Forty Years of Stephen King – Rafe McGregor

Stephen King is one of a mere handful of authors to have sold hundreds of millions of books. Though he has written across multiple genres, he is best known for his horror fiction and more specifically as the author of: The Shining (1977), Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Misery (1987), Pet Sematary (1983), and his apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand (1978, republished in 1990). King was born in Portland (Maine), in 1947, and will be turning eighty next year. He began writing fiction at a very young age and made his first professional sale, a short story called ‘The Glass Floor’, to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, nearly sixty years ago. He is currently completing Other Worlds Than These, which is the final instalment of a trilogy that began with The Talisman in 1984, continued with Black House in 2001 (both of which were co-authored with the late Peter Straub), and is due for publication in October. My mother was a great fan of King so the house was full of his novels when I was growing up and I’ve been reading his work for about forty years now. I’ve also become an unreserved and unashamed fan…why?

Lots of reasons. First, I must give my mother credit for never forcing King on me. Unfortunately, she didn’t live long enough for me to thank her, but she clearly knew my teenage self very well; that my curiosity would be more of a motivation than any recommendation. Second, King seems like a really (and rarely) decent human being. At least from his public persona and autobiographical writing. His to-and-fro with Trump on Twitter was particularly entertaining. So are his responses to book burners. I could go on. Also, King doesn’t have to be that way – he has sufficient celebrity to be as obnoxious as he wants without losing his fanbase. Third, he has written the best book on writing that I’ve ever read and am ever going to read, titled, simply, On Writing (2000). As such, I regard him as a writer’s writer (whatever, precisely, that may mean). Fourth, in spite of all the money and fame, he’s an underdog, ignored and even despised by the literary establishment and academia until very recently and then recognised with reluctance. Even champions of genre fiction like S.T. Joshi seem to have taken great pleasure in deriding almost everything about his writing. I almost always agree with Joshi, but he tears King to pieces in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction (2001), setting him up as a kind of anti-Ramsey-Campbell, who is represented as the second coming of Lovecraft. (I don’t object to the comparison between Campbell and Lovecraft, but to King as an inferior binary opposite.) While I’m not going to pretend that I’ve loved every word of his that I’ve read (on which, more below), given that, at the latest count, he’s published sixty-seven long and two hundred short works of fiction, there are bound to be at least some mediocre or subpar offerings. There are also, however, many great offerings and perhaps even a work of two of genius.

In spite of my lengthy acquaintance with and enjoyment of King’s oeuvre I’ve only very recently completed all six of the novels for which he is famous. Misery is my favourite, a great narrative that succeeds on multiple levels and is essential reading for anyone who enjoys books about writing and the writing life, whether fiction or nonfiction. The Shining is excellent, especially the effortless changes of perspective from father to mother to child and back again. This is King doing what he does best, exploring either the traditional or nuclear family in all its complexity of love, hate, joy, sorrow, comfort, and anxiety. At its most basic, The Shining is the tale of a haunted house, the house being a giant hotel isolated in the winter snows. I’ve seen the novel criticised for its lack of internal logic (a recurring complaint from King’s detractors), but as someone who pays a great deal of – probably too much – attention to such things, I don’t see the problem. The supernatural elements make sense, they move the plot along…what’s not to like? Carrie and Pet Sematary are competent and maybe even original outings in the horror genre, with King playing to another strength of his, the representation of the worlds of children and teenagers, but neither are favourites of mine. Salem’s Lot and The Stand were, regrettably, too long for me, which was a shame regarding the latter because I really wanted to like it. There just wasn’t enough story to sustain either novel all the way to the end and with respect to the former, I thought the short story ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (which was first published in Night Shift in 1978) far superior. It is probably not surprising that the two of the six I like the most are about writers and, more specifically, writers with addictions, as King reveals in his discussion of his own struggles with addiction in the autobiographical part of On Writing.

