Fear Across the Mersey XXII: On the Tour | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The second in a row after ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) that I enjoyed without reservation. Stu was the drummer in Scotty and the Scousers, a one-hit-wonder band in the nineteen sixties that released a single album and once – just once – featured The Beatles as a supporting act. He claims Ringo Starr called him his favourite drummer at some point and has never moved on from his brief and superficial brush with fame, living alone after two divorces and working in his indulgent friend’s record shop. When The Beatles bus tour suddenly passes his house, with the guide pointing it out to tourists, Stu revels in this rather pathetic rekindling of his flicker of success and becomes increasingly obsessed with, first, being at his window to wave and, second, hearing exactly what is being said about him. The real horror here is not nostalgia, but failure.