Book 5 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Still behind in my reading, but have another that I will finish within a few days.

It doesn’t take me very long to read anything new by Ramsey Campbell — assuming I am aware that something has been released! As longtime readers of this blog are probably aware, Campbell is my favorite horror author, and one who in my opinion really demonstrates the literary potentials of horror. His writing is precise and subtle, and he is a master at conveying a mood with a careful choice of words.

So when I saw Fearful Implications, his latest compilation of short stories, had been released in 2023, it didn’t take me long to get it.

Before I talk about the stories, let me give a shoutout to the cover art by Ilan Sheady, which is clearly an homage to Henry Fuseli’s famous 1781 painting The Nightmare!

This is particularly apropos, because one of the stories in the collection is about fears of inadvertently copying the works of others! (Incidentally, read the linked Wikipedia article about The Nightmare, which may have inspired in turn some of the greatest writers of horror in history.)

One thing that strikes me about Campbell’s latest compilation is something that has struck me about the later work of Stephen King — what I might call a transition into more “existential horror.” As we get older, the simple fears of our youth start to transform into fears and anxieties about our entire lives and existences. To paraphrase a character in Stephen King’s “Riding the Bullet”: “What was the point?” I feel like we can see some of that evolution in Campbell’s work as well, who is now 78 years old. His own afterword for the book strengthens this view, as he talks quite frankly about getting old and fears of not being able to produce work as well as he once could. (Though the stories are again excellent.)

In the first story of the collection, “Speaking Still,” we meet a man whose wife has recently died… but he may still be conversing with her and she may have ended up with a horrific fate after death. In “How He Helped,” a fanatic plans an act of horrible violence but it may have implications beyond what he ever imagined. In “Getting Through,” we follow a man through most of the major events of his life, though he wonders what might have been different if he had followed a different path beyond the reflecting surface of a mirror. In “Extending the Family,” a retiree sees horrible treatment of children in the house across the way from his, but his attempts to intervene show he is more connected to his neighbors than he knew.

In “Wherever You Look,” an author finds that he has inadvertently plagiarized a passage from an obscure short story he read as a child, and the late author of that passage has some opinions about that. This tale captures Campbell’s own anxieties about accidental plagiarism, and he shares an anecdote in his afterword about accidentally reusing one of his own phrases in a later story. I imagine most authors have this anxiety at some point or another, which is both natural and overblown: the nature of writing is that we adapt and build upon the ideas we’ve learned from others, and it is inevitable that some of our works look a bit like our inspirations.

These are the stories that to me evoked some of the existential dread that an older author experiences, but there are plenty of more conventional stories, as well. “The Fourth Call” relates an extremely bizarre holiday tradition done by a neighborhood family, and the tradition itself is more unnerving than the supernatural elements that follow. “Someone to Blame” is a modern take — or a sequel, even — of M.R. James’ classic story “Count Magnus,” and the ending to Campbell’s story absolutely delighted me. In “The Run of the Town,” a traveler passes through a town on the eve of a strange traditional footrace, and when he ventures into territory he shouldn’t, he finds himself drawn into events in an extremely unpleasant way.

One other thing that I’ve mentioned before and feel is worth mentioning about Campbell’s work is how he manages to capture dysfunctional social interactions. In his stories, almost every conversation is an unpleasant one, with people misinterpreting each other’s statements in the worst possible way an ending up borderline hostile even after the smallest misstep. This feels like a commentary on modern society and its inherent unfriendliness, and I interpret it as a major theme of Campbell’s later work. It is also very effective in adding to the horror of the stories. If you’ve ever wondered how someone could feel completely alone in the middle of a city with millions of people, Campbell shows that one is truly alone in a society filled with people who are indifferent at best to your struggles.

Overall, this is another fantastic compilation of stories by Ramsey Campbell, and one that I can recommend.