Surely this is faint praise if I’m recommending no more than two of King’s six most successful novels? I’m not alone in this assessment because in an interview in Far Out magazine in 2022, he listed his favourite five stories, only one of which is from the six: ‘Survivor Type’ (1982), Misery, Lisey’s Story (2006), ‘The Body’ (1982), and Billy Summers (2021). What is particularly interesting about this list is that only one of his favourites has a supernatural element (Lisey’s Story), much of which is presented with great subtlety. I think King is at his best without the supernatural and in his shorter work, albeit with several exceptions that prove the rule. My own list of favourites also includes only one of the six (mimicking King’s choice) and one other from his list: ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ (1982), Misery, ‘Survivor Type’, ‘N.’ (2008), and Cycle of the Werewolf (1983). One novel, two novellas, and two short stories, in the first three of which the supernatural is absent. I was lucky enough to read ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ before I saw the film (which I also enjoyed, but is not as good) and without any spoilers, both of which contributed significantly to my reading experience.

I think I’ve already justified my enthusiasm for both King and his work, but let me say one more thing to make this a genuine appreciation. His own list of favourites covers forty years of writing and mine twenty-five. Since his big break with Carrie in 1974, the quality of King’s work has remained consistent, in spite of the life-changing injuries he sustained when he was run over by a reckless minivan driver in 1999. Since then he has published, among others, Lisey’s Story, Just After Sunset (2008), The Outsider (2018), and Billy Summers. The first of these is an epic love letter to his wife, the second one of his best short story collections to date, the third an excellent occult detective story, and the fourth a great crime thriller. I hope there are more to come and I hope we’re both around for his eightieth birthday…

Fear Across the Mersey XXV: A Chill off the River | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

I’m partial to an afterword (or notes or a postface) in an edited collection, as they often shed light on either the sources of inspiration, creative process, or both (unlike introductions or prefaces, which are often redundant) – Stephen King’s notes are exemplary in this regard. In ‘A Chill off the River’, Campbell takes his readers on a tour of all of his Liverpool based fiction, both the short stories that appear here and the novels set in Merseyside. He includes some autobiographical comments and occasional self-assessments as well as some general reflections on what King calls ‘the craft’. Several of the latter are particularly interesting, such as the attempts of his publishers to dissuade him from setting stories in the North of England and concerns by the same that horror fiction had been consigned to history. A brief but fascinating read.

I enjoyed writing the rolling review and learned a lot about the geography of Merseyside, proving Samuel Johnson’s point about fiction ‘instructing by pleasing’ (he was actually referring to poetry). I had an idea that Campbell and King were two of the – probably the two – greatest horror writers of the last fifty years and thought they made an interesting pair for comparison. While they are the same age (Campbell is a year older) and both prolific writers of short and long fiction, King is a household name and Campbell a ‘fan favourite’. I think the difference in success is consequent on King being better known for his novels, which is itself a consequence of their early success as Hollywood adaptations, beginning with his first, Carrie (1974). In contrast, only three of Campbell’s novels have been filmed, all in Spanish. Like many others, I seem to have underestimated and underappreciated Campbell…Fear Across the Mersey has instructed me on the error of my ways.

Fear Across the Mersey XXIV: Wherever You Look | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Maurice Lavater is a midlist genre fiction writer, with his Victorian supernatural thriller series about to reach its seventh instalment. He is hosting a reading of his work at a library when one of the attendees accuses him of plagiarism. I imagine this is a regular occurrence for those who have achieved commercial success, but what is especially interesting – and authentic – is Lavater’s reaction. After an initial denial, he begins to worry that he read something, forgot about it, and when it came back to him thought it was his own invention. This is, I think, a fear all writers share regardless of the extent of their success. Lavater begins searching for the text he was accused of plagiarising and discovers it is an obscure short story, which was only published once, in a similarly obscure anthology, and never reprinted. When he eventually finds it…I won’t ruin the twist in the tale!

