Rating: 
Summary: Weird and Wonderful
Review: Campbell's style is extremely strange; his prose is cool, almost icy, and his characterizations unsympathetic in the extreme. All this, however, makes this novel somehow more affecting and horrifying than a more dramatic approach would have. This grisly tale of an evil child (told with overtones of Satanism and Black Magic) set against the somewhat drab and mundane backround of modern Liverpool, sets your teeth on edge from the first page and holds you spellbound. The undramatic way Campbell handles his tabloid-style subject matter lends an extra chill to the book that engulfs the reader as well.
Rating:
Summary: Weird and Wonderful
Review: Campbell's style is extremely strange; his prose is cool, almost icy, and his characterizations unsympathetic in the extreme. All this, however, makes this novel somehow more affecting and horrifying than a more dramatic approach would have. This grisly tale of an evil child (told with overtones of Satanism and Black Magic) set against the somewhat drab and mundane backround of modern Liverpool, sets your teeth on edge from the first page and holds you spellbound. The undramatic way Campbell handles his tabloid-style subject matter lends an extra chill to the book that engulfs the reader as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Review: Clare Frayn was giving her brother a ride home, on the night someone ran in front of her car and caused the accident. Her brother died instantly. Funny thing was, they never found his arm. Funnier than that - though Clare isn't laughing - is that the man who ran in front of her car seemed to be disappearing around a corner shortly after the accident, carrying something looking suspiciously like an arm...A couple of months later, popular exploitative true-crime writer Edmund Hall contacts Clare for help in researching his latest book, "Satan's Cannibal," about the man he is certain was responsible for Clare's brother's death. When a young boy, Hall went to school in Clare's Liverpool neighborhood with a creepy kid named Christopher Kelly. Kelly was a ghoul, who eagerly attacked and ate living small animals - and even badly scared the school bully, by nearly biting off his nose. Clare and Edmund play amateur detective, with a few friends, to track Kelly down. Of course, with that much attention coming his way, it can't be too long before Kelly turns the tables, and comes looking for them... This was Ramsey Campbell's first novel, and it still reads quite well. It's more a crime story than anything else, sort of an odd and eerie "day in the life" of an unsettled and unsettling shadow-crawler of a man. Balancing the psychological and possible supernatural aspects is what makes Campbell's story so compelling - that, and his fascinating characterization of a truly bizarre criminal. The book reads like a good episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and is surprisingly mature for this kind of material. It may well have partly inspired Thomas Harris' more famous Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon especially - though it isn't quite as good, just along similar lines.
Rating:
Summary: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Review: Clare Frayn was giving her brother a ride home, on the night someone ran in front of her car and caused the accident. Her brother died instantly. Funny thing was, they never found his arm. Funnier than that - though Clare isn't laughing - is that the man who ran in front of her car seemed to be disappearing around a corner shortly after the accident, carrying something looking suspiciously like an arm... A couple of months later, popular exploitative true-crime writer Edmund Hall contacts Clare for help in researching his latest book, "Satan's Cannibal," about the man he is certain was responsible for Clare's brother's death. When a young boy, Hall went to school in Clare's Liverpool neighborhood with a creepy kid named Christopher Kelly. Kelly was a ghoul, who eagerly attacked and ate living small animals - and even badly scared the school bully, by nearly biting off his nose. Clare and Edmund play amateur detective, with a few friends, to track Kelly down. Of course, with that much attention coming his way, it can't be too long before Kelly turns the tables, and comes looking for them... This was Ramsey Campbell's first novel, and it still reads quite well. It's more a crime story than anything else, sort of an odd and eerie "day in the life" of an unsettled and unsettling shadow-crawler of a man. Balancing the psychological and possible supernatural aspects is what makes Campbell's story so compelling - that, and his fascinating characterization of a truly bizarre criminal. The book reads like a good episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and is surprisingly mature for this kind of material. It may well have partly inspired Thomas Harris' more famous Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon especially - though it isn't quite as good, just along similar lines.
