Fear Across the Mersey VII: The Companion

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The second sentence of this story may resonate with other readers who have walked Liverpool’s coast as much as it did with me: ‘A couple of paper cups tumbled and rattled on the shore beneath the promenade, and the cold insinuating October wind scooped the Mersey across the slabs of red rock that formed the beach, across the broken bottles and abandoned tyres.’ The protagonist, a man named Stone, is not just a visitor to the fairground, that staple of the horror genre, but an afficionado who spends each of his holidays in a different one. The first indication that he might be a little more than idiosyncratic is when he has a vision of his dead mother and the tale builds to a taught and thrilling climax when he boards the Ghost Train ride. Campbell matches his early eloquence with a deft narrative twist in the very last sentence.