Fear Across the Mersey XXIII: Still Hungry | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The third masterpiece in a row from Campbell, following ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) and ‘On the Tour’ (the twenty-second), this is a prose paeon to the thankless, demoralising, alienating, and at times dangerous work of security guards and to the impact that work has on one’s social and personal lives. If that sounds like faint praise, it really isn’t and it takes real skill to turn such a job into a compelling narrative and to deploy fiction as a means to the end of saying something meaningful about a job which is widely regarded as wholly uninteresting and either ignoble, distasteful, or both. Bertram is a security guard in a city centre department store...he stops a woman who is using her child as an accomplice from stealing clothes, then thinks he sees them committing suicide on a railway line and is haunted by the part he has played.

Fear Across the Mersey XXII: On the Tour | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The second in a row after ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) that I enjoyed without reservation. Stu was the drummer in Scotty and the Scousers, a one-hit-wonder band in the nineteen sixties that released a single album and once – just once – featured The Beatles as a supporting act. He claims Ringo Starr called him his favourite drummer at some point and has never moved on from his brief and superficial brush with fame, living alone after two divorces and working in his indulgent friend’s record shop. When The Beatles bus tour suddenly passes his house, with the guide pointing it out to tourists, Stu revels in this rather pathetic rekindling of his flicker of success and becomes increasingly obsessed with, first, being at his window to wave and, second, hearing exactly what is being said about him. The real horror here is not nostalgia, but failure.

Fear Across the Mersey XXI: The Rounds | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

This story is narrated in the first person and present tense – a difficult combination to do well and achieved with admirable ease by Campbell (few authors can sustain the present tense for long without it becoming either jarring or distracting). It is also set entirely on Merseyrail’s inner loop (for want of a better term) and begins with a compelling hook: the narrator sees a woman leave her briefcase on the train, picks it up, and hurries to return it to her. But the woman is a practising Muslim and this is 2010 so perhaps he should be more careful…or perhaps Campbell is playing with the implicit (and explicit) biases and prejudices of his readers…which he seems to be doing when she receives the briefcase with gratitude. But then she leaves it on the next train. A real cracker of a narrative that never lets either the pace or the suspense flag.

Fear Across the Mersey XX: Chucky Comes to Liverpool | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Few British people a couple of generations either side of me can see ‘Chucky’ and ‘Liverpool’ in the same sentence without thinking of one of the most shocking crimes in recent history, the planned abduction, torture, and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys. Both perpetrators were released after only eight years and one has since been in and out of prison with paedophilia-related convictions. At the time of the murder, tabloid newspapers did what they usually do, milking the misery by exploiting what criminologists call a ‘moral panic’ about ‘video nasties’, claiming that Child’s Play 3 (1991), which featured Chucky as its antagonist, motivated the killers. This story seems to be an indictment of both the media and the moral crusaders it inspires, suggesting that the obsession with censorship is as dangerous as the obsession with violence it claims to counter. Disturbing, but perhaps not in the way Campbell intended.

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.

Fear Across the Mersey XVIII: Watch the Birdie | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

This story is narrated by Campbell himself rather than an author surrogate or alter ego and begins and ends with what one might call an explicit authorial intrusion, two short passages in italics which, taken together, suggest that it is nonfiction rather than fiction. The narrative is set entirely in The Baltic Fleet, a popular pub and Victorian tourist attraction on the dockside and concerns the landlord, his parrot, and a foreign language curse scrawled on the wall in the toilets. I must admit to being confused by Campbell’s repeated use of ‘Slavonic’ instead of ‘Slavic’ to describe that language and wondered if it was a typo or an error. The former is, apparently, simply an older term for the latter, but its presence interfered with my suspension of disbelief, as anomalies often do. A laconic and lively yarn, though I’m not sure what the bookends added to it.

Fear Across the Mersey XVII: Calling Card | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Along with the next story, ‘Watch the Birdie’ (the eighteenth), this is the shortest in the collection, a second ghost story for Christmas following ‘The Christmas Present’ (the third). The protagonist, Dorothy, is not enjoying the festive season, after receiving a threatening card on Christmas Eve and having rubbish dumped on her doorstep on Boxing Day. Her son-in-law points out that in addition to the addressee of the card being illegible, it was posted sixty years ago. On New Year’s Eve, she learns that the previous occupant of her home had a violent mentally ill son who drowned himself in the Mersey. His body was, however, never recovered…which adds a mundane threat to the supernatural. The tale reminded me of ‘The Ferries’ (the fourteenth in the collection) with its multiplicity of memorable and menacing images of water and the threats it poses. A good choice to share with friends and family around the fireplace.

