The Darkest Part of the Woods

Rating:
Summary: Lovecraftian touches hide an empty core
Review: "Taut storyline"? "Horror extravaganza"? "A richly textured tale of modern horror"? What are you people [thinking]? I bought this novel on the strength of the story premise given here at Amazon, and it's certainly a good one. The problem is that Campbell does nothing interesting with it, and does it so badly that I found parts of this book almost unreadable with their insistence that everything be decorated with an adjective, preferably a "woody" one. A character can't look out a window or drive down the motorway or see another person without it being described in tree-like terms. Do you get it, reader? Do you get it?! Yes, Ramsey, we get it - the woods are imbued with a brooding menace and you want to imbue the entire story with the brooding menace of said woods. Now would you please get to the part where SOMETHING HAPPENS? The novel vacillates through 200-odd pages of false starts before what you suspect is going to happen from the first page even looks like getting started. There is very little tension, no frights, a wonderful mystery which no one makes any real attempt to solve, and hardly any exciting prose. The best passages owe too much to Lovecraft (which is no great compliment). Indeed, the whole premise of the story owes far too much to Lovecraft's Cthulhu concept, but without the bit that really counts - Lovecraft's "mechanistic materialism" emphasized man's ultimate cosmic insignificance, whereas Campbell's plot has the nameless menace relying absolutely on human agency for its work. But the most disappointing thing about this novel is that, as usual, Campbell's characters and premise are really quite inspired. They could have been the basis for a far more engaging work. Anyone familiar with the scientific community's current "best guess" as to the real cause of the witch scare in Salem - an hallucinogenic fungus on the rye crop - will find that's just one of the many unexplored directions in which this novel could have gone. The morality (or not) of environmentalism, the power of representational art, and a Dionysian view of adolescent sexuality are other missed opportunities. If you want see what can really be done with the menace of the wilderness, a vanishing father and a sustained deployment of symbolism - and how it can all be worked up into a novel of enduring power and meaning - go read Margaret's Atwood's "Surfacing". Or to see what serious fun you can have with real English history, take a look at Michel Faber's novella "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps". I know these are unfair comparisons; genre fiction aspires to do very different things to its literary cousin. But even rated against its own apparent goals - to thrill, to engage, to frighten and to entertain - "The Darkest Part of the Woods" only hints at what might have been.

Rating:
Summary: If you go out in the Woods today, you'd better not go Alone.
Review: "The Darkest Part of the Woods" is less of a return to form for British horror Grandmaster Ramsey Campbell and more of a homecoming jaunt to his old, familiar haunts: the dark thickets and menacing woodland traipses of Southwestern England, where the Elder Gods slumber beneath rotten standing stones, and hungry, withered things wait and watch for the innocent and unwary.

For those with the patience to penetrate its thickly forested perimeter and discover its mysteries, "The Darkest Part of the Woods" ultimately proves a darksome treasurehouse, and Campbell ratchets the atmosphere up from slight unease to soul-stifling terror. This is a tasty spiced October brew of ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties, but in Campbell's England there are no Saints left to preserve us.

"Darkest Part" starts with a peculiar kind of homecoming for the Price family. The mad patriarch Lennox Price, presiding over a circle of his fellow inmates in a Brichester madhouse, issues a mysterious summons to his estranged wife Margo, a London artist starving for inspiration; stoic daughter Heather, now a university librarian struggling with her listless teenage son, Sam; and Sam himself, still wrestling with what he thought he saw as he camped in a tree shelter one night, something so vast and shadowy that he lurched off the platform in terror and snapped his leg.

Lennox Price was formerly a brilliant toxicologist who came to the Goodmanswood in the Severn Valley to study a peculiar fungus in the depths of the forest. The most perilous Science has a habit of devouring the scientist, and Lennox promptly fell victim to the mind-warping hallucinogenic properties of the fungus he discovered, categorized, immortalized in print, and named; now he spends most of his days tittering and gazing across the lowering woodland outside the window of his sanatarium.

