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