alandraven.com and MySpace at www.myspace.com/alandraven

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http://vintagehorror.com/home/author/matt

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Well, there have been a couple of flipper babies...yeah.

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Well, there have been a couple of flipper babies...yeah.

Hey Jong,

I just recieved my copy of Hungry Moon in the mail yesterday. I'm taking a little novel reading break to read through all these short stories and comic books I have built up, but after that it will most likely leap frog all my other To Be Read books. With Campbell I know I'm in for an awesome read, and you've spoken so highly of this one I can't resist.

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http://vintagehorror.com/home/author/matt

It's funny, my take on The Overnight was that it was extremely tedious. It seemed to go on and on, had very little scares, and the writing seemed very bland to me. I got three quarters of the way through and gave up.
I just seem to have such a problem with this mans writing.

Tt

I'm very excited about this one. Campbell is the only writer alive that I'm willing to spend the money on a new hard cover because I can't wait for it to come out in paperback or, more often than not, wait until I can buy it used at Half Price Books.

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http://vintagehorror.com/home/author/matt