Strange Things and Stranger Places

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for "Needing Ghosts"; 3 for the rest of the book
Review: STRANGE THINGS AND STRANGER PLACES, another welcome short-story collection from horror grandmaster Ramsey Campbell, nevertheless doesn't offer quite enough in terms of quality and quantity to compare favorably with his great earlier collections of short horror fiction, from DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT in the early '70s all the way through to WAKING NIGHTMARES and ALONE WITH THE HORRORS, both dating from the early '90s.

While the stories on offer in this volume are, on the whole, as good as anything being done in horror fiction today--except for one regrettable entry entitled "Cat and Mouse", which doesn't exactly open the collection on a note of high promise--none of them quite exhibits the genius for subtle, intricate, blood-curdling storytelling evident throughout Campbell's work. The best of the shorter pieces here is undoubtedly the truly creepy "Run Through", a story that needs to be read first, described later. A few other stories also offer some decent chills along more familiar lines: an odd new children's toy craze of unknown and possibly sinister origins in "Passing Phase", a lonesome, gloomy detour through a particularly twisted and unwelcoming mirror maze in "The Next Sideshow", and the malevolent miniature escapee from an ancient, broken-down arcade machine in "Little Man". Other stories ("Rising Generation", "A New Life", "Wrapped Up") less successfully attempt to breathe new life into musty old pulp horrors, while the novella "Medusa", possibly Campbell's only published attempt at science fiction, almost succeeds as a strange tale of visionary terror and awe, perhaps hindered by its potentially alienating reliance on oblique language and invented terminology.

But the jewel of this volume is unquestionably its final entry, the remarkable and terrifying novella "Needing Ghosts", whose appearance in this collection marked its first (and presumably only) publication in the US. This extended journey through an eerie twilit landscape where lingering anxieties coexist with nightmare horrors is a crowning achievement in modern weird and horror fiction. The conclusion, which, quite unexpectedly, both completes and intensifies this sublimely hellish vision, is one of Campbell's most powerful and stunning (and that's saying something), offering perhaps the most stoically unflinching glimpse into the heart of the void the world of horror literature has yet put forth. One of the major works of horror fiction from this, or any, era, "Needing Ghosts", all by itself, is worth at least the full price of this collection.