Fear Across the Mersey XVI: This Time | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The story starts with Crosby, a moderately successful artist, leaving the dentist while under the influence of anaesthetic, creating the expectation of reality blending and bending along the lines of ‘Concussion’ (the second in the collection). There seems to be something like this in play as he has recurring thoughts about and encounters with an image of a blank face and something that scrambles on all fours (which may or may not belong to the same creature). Crosby visits his girlfriend, takes part in a game show on television, and hosts an exhibition of his work as the haunting continues. The narrative is elegant in style, with very fine description in places, and carefully constructed, but if there is an internal logic it escaped me entirely. As such, the conclusion was less a surprise than a non sequitur and I still think I must have missed something somewhere.

Fear Across the Mersey XV: The Depths | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Like its immediate predecessor, this story is also set in Neston and London (as well as a couple of other locations). Jonathan Miles is a famous crime fiction writer facing every author’s greatest fear: he has run out of ideas and has nothing left to say. Desperate for inspiration, he rents a house where a particularly violent crime took place. It doesn’t seem to help, but it does give him nightmares about even more violent crimes which, if he doesn’t immediately write them down, seem to come true. I read this immediately after finishing Joel Lane’s This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays, which includes three essays on Campbell and although I don’t rate ‘The Depths’ quite as highly as Lane, it is definitely one of the best in the first two-thirds of this collection. The real horror is, of course, the death of creativity and the desperation to recover it, not the nightmares.

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.    

Fear Across the Mersey XIII: The Show Goes On | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

A well-placed title as the collection moves on to its second half. Lee inherited what we call a corner shop in the UK (regardless of its location – the US ‘convenience store’ seems more appropriate) in central Liverpool. He is, quite rightly, worried about being broken into or robbed and this is another one of Campbell’s tales where the casual violence and everyday brutality of city life is never far from the foreground. Lee discovers that part of the wall between his shop and the derelict cinema next door has collapsed, can’t get anyone to repair it, and decides to stand guard overnight to deter burglars. He hears noises in the cinema and makes a brave foray into the darkness, but what he finds there isn’t nearly as bad as what’s waiting for him when he returns. Not only well-placed, but well-paced and well-written with one of Campbell’s best conclusions so far.

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring | review by Rafe McGregor

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring by Patrick Zircher

Titan Books, paperback, £14.99, November 2025, ISBN 9781787746428

 

Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian (who first appeared in ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, in Weird Tales in 1932). Together with Fritz Leiber, the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (who first appeared in ‘Two Sought Adventure’, in Unknown in 1939), he established the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction. When J.R.R. Tolkien popularised epic fantasy, which was pioneered by E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the map of the fantasy landscape for the rest of the twentieth century was drawn. Howard and Leiber were both correspondents of H.P. Lovecraft, contributed to what Ramsey Campbell describes as the Lovecraft Mythos, and benefitted from their correspondent’s inspiration in their original work. Like Lovecraft, Howard was a prolific writer, publishing three hundred short stories and novellas by the time of his premature death at the age of thirty and leaving an archive of double that, much of which was published posthumously. Along with Conan, Solomon Kane was one of several of Howard’s serial characters to appear in narratives that combined fantasy with history, but he published across a wide variety of genres, including: boxing stories, tales of the sea, crime fiction, horror, comedy, and what we would now call erotica and narrative nonfiction. He was also one of the two founders of the Weird Western (along with Oliver La Farge), which was popularised on television in the nineteen sixties and in comics in the nineteen seventies.

