English horror writers are often more effective than American ones; their cool, carefully-constructed prose tends to make the horrors about which they write seem that much more horrible. The late John Wyndham and James Herbert were both masters of this style of writing, but the grand prize may well belong to Ramsey Campbell, who is happily still with us, and who writes a cool, almost icy prose that takes an already chilling genre and chills it to absolute zero.
Campbell's debut novel may have the most unsettling title in all of literary history: THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER, an incredibly audacious debut novel that is so indescribably weird that I must leave each potential reader to experience it for him- or herself.
I can give you the bare bones: the story begins when Clare Frayn and her brother Rob are driving to his flat in Liverpool and a man steps out into the street and deliberately causes Clare, who is behind the wheel, to crash. Right before impact, Rob foolishly opens his door to yell at the man in the street and ends up with a severed arm, and later dies of his injury. But that isn't the unsettling thing: someone made off with the arm.
It's an auspicious beginning, and sets the stage for one of the weirdest horror novels I have ever read, its weirdness made all the more wonderful by Campbell's utter refusal to play the emotion card. Stephen King commented that people who read this book might get the feeling that "Campbell has not written a novel so much as grown one in a petri dish." A fair assessment, and Campbell's cool, icy prose may be a matter of taste, but for me it made this novel a thing to be savored. And the plot has just the slightest echoes of Stoker's DRACULA if you can locate them.
Good horror novels are rare. Great ones resonate long after their authors depart this earth. THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER is stupidly out of print at the moment, but I managed to locate a used paperback copy through Amazon and I urge all horror fans: if you have not experienced this book, get a copy if you can find one. It is, in a word, sensational.
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Top reviews from other countries
Normen Behr
Verwirrend und so abstrus wie sein Titel
Reviewed in Germany on May 15, 2010