Scan barcode
A review by stevendedalus
Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991 by Ramsey Campbell
4.0
A very able Lovecraft successor whose comfortably middle class, white, stodgy protagonists are assailed by an unfathomable chaos lurking just below their ordered lives.
It's a conservative horror: the ghouls are always outcasts: the homeless, old women. So it does rub the wrong way with its literal demonization of those outside the norm even if the disordered dread is effective. You start cheering on the horrors; Campbell rarely features likeable protagonists.
When he does stray from his formula, featuring a recently married woman, he is most effective though the WASP aesthetic still shines through. He's a great stylist for nameless, faceless creepiness, but the collection definitely feels of the old school, rearward looking. I'd like to see what he's done recently and if he's applied his talents to a more modern, variegated world existing now that all his characters seem to fear so much.
It's a conservative horror: the ghouls are always outcasts: the homeless, old women. So it does rub the wrong way with its literal demonization of those outside the norm even if the disordered dread is effective. You start cheering on the horrors; Campbell rarely features likeable protagonists.
When he does stray from his formula, featuring a recently married woman, he is most effective though the WASP aesthetic still shines through. He's a great stylist for nameless, faceless creepiness, but the collection definitely feels of the old school, rearward looking. I'd like to see what he's done recently and if he's applied his talents to a more modern, variegated world existing now that all his characters seem to fear so much.