Fear Across the Mersey XIX: Peep | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

One of the best stories in the collection so far, a slow burner whose real meaning and value are only revealed on reflection or repeated reading. ‘Peep’ is another word for ‘peek-a-boo’, the game most of us played with our parents and others as infants. The anonymous narrator had a frightful and frightening aunt who turned it into a source of surveillance, stalking, and shame and whose memory haunts him as he spends time with his daughter, her husband, and their young children, a pair of dizygotic twins. While Campbell paints a bleak but accurate picture of the simmering violence of much of Britain’s seaside and the predictable regularity of antisocial behaviour on public transport, the real horror here is the fragility of the family as a source of unconditional positive regard and safety and security. The narrator’s familiar relations are familiarly tense as he both looks forward to and dreads their departure.