FEARFUL IMPLICATIONS b y Ramsey Campbell -- a review
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