Fear Across the Mersey I: The Cellars | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

 

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to Merseyside, but I never settled in properly. It doesn’t help that I dislike football and don’t worship the Beatles. Or that we spent much of the first two years either locked down or socially distanced. I have a similarly ambivalent attitude towards Britain’s greatest living horror author, lifelong Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. While I recognise his talent, I’ve never been bowled over by his most critically acclaimed work. When I saw that PS Publishing had released a collection of his locally based short stories last year, I thought it the perfect opportunity to rekindle my enthusiasm for Campbell and the city in which I will probably spend the rest of my life. I also thought I’d try my hand at a rolling review, reviewing each of the twenty-five short stories as I read them. They are all previously published, from 1967 to 2021, and presented in a loosely chronological order. Fear Across the Mersey has an afterword, but no introduction so I’ll dive straight in…The first half or so of ‘The Cellars’ is overwritten, with too many adjectives, too much imagery, and some idiosyncratic combinations of verb and noun. Notwithstanding, the story improves as soon as the protagonist, Julie, enters Liverpool’s catacombs, where Campbell succeeds in making ordinary fungi genuinely sinister. Very quickly after the visit, he creates an exquisite tension that builds to a climax both inevitable and not quite what one was expecting. Though I’ve not read a great deal of Campbell, he seems to have a real knack for portraying compelling characters who are unsympathetic, which is Julie in a nutshell. She is interesting enough to for us to want to know her fate and disagreeable enough for us not to care what it is. A slow-starter, but also a slow-burner.