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THE LONELY LANDS by Ramsey Campbell -- review and interview with the author

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  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
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FEARFUL IMPLICATIONS b y Ramsey Campbell -- a review

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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
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What I read in 2023 -- a review

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Well, another year is done, and my reading list is longer than ever before. Of the 217 books I got through in 2023, here is the pick of the bunch for me (excluding rereads), followed by the whole list.  Fiction The Lonely Lands , Ramsey Campbell -- another strange masterwork that lingers in the mind long after reading. It involves some of the author's most sinuous writing, the world shifting back and forth from a dreamlike sphere to the prosaic with craft and style.  The Hawthorne series , Anthony Horowitz -- an absolutely terrific series of detective novels, still only in its fourth incarnation of a projected ten. Hawthorne is a brilliant creation and the presence of the author himself as his Dr Watson is an inspired touch. Horowitz is as ingenious as Christie in his plotting.  Wylding Hall , Elizabeth Hand -- a truly ghostly novella with some scenes that disturb even as you read them (as opposed to lingering under your skin for later haunting, though they do that too).  The Poiso
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