The Darkest Part of the Woods

"This is a novel that Ramsey wrote after having taken some time away from a long career principally writing supernatural horror of a cosmic horror stripe. He pauses to write a trio of non-supernatural suspense novels. This was something that a number of writers did in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the horror market had largely imploded, so writers had to look for other ways to express their concerns. The American writers Thomas Tessier and Peter Straub had done the same thing, and even Stephen King had played around with other iterations of the horror genre. So having tried these things, which are very interesting technical experiments, Campbell came back to writing Lovecraft-y cosmic horror. It was in a very self-conscious way, much as Klein had done, possibly even more so. This is a novel about a forest located in a part of England that was never covered by the ice sheets. So this is a particularly ancient place. There is an asylum on the border of this forest, and within the forest, there’s a tower, built by a man some centuries ago who was looking to engage in something terrible; and the family who are associated with the asylum are all caught up in the long-term ramifications of those earlier experiments. Campbell manages to give us a novel where it might seem from the outside that very little is happening, but actually there are events of cosmic, galactic magnitude taking place. It’s a wonderful book that is deeply and playfully engaged with the history of cosmic horror fiction – with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long and so on – but which also manages to be very English, and concerned with where England is in the early part of the 21st century. Ramsey writes about a novel a year and is still busily working away. I think that you can tell a Ramsey Campbell novel, regardless of what it’s about; there are certain quirks and narrative strategies that he deploys, whether it’s a non-supernatural suspense novel, or something about a cosmic entity that’s descending to earth. There’s a great interest in characters who may be mishearing things, and language slips… As a very young boy, Ramsey was stamped by Lovecraft’s influence, but later on, he would discover Nabokov, and the playfulness that you find in Nabokov’s language works its way into Ramsey’s work, where characters mishear things. There are puns that are made, which add to a destabilizing effect that reality itself is falling apart. There’s also a great interest in people who are paranoid. He also read a lot of Graham Greene – and if you think about the early Graham Greene, things like Brighton Rock , there’s a real paranoia. That shows up throughout Ramsey’s work. And he’s very good at portraying people who are aggrieved in some way, shape, or form. They may be the villains of his pieces, or they may just be assorted other characters – once in a while, one of them might be a protagonist. You can absolutely see a through line from his very first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother , all the way to The Darkest Part of the Woods and beyond."