Genre fiction can be thought of as a “conservative” fiction, mostly because of its tight adherence to the traditional storytelling form that was codified way back when in  Aristotle’s Poetics.

The thought is fair. Even so, on occasion, someone brilliant burrows into the old forms and digs a new tunnel that takes readers in startling—often disturbing--new directions. I mean, look at Poe—no, on second thought don’t look at Poe, not after he’s been in the grave for 160 years.

Instead, I’ll tell of someone very much alive—the U.K.'s Ramsey Campbell. Since the 1970s, the Sceptered Isle’s poet laureate of horror fiction has been haunting the literary world with offbeat, remarkably literate stories and novels, many of them scary and entertaining, some of them genuinely daring in their approach (Two classic stories come to mind: “Next Time You’ll Know Me,” a weirdly angry epistle to a writer's group by one very frustrated writer; and “A Street Was Chosen,” a tale written in the dry passive manner of a social survey).

There is little that anyone could call merely formulaic in Ramsey Campbell’s work. To read anyone of his stories or novels—including one of his latest—Thieving Fear (PS Publishing, HC, $40.00) is to open a door into an enigmatic and striking point of view and a writing style that is both evocative and provocative, to a world I rarely find in any other fiction. A world I hope I don’t find in this one.

Thieving Fear is about the slow breakdown of four young Brits: two brothers, Rory and Hugh, and their two cousins Charlotte and Ellen. One night as teenagers, they camp out on a high grassy bluff—“where the darkness was finding its voices”--overlooking the River Dee, across from coast of Wales. One of them goes sleepwalking toward the cliff and almost fails to make it back. Nor does she return alone.

Years pass and their lives are spinning wheels, as if some hungry something they encountered on that windswept night had tasted their souls and decided to shadow them all their lives. Hugh is a frustrated ex-teacher reduced to working as a harried stock boy at a Wal-Mart-like store; Rory is an avant-garde artist who finds the controversy surrounding his work harder on his sensitivities and insecurities than he expected; Charlotte works as an editor in the airless sub-basement of a
publisher run by the same mindless conglomerate that own the store Hugh works at. Most broken of them all is Ellen whose promising career as geriatric professional is destroyed by allegations of elder abuse.

All these people’s lives are being stolen by fear, as embodied by a classically Campbellian demon--skeletal, slinky, faceless--who playfully peels away their defenses like onion layers to set loose a disturbing array of phobias and delusions: one loses his sense of direction, another finds
herself smothered by claustrophobia; yet another is caught up in what is known clinically as a somatic delusion, and finally, another has his combative consciousness erased altogether. All of them are pushed and pulled to the brink of insanity, and finally, back to the mysterious spot where the demon who’s been following them lives, waiting and hungry.

In tale after tale, Campbell has portrayed withdrawn, fragile and sensitive types, always taking a nuanced and sensitive approach to the fragility of the self. His cryptic prose captures human consciousness under terrible duress. It’s an eerie, indirect style that your average Amazon reviewer
would probably (to put it politely) find challenging.

To Campbell’s exquisitely and perilously susceptible characters, everyday objects—litter, cell phones, passing remarks by passersby, even their own mirrored reflections—shimmer with menace. Normal reality is a thin, quaking shell where people are constantly at cross-purposes with one another, in a constant state of misunderstanding and miscommunication, as though lost in a grubby, foggy labyrinth. The demon’s playground is not the world, but within our own minds, our most secret selves.

I’ll even humbly creep out on a thin limb here by comparing Campbell with another writer fantastically adept at conjuring his own magic from the everyday—Vladimir Nabokov. (Go ahead. Saw away.) But where Nabokov expresses a mastery of reality’s everyday magic, Ramsey Campbell is his more-than-respectable opposite, an ingenious artist at finding deviltry in the tiniest crumbs of everyday life, crumbs followed by modern-days Hansels and Gretels.

Having said all this though, I’ll admit that Thieving Fear isn’t my favorite Campbell novel (I go for Obsession, a brilliant take on the classic Deal-with-the Devil tale; and Ancient Images, a novel that starts out being about old movies in modern culture, before taking a startling and poignant swerve toward more fundamental concerns). Like most horror novels I’ve read, the buildup in Thieving Fear is terrific, but the payoff is a bit of a letdown.

Further, his unique spongy style seems to trip him up from time to time. There are points where I was unable to tell whether a character or the copyeditor had lost their way; other times, the author could be called on for being too clever with a line and Thieving Fear’s ending, is suitably ambiguous but unsatisfying; it doesn’t have the emotional charge of his last two novel, Grin of the Dark and Secret Stories.

As with most serious horror authors, the good stuff is in the shorter stuff, so, for those of you new to Campbell, I unhesitatingly point you right to his short stories, which are available in two volumes from Tor Books: Ghosts and Grisly Things and Alone with the Horrors. Many of his stories have been anthologized repeatedly elsewhere and they’re almost always the star attraction, no matter where they appear.

 And for those curious as to why such a talented writer would work with such passion in a low-rep genre like horror, need to read “At the Back of My Mind” his disturbing but moving introduction to an early novel, The Face That Must Die. Finally, more smart literate fun can be had at the Discussion Board on Campbell's website, hosted by the master himself and visited by some of the most literate sophisticated folks you'll find anywhere on the InterWires.

(Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield)

My contemporary Dracula novel, Dragon’s Ark is scheduled to be out at the end of the year from Ambler House. More essays and other ephemera can be found at the Red Room website for writers, while my comic screenplay Whackers can be downloaded at Smashwords.com. I can also be followed on Twitter (ThomBurchfield) and Facebook.