Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell
PS
Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701
‘Mackintosh Willy’ concludes the first half of the collection and is, unfortunately, one of the weakest thus far. As I’ve come to expect from Campbell by now, the eponymous individual is not what he seems, neither a flasher nor even a character with a speaking part. The tale is narrated in the first person by a ten-year-old boy who lives near Newsham Park, north-east of the city centre. I have no idea if Campbell grew up there himself, but the narrative sometimes reads as a fascinating and in places even touching memoir of lost youth. As horror fiction, however, it never finds its rhythm: a mystery is set up, solved immediately; the supernatural makes an initially brief and unconvincing appearance; and the resolution fails to follow from complication and exposition. If some of the content is autobiographical, then I think it would have been better put to use as literary rather than genre fiction.
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