Ghosts and Grisly Things

Rating:
Summary: Terrifyingly anti-climactic
Review: I found this book confusing and disapointing. I like subtlety, but after reading many of these stories, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be scared of. I would go back and re-read the storys, thinking that I had missed something, but I never found anything, the stories were actually just not scary.

For example, one story ends with a guy giving out his ex wife's
address to a very non scary, but annoying, couple so that they can deliver some pictures. Oh but the ex told him not to! 0o0o0o0o scaaaaaaaary!

I bought this book because I was impressed by one of the stories, "Going Under", which I read in a horror anthology. A fat guy trampling a crowd of people isn't too scary, but I found it extremely funny and dark.

Anyway, if you like to be scared, and you're under the age of 50, this book might not be for you.

Rating:
Summary: Another fine Campbell collection.
Review: Ramsey Campbell, Ghosts and Grisly Things (Tor, 1998)

I sometimes wonder where books get their titles. In this case, I have to lay the blame on some copy editor at Tor who hadn't even bothered reading the manuscript, or at best skimmed it a tad. There's the odd ghost in this collection of stories, and a grisly thing or two, but anyone who's read Ramsey Campbell before should be well aware by now that the horror which Campbell makes his stock in trade has far less to do with such external fear-inducing stimuli. Stephen King writes in the opening pages of Cujo about how our fears change as we grow older, how the monster in the closet becomes the horror of not knowing how you're going to pay the rent on time. Within that perspective, Campbell is very much an adult horror writer; while his characters find themselves in widely disparate situations doing widely disparate things, the horrors that plague them are usually those who invoke the same fear as not knowing whence the rent check. And perhaps this is why Campbell has yet to find the audience in America that King and his monsters or Koontz and his aliens have found. When the monster is something other than the average Joe (even if he's a serial killer or some other damaged version of humanity, he's still "other"), there's a cushion of safety against which the reader can lean. When the monster is a guy on a cell phone ("Going Under"), a return to one's hometown ("Welcomeland"), or the banal passengers you're stuck with on the train ("Missed Connection"), you can't help but identify. We've all been there and done that.

Campbell is probably better known as a novelist, but he's published a number of collections of top-quality short stories. Add this one to the list. He's the grand master of writing the type of horror that has fueled the recent careers of such lights as Kathe Koja, Lucius Shepard, and Patrick McGrath; fans of such writers should have no problems glomming onto what Campbell's doing, and those few who haven't discovered him yet deserve to. ****

Rating:
Summary: not grisly
Review: there were a few good ideas here. also some good writing. but the stories never seem to have a suspenceful enough climax. the stories were full of irrelevant stuff, like "he went to work", dwelling, and too long dialogues. the suspence died. some of the ideas were actually kind of interesting. inventive in a way. one story was actually good. but not enough is being invested in suspence, too much in people's actions and dialogues. if only there was more focus on descriptions and suspence. and some of the stories were also uninventive.