horror, page 1 of 67

In Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel, eight year old Tim Bystone is the scion of two families with deep roots in the Wirral Peninsula, where both still live. (His mother works with her parents at Stanton’s Stationers, his father with his parents at Bystone’s Pharmacy across the road.) Only a couple of generations back, the two families wouldn’t have spoken, let alone married and produced a child, as they were under the shadow of a rivalry so old no-one recalled its origins—though hints come through in the memory of certain significant locations even the current generations somehow find familiar: the gloomy cave of Boggart’s Grot, the foggy mountains at Stalking Edge, the viscid waters of Umbrage Cove, and the overcrowding trees of Fay Woods.

Told, at school, to write a true story, Tim is upbraided for producing one about a battle between two wizards whose rivalry was so intense they summoned elementals from the landscape to fight one another, which obviously can’t, the teacher insists, be true. (What’s more, it offends his classmate Sophia, the daughter of strictly religious parents, meaning he has to apologise to her in front of the class.)

But perhaps there’s more truth to Tim’s story than anyone could suspect, and he’s feeling the stirring of a magical power feeding into him from both of his ancestral lines. When his parents ask him to pick locations for a series of weekend trips, he chooses Boggart’s Grot, Stalking Edge, Umbrage Cove and Fay Woods, and at each feels he’s encountering something that wakes to his presence, and follows him back home…

There are Lovecraftian touches here (in the influence of an ancestral wizard being visited on a modern descendent), and even the hint of a dark Harry Potter (in a child’s awakening to magical powers, though with no Hogwarts to guide him), but most of all this feels like a companion piece to Campbell’s 2025 novel An Echo of Children. There, a young boy apparently comes under the influence of the supernatural, only for his newly (and strictly) religious parents to begin a programme of, essentially, persecuting their own child so as to “save” him. Here, there’s no doubt Tim really is in touch with the supernatural, but aside from Sophia’s parents demanding front-of-class apologies whenever Tim even mentions something like the occult, at least in this novel the boy’s parents are on his side. They may not believe what Tim suspects to be true, but they are willing to listen to the boy.

(Is there a hint, though, about the dangers of families, if they’re too insular? There Sophia’s unquestioning parroting of her parents’ extreme views, but there’s also Tim’s parents, who still work for their parents, and whose union has resulted in a combination of two ancestral lines of dark magic and a dangerous supernatural re-awakening—something like an occult version of the intermarriage of cousins, perhaps.)

There are other echoes of previous Campbell works, here, too. Both The Kind Folk (2012) and The Wise Friend (2020) used the idea of a tour of supernaturally-charged locations to reawaken the dark forces found there, in what might be termed (after MR James) a “Black Pilgrimage”, or perhaps (playing to Campbell’s Catholic upbringing) the “Stations of the (Inverted) Cross”. Such a scheme plays to Campbell’s strengths, as the exploration of a spooky environment, fraught with darkly suggestive hints of something unnatural emerging in uneasy ways, is one of his most characteristic tropes.

Here, the “Black Pilgrimage” takes up the first half of the novel, but it was after this that I felt the suspense falter a bit, and mainly, I think, because of the publisher’s tagline: “An age-old rivalry rears up as inherited memories awaken.” This, to me, suggested the ancestral rivalry between the two now-wedded families was going to be revived, perhaps because it made me think of Gordon Honeycombe’s Oedipally-charged 1972 novel Dragon Under the Hill, in which a similar clash of ancestral rivalries (in this case between the descendent of a Viking raider-king and the his first English victims) comes dangerously (and supernaturally) alive in the child of the two lines. There, it results in the young son throwing an ancient spear-head (mounted on a modern mop-handle) at this father. But that’s not the line Ancestral follows at all. That tagline, I can’t help feeling, is misleading.

Rather, having awoken those elemental forces once summoned to life by his wizardly ancestors, Tim finds himself with a supernatural servitor all too ready to take his slightest childish resentment or whim as a potentially lethal command. And it’s not either of his parents, nor his grandparents, that he has a problem with, but those difficult buggers in his class at school. (It could be said Tim is on the road to becoming what the parents of An Echo of Children feared their child would become.)

Ancestral is a fine supernatural novel, full of classic Campbell linguistic spookery. (It contains what may be the boiled-down essence of all of his negative suggestiveness, in the line: “No, not a face; the swelling mass had none.” Is that the denial of a face, or the refusal to see one? Either way, the reader’s left with the image of some sort of face/not-face… swelling…)

He has some fun with language too, as with a visit to the Pizza Piper (one of a series of punningly-named eateries that pepper his work):

“The pizzas proved palatable, though Tim perceived politeness had prompted his parents to purchase them despite their presentiments.”

