Book 18 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

Ramsey Campbell still knows how to catch me off guard. The first chapter of his latest novel An Echo of Children starts with grandparents visiting their children and grandson at their new house in the seaside town of Barnwall. Everything seems very mundane throughout, though there is a bit of tension in the house that eventually gets traced to the grandson Dean having an imaginary friend. That in itself is not terribly worrying, until Dean lets slip a completely unexpected and shocking comment about this imaginary friend.

This is what I’ve come to expect and love about the works of Ramsey Campbell, who I have written about many times on this blog. His stories tend to be a slow burn, with dread building up slowly and inexorably, leaving the reader with the uncomfortable awareness that something is very wrong but unsure of exactly what that is. Even the moments that catch me off guard, like the end of the first chapter of An Echo of Children, is in service towards establishing that dread and uncertainty.

The book comes out in September; Flame Tree Press was kind enough to provide me an ARC of the book to read and review in advance.

As I’ve said, the story begins with grandparents visiting their children. In particular, we meet Thom and Jude as they visit their son Allan, his wife Coral, and grandson Dean, who have just moved to picturesque Barnwall to get away from their old troubled neighborhood. Though one would expect it to be a happy occasion, Jude immediately picks up tension in the household. Allan and Coral seem hesitant to let their parents talk to their grandson alone. This tension is traced to Dean’s imaginary friend, seemingly a boy his own age, and the unwillingness of Dean’s parents to acknowledge this (imaginary) intruder in their life.

Things change when Thom and Jude encounter phenomena in the house that makes them believe that the imaginary friend may very well be real, a suspicion shared by Dean’s parents. An attempt to spiritually cleanse the house appears to be successful, but this does not assuage Jude’s suspicions and her fear that something remains very wrong in the house. Jude and Thom learn that Barnwall has a dark and ancient history involving the deaths of children; could Dean be the next victim of whatever lurks in the town?

The horrors in Campbell’s novels usually lurk just out of sight, out of the corner of your eye, for most of the novel. This is especially true in An Echo of Children, which keeps the reader uncertain of the nature of the horror and its origin throughout. This novel is in this sense more subtle than others that Campbell has written like the Lovecraftian The Last Revelation of Gla’aki and the sinister Creatures of the Pool. This is not a problem for the novel, which is incredibly atmospheric and compelling, but I mention it for those people who might be looking for something with more “jump out at you” monsters in it.

The book seems to be centered on a theme of trauma and cycles of abuse. The horrors of past abuses of children in Barnwall carry on and threaten the young people of today. The work of Jude to protect Dean is an effort to break this cycle of abuse, and it certainly isn’t a coincidence that the main characters of the novel are the various generations of a single family.

I should note that, despite the rather grounded setting and characters, there are plenty of twists and turns and revelations that keep the reader guessing throughout. I was captivated by the novel from beginning to end, and never found a point where I felt that the story slowed. In fact, I read the last few chapters in a single sitting in one night. It ends in a place I was not expecting, but in hindsight made perfect sense and had an ironic twist to it.

Overall, I would say that An Echo of Children is another excellent novel from Ramsey Campbell. It demonstrates that, despite his long and prolific career, he still has plenty of great ideas and remains a master of his craft.