Fear Across the Mersey XIV: The Ferries | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

James Berry works in publishing in London and his uncle, a retired sailor, lives in Neston, on the western side of the Wirral Peninsula, which sits between the Mersey and Dee estuaries. Like much of the coast north of Liverpool, most famously Southport, the sea has retreated from Neston, leaving an inhospitable, in-between wetland. Berry’s uncle disappears while he is visiting, apparently sucked into the saltmarsh, and Berry is haunted by a ship in a bottle he finds there. Campbell makes very good use of the uncanniness of a location that is neither earth nor ocean and describes the collapse of the border between the dry and the wet that follows Berry when he returns to London with inventive imagery. Aside from an internal logic that would have benefitted from more scaffolding, this is another compelling tale of terror that demonstrates Campbell’s mastery of the short story as a literary form.