Or, at the Fish You Wish café:

“He used his fork to separate a crunchy chunk of fish and captured a chip before raising the culinary combination to his mouth.”

Which, aside from making my mouth water, makes me think there’s a (no doubt darkly-comic) food-related horror novel to come from Campbell (if I haven’t missed one he’s done already—I’m still catching up on his prodigious output, in between re-reads of his older novels.)

Of course, there is an Antimemetics Division, you’ve just forgotten about it… The thing that threw me initially about this book is I thought it was Antimimetics Division—mimesis as in mimicry—which was compounded by the Penguin UK edition having a deer on the cover, making me think of aliens imitating Earthly forms. (A four-eyed deer, at that. Which makes me wonder if there might be a rebus puzzle going on here. Four-eyed-deer? No idea.) But it’s memesis as in memory. Antimemetics are beings, ideas, forces, that devour, negate, or generally affect human memory. So the science-fictional question behind this book is, “How do you combat an entity whose existence you’ve likely already forgotten?”

The job of doing that—and it is a job, mostly made up of meetings, training updates and paperwork (“Paperwork saves lives”)—is the purview of the Antimemetics Division, part of the larger Unknown Organisation, which is not an organisation that’s unknown, but one that deals with Unknowns. As the head of the AD (as I’ll call it from now, to save my word-processor’s spellcheck facility from a meltdown), Marie Quinn, explains:

“When empiricism and the scientific method were first starting to take shape, we realised that there were phenomena in the world that actively defied reason. Violations, weirdnesses, defects… places, events, ideas…”

Or, as one of her co-workers says, on reading through the AD’s database of known Unknowns:

“They have to be jokes. That’s how most of them read. Like very bad, dark, frightening jokes.”

The first half of the book is, essentially, a collection of short stories or episodes in which the AD deals with a variety of often invisible, sometimes humanoid (so it’s mimesis as well as memesis) Unknowns—antimemes, infovores, memory-corrupting entities, you know the sort of thing. Despite having at their disposal a variety of technologies, including hi-tech containment units, a pharmacy full of mnestic drugs (for the enhancement and restoration of memory), advanced concepts (“ideatic space”, “consensus nominality”), rigorous training (you might think it’s your first day in the Division, but it’s possible you’ve just had the memory of an entire career there wiped out), and lots of paperwork, but what they’re dealing with, ultimately, defies reason, and requires a sort of practical knowhow (or unknow-how) to defeat, or at least contain. It also requires a certain amount of bottom-line “is it better to let one person die than risk the release of a dangerous entity on the entire human race?”-style thinking.

The protagonist throughout this first half is Marie Quinn, whose life is a constant battle with some entities, and an attempt to keep numerous plates spinning with regard to others. (She regularly reads trivia so as to keep a certain low-level memetic entity that’s attached itself to her from feeding on her more important memories).

In the second half, the book leaves the short story feel for a single narrative about a far more apocalyptic and world-threatening entity, and it’s this I found a little less engaging. What worked in the first half of the book—a lot of quick ideas, sharp narrative turns, a somewhat absurd level of humour, and a number of characters you meet only to witness their demise—worked less, for me, in the more sustained narrative of the second half. There, the quickfire plot-turns, for instance, left me unsure what was actually going on, and while that might accurately represent what it would be like to deal with a reality-warping incursion, it also lead to a certain disengagement from the narrative on my part.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, though, making the whole thing worthwhile. There might be touches of Lovecraft here—in particular “From Beyond”, with its idea that we’re surrounded by invisible entities that will turn on us as soon as they realise we’ve worked out how to see them—as well as Ligotti, for his sense of absurdist humour. qntm, though, doesn’t share Ligotti’s misanthropy or truly nihilistic (even joyfully-nihilistic) levels of despair. (And I can’t help feeling that a writer with a pseudonym like qntm is surely bound, at some point in a book, to use the phrase “non-trivial”—and he does.) This is a book that brings the can-do science fictional mindset to cosmic horror, even when it takes us into the sort of apocalyptic levels of threat to reality you find at the end of, say, Alan Moore’s Providence. As Marie Quinn says—and no Lovecraft protagonist ever said:

“I’m going to win this war… I’ll beat the universe.”

The loss of memory has a lot of potential for real human drama—no mention is made, as far as I recall, of the potential use of mnestic drugs to combat dementia—but this is a book of quickfire ideas and narrative brio, not so much character and poignancy. (There was some of that, but I felt it less because of the general idea-driven momentum of the book—plus the sense that I shouldn’t get too attached to anyone.)