Kane is a Puritan English swordsman who wanders the world righting wrongs at the turn of the seventeenth century, following his service in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). Howard published seven Kane short stories in his lifetime, all in Weird Tales, beginning with ‘Red Shadows’ (1928) and ending with ‘Wings in the Night’ (1932). He left two unpublished stories, three poems, and four fragments and the complete Kane was first published as Red Shadows (1968) and then The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (2004), with the fragments completed by Campbell. The Kane stories not only mix history with fantasy in Howard’s trademark style, but include elements of the weird that bear testimony to Lovecraft’s influence (in much the same way as it can be seen in Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser). Five of the seven original stories are set in Africa, however, which makes Howard’s racism impossible to ignore. Like Lovecraft, Howard was also a White supremacist, subscribing to the pseudoscientific theory that humanity is divided into biologically distinct taxa which coexist in an intellectual and moral hierarchy loosely based on lightness of skin. He also had what one might charitably call an unconventional relationship with his mother, committing suicide when she became comatose from tuberculosis and preceding her death by a day. There seems to have been a concerted campaign to sanitise Howard’s reputation posthumously, but Victor LaValle provides what I think is an accurate portrayal of the author when he fictionalises him as a pathologically racist private investigator in The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).

Though I've read only a fraction of Howard’s oeuvre, his racism seems both more pronounced in and more intrinsic to his narratives than Lovecraft’s. In the latter, racism is always an ethical flaw but rarely an aesthetic one, by which I mean constitutive of the worldview that underpins the narrative and configures one’s engagement with it. It is no defence of Lovecraft to point out that his cosmic horror is founded on a fear of all that is unknown, of interplanetary and international aliens alike (or in collaboration). In contrast, Howard’s racism is constitutive of his worldview and, in consequence, an aesthetic as well as ethical flaw, creating an imaginative resistance for all but the most insensitive of readers. Notwithstanding, the African Kane stories are, in my opinion, the best, reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard at his best, albeit at times similarly offensive, jarring, or both. What makes this bitter pill a little easier for me, personally, to swallow is that Kane’s attitudes are completely compatible with what would have been considered an enlightened disposition towards people of different ethnicities and nationalities in the early seventeenth century. History is replete with racism, sexism, and elitism and Kane is a historical character from a past increasingly alien to our present.

Half a century after Howard’s death, Kane enjoyed an afterlife in comics with a serialisation by Marvel that ran from 1973 to 1994. In anticipation of the feature film, Solomon Kane (2009), Dark Horse revived Kane in 2008. Aside from the selection of James Purefoy for the title role, I have nothing positive to say about it and wasn’t surprised by the box office failure. Plans for a trilogy were abandoned, Campbell’s 2010 novelisation was as poor as his source material, and the comic series concluded in 2011. Fourteen years later, Titan launched another revival, releasing Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring in March and collecting all four issues as a graphic novel in November. The latest adaptation is largely the work of Patrick Zircher, a veteran artist for DC and Marvel, who is also the writer. His artistic style is mimetic and cinematic, with clearly defined and cleanly outlined figures, and a seamless integration of dynamism and narrativity in his use of panels. All of these features are evident in The Serpent Ring and the first extended action sequence, the boarding of a Portuguese caravel by an English letter of marque, is nothing short of breathtaking, as close to watching a well-choreographed action sequence on screen as is possible on the page. Zircher’s use of colour is also striking, his art here at its best when depicting the natural rather than supernatural, with a stunning African elephant and an awe-inspiring giant serpent particularly memorable.

The eponymous ring is the Serpent Ring of Thoth-Amon, a magic jewel of great power, and the narrative concerns two attempts to acquire it: a preliminary one that fails but brings Kane into contact with Rolando Zarza, a renegade Knight Hospitaller, and Abramo Bensaid, a Jewish archivist and scholar; and sets the scene for the second, which takes the three men and their entourage to the Kingdom of Ndongo, on the banks of the Kwanza River (more commonly known as the Cuanza, in northern Angola). Various clues suggest a dating of 1590, one of Kane’s earlier adventures, immediately after his service with the suicidally courageous Richard Grenville (who died at the Battle of Flores, in 1591). The origin of the ring draws on the legend of Lilith, who started off as Adam’s first wife, coupled with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and ended up a demon...which brings me to my main criticism. The artwork is excellent and the story for the most part compelling, but the mythological context – perhaps even internal logic – is an incoherent motley of Egyptian, Semitic, and sub-Saharan African, with what appears to be a touch of the Aztec thrown in. There are simply too many myths and legends involved and their abundance detracts from the suspension of disbelief. A less significant problem is the cast of characters. While Kane is indisputably the protagonist, there is no obvious antagonist and half a dozen or more point of view players seem to vary between central and supporting roles. As with the mythologies, less might have been more. Overall, the graphic novel is a disappointment, despite its many highlights and flashes of finesse. The revival is nonetheless worth continuing and I hope Zircher is given a second shot at Kane.

