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.