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.
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