Dark Feasts: Where’s the fun?

Dark Feasts by Ramsey Campbell

The last two books that I finished in 2024 had this in common: They were both collections that were chosen for inclusion in Jones & Newman’s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books (1988). I just loved Karl Edward Wagner’s In a Lonely Place (1983), as it turned out, and much enjoyed Lisa Tuttle’s A Nest of Nightmares (1986), although some of the stories in that latter volume had proven disappointing for me by dint of their ambiguity. Hoping to pull off a hat trick of sorts, I chose, as my next read, another collection of shuddery tales suggested by the Jones & Newman guide – Ramsey Campbell’s Dark Feasts, the final book in that volume chronologically – and it seems that I have gone to the well once too often, as I did not enjoy this collection nearly as much as I’d hoped. This was surprising, given that horror authority Jack Sullivan, writing in the Jones & Newman book, tells us, regarding Campbell’s oeuvre, “Dark Feasts is the book to get, for the simple reason that it has more first-rate Campbell tales than any other single volume.” More on this in a moment.

Dark Feasts, it must be admitted, may not be the easiest book for you to lay your hands on today. It was originally released in 1987 as a hardcover by the British firm Robinson Publishing Co., its dust jacket depicting a woman eating pickled onions straight out of the jar, in which also reside … two eyeballs! All 300 copies of the book were soon recalled after a printer’s error was noticed on page 233; an instruction that read “End of File: 170AUP … on Dir:70.” I can tell you this because I somehow wound up with one of those rare, recalled copies somewhere along the line. Later in 1987, Robinson also released the book as a trade-size paperback, after which the collection went OOPs (out of prints) for 38 years, as of this writing. One might imagine this book, a recalled rarity complete with dust jacket, would be a prize in my personal collection here at home, but no. The book has so many typographical errors –hundreds, I’d say, spread over its 339-page length – that it is assuredly nobody’s treasure. Why the print run was recalled for that one error on page 233, when there are literally hundreds of other glitches to be found, is beyond me. Add to this the fact that I didn’t care overly much for the book itself and you have a volume that is certainly no prize package!

Ramsey Campbell

Before proceeding with some complaints, faint praise, and general descriptions of this Ramsey Campbell collection, a quick word on the author himself, for those few who, like me, might be unfamiliar with him. Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946, and over the decades has gained a reputation as England’s preeminent living writer of horror; the British Stephen King, as he has been called. As of this date, he has come out with no fewer than 37 novels and almost 30 short-story collections; a remarkably prolific career that shows little sign of abatement. Campbell turns 79 years old as I type these words today (January 4^th), and continues to make his home in the Liverpool/Merseyside area.

Dark Feasts, say what one will about it, is certainly a generous volume, incorporating 30 stories written during the period 1964 – ’86. Presented in roughly chronological order, they allow the reader to experience the author’s stylistic changes across the decades. Several of the earlier stories are set in Campbell’s fictitious town of Brichester, in the Severn Valley (a stand-in for H. P. Lovecraft’s Arkham and Miskatonic River Valley, perhaps), but the vast majority take place in the Liverpool/Merseyside/Wirral Peninsula area that the author knows intimately well. Most of the protagonists in the stories are male, many of them writers, editors, or workers in publishing, similar to their creator. And unfortunately for them, around half do not survive till their story’s conclusion. This can be a fairly brutal book, in that even the most undeserving and sympathetic of characters may still be in for a horrific fate. No character, it seems, may be presumed safe in a Ramsey Campbell story!