Price's "invitation" is rather sneaky: the family converges on the insane asylum---known as the Arbour---where he is imprisoned, after Price's doctor telephones Margo with the warning that Lennox and his band of followers have escaped into the woods that surround the madhouse. Lennox is a uniter, not a divider: his nocturnal flight into the woods even manages to call up the Price family's other daughter, the more whimsicial Sophie, from her mysterious travels in America. She arrives unannounced in Brichester days later, and bearing not a few secrets herself.

When I was in graduate school in upstate New York I lived in a cottage that backed up directly onto a deep, dark woodland. I remember resting my eyes for a few minutes from my studies, and gazing out through my study windows at the lowering trees; practically every day I would go for long walks in the wood, meandering walks for the most part, but walks that would unfailingly lead me to a sort of central circle of ancient, gnarled giants, which held court around a huge, venerable maple. That tree had presence, power, authority: I nicknamed it "Grandfather Tree", and it became a centerpiece of my private mythology.

I always found myself replenished, fortified, by these walks, but I never felt I had been alone in the lonely woodlands. On some nights, cast in a shroud of darkness by the New Moon, I unwelcome and would quicken my steps, as if intruding on some sylvan ritual, resented by the thick leafy groves and twisted, wooden sentries.

Woods have an atavistic power---even Campbell's besieged Goodmanswood, its territory threatened by a new highway bypass, has something cloaked within, something corrupt, hungry, growing and eager to push its tendrils into neighboring Brichester. This is what I mean when I say that Campbell has returned to his old haunts. The very best of Campbell's horror derives much of its magic from the juxtaposition of the teeming, seedy, guttering modern United Kingdom with the ancient secrets that sleep fitfully below its new glittering plastic, steel and neon surface of superhighways and strip malls.

Campbell is fascinated in the interplay between ancient and modern, between the horrible banality and tedium of contemporary life and the seething, soul-searing horror of the cancred tomb and unquiet grave. Campbell uses all the magic in his trunk to terrify the reader, and he is particularly intrigued by transformations. Can a family, ensconced in a nettle of horror and magic, ever truly be free of it? The neighbors, sensing the Price family drawn back to the haunted forest, turn on them, and yet what are the malformed, moon-pale heads peering up over log-piles and rock walls? What is the thing with burning hands and buzzing face that Sam glimpses in the woods? What of the elongated, pale "Sticky Man" the schoolgirls talk about in terrified whispers, growing taller and thinner with each full moon?

The less said about the plot here, the better: this is a novel bursting at the seams with ideas, and Campbell lures the reader deeper into this forest at twilight, ever more mazelike with each page, ever more engrossing and disturbing, with its increasingly stealthy, sinister, and sneaky tale of ancient sorcery that flourished in Goodmanswood---named after the "Tall Man" that would show lost travelers out of the wood, or in darker tales, draw them farther in---sorcery, and worship, and secrets ancient when Rome was an infant.

With that in mind, a word of caution: Campbell is no King or Koontz, and his terrors are subtle, almost reticent. A work by Campbell is a work of secrets cloaked in skin, bone, and earth, a work of layers, and it takes a while for "The Darkest Part of the Woods" to really pick up steam. Initially I was annoyed by its pace, and almost gave up on it.

How fortunate for me---and unfortunate for my sleep---that I soldiered on! Campbell an admirer of classic ghost-tale wrangler M.R. James, uses many Jamesian techniques and draws on the ancient power of his silent, looming woods to craft up some delicious, mortifying terrors. There are two sequences late in the book---one involving a confused pursuit through the forest, the other involving a spelunk into the sooty, twisting cellar of a ruin---that are among the most terrifying ever set to paper.

For all his deftness and misdirection, for all the creepy Autumn richness of this book, Campbell has written a work of sheer, skin-crawling horror. Like an October storm, "Darkest Part" starts up with a flurry of crinkled leaves, the kiss of a zephyr, the flash of heat lightning and the soft cough of far off thunder, and then---before you can get out of the way---you're caught up in the torrent and forced to seek shelter for the night in the forlorn cottage in the middle of the forest---in the very darkest part of the Woods.

