I’ve covered the works of Ramsey Campbell many times over the years here at Horror Delve, including many of his novels and novelettes but most commonly, a bunch of his short stories. What follows is the next installment in my ongoing series examining selections of his short stories. Below are links to all my previous Ramsey Campbell short story lists.
R.C. Stories List I: https://horrordelve.com/2013/09/25/my-top-ten-favorite-ramsey-campbell-short-stories/
R.C. Stories List II: https://horrordelve.com/2014/09/20/holes-for-faces-by-ramsey-campbell/
R.C. Stories List III: https://horrordelve.com/2015/02/09/far-away-and-never-by-ramsey-campbell-review/
R.C. Stories List IV: https://horrordelve.com/2015/06/01/13-more-great-short-stories-by-ramsey-campbell/
R.C Stories List V: https://horrordelve.com/2018/07/09/yet-another-batch-of-ramsey-campbell-stories/
R.C. Stories List VI: https://horrordelve.com/2019/07/08/by-the-light-of-my-skull-by-ramsey-campbell-review/
R.C. Stories List VII: https://horrordelve.com/2020/09/14/ramsey-campbell-short-stories-list-vi/
If you want to peruse all the entries for Ramsey here at Horror Delve (including novels, etc.), you can find the extensive list here: https://horrordelve.com/?s=Ramsey+Campbell .
THE LIST (Listed By Order of Publication):
1. “Rising Generation” (1975) – A teacher takes her students on a field trip to an old castle ruin which sits upon a high hill. The old baron who lived there long ago was said to keep zombies working as slaves in the caves beneath the castle. Could those rumors actually be true?
2. “Cyril” (1976) – A woman lures a shy young man into her house for the night with designs on making him an unwitting participant in a spell she’s casting.
3. “Root Cause” (1986) – An anxious librarian notices people being overcome by something while they are on a large overpass near his job. He’s subsequently dealing with the threat of three delinquent youths he accidentally overheard planning a criminal act.
4. “Jack in the Box” (1987) – This story casts you, the reader, as a person who’s obsessed with blood and driven to murder.
5. “Watch the Birdie” (1984) – Graffiti on a bathroom wall and a talking bird play a role in invoking something inhuman within a Liverpool pub.
6. “The Alternative” (1994) – A successful accountant with a happy family life suffers from a recurring dream where his life is drastically different. In that version, he and his family are miserable and living in extreme poverty. In the real world, he finds the downtrodden house where his unfortunate alternative-self resides and recognizes things inside as identical to that of his dreams. He begins to try and secretly assist this divergent family, often at the expense of his own real one. This is an excellent, weird tale by Ramsey!
7. “One Copy Only” (2002) – A judge by day, who spends her downtime reading all manner of fantasy books, finds herself growing weary of her favorite author’s new, recently-adopted style. After discovering a bookshop called Books Forever, she happily accepts recommendations from the booksellers there. While enjoyable, these recommended books are all geared toward younger readers. When she asks for something not meant for the YA market, he directs her to an upstairs room which features a large collection of never before seen books by classic authors, including one by her favorite, Clarence Cole Hope, called The Glorious Brethren. The only drawback is that these books can only be read in that room and never removed from it. There’s something magical about the place which only a select few are permitted to enter. Later it’s revealed to contain completed works which their authors never finished during their lifetime (Edwin Drood, etc.). This superbly written story will particularly appeal to book lovers.
8. “Out of the Woods” (2002) – A cut-throat book publisher is approached by a mysterious man about how his practices are affecting nature. He blatantly ignores the suggested remedies which leads to a horrible visitation.
9. “The Dreamed” (2017) – Don Jones takes a vacation to the Greek Isles, but the front desk accidentally switches his passport with one of a different person named Knoft staying there. Knoft is away but due back later, so Don holds onto his passport to exchange with him when he returns. As the days continue to pass, Don tries to enjoy his vacation while constantly worrying about the loss of his passport. The way people react to him and the occasional glimpses he gets of Knost begin to make him question his own sanity.
10. “The Fourth Call” (2021) – While stuck at his childhood home in the rural village of Leanbridge, a man recalls the bizarre Bundle family. The Bundles were very odd, dressing up like strange birds to travel door-to-door demanding mince pies on successive nights around Christmas. He remembers their appearance and activity as being very disturbing. While this may sound silly at first, it becomes truly chilling as the story continues on toward its ominous finale. I particularly like how it incorporated the idea of separate but linked entities visiting the house on successive nights around Christmastime (which harkens to A Christmas Carol). In lesser hands the bird-like appearance and movements of the Bundles would be difficult to pull off as horror, but here it’s masterfully done. This is a chilling, unsettling piece of festive horror I won’t soon forget.
11. “Someone To Blame” (2022) – A boy is bored while being drug by his curator parents to an old Swedish church to examine its mausoleum. Unable to find anyone to grant them access, his parents simply let themselves into the place. They discover a coffin inside which has lost one of its padlocks that had fallen away leaving just a single rusty lock in place. When the boy touches it, it comes off. Soon afterwards, something starts following them on the journey back home. Ramsey wrote this tale as a sