Danse Macabre

Of The Doll Who Ate His Mother he has this to say-some of it bearing directly on the difference in the amount of endurance needed to do a novel: "What I wanted to do with The Doll was to invent a new monster, if that is possible, but perhaps the big thing was to actually write the novel, since previously I'd been doing short stories. In 1961 or '6i I made notes for a story about a black magician who was going to take revenge on his town or village for some real or imagined wrong it had done him. He was going to do this by using voodoo dolls to deform the babies-you'd have the standard pulp-magazine scene of the white-faced doctor coming out of the delivery room saying, 'My God, it's not human . . . !' And the twist was going to be that, after all these deformed infants had died, the black magician would use the voodoo dolls to bring them back to life. An amazingly tasteless idea. At about the same time the Thalidomide tragedy occurred, making the story idea a little too `topically tasteless' for me, and I dropped it.

"It resurfaced, I suppose, in The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which eats its way out of its mother's womb.

"How does writing novels differ from writing short stories? I think a novel gathers its own impetus. I have to creep up on it unawares, thinking to myself, `Maybe I'll start it next week, maybe I'll start it next month.' Then one day I sat down, began to write, and looked up at noon, thinking: `My God! I've started a novel! I don't believe it!

"Kirby [McCauley] said, when I asked him how long the novel should be, that 70,000 words or so would be about right, and I took him almost literally. When I got up around the 63,000 word mark, I thought: `Only 7000 words left-time to wrap this up.' That's why many of the later chapters seems terse.” Campbell's novel begins with Clare Frayn's brother Rob losing an arm and his life in a Liverpool car accident. The arm, torn off in the accident, is important because somebody makes off with it . . . and eats it. This muncher of arms, we are led to suppose, is a shadowy young man named Chris Kelly. Clare-who embodies many of the ideas already labeled as "new American gothic" (sure, Campbell is British, but many of his influences-both literary and cinematic-are American)-meets a crime reporter named Edmund Hall who believes that the man who caused Rob Frayn's death was the grown-up version of a boy he knew in school, a boy fascinated with death and ca

Clare, Edmund Hall, and George Pugh, a cinema owner whose elderly mother has also been victimized by Kelly, join together in a strange and reluctant three-way partnership to track this supernatural ca

And the three of them do track Kelly down . . . after a fashion. The climax of the hunt takes place in the rotting cellar of a slum building marked for demolition, and here Campbell has created one of the dreamiest and effective sequences in all of modern horror fiction. In its surreal and nightmarish evocation of ancient evil, in the glimpses it gives us of "absolute power," it is finally a voice from the latter part of the twentieth century which speaks powerfully in the language which Lovecraft can be said to have invented. Here is nothing so pallid or so imitative as a Lovecraft "pastiche," but a viable, believable version of those Lovecraftian Elder Gods that so haunted Dunwich, Arkham, Providence, Central Falls . . . and the pages of Weird Tales magazine.

*Stories of ghouls and ca

Campbell is good, if rather unsympathetic, with character (his lack of emotion has the effect of chilling his prose even further, and some readers will be put off by the tone of this novel; they may feel that Campbell has not so much written a novel as grown one in a Petrie dish): Clare Frayn with her stumpy legs and her dreams of grace, Edmund with his baleful thoughts of glory yet to come, and best of all, because here Campbell does seem to kindle real feelings of emotion and kindliness, George Pugh holding on to the last of his cinemas and scolding two teenage girls who walk out before the playing of the National Anthem has finished.

But perhaps the central character here is Liverpool itself, with its orange sodium lights, its slums and docks, its cinemas converted into HALF A MILE OF FURNITURE. Campbell's short stories live and breathe Liverpool in what seems to be equal amounts of attraction and repulsion, and that sense of place is one of the most remarkable things about The Doll as well.

This locale is as richly textured as Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles of the forties and fifties or Larry McMurtry's Houston of the sixties. "Children were playing ball against the church,” Campbell writes. "Christ held up His arms for a catch." It is a small line, understated and almost thrown away ( like all those creepy, reaching gloves in The Parasite ), but this sort of thing is cumulative, and at least suggests Campbell's commitment to the idea that horror exists in point of view as well as in incident.

The Doll Who Ate His Mother is not the greatest of the novels discussed here-I suppose that would have to be either The Haunting of Hill House or Straub's Ghost Story -and it is not as good as Campbell's The Parasite . . . but it is remarkably good. Campbell keeps a tight rein on his potentially tabloid-style material, even playing off it occasionally ( a dull and almost viciously insensitive teacher sits in the faculty room of his school reading a paper with a headline which blares HE CUT UP YOUNG VIRGINS AND LAUGHED-the story's blackly hilarious subhead informs us that His Potency Came From Not Having Orgasms ). He carries us inexorably past levels of abnormal psychology into something that is much, much worse.

Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary roots-he mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares The Doll 's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of Psycho , where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness (wi

While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that might awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in The Doll Who Ate His Mother .

James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older tradition-the same sort of pulp horror-fiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Qui

Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the all-time pulp horror classic: The Sucking Pit .

This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbert-and the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E.