Rating:
Summary: Campbell in Fine Form
Review: American professor Dr. Lennox Price moves his family to Goodmanswood, England to study the dark legends surrounding the area especially the delusions of the nearby residents. However, instead of debunking the myths, Lennox is soon sucked into his work as a converted true believer. Thus he is committed, but quickly develops a cult following among the asylum's crazier folks.

His daughter archivist Heather follows up on her father's enigmatic beliefs about Goodmanswood that links them to the alchemist Nathaniel Selcouth, who resided there. Heather digs into the works of Nathaniel, who apparently was trying to fashion a messenger who would serve as his servant in seeking the outer limits of the spiritual and physical universe. Meanwhile, children insist a grotesque "sticky man" resides in the woods. Heather wonders if he exists and if he does is he the evil behind all the malevolence destroying the Price family?

THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS is a classic horror tale that works because of the set up by Ramsey Campbell is at its best here. The Price family are intelligent nice people who are being overwhelmed by a sinister darkness that grows ever menacing with each new page. The story line is taut as readers will feel the creepiness of the woods that transforms into something immoral and dangerous. Mr. Campbell is at his best with this superb horror thriller.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: ColverPA
Review: I bought this novel on the strength of the story premise given here at Amazon, and it's certainly a good one. The problem is that Campbell does nothing interesting with it, and does it so badly that I found parts of this book almost unreadable with their insistence that everything be decorated with an adjective, preferably a "woody" one. A character can't look out a window or drive down the motorway or see another person without it being described in tree-like terms. Do you get it, reader? Do you get it?! Yes, Ramsey, we get it - the woods are imbued with a brooding menace and you want to imbue the entire story with the brooding menace of said woods. Now would you please get to the part where SOMETHING HAPPENS? The novel vacillates through 200-odd pages of false starts before what you suspect is going to happen from the first page even looks like getting started. There is very little tension, no frights, a wonderful mystery which no one makes any real attempt to solve, and hardly any exciting prose. The best passages owe too much to Lovecraft (which is no great compliment). Indeed, the whole premise of the story owes far too much to Lovecraft's Cthulhu concept, but without the bit that really counts - Lovecraft's "mechanistic materialism" emphasized man's ultimate cosmic insignificance, whereas Campbell's plot has the nameless menace relying absolutely on human agency for its work. But the most disappointing thing about this novel is that, as usual, Campbell's characters and premise are really quite inspired. They could have been the basis for a far more engaging work. Anyone familiar with the scientific community's current "best guess" as to the real cause of the witch scare in Salem - an hallucinogenic fungus on the rye crop - will find that's just one of the many unexplored directions in which this novel could have gone. The morality (or not) of environmentalism, the power of representational art, and a Dionysian view of adolescent sexuality are other missed opportunities. If you want see what can really be done with the menace of the wilderness, a vanishing father and a sustained deployment of symbolism - and how it can all be worked up into a novel of enduring power and meaning - go read Margaret's Atwood's "Surfacing". Or to see what serious fun you can have with real English history, take a look at Michel Faber's novella "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps". I know these are unfair comparisons; genre fiction aspires to do very different things to its literary cousin. But even rated against its own apparent goals - to thrill, to engage, to frighten and to entertain - "The Darkest Part of the Woods" only hints at what might have been.

