Ghosts and Grisly Things (1998) by Ramsey Campbell
Twenty stories from 1978 -1998
Readers unfamiliar with Ghosts and Grisly Things may wish to read my notes only after reading the collection.
“The Same in Any Language” (1991) is a closely observed vacation horror story. Ten-year-old Hugh gets a much-anticipated tour of Greece and nearby islands, but is stuck with a "joke-loving" dad who loathes any person, place, or situation outside the UK (and probably quite a few there, too). The story observes Hugh, his dad, and dad's girlfriend Kate as they visit Spinalonga, an offshore island once used as a leprosarium. The ride in a small boat in the "hour twixt dog and wolf" gives Campbell plenty of time to play with shadows and misinterpreted glimpses. But as soon as the sun sets, the island's tunnels and ruined housing structures, its walls and grave-shaped excavations, shift to black-shadowed points of ambush. Voices echo and deceive; certainties about directions - and the actual identity of companions sharing a gravel path - erode.
As was the case with L.P. Hartley's superb story "Podolo," not everyone will make it back to the mainland alive.
“Going Under” (1995) Blythe picks the wrong day to join a charity walk through a tunnel under the Mersey River. And the wrong day for a force 10 nervous breakdown. His fellow walkers assume the role of flagellants cast from a series of Daumier prints. Within the confines of the tunnel Campbell creates a mad cacophony of voices, bodies, and maddening bodily contacts. Tactile horror, not to mention body horror, at its most subtle.
“The Alternative” (1994) is about a man (named Highton) who has a successful life as husband, father, and accountant for slumlords. But in dreams at night Highton is an unemployed electrician who cannot even provide a tv for the family apartment in a squalid housing project; his teen daughter turns tricks to pay for her younger brother's drug habit.
The dream Hightons live in a property owned by one of the waking Hightons’ clients, the despicable O'Mara. Successful Highton becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that his dream family actually lives at the property. When he takes a step to reach out to them with cash, the act destabilizes waking life: good fortune flows from one existence to another.
"The Alternative" is not a cautionary tale about the scolding of an Ebenezer Scrooge. It is a remorseless lesson in noir ethics: you can't win, there is no alternative. The dictatorship of capital has a plan for Highton: to pull him apart like a Medieval torturer.
The critic Michael Dirda, discussing Mark Samuels, noted:
[....] His protagonists tend to be writers, scholars, or business professionals, almost always male, without wives or children. I suspect the presence of families would risk causing his stories to grow unbearably painful.
In "The Alternative," Ramsey Campbell unleashes the full fury of that unbearable pain.
“Out of the Woods” (1996) depicts the last frantic minutes of a publisher as he faces – perhaps – nemesis flowing from use of low-cost paper. The initial scene's interview with a high-end paper products salesman has the ring of Final Warning.
“A Street Was Chosen” (1991) is – among its many excellent aspects – a “Backrooms” look at the makings of a Campbell story or novel. The story's texture, as a report on an apparently clandestine psychological warfare experiment, hints at a modern city created by J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs.
“McGonagall in the Head” (1992) A tyro reporter on a newspaper takes obituary dictation over the phone. Soon he can't forget the rhymes callers use: a word virus infection that sends him to the edge.
“Through the Walls” (1978) The most emotionally disturbing Campbell stories are ones where men who seem comfortably slotted into modern married life and careers find themselves “going wrong again.” The descent of Hugh Pears is triggered by a car accident in front of his house, and gathers speed as he begins desiring his daughter.
“Through the Walls” bears comparison with “A Street Was Chosen,” as Hugh’s perceptions can be read as reflecting either mental illness or employment of chemical and psychological weapons to mirror schizophrenia.
“This Time” (1986)
The decks of the Liverpool ferry were crowded with shoppers. White stuffing bulged from splits in the blue sky. A pigeon on the mast of a yacht was modelling the metal bird on the tower of the Liver Building. A naked baby was crawling about behind the legs of the crowd. Of course it must have been a dog.
When he’d overseen the mounting of his exhibition in the Bluecoat Gallery, he sat on a bench in Church Street and watched people. A man with a bowler hat and umbrella danced by as though in search of the rest of his troupe. A scrawny man in a pinstripe suit sat opposite Crosby, his limbs like sticks of mint rock. A whitish dog that looked hairless vanished into the crowd.“The Sneering” (1985) Perils of age and anxieties about caring for our spouses and ourselves, being powerless in the face of the everyday, steep like acid in Ramsey Campbell's little gem about how contempt is fed.
