Recommendation: The Little Gift by Stephen Volk

I recently had the opportunity to read Stephen Volk's new novella, The Little Gift, and what a treat that proved to be. It's a cleverly structured and quietly devasting piece of work, a story with implications that linger long in the mind. It begins with a scene of routine, comfortable domesticity into which death intrudes: a long married couple are woken by their cat dismembering a bird in the kitchen. Cleaning away this 'gift' their pet has bought them causes the narrator to reflect on his past, on his marriage, and how things could have been very different...

The Little Gift is a book about which it's hard to say too much about the plot without spoiling things. Indeed, much of the actual plot takes place off-stage; Volk's narrator is a man at the periphery of a truly barbaric event, affected by its ripples but who neither directly caused it or experienced it. So non-central is he that certain key plot points are revealed while he watches the TV news. Of course, only the best writers could make this technique work, and Volk pulls it off with quiet aplomb. Very subtly, this is also a piece of metafiction - a story about stories, about how we tell stories in our own heads. About how we make every story about us, even when we are merely bit-parts.

Some books, you finish reading them and you're done; but the events of The Little Gift stick around in your head, nag at your thoughts, reveal new interpretations as you shower, go shopping or drive to work. It's another remarkable work from one of the best writers we have. You can (and should) pre-order it from PS Publishing here.

Recommendation: The Searching Dead by Ramsey Campbell

However one defines adulthood, I've been reading Ramsey Campbell's books all my adult life. Indeed, the discovery of his fiction (and its impact on my own nascent writing) feels like part of that transition to adulthood, a defining event. A bold claim to make for the purchase of a book of short stories for 50p from a second-hand shop in Cleethorpes, perhaps, but one that feels emotionally true when I look back now.

So it's apt that Campbell's latest work is based around just that change from youth to adulthood, that it so well describes the experience and embarrassments of beginning to write, and that it is told from the point of view of someone looking back at the events he describes. Worried that he may be imagining as much as he is remembering, creating significance where none appeared at the time - much as I am no doubt doing above.

The Searching Dead is the first volume in a trilogy called 'The Three Births of Daoloth'. And, while it's a book that could be written by no one other than Campbell, it also seems to develop something genuinely new from him: a strand of (pseudo)autobiography. It's set in 1950s Liverpool, a location effortlessly and expertly captured in Campbell's prose, a setting of vivid and concrete detail that still evokes the shifting and nebulous horrors so common to this author's fiction. Crucially, it's a time & place in the midst of transition, caught between the old world of rationing, respect for ones elders, omnipresent Christianity and a newer world yet to be fully visualised - a thought made disquieting by the narrator's hints at the dark way the world does change later, which we will presumably learn about later in the trilogy...

The narrator, Dominic Sheldrake, is also shown in a moment of change. The plot centres around Dom and two of his friends and their suspicions about Mr Noble, a teacher at their school. Noble is also involved in the local spiritualist movement, taking it over with his apparently genuine ability to rouse the dead... Dom has been reading Enid Blyton-esque children's fiction and it is this that spurs him into action. He thinks of he and his friends as the 'Tremendous Three' and imagines movie-like dialogue for them. But fiction, at least of the childish variety, is a poor guide and Dom and his friends' investigation does not go to plan.

The book is built around the classic horror motif of someone attempting to raise the dead, but beneath this conceit are reoccurring hints at something larger, at a cosmic horror that will surely become more explicit as the trilogy progresses. Not that this first volume doesn't build to a satisfyingly scary climax of its own. The Searching Dead is studded with some standout set-pieces - a faceless terror following Dom when he visits the cinema being particularly fine. But as ever with Campbell it's the atmosphere that really makes the book; he's a virtuoso at creating horror from small details, each seeming insignificant in isolation but which cumulatively hint at terrors Dom and his friends only partially understand. It's something he does better than anyone.

I've been reading Ramsey Campbell's books all my adult life, and yet he continues to surprise me. The Searching Dead is up there with his finest novels and I for one can't wait for the next volume. Highly recommended.

The Searching Dead - PS Publishing

Review: Just Behind You - Ramsey Campbell

It's hard to know quite where to start reviewing a new collection of Campbell's short fiction (I say new - this came out in 2009). I must have read over a hundred of his stories by now and for a writer with such a distinctive style as Campbell's, that's bound to led to some slight diminishing returns, no matter the quality of the stories.

I suppose I started thinking along these lines because the first two stories in the book were somewhat disappointing; Fear The Dead being a second-rate rehash of previous Campbell ideas, and Digging Deep seeming to exist only as a means to getting to its weak punchline.

But then, just as the doubts were starting to set in, Campbell follows with two excellent tales - Double Room, a disturbing story of a man alone in a hotel room at night who starts hearing voices (I was initially worried it was going the same way my own The Other Room...). And then The Place Of Revelation which is even better, a homage to Machen's The White People (I think) - something genuinely new and intriguing in Campbell's fiction and one for any future 'best of'.

So the score at this point, two all.

Fortunately, most of the rest of the stories in the collection were better than the first two, with only a few others I didn't particularly care for. (I should say, even the weaker tales in the book are still well-written and interesting, second-rate Campbell still being better than a lot of writer's best work.) Amongst the most compelling were Unblinking, a disturbing story about an academic's jealous descent into madness; The Unbeheld; and the Lovecraft influenced Raised By The Moon.

My favourite story of all was the titular one, a typical Campbell master-class in making the mundane creepy. This is the kind of thing he does so well, something I'm sure most readers of this blog don't need to be told.

So despite some initial misgivings, Campbell's place in my own personal 'Top Five Horror Short Story Writers' chart has been retained. Just Behind You has just been re-released in paperback from PS Publishing (although I bought a snazzy signed copy of the limited hardback) and Campbell fans would be well advised to pick up a copy, along with the other new PS paperbacks.