A
Review by Bill
Ramsey Campbell was one of
the second generation of Lovecraft
disciples. His first book, the Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome
Tenants (trust Arkham House anthologies to have cutesy titles), was
published when he was in his teens and has been out-of-print for years.
I was ecstatic to find that Cold Print (published by TOR) contains a
number of stories from that book, since I've wanted to look at those
stories for a long time and was told (five years ago) that the first
edition of Inhabitant would cost about $30. Cold Print also contains
later stories, most of which have some hint of a Lovecraftian flavor.
As in most of Campbell's books,
there's a detailed introduction
on why certain stories were included/excluded, and the source ideas
for some of the stories. I've always felt that Campbell's best stories
are his painfully obscure ones. Most Lovecraft disciples/imitators have
no idea how to handle foreshadowing effectively; their "subtle"
hints
are like the KKK leaving 8 foot high burning crosses on people's lawns.
Campbell's hints are relatively obscure: a newspaper headline that's
quickly glossed over (in Cold Print), or maybe a small snippet of a
conversation. Also, in the most effective Campbell stories, he tries
draw the reader into experiencing the traumatic event, rather than
describe it from a distance like Lovecraft and his lesser imitators.
Campbell includes some passages
from his first published story,
"The Church in High Street", that were deleted from the final
version
when August Derleth "edited" it. They're really overwritten
and funny.
Even the finished story and some of the earlier material from Inhabitant
are awkward and campy. To his credit, the teenaged Campbell tries to
invent new monsters and situations that are significantly different from
those rehashed endlessly by lesser Lovecraft imitators such as Brian
Lumley (most of Campbell's monsters are not dark amorphous blobs, for
instance). However, he was still trapped by the web of "Lovecraftian"
rhetoric that he felt obliged to generate. Most of the stories from
Inhabitant looked very dated to me (though some are campy and a lot of
fun to read, and some of the monsters are rather original). Even "The
Render of the Veils", which Campbell considers a milestone in his
liberation from the Lovecraft style, seemed rather unsatisfying. "The
Inhabitant of the Lake" itself disappointed me mainly because I had
read Campbell's own analysis of the castration imagery in it and had
very high hopes for it. Most of the story failed to convey the dreamlike
atmosphere of the climatic sequence.
"Before the Storm",
written much later, is fairly close to the
traditional Lovecraft plot structure, but has a gruesome last scene
that somebody should steal for a movie (maybe John Carpenter?) Campbell
decided not to include "The Stone on the Island" because of
its
"adolescent sadism", which is too bad because I consider it
one of
the first effective stories in his new prose style; it's spare, subtle
and has another truly gruesome revelation at the end. "Cold Print"
is still one of my favourites (originally appeared in Tales of the Cthulhu
Mythos) because of Campbell's effective evocation of rundown, depressing
urban landscapes. These environments dominate the stories in his '70s
collections like the Height of the Scream, with their seedy characters
in tenements and slimy garbage. (Unfortunately, Campbell later abandoned
this style to write more conventional horror novels.)
Despite all its faults, Cold
Print is a lot of fun to read, and
does reprint some obscure material.
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