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 pieces in the book is “The Stillness”, a truly captivating examination of the recent tendency to remove statues of people whose personal lives are found to be rather less than acceptable to modern sensibilities. Its intensity builds to an inevitable and yet chilling conclusion, and I’m delighted report that the tale gave me a bad dream. It reminded me of another stone-cold Campbell classic, “The Long Way”.

 An equally powerful and yet more eccentric tale is the excellent “The Fourth Call”. There’s a hint of crackpot old British horror about this one, a tale of human/avian visitations and the boy whose life they blight in the long term. The back-and-forth-in-time narrative hints at a considerably lengthier fiction than a short story and that’s testament to Campbell’s structuring skills.

“The Dreamed” is one of two tales in the book set outside of the UK, a common excursion in Campbell’s world. A chap checks into a hotel but is soon confused for another, and as the plot unfolds this convergence of identity becomes more apparent until … well, I’ll say no more, except that the story showcases the author’s dark humour and suggestive powers.

In “Someone to Blame” a refugee from the great M R James turns up in the modern day and wreaks similar spectral unease. It’s another of Campbell’s young-boy-and-his-family tales, perhaps at least one major theme of this collection.

From the past to the very much present, we have “How He Helped”, a tale firmly embedded in contemporary cultural mores and demonstrating just how much Campbell keeps abreast of The Way We Live Now. Some of the main character’s thoughts are perhaps risky even to dramatize in our current climate, so relish their irony before even this kind of thing becomes beyond the pale.

“The Bill” is relatively straightforward tale of creature revenge, its lead character punished for an act he’s felt guilty about for years and which may well have accrued compound emotional interest.

Now for the most bizarre entry in the collection. “A Name for Every Home”, the story of nothing more humdrum than a postman on his round, is shot through with druggy prose, to such a degree that you might feel a little stoned just reading it. Any writer could learn a lot here about how malleable the language can be. It’s a tour de force of stylistic invention.

Another fine passage of writing can be found in “The Run of the Town” as a man attempts to escape the otherworldly gravitational pull of a malevolent location. The last few pages are genuinely menacing and put me in mind of a sequence in The Darkest Part of the Woods.

Much the same might be said of “Fully Boarded” which involves a chap on holiday in Greece and experiencing hotel accommodation with many more designs on him than hospitality. I found one paragraph so wonderful that I wish to cite it here:

The only illumination within the hut came from the lights on the graves. Surely the worker couldn’t be as thin as the dim unstable outline made the figure look. It was dressed from head to foot in black, exposing no more than the sketchy arms. From their rapid relentless movement Warden deduced that they were weaving some material. Why should he think of a spider? He tried to conclude that just the movements suggested the resemblance, until he couldn’t avoid noticing too many arms on the table where the figure was at work. Surely the extra limbs were composed of stone and belonged to a memorial. That would explain why they were overgrown with vegetation, strands of which the figure was peeling off with its exceptionally long nails to weave into another wristband.

Now that, folks, is how to write the creeps.

And next – “The Devil in the Details” – we have another boy struggling to negotiate a complex familial dynamic. There’s something extremely Jamesian about the spook that wields its menace, in both its nature and the way it’s communicated. The story also contains a paragraph I found particularly striking (in this case, its stylishly unorthodox description of dramatic action):

… but his left foot slipped off the platform. In a moment the rest of him did … Brian hadn’t realised how long a second could last: long enough for the man to finish a wordless cry that might have been aimed at the photographer, and to flail all his limbs as if trying to swim in the air, and even to clutch at his head with both hands to protect it. The gesture ran out of time, and the back of his head collided with the stone floor with a thud like the fall of a stuffed sack. Brian couldn’t turn away until the floor around the twitching figure began to look as if someone had spilled paint, and then he dashed out of the chapel.

“Some Kind of a Laugh” brings us back to another recurrent Campbellian motif – the travails of comedians. Its doppelganger-style narrative becomes almost slapstick itself and the story builds to a suitably mordant punchline.

“Play with Me” was originally written for a youths’ collection and is short and direct and effectively gruesome, with a memorably unsettling last line.

My other favourite tale in the book (in addition to “The Stillness”) is “But Once a Year”, a Christmas-based story which, again, is about a boy and his family – or more accurately, a boy experiencing a sexual awakening and the way unresolved family secrets permanently bruise this tender period. This story reminded me, rather tangentially perhaps, of another Campbell classic, “The Same in any Language”.

“Brains” might serve as a coda to The Grin of the Dark, being old film-focused and laying bear the schizo nature of the internet. It’s unusual for Campbell in that it’s related in the form of a forum discussion.

And gosh, in “Getting Through”, there’s another boy-and-family tale, though in this one we get to see the lad grow a little older and yet with no fewer dark consequences. The tale is more SF than horror, perhaps, and is unusual in Campbell on account of its time-transitional structure.

In “Extending the Family” we’re back in familiar Campbell territory, the grubby cheek-by-jowl tenements and lowlife occupants of modern Britain. The story is a grim portrait of unwitting hypocrisy that blurs the boundaries between the real and unreal. The budget-stricken police and social services are given a necessary slap, too.

“Still Hungry” is another traditional horror tale, which has a killer last line. Set in a department store, its security guard protagonist showcases another of Campbell’s tropes – the unacceptability of modern employment conditions – and weds this to a suitably grisly tale of the undead returning.

And to end the book we have another tale with a superb last line, in this case one that completely upends the story you thought you were reading. “Wherever You Look” addresses the issue of unwitting plagiarism but gives the stream of events such a leftfield shunt that the final few words – the very last in this excellent collection – reveal to the reader just what new things can be done in the field.

In Fearful Implications, Campbell remains, as ever, on top of his game, continuing to produce, in his eighth decade, fiction that is original, unsettling, experimental, eccentric, funny, moving, and strange. None too shabby a range for a single volume! I perhaps needn’t add that it’s required reading for all we who relish the dark.