Ramsey Campbell is another of those writers I've been reading for decades and one of a select few by whom I own 40 separate books. This is one of his more recent, though I'm still slightly late to the party on it as it's part one of a trilogy that was completed a year or two ago.
Ramsey has never been a writer of schlock horror. He has always relied on building an atmosphere that unnerves rather than going for the big loud scary stuff. That's not saying he can't write a set piece, he certainly can, but he earns them and they have so much more impact because we go into them with our nerves already on edge.
This book is no exception. Young Dominic Sheldrake lives next door to a graveyard. The night before he starts at his new grammar school he witnesses a strange man in the cemetary. The next day he recognises the strange man as one of his new teachers, Mr Christian Noble. Meanwhile, an elderly neighbour claims a man at her spiritualist church has brought her deceased husband back. No prizes for guessing who the new man might be.
It turns out that Mr Noble is far from your average history teacher, and soon his malign influence is causing problems for many people. He has plans that involve the elder gods, and that's not good news for anyone. But what can one young teenager and his two best friends do to stop him?
The setting is a brilliantly drawn small town in early 1950s England. The school and its environs feel absolutely real. I wouldn't be surprised if the more mundane (as in not supernatural rather than not interesting) parts of the story might be drawn from Ramsey's own schooling experiences.
Dominic is a very interesting narrator, telling us his childhood memories and always hinting at bad things to come.His relationship with his parents and his two best friends Jim and Bobby are eminiently believable. It's written in Ramsey's usual very formal style and contains a few of those well earned set pieces.There's a definite wry mordant humour running through the storytelling. Simply naming the villain of the piece Christian Noble is a prime example
One thing I've touched on in other reviews is how much I dislike it when characters instantly believe in the most extreme supernatural events without any rationalisation (William H Hanrahan i'm looking at you here). One of the genius aspects of Ramsey's writing is that the characters struggle so much to comprehend what's going on around them. When strange spectres with gibbous blobs for faces are following them, they still don't believe the evidence of their own senses even as they flee in terror. This self-doubt lends an almost hallucinatory feel to his writing.
The story felt unfinished in this volume. Nothing that happened quite lived up to the foreshadowing of disaster in his life - but there are two more volumes to go. As stated, this is book one of a trilogy. Book two is on my reading list for the very near future and I aim to fit the whole series in this year.
This is a typical Ramsey novel, creepy as hell (or some malformed further dimension) and a damned good read.
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