Fear Across the Mersey XXIII: Still Hungry | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

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

The third masterpiece in a row from Campbell, following ‘The Rounds’ (the twenty-first in the collection) and ‘On the Tour’ (the twenty-second), this is a prose paeon to the thankless, demoralising, alienating, and at times dangerous work of security guards and to the impact that work has on one’s social and personal lives. If that sounds like faint praise, it really isn’t and it takes real skill to turn such a job into a compelling narrative and to deploy fiction as a means to the end of saying something meaningful about a job which is widely regarded as wholly uninteresting and either ignoble, distasteful, or both. Bertram is a security guard in a city centre department store...he stops a woman who is using her child as an accomplice from stealing clothes, then thinks he sees them committing suicide on a railway line and is haunted by the part he has played.