Flame Tree Press have recently reissued Ramsey Campbell's classic eighties novel,
Incarnate. Disclaimer! they sent me a free copy of the book to review, but as anyone who's read my
thoughts on Ramsey Campbell before, that was hardly a big gamble on their part...
Incarnate is a long novel by Campbell's standards, and a complex one with multiple narrators, but at its heart is a simple concept: eleven years ago, several people participated in an experiment on precognitive dreams. And now, something from those forgotten dreams seems to be infecting their waking lives and reality itself, and it's driving them to come together again...
Cue some classic Ramsey Campbell scenes where the characters (and the reader) struggle to distinguish just what is real, just what the horror they are trying to resist actual
is. These nebulous frights are grounded both by Campbell's always superb prose and the mundane, grubby real-lives of the characters. The people being haunted by that long ago experiment are a single-mother, a cinema projectionist, a care-home worker. The closest the novel has to a central antagonist, Molly Wolfe, has a slightly more glamorous job as a TV assistant, but even that is shown warts and all. And the novel's dream-like intrusions don't contrast the characters practical, grimy lives, but echo them. They prey on secret fears and longings: the grief of Freda for her long-dead lover; the sad revenge fantasies of the repressed Danny Swain; Molly's attempt to uncover the truth about a case of police brutality.
The horror in Incarnate is, with a few standout exceptions, not based on physical threat but the escalating doubt and uncertainty about what is true and real. Indeed, the dreams in the book affect the reader as well as the characters, as I found myself constantly doubting things I'd previous thought 'true'. Incarnate inverses that old cop-out: "it was all just a dream". Here, realising something you'd assumed real was actually a dream makes things more scary, not less. Even more so, when characters haven't the same realisation as you—several great scenes here centre on characters making mistakes because of something they've dreamt but think was all too real.
What is definitely true is that Incarnate is a brilliant horror novel, even compared the rest of Campbell's exceptional body of work. It's one of his best longer works, and the fact it sustains its atmosphere of low-key doubt and existential dread for so long and so well is a testament to great literary skill and craft. Its reissue by Flame Tree Press is—surely?—a real dream come true...
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