Also unfortunate, at least for this reader, is the fact that no fewer than 22 of the book’s 30 stories end on a note of decided ambiguity … more ambiguous even than in the Tuttle volume. Don’t get me wrong: Campbell can be a terrific writer, and is particularly adept at depicting nightmarish scenarios in an off-kilter manner that defies my poor powers of description. But just like a nightmare, these tales often make little coherent sense when one tries to analyze them afterwards. Even Campbell, in his intro to the book, admits that some of these stories “seemed less important to understand than to write”! And if the author himself doesn’t understand what he’s created, how the heck are his readers supposed to?!?! Despite the finely crafted prose and nightmarish/surreal sequences – and really, anyone who can craft such lines as “His voice was muffled, blurred as a dying radio” and “Grey clouds crawled grub-like across the sky” must know what he’s doing – story after story proved letdowns for me, ultimately. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to feel that I’ve gotten a story, even if the cause of the horrors – ghosts, spacemen, zombies, whatever – is farfetched and unlikely. When all those nightmare sequences add up to mere head scratching and bewilderment, where’s the fun? Where’s The Fun … that’s a good reason itself to call those 22 tales WTF Stories!

So despite what Sullivan rightly refers to as Campbell’s “jagged, hallucinatory prose,” the lack of logic, explanations and sense proved more than a stumbling block for me. And in this, I recognize that I am in the distinct minority. Ramsey Campbell has been called “Britain’s most respected living horror writer” by the Oxford Companion to English Literature, is seemingly esteemed by all the horror writers out there today, and is the multiple winner of the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award. So who am I to judge him, based on the merits of this one book? All I can tell you is that this particular collection was not to my tastes, and that your take on it will most likely be different than mine. As always, I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em!

The 30 stories in this collection can be roughly grouped into half a dozen categories. First up are Campbell’s Pastiches of Lovecraft. In this group we find “The Room in the Castle,” in which a man, after reading the fabled Necronomicon, unleashes an ancient evil from the entity’s underground prison, and “Cold Print,” in which a bibliophile chooses the wrong bookshop to patronize on a blizzardy night. These two tales were both pleasing for this old Lovecraft fan.

Pastiches of Algernon Blackwood is our next category here. In this group we find “The Voice of the Beach,” perhaps my favorite story in the collection. Here, as in Blackwood’s famous novella “The Willows” (1907), two men, staying not on a willow island in the Danube but rather on a nameless beach, become aware of a higher reality … in this case, one that is supplanting our own. Campbell has listed “The Willows” as one of his Top 10 Horror Stories of All Time, and his own stunning tale is a very fine tribute, indeed. Also in this Blackwood category we find “Above the World,” in which a man becomes lost while doing some climbing in the Lake District and possibly comes across the figure of his late wife. I can’t say for sure; the ending is waaay ambiguous.

In the grouping dealing with Killers we have “The Scar,” in which a family man encounters his murderous doppelganger, as well as “Again.” I can’t say enough about this absolutely bonkers tale, in which a hiker is trapped in the hellhouse of a very strange and very kinky old woman. This story’s final, three-word sentence will surely linger in the memory, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not!

In the category of Monsters we find “The Interloper,” in which two students encounter horror inside the catacombs beneath a Brichester pub (!). In “Call First,” a librarian explores a strange old man’s deserted house and runs afoul of a hideous woman. And in “The Brood,” another man performs some illegal snooping in a seemingly deserted home and discovers a human vampire moth (!) and her basement nest.

And then we have a category made up of Ghost Stories, some of which are so (here comes that word again!) ambiguous that the reader might never have suspected them as such, had Campbell not told us so in his introduction. In “The Guy,” thus, we learn of a particularly horrible Guy Fawkes Night bonfire incident. “The Whining” tells the unusual tale of a vengeful, ghostly dog, of all things, while “In the Bag” gives us the story of a boy who’d died after being accidentally suffocated inside a plastic bag … and of how he returned many years later! A book dealer purchases one of the rarities of 19^th century horror author Damien Damon in “Out of Copyright,” resulting in the resurrection of the long-dead author, while in “Mackintosh Willy (which copped the World Fantasy Award in 1980) two teens in one of the poorer Liverpool neighborhoods contend with the ghost of a local homeless man. In “The Ferries,” a London editor’s life is upended after he discovers a miniature ship in a bottle, and sees the ghostly image of a schooner-type vessel on the silted-up River Dee. “The Fit,” meanwhile, narrated by a pubescent youth visiting his Aunt Naomi, tells of a witchlike woman and the cursed garment that almost leads to Naomi’s demise. And then there’s the Halloween story “Apples,” in which the shade of a neighborhood oddball comes back to take revenge on the kids who’d pestered him, on still another Guy Fawkes Night.

