GARY FRY

FEARFUL IMPLICATIONS By Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry   A new short story collection from Ramsey Campbell is always a perfect opportunity to catch up with what the great man has had published in this form during the last five years or so. You might have read a handful of the tales but surely only the most dedicated indie press reader will have caught them all. The book opens with a story – “Speaking Still” – thematically linked to his latest novel The Lonely Lands , and it’s a frankly terrifying piece about the afterlife told in a chatty first-person narrative related mostly through dialogue. It’s perhaps the least stylistically vivid tale here and all the more powerful for its stripped-back starkness. “First a Bird” is a relatively lowkey slice of weirdness, redolent of one of Campbell’s earlier tales, “No Strings”. It involves a young boy and his family (by no means the only story here to do so) and wrings true creeps out of only minimal material. One of my favourite

  The Lonely Lands by Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry   I’ve been reading the fiction of Ramsey Campbell for well over thirty years, and there are many observations I might make on it. For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll say only one thing: you never quite know what you’re going to get from one book to the next. That isn’t true of many of his weight-by-weight contemporaries. For instance, with Stephen King, except for a few exceptions down the years – the structural peculiarities of Gerald’s Game , the multi-novella composite that is Hearts in Atlantis , and the recent oddity “Life of Chuck” – you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll remain in familiar literary territory: everyday folk in everyday locales dealing with the outlandish. Not so much with Campbell. Yes, the stories usually occupy the north of England, boast quirky characters battling some form of badness, and are related in richly lyrical and ambiguous language. But the tales themselves often come fro

  "Gary Fry engages the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft to tell the story of a family’s descent from middle-class comfort to a state utterly horrifying. In the process, Fry evokes such stories as “The Colour Out of Space” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward . This is no pastiche, however, as Fry employs Lovecraftian tropes and conceits in order to dramatize his characters’ slide into confusion physical, temporal, linguistic, and ultimately moral. What results is a Lovecraftian narrative whose political implications are trenchant and timely. Fry paints with a full palette of emotions: there is horror of the most ghastly sort, but there is also regret, and even guilt. Like Ramsey Campbell before him, Gary Fry demonstrates the continuing strength of the Lovecraftian lineage, to which “The Dread They Left Behind” is a fine addition.”  – John Langan   1   After navigating the motorways from London, I’d found myself in no rush to reach my native town, and had taken the longer, scenic r