Fear Across the Mersey XII: Mackintosh Willy | review by Rafe McGregor

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.

Fear Across the Mersey XI: The Brood | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

 

Protagonist Blackband is a veterinary surgeon who likes to watch ‘all the local characters’ through his binoculars from the sanctuary of his apartment in Princes Avenue, in Toxteth, famous as the childhood home of Ringo Starr and for rioting in the summer of 1981. Campbell communicates the horrors of urban living in a wonderfully subtle, understated way…the anonymity, isolation, indifference, cruelty. Blackband has a particular interest in two of the locals, a pair of elderly women who live in a derelict house next to his block of flats and have been collecting a menagerie of stray dogs and cats, triggering his professional instincts. This is a slow burner of a story in which the suspense is expertly maintained as he vacillates between doing nothing and finding out what has happened to the animals. First one of the women disappears, then the other, and the stage is set for the finale.

Fear Across the Mersey X: The Invocation | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

‘The Invocation’ is the weakest of the collection so far. Like ‘Through the Walls’, the ingredients for a potent plot are set out in quick succession – this time a film studies student with an irritating landlady, a cut glass decanter that distorts its contents (if, indeed, it has any), and shapes and noises in the night – but their chemistry also fails, making the narrative’s cause and effect unmemorable. In addition, the resolution is far too reminiscent of ‘Baby’ and, unlike that story, largely unsupported by a scaffold of internal logic. I wondered if it was either inspired by or an intentional reimagining of M.R. James’ ‘The Ash-Tree’. While ‘The Ash-Tree’ is famous for its dénouement, it is overrated as a ghost story and, in consequence, a challenge for contemporary authors to revisit. As a reimaging of ‘The Ash-Tree’, there is a flicker of Campbell’s genius in ‘The Invocation’, albeit a flicker that never flames.  

Fear Across the Mersey IX: Baby | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

Another narrative with a strong opening, in medias res as we meet Dutton, an unemployed alcoholic stalking his elderly neighbour as a precursor to beating her to death. Campbell quickly shifts our sympathy away from the victim by hinting that she may have purchased a baby to either raise as her own, exploit for some nefarious purpose, or both. When Dutton discovers that the ‘old woman’ is pregnant, we cannot be sure whether he is suffering from brain damage caused by long-term alcohol abuse, whether it’s a phantom pregnancy, or whether there is a supernatural element in play. These options are held in a delectable tension when he is stalked himself, by the woman’s pram – which sounds farcical but is both convincing and frightening. Like ‘The Companion’, the initial hook is complemented with a twist in the final sentence, the two devices bookending an accomplished and disturbing tale of urban terror.

Fear Across the Mersey VIII: Through the Walls | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

At just over twenty pages, this is one of the longest stories in the collection, together with ‘Concussion’ (the second) and ‘Chucky Comes to Liverpool’ (the twentieth). Where the extended form was integral to the success of ‘Concussion’, ‘Through the Walls’ would have benefitted from more exacting editing. To take just one specific example, ‘fog’ is repeated far too often and there are some very amateurish descriptions throughout the narrative. This is a shame as the ingredients for a literally terrific tale are all introduced immediately: a traditional nuclear family under multiple strains, a traffic accident outside the home, a creepy neighbour with dodgy guests, and an even creepier doll named Fritz. Campbell must also be given credit for tackling what may be the most taboo topic of all in a mature and compelling manner, but unfortunately the potentially explosive chemistry of the opening fails to ignite and the conclusion is ultimately anticlimactic.