Rating:
Summary: A horror legend's masterful debut novel
Review: Despite being Campbell's first published novel, THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER is a confident and inspired work from a writer clearly in control of his talent. In the two short-story collections he published prior to this book (the outstanding DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT and the even better THE HEIGHT OF THE SCREAM) Campbell had already established his distinctive, powerful voice, endowing those horror tales with a unique blend of fluency, imagination, ambiguity and maturity that owed as much to the work of writers such as Nabokov as it did to the horror aesthetics of WEIRD TALES and MR James. The results were stories--sometimes oblique and mysterious, sometimes outright terrifying, and quite often both--that leave a deep and chilling impression on readers, whether read a week ago or years ago. THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER simply demonstrated that Campbell could extend his skill over a novel-length narrative. Since then, he has gone on to equal and even surpass the extremely high standards set in these early works--see, for instance, his later collections DARK COMPANIONS and ALONE WITH THE HORRORS, and subsequent novels INCARNATE, THE INFLUENCE, THE NAMELESS and THE FACE THAT MUST DIE, some of the finest-written and most frightening works in the modern horror canon. There is no doubting THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER is an essential modern horror novel. The unflinching honesty in Campbell's portrayals of his characters and settings elevates the story beyond the level of escapist thrills and turns it into something more challenging than formulaic horror shocks. Themes of urban decay and social isolation that are woven into the text, and which also recur in some of Campbell's later works, augment the supernatural dread not by adding to the unpleasantness of the story but, rather, by adding to its realism. In his handling of characters, too, Campbell favors this realistic approach: his characters are believable, warts-and-all individuals, sometimes obnoxious or plagued by self-doubt, and their credibility is never sacrificed to make them seem more appealing or more noble to the reader. Thus, while Campbell's characters may occasionally appear less than admirable, the sympathy they elicit from the reader is more genuine, less artificial than that aroused by superficial appeals to the reader's emotions. As a result, this is an atmospheric and affecting novel of urban horror on par with Fritz Leiber's OUR LADY OF DARKNESS--an eerie yet surprisingly subdued effort, a classic horror tale at heart, told as a modern mystery and presented with honesty and conviction.
Rating:
Summary: One of his earlies and best.
Review: I believe that this was Campbell's first novel, after writing short fiction. It's nothing short of masterful- he writes some of the dreamiest imagery you'll find anywhere, and coupled with his disconnected narration, makes for one hell of a read. Stephen King considers this along with Campbell's short story "The Companion," to be one of the greatest works in the horror genre. Speaking of King, the review mentioning icy prose and unsympathetic characterizations- both true- was lifted from King's "Danse Macabre," a series of essays on horror also well worth checking out.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, the title is eventually explained in the book!
Review: Quick synopsis: Clare and her brother Rob are in a car accident. Rob is killed and his arm is stolen. A true crime writer contacts Clare because he believes he knows who stole her brother's arm and he wants her help in tracking down the macabre thief. Okay, well maybe that is an overly concise version of the plot, but you get the picture.
I think it's shame this book is out of print. I really enjoyed it. I loved the bleakness of it all because I felt that it enhanced the story and helped to set its mood. I thought the juxtaposition of the horror of the events with the blandness of the setting made those events seem even more horrific.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, the title is eventually explained in the book!
Review: Quick synopsis: Clare and her brother Rob are in a car accident. Rob is killed and his arm is stolen. A true crime writer contacts Clare because he believes he knows who stole her brother's arm and he wants her help in tracking down the macabre thief. Okay, well maybe that is an overly concise version of the plot, but you get the picture.
I think it's shame this book is out of print. I really enjoyed it. I loved the bleakness of it all because I felt that it enhanced the story and helped to set its mood. I thought the juxtaposition of the horror of the events with the blandness of the setting made those events seem even more horrific.
Rating:
Summary: A fine tale of urban despair
Review: Ramsey Campbell;s debut novel is perhaps one of the most important pieces of modern British horror. It's use of the urban landscape to explore fears of alienation,the supernatural and the evil of children has been unsurpassed in the field.
Rating: 
Summary: Sorry, no good
Review: Sorry, thought this was rubbish. Characters are thin, the plot thinner, and the 'masterful conclusion' that the jacket blurb promised, the only reason I read this terrible book to the end, just wasn't there at all.
I know Campbell is supposed to be a legend, but on the evidence of this, I can't see why. I've read one other of his books, The Claw, which thankfully was far better, and I only hope his others are also better. This is his debut, apparently, so I'll let him off.
But come on - and sorry, this really gets me - we're faced with a good guy called Chris, and a bad guy called Christopher, and we're not expected to realise it might turn out to be the same person? Give the reader some credit, please.
The only good thing about this book is that it's short. Don't bother, you'll be wasting your time. I've read a lot of books, and very rarely do I think this little of them.
Terrible.
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