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.