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.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique but frustratingly bland and cold
Review: Stephen King heaped praises on this, Ramsey Campbell's first published novel, and I have tried to discover what he saw in it; after two readings, I still can't warm up to this book. Part of the problem is Campbell's prose style-his dearth of emotion makes the Liverpool setting of this drama even more colorless and empty than his characters. King has said Campbell's characters see the world in much the same way that an addict on an LSD trip does-if so, it is a bad trip indeed. I hate to keep citing King here, but one other thing he said about this novel that fits it perfectly is that some may feel as if Campbell has, instead of having written a novel, has grown one in a Petrie dish. This is exactly how I feel about Campbell's writing. These characters are not real at all; they are hollow husks of humanity blown aimlessly in the wind with no more than one or two ideas driving whatever they happen to do. Even when the passionless author tries to take us inside their heads, it is impossible to connect to them because their very thought processes are both mechanical and somehow wrong. I would sometimes get lost in the middle of a paragraph because Campbell would throw in a sentence or observation that made entirely no sense at all. Often, I felt as if sentences must have been left out, or even more frustrating, reassembled so that he was commenting on things before he even described them. I know many readers hold Campbell in high regard, and I will not attempt to judge his art based on this one novel, but this novel just did not work for me. Campbell supposedly attempted to create a new type of horror story here. It's certainly unique; I know of no other writer I could compare Campbell to in terms of his writing style. The monster here, though, is basically just a cannibalistic, irrational killer of the type we have seen before. I grant you the story starts out promisingly, with Clare Frayn's brother Rob being killed in an accident and having his arm taken from the scene by an unknown young man. Clare, by the way, has a disturbing bevy of emotional problems all her own. Then a writer comes to town with the idea of writing a book on this "cannibal," claiming to have known him back in school. He, Clare, a fellow whose mother was a victim of the killer, and a weird actor who says his cat was killed (and presumably eaten) by the killer set out to find him. This task is made much easier by the fact that the writer knows who it is (based on some pretty shotty evidence, I say). The only gripping part of the narrative, in my opinion, comes when the group locates the killer's grandmother and hears from her lips some of the details of the psycho's birth. The identity of the monster comes as no surprise whatsoever, and the conclusion is basically just weird. Personally, I just don't see a lot of merit in this novel, and it fails to produce any kind of monster different from what I have seen before-it's just harder to see through Campbell's murky prose.
Rating:
Summary: Unique but frustratingly bland and cold
Review: Stephen King heaped praises on this, Ramsey Campbell's first published novel, and I have tried to discover what he saw in it; after two readings, I still can't warm up to this book. Part of the problem is Campbell's prose style-his dearth of emotion makes the Liverpool setting of this drama even more colorless and empty than his characters. King has said Campbell's characters see the world in much the same way that an addict on an LSD trip does-if so, it is a bad trip indeed. I hate to keep citing King here, but one other thing he said about this novel that fits it perfectly is that some may feel as if Campbell has, instead of having written a novel, has grown one in a Petrie dish. This is exactly how I feel about Campbell's writing. These characters are not real at all; they are hollow husks of humanity blown aimlessly in the wind with no more than one or two ideas driving whatever they happen to do. Even when the passionless author tries to take us inside their heads, it is impossible to connect to them because their very thought processes are both mechanical and somehow wrong. I would sometimes get lost in the middle of a paragraph because Campbell would throw in a sentence or observation that made entirely no sense at all. Often, I felt as if sentences must have been left out, or even more frustrating, reassembled so that he was commenting on things before he even described them. I know many readers hold Campbell in high regard, and I will not attempt to judge his art based on this one novel, but this novel just did not work for me. Campbell supposedly attempted to create a new type of horror story here. It's certainly unique; I know of no other writer I could compare Campbell to in terms of his writing style. The monster here, though, is basically just a cannibalistic, irrational killer of the type we have seen before. I grant you the story starts out promisingly, with Clare Frayn's brother Rob being killed in an accident and having his arm taken from the scene by an unknown young man. Clare, by the way, has a disturbing bevy of emotional problems all her own. Then a writer comes to town with the idea of writing a book on this "cannibal," claiming to have known him back in school. He, Clare, a fellow whose mother was a victim of the killer, and a weird actor who says his cat was killed (and presumably eaten) by the killer set out to find him. This task is made much easier by the fact that the writer knows who it is (based on some pretty shotty evidence, I say). The only gripping part of the narrative, in my opinion, comes when the group locates the killer's grandmother and hears from her lips some of the details of the psycho's birth. The identity of the monster comes as no surprise whatsoever, and the conclusion is basically just weird. Personally, I just don't see a lot of merit in this novel, and it fails to produce any kind of monster different from what I have seen before-it's just harder to see through Campbell's murky prose.
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