Book 34 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year!  My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Ramsey Campbell has been a prolific and influential fixture of horror fiction for decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year, I received a complimentary copy of his reprinted novel Incarnate from Flame Tree Press and also was given the opportunity to interview Campbell for my blog. This latter event has pretty much been a highlight of blogging and justified me taking up the activity nearly 20 years ago.

Recently, the kind folks at Flame Tree Press sent me an Advance Reading Copy of Campbell’s newest novel, Ancestral, which will come out in November of this year.

Ancestral is a fascinating novel of horror with almost a fairy tale quality to it, in which ancient supernatural feuds from the past reverberate in the modern world!

Centuries ago, two families — the Bystones and Stantons — were bitter enemies. The reasons for that enmity have been lost in time, and the families have even now been joined together. Lou Stanton and Ray Bystone are married and have a young son Tim, and they and their parents form a tight knit family.

When medical issues with one of Tim’s grandparents cause the parents to cancel a vacation in Greece, they give Tim the option to choose local places to holiday. Tim chooses some odd, out of the way places that none of them have been to before yet seem very familiar: a dark cave, an isolated cove, a lonely summit, and an eerily silent woods. At each location, unsettling things occur, and Tim feels like something has followed them home each time, yet he feels driven to continue. As the first descendent of both the Bystones and the Stantons, is he fulfilling some sort of ancient ancestral mission? And what will happen when the things from all four sites come together when they follow the family home? Tim struggles to find a way to stop what he’s inadvertently unleashed, but his parents can’t help because they are completely unaware of the danger…

This story has a bit of a fantasy flavor to it, as even though it is set in modern times it references back to a battle between ancient wizards and the familiars they conjured. One of my favorite parts of the book is Tim’s efforts to dredge up his ancestral memories by writing them down as stories; these stories are what have the fairy tale feeling I mentioned earlier. They are poetic in their simplicity and chilling because they are very suggestive about greater horrors without sharing many details. Furthermore, the way the story resolves feels very much like some sort of ancient folk tale being reenacted in modern times. I found it all very fascinating and when I first started reading I idly wished that Campbell would write a full novel about the history of the wizard feud!

As is almost always the case with Campbell’s novels, the horror is a slow burn: monstrous things seen just out of the corner of one’s eye, strange sounds that must have been an echo, horrible events that seem to have a rational explanation but maybe shouldn’t. Campbell is as always a master at atmosphere, crafting sentences that manage to convey more mood than one would think possible. It’s what I’ve always loved about his work and continue to love!

So if you’re a fan of atmospheric creepy horror, check out Ancestral! (And if you haven’t, you should check out all of Ramsey Campbell’s work!)

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Just for my own recollection, here’s what the ARC of Ancestral looks like. My thanks again to Flame Tree Press for the copy!