“Between the Floors” (1997) Jack Latimer is on his way out. Out as a cinema manager and out as a guest at the yearly marketing extravaganza run by his chain. He just hasn't figured it out yet, principally because he is trying to connect with a female colleague, and because he is distracted and bedevilled by the macabre elevator operator he meets every time he goes to and from his room.
“Where They Lived” (1994) is a story in the “hell is other people” subgenre of non-supernatural horror tales. Campbell is the master of this kind of hunter-hunted story, in which people with their own problems try to elude annoying, uncouth caricatural others. Showdowns and breakdowns often occur during Mediterranean vacations, as here, to superb effect.
“Root Cause” (1986) A timid new-hire librarian faces clientele in a lumpen and forsaken town missed by a prophesied economic miracle. Emblematic is an overpass amid “green tips of the saplings beside the intersection…”
Teenagers menace and vandalize, and the library itself is not spared broken windows.
Campbell brilliantly collects glimpses, sensations, looks, and the hardening faces of demented motorists.
I hid beneath the overpass and watched for the bus, but I felt by no means safe. Clouds were blackening the twilight; it was very dark among the pillars. I was surrounded by graffiti, incomprehensible as runes. They were confusing the edge of my vision, for there seemed to be too many pillars, disfigured by huge looming faces. I wouldn’t look up, even though I kept thinking that children were clambering overhead; I knew it must be an illusion of the graffiti — no children ever had such bright red mouths. I had enough trouble convincing myself that the spidery saplings weren’t fat and darkly glistening.
Only at the end does our narrator realize an explosion with ancient roots is being prepared.
“Looking Out” (1986) “Future events cast their shadows behind,” may not be a consistent Campbell theme, but it is often a predicament characters only realize at the end, when a series of weird sightings become an explanation.
As he works to barricade his apartment against landlord intrusions, Mr. Nairn wonders what the gray, lumpy thing glimpsed in his bedroom window is doing.
“Looking Out” is a powerful story exploring the nesting-doll trap of self-isolation amid societal neglect.
“The Dead Must Die” (1992) features the recurring Campbell theme of small-minded Christian fundamentalism. It makes men monsters. Campbell relentlessly demonstrates the harm these Christians do to their fellows, before the coup de grace commences their damnation.
“A Side of the Sea”(1994) Coaching holidays: revelatory of madness? Are we not all at our peril, realizing we've just gone ineptly over the wall?
“Missed Connection” (1986)
He opened his eyes to glance at his watch. God, time seemed to have waited for him while he’d slept. Across the aisle the compulsive talker never faltered.
“They’re not what they used to be,” he was saying. “Nothing is these days.”
Hadn’t he said that before? No, Ted silenced himself: no déjà vu, thank you. He’d had enough philosophy of time this term to last him the rest of his life.
The train hadn’t even left the city yet. Perhaps it had halted while Ted was asleep. He shifted so that he could look out of the window, trying to be stealthy: whenever he moved, the fat woman next to him encroached further. Specks of a new rain glittered on the windows. Beneath streetlamps, gleams of orange light drifted across the mirrors of streets, drawn by the movement of the train. At the end of a street, another train passed.
“The Change” (1980)
Hasn’t civilisation simply trapped and repressed our primitive instincts? he managed to stutter at last. But the more strongly Scarved crowds were massing outside, chanting football slogans. There’s tribal behaviour for you. But the more strongly Youths stared in at him, shouting inanities. If only there was room in the bedroom for his desk, if only they had erected the bus-stop just a few houses away — He forced himself to keep his head down. But the more strongly primitive instincts are repressed the more savage their occasional outburst will be, whether in mass murder or actual lycanthropy. God, that was enough. Sunday would be better.
Can a man face interruption civilly – and sanely – while composing his werewolf novel? Alas…
“Welcomeland” (1988) Slade returns to the village where he grew up, and in Ramsey Campbell's hands "learns better" -- that he cannot go home again.
The town is now the site of a bankrupt amusement park, though the attractions and their staff seem to carry on with malfunctioning clockwork imprecision. Did the austere there-is-no-alternative 1980s turn Slade's native ground into a horror attraction?
“See How They Run” (1994) A bourgeois shop owner finishes jury duty, imprisoning a homicidal young man – and just before Christmas!
But was a 1:1 identification transference completed in court before jailhouse suicide pulled up the ladder, with a new vessel on course for homicide?
“Ra*e”(1998) Mothers and wives have their own wavelengths. Neither local nice-guys or spouses escape the implacable gristmills.
N B. The appendix of themes and keywords below is my own invention
Jay
17 February 2025
Appendix:
