Saturday 19 February 2011

Book Reviews of Ramsey Campbell's Creatures Of The Pool & Obsession

Ramsey Campbell is the greatest contemporary writer of horror fiction but is completely unknown to the public & ignored by the mainstream. Creatures of the Pool one of his most recent novels is an updating of & homage to Lovecraft's aquatic tale of terror The Shadow Over Innsmouth, set in Campbell's home town of Liverpool. He is going over old ground here in comparison to his previous masterpiece The Grin Of The Dark but has all the disturbing atmosphere of classic Campbell. Read a short review here from Skulls In The Stars Blog.

Obsession is an older novel of his from 1985 which I have had in my collection for years but have only now got around to reading. It's a psychologically 'realistic' horror novel of subtle supernatural intrusion into everyday life, where even at the end your not sure that the uncanny is in fact all in the mind. Read Arthur B's review in Ferretbrain here.

Saturday 5 February 2011

Book Review of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles by Mat Brewster (blogcritics) & Rudyard Kipling's Strange Tales

The cold mid winter is the best season for 19th century ghost and horror stories and so I read over the Xmas period Rudyard Kipling's Strange Tales, a collection of his horror and supernatural stories containing such classics as 'They,' The Phantom Rickshaw and The Mark of the Beast. Also the Sherlock Holmes gothic crime novella The Hound of the Baskervilles by of course Arthur Conan Doyle. Read Mat Brewster's review from blogcritics here.