The Overnight | ||||||||
Ramsey Campbell | ||||||||
Tor, 448 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
Campbell does what he does best, write exquisite prose, develop atmosphere over blood and gore, and thereby develops a truly
creepy and gloomy mood surrounding the store's staff and the sense of doom which overshadows them. The book is also interesting as
each chapter is presented in turn from the point of view of a different character, so one gets, at times, multiples views of
the same events. Other reviews have (see side bar at left) expounded on these qualities, and while I agree that the delivery is near
flawless, I would propose that Campbell's type of horror writing inherently only lends itself very poorly to novel length works.
If one were to isolate the first 250 of 400-odd pages of The Overnight and present them to a reader, without identifying
the author or genre, this reader might easily ignore a number of small incidents or explain them as the doings of a disgruntled
employee, or chance. I realize that this builds the atmosphere, but I must admit to skipping paragraphs. The
remaining 150 pages are much like the films Alien and more
recently The Cave where the humans in an enclosed area
are picked off one by one. To Campbell's credit he doesn't let anyone get away -- no Ridley to blow away the nasty
beasty -- and portrays the claustrophobic atmosphere of the fogged-in store, beautifully.
I am a great fan of atmospheric/psychological (over blood and gore) horror as my comments in some other reviews
(1, 2) will attest, but, in my opinion, with the possible
exception of Dorothy Macardle's Uneasy Freehold (1941; a.k.a. The Uninvited), and perhaps one or two others,
novel-length atmospheric horror just doesn't work very well. If one looks at the works that have made the reputation of
atmospheric horror writers -- British (E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Oliver Onions, and more recently
Robert Aickman) and American (Edgar A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and more recently Thomas Ligotti) -- it is their
short stories or novellas at best. Who remembers Algernon Blackwood's novel The Fruit Stoners over
his "The Wendigo?" Event-based, blood and gore-driven or supernatural horror has from the Gothic era been able to
sustain the novel length, but expand the succinctness of an atmosphere-driven horrific situation/concept beyond its
capacity and it simply becomes tedious -- even if it beautifully written.
Campbell's The Overnight is a work where the mechanics are well, even beautifully done, but placed in a form not
best suited to it, something like placing a Ferrari F-1 engine in a school bus.
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature. |
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