Finally, Dark Feasts offers up no fewer than a baker’s dozen of tales that must be deemed Unclassifiable. And what an assortment they are, with a high number of them being (perhaps unsurprisingly) of that mystifying, head-scratching ilk. In this grouping, to start off, we have “The End of a Summer’s Day,” in which newlywed Maria loses her husband Tony (Maria and Tony? Had Campbell just watched West Side Story before penning this thing?) while on a guided tour of a subterranean cavern … with bewildering results. In “The Words That Count,” a young woman receives a strangely suggestive pamphlet in the mail, thus incurring the wrath of her religious, disciplinarian father. “The Man in the Underpass,” narrated by 10-year-old Lynn, tells of how one of her schoolmates, Tonia, had been drawn into the world of Aztec sacrifice (!) after being fascinated by the graffiti covering the wall of that local underpass. In the flamboyantly titled “Horror House of Blood,” a couple agrees to let their home be used by the producers of a new slasher film, with unforeseen results. “The Companion” (which Stephen King has called “maybe the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years”) tells the story of a man who visits an abandoned fairground and, to escape a nearby gang of juvenile delinquents, hops a ride aboard the Ghost Train. It really is quite a haunting tale, only let down, for this reader, by still another bewildering ending. “The Chimney” (winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1977) tells of a young lad who lives in mortal fear of something coming down the fireplace chimney in his bedroom, a fear only exacerbated as Christmas approaches. An unexpected tragedy at this tale’s conclusion is the capper of a very fine piece of work. In “Midnight Hobo,” another overpass is the source of major-league trouble … here, something that lives high beneath the arch, and haunts the radio host who lives nearby. Meanwhile, “The Depths” gives us the story of a writer named Miles, who realizes that his nightmares of violent crime are soon converted into horrible reality … a reality that can only be averted by his writing those horrors down before they can be perpetrated. One senses that author Campbell identified with poor Miles’ dire predicament here! In “Hearing Is Believing,” a social worker, who dreams of taking his holiday in Greece, comes into possession of a very bizarre stereo system, with the expected baffling results. In “The Hands,” another book dealer escapes a rainstorm by entering a seemingly empty church, only to become hopelessly lost in a maze of corridors … and tried by some not-very-sympathetic nuns. “Just Waiting” tells of a novelist/screenwriter who returns to the forest glade where he’d had a strange picnic with his parents 50 years earlier, close to a mystical wishing well. “Seeing the World” might strike a chord with any reader who has ever been forced to look at the neighbors’ vacation videos and photographs, although I can guarantee that those readers will not have experienced what poor Angela and Richard have to go through here! Finally, in “Boiled Alive,” a paymaster/office drone discovers that his phone number has been shown in some kind of horror video, leading to his receiving all kinds of prank calls, as well as the realization that he can now alter and reshape reality! Don’t ask.

Anyway, there you have it … 30 stories to stun, frighten and assuredly perplex, all impressively penned by England’s foremost purveyor of frights. The fact that the majority of these tales did not work for me should in no wise deter you from this volume; as I said, most readers seem to regard it very highly. I suppose the nonstop barrage of nightmare sequences, undeserved deaths, baffling conclusions and relentless typos just palled on me after a while. So only my slightest of recommendations for this particular Ramsey Campbell collection, which admittedly only represents but a fraction of the author’s work. Would I be willing to give him another chance? Absolutely! As a matter of fact, Campbell’s 1983 novel The Face That Must Die, which was chosen for inclusion by Poppy Z. Brite in Jones & Newman’s Horror: Another 100 Best Books, has long been on my personal TBR list. So stay tuned for that!

Oh … as for that woman eating the pickled onions from the jar with the two eyeballs in it, no such story appears in Dark Feasts. Another disappointment for me. Harrumph!