Rating:
Summary: Got lost in the woods
Review: I have always wanted to read a Ramsey Campbell book. Now that I have, I am thinking starting with "Deepest Part of the Woods" was a mistake. The story focuses on the Price family who lives near a forest in England. The forest is apperaently haunted, and the investigation by Lennox Price drove him insane. Now he is an inmate in an insane asylum and ministers to a cult he created with other patients. After a while the forest calls Lennox's daughter and his grandson for mysterious reasons. The book certainly has a certain style, I will give it that. There is a very dark and moody atmosphere that is impossible to deny. Think of it as sort of Walden meets Stephen King. But then the problem is that it is a baddly told story with very thick prose; imagary too dream like to understand; and the story is kind of hard to follow. The characters are the worst part. Sam (the young man) is too passive and weak to like very much, Sylvia (his aunt) is too creepy and selfish to understand, even if you can guess where her baby came from. Heather, Margo, and Lennox are too strange and flat to care much about, and so that leaves us with very little to enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Oh God this was the most horrible story ever WRITTEN
Review: I have never in my life read a more BORING, POINTLESS work of fiction. You will find yourself utterly befuddled when trying to follow the poor wording and punctuation of this story. The plot is MIND NUMBING, and of course I have to finish it because I am compelled to finish every story I begin reading. I wish I could find it in myself to light this on fire and put the ashes in my cat's litterbox but that won't happen for another one hundred agonizing pages at least. RUN THE OTHER WAY while you still have the chance, friends! Use the five or six bucks you would have spent on this paperback to buy some toilet paper instead, I promise it will be more interesting!

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book That Brims with Dark Foreboding Atmosphere
Review: I've read a good chunk of the Campbell canon and THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS is truly among his very best works. In fact, I'll stick my neck out and state that in future years this novel may be widely recognized as a classic of the horror genre. The best horror, in my opinion, builds slowly and frightens subtly, at least initially. It does so by using well realized characters and a sharply - and darkly and unusually - painted setting. Here is a novel in which the setting is every bit as important a character as any human being in the tale. Campbell masterfully makes the woodlands a dominant presence both inside and outside the Price household. He does so by the use of clever naturalistic metaphors to describe characters' traits, moods, and home surroundings. The novel's setting is a curious one: a place where an urban neighborhood, convenience store, highway and nearby mental asylum threaten to encroach upon the nearby woods. But it is the shrinking woodsy setting which dominates over all and whose power is felt by each member of the Price family. The novel is richly textured and surprise builds upon surprise as the tension mounts toward a horrific climax which echoes some of H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror tales. Fans of great fright fiction: do not miss this book.

Rating:
Summary: Ode to Lovecraft that never really takes flight
Review: If you ever needed proof that Harriet Klausner (or whatever cartel of braindead illiterates is operating under that name) never actually reads the books she "reviews", then this is it. "Horror at its best"? Give me a break. The key requirement of horror is that it's FRIGHTENING. This is dull. It's a long, meandering, ode to Lovecraft that simply never gets off the ground. I admire what Campbell was trying to do here, but it just doesn't work. There was a reason Lovecraft wrote short stories - his intense style is digestable only in small doses. It can't sustain a novel, especially one with too many plot strands which are never satisfactorily intertwined.

Rating:
Summary: slow, odd , beautiful and really, really creepy
Review: Like Heather Price, the main character in this novel, I started out in denial of the power of The Darkest Part of the Woods. The pacing was slow, the literary conceits seemed obvious, the characters acted tranquilized. But eventually, I became obsessed with the woods and I continued to think about (be haunted by?) this novel long after I finished reading it. The reviewer who complained about Campbell's over-use of forest imagery missed the point. The woods are a camouflage; it's the darkness that holds the power. This is a difficult book, and I understand why the reviews are so polarized. But I thought it great and seriously disturbing.

Rating:
Summary: smells like dead leaves
Review: This book felt, smelled, and oozed autumn. The best "something wrong with the woods" story ever. At one point Mr. Campbell tips his hat to the Blair Witch Project with a mention of Burkitsville, which is fitting. Like The BWP this book gives you hints and clues, and enough "what the hell was that's" to hint at something nameless and ominous, but always lets the reader complete the picture. Another reason it works as with all his other books, you give a damn about the people that fill the pages. I genuinely felt bad for our artist/mother when her work fails to inspire, or the brother who fears he has been spending a little too much "quality" time with his aunt. Mr. Campbell has a writing style that has always seemed authentic and somehow slightly antiquated in a good way (or maybe just very British) .. It never feels like your reading Stephen King...you can tell his influences are much older.. Lovecraft, Blackwood, and Machen. Darkest Part of the Woods has a hint of decadence as well..Huysmans come to mind. Highly recommended for those who enjoy their horrors lush and literate.