Which makes me think that may be the solution to the cover’s rebus (which qntm refers to as a “braindeer” on his site): it’s a book to read for the ideas (four-eyed deer)…

If the “cosy catastrophe” is the archetypal post-WWII English SF story, surely the quiet invasion comes a close second (The Midwich Cuckoos or Quatermass II being prime examples). They’re quiet because they either occur in an isolated location (a cut off village in Cuckoos) or by hiding in plain sight (an industrial processing plant in Quatermass II). John Christopher’s The Possessors (first published in 1965) is of the former type, being set in a ski-chalet high in the Swiss Alps, which is further isolated from its nearest village when an avalanche blocks the one mountain road leading to it.

At first, the holidaymakers (all Brits, having chosen this chalet for the English-American couple who run it) continue as normal, expecting the pass to be cleared in a couple of days. They’re a hung-up bunch, many of them recovering (or not recovering) from a variety of losses: Jane Winchmore is a widow in her thirties, Douglas Poole is on the rebound from an abruptly ended affair, while hostess Mandy Hamilton left the three children from her first marriage behind in America. Others have clear compromises or unbalances in their relationships: plastic surgeon Selby Grainger is the eternal dallier-with-women, while his wife, the cooly beautiful Elizabeth, puts up with it, confident he won’t actually leave her, and Ruth Deeping clearly favours her younger son Andy over ten-year-old Stephen, whom she constantly nags. Perhaps the only fully happy one of the bunch, in fact, is eight-year-old Andy, so beloved by his mother, which is perhaps why he’s the first victim of the alien invasion. Thinking he’s found a glowing blue ball in the snow, he touches it and instantly drops to the ground. Selby declares him dead, and he’s put in a makeshift coffin in the cellar—only for him to get up and leave the chalet sometime in the night. Everyone joins in the search, though only his mother, Ruth, has any faith that a boy in so few clothes and no shoes can survive for any length of time in the snow. But he does return—only, not quite himself. Significantly colder to the touch and slightly less human, he has (as we, the readers, know from the book’s opening section) been taken over by an alien spore, flung out from its dying home planet millions of years ago, which landed by chance on the Earth and was uncovered by the recent avalanche.

The alien—symbiotic or parasitic, depending on whether you take its point of view or ours—needs to isolate the humans, one by one, so as to infect them. And of course the humans take a long time working out what’s happening, speculating first of all that it’s some new kind of illness, or an infectious mass hysteria, or even demonic possession. And all the time, the survivors are becoming increasingly besieged in the chalet, boarding themselves up against the possessors trying to get in, get them alone, and take them over.

For most of the book the story is driven by suspense and the increasing tensions between the already flawed characters. In this, there’s an obvious contrast to be drawn between the aliens (who work effortlessly together, and tempt in at least one character with the promise of an end to human struggles) and the humans, whose only working relationships are those founded on long-held compromises. Chalet owner George Hamilton, for instance, is a good husband to his wife Mandy because he ignores the bottles of gin she’s got stashed about the place, and is pretty much an alcoholic himself. (There’s a lot of drinking in the book. Interviewed in a special issue of Interzone, Sam Youd—the real name of John Christopher, and meant to rhyme with “cloud”, apparently—admitted: “It’s the way I live, yes, I do drink alcohol, and quite a bit of alcohol, though only wine…” Though it seems to have been pretty much part of the times anyway.)

It’s hard not to compare Christopher with his contemporary John Wyndham, both of whom were the face of general-readership SF in Britain at the time. Christopher’s characters are much more evidently flawed, and come with a greater dose of cynicism about human relationships, a sense that there can never be anything more than a “total failure of comprehension” between people. Offered the slightest sign of sympathy for her widowhood, young Jane just wants to escape, and instantly regrets it the one time she shares her feelings of despair with someone else. The sense is that isolation and compromise are built-in to the human condition, whereas the characters in, say, Day of the Triffids, though they have to overcome external difficulties and the occasional dangerous human, will eventually find some sense of community, even family, in the end. For Wyndham, decency is a struggle but a worthwhile one; for Christopher it feels, at times, like a lost cause.

But there are resonances with other SF-horror, too. The most obvious to me was The Thing, for its icy setting and its alien that takes on human form, but also for its sense that if the invasion isn’t stopped here, the whole of the human race is at risk: “there can be no question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another, as is one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, The Horror of Fang Rock (where, as here, the isolation is prolonged by a lingering thick fog).

It’s certainly a suspenseful read, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been filmed (it was optioned, apparently), because it could surely be made on a reasonable budget. (Special effects: one glowing blue sphere.) It perhaps has less of the weird feeling I might have liked—I’d have preferred more of what seems to be promised by the German translation of the book, titled Die Unheimlichen (“The Uncanny Ones”). This is far more of an adventure/disaster tale (and the cast of flawed characters, each with their cross to bear, recalls the set-up to so many 70s disaster movies), and a successful one, at that. I’d definitely like to read more by Christopher. I’ve been meaning to read The Tripods since around the end of the 1970s…