The nameless

Rating:
Summary: Spectacular Horror Tale
Review: First let me say that you should ignore the rubes who have bashed this book for a reason i simply can't fathom. It's obvious that they have no idea what makes a horror novel great.

Okay let's discuss the story. It starts off with the abduction of a woman's child and than her apparent murder. Years later the mother of the girl recieve's a phone call from a girl saying that she's her murdered child. It all picks up pace after that.

Later in the book we learn about a cult that's members have no names (hence the title). The girl says she is living with them or that they are keeping her prisoner and only her mother can help rescue her. The cult worship some force or being that reminds me of one of H.P. Lovecraft's Old One's or nameless terrors. I can't reveal much more about the story because i do not want to ruin it for those who have not read it yet.

This book starts alittle slow and than like a cannon blast it explode's never leaving the reader time to catch his or her breath. The horrible deeds of the cult will shock and disturb you a great deal and if they don't your a sick person. This book is downright scary because of Campbell's ability to scare the living daylights out of us with his descriptions of the enviorments and the shadows and things half glimpsed before all goes dark. Pick this up and enjoy it as much as i did...i have to say though that the ending is very different and some may not like it but if you have read Campbell before you will be able to take it better than most.

Rating:
Summary: Campbell's conclusion is a betrayal of the evil he created
Review: I had high hopes for this novel. Ramsey Campbell, a master of psychological horror, seemed poised to add some uncharacteristically tangible frights and perhaps even it a bit of good old-fashioned gore to this particular work of fiction. The concept is far from original-cult activity at its most disturbing-but I anxiously awaited the results of the author's decision to really get his hands dirty this time. The book crawled along in places, but intermittent moments of foreboding kept my optimism intact as I continued my quest to reach what I felt would be the shocking conclusion. Sadly, all of this great buildup essentially came to naught in the form of a sudden, anticlimactic, depressingly disappointing ending. This novel proves that where there's smoke, there is not in fact always fire. I actually felt cheated by the seeming rush job of an ending here, and I can only look back with regret at the high hopes I associated with this book as I made my way through it. After the complete absence of tension or excitement at the end, one is left with a number of unanswered questions and a small set of characters who apparently served no purpose whatsoever in the narrative. It is as if the author suddenly decided at the last minute that he just didn't care anymore.

Perhaps the term "the nameless" makes you think of unimaginable entities out of space and time with revoltingly indescribable features; it certainly brought a Lovecraftian connotation to my mind initially. In terms of this novel, though, the Nameless are a cult who forego all earthly experience (such as names) in service to their cause. It remains unclear, but there goal seems to consist of gaining power for themselves and presumably opening the door for something evil, I suppose, to manifest itself. All I really know is that they were obsessed with torturing their victims and offering them up as sacrifices to nefarious agents (or so we are told but never really shown). There is some type of nonhuman agent associated with them, but I never really learned what it was or why Campbell thought it needed to be included in the first place. This cult had kidnapped Barbara Waugh's beloved three-year-old daughter, leaving behind an unrecognizable dead body which was naturally determined to be that of a murdered young Angela. Nine years later, Barbara suddenly begins to receive mysterious phone calls from someone purporting to be her long-dead daughter. Desperate to find out the truth and to rescue her daughter if she is in fact still alive, the distraught mother embarks on a frantic search for the group's whereabouts, assisted by her boyfriend Ted and a young reporter looking for her big break. They pick up rather easily on the trail of the cult and seem to always be a few days behind it as it moves around. But just who is chasing whom here? The Nameless have designs on Barbara herself, and they know that her obsession with finding her lost daughter will lead her to them. Some but by no means all of my own questions about Angela's real story are answered in the end, but they are less than satisfying.

Ramsey Campbell is certainly a talented author, but he seems to have misfired on this comparatively early effort. He never goes as far as the storyline would seemingly require him to go here, and this retreat from the abyss he has spent so much time constructing damages the novel's effectiveness and appeal a great deal.

Rating:
Summary: The Nameless or The Numbing?
Review: When I brought The Nameless I thought it was
written by an author that I quite liked.
Then doubt crept in and I feared the
author was none other than RC who had
written The Doll who Ate His Mother.

After I confirmed my fears that it was
indeed the same author I dithered on
whether to read the book but decided
to give RC another chance.

It wasn't worth it! RC is very good
at describing things, so good in
fact that most of the Nameless
describes the countryside, houses
etc and maybe about a 1/5th of
the book has dialogue or
advancement of the plot. As Stephen
King put it in In Writing, description
is a tool that needs to be used
appropriately. RC seems to want
to describe everything not just
the important or significant things
and in this book he doesn't
move very much beyond doing exactly
that.

So if you like endless descriptions,
a plot that hardly goes anywhere
(except maybe in circles) than this
is your book.

But if you want a good horror novel
DON'T buy this book and don't
waste your time reading it thinking
that maybe in the next page- or the
next- or the next etc, that something
might happen and that you might
actually be rewarded for
plodding your way through The
Numbing! I fell into that trap
and by the end of the book I
was in horror at the fact that
not only had I bought the book
but that I'd also forced
my self to read it to it's
uninspired and unoriginal ending.

The Numbing!

What makes good horror? Well I won't claim to know
that as everybody likes a horror (or not) for his
or her own reasons, and we should respect other
people's right to have their own opinion with out
labelling them as 'country bumpkins'[dictionary
definition of a rube].

Having said that I *can* recommend Cold Print
by Ramsey Campell, an excellent read perhaps
because he can't ramble on endlessly in a
short story.

However for a truely good horror I suggest
Graham Masterton's Ritual- now there's a
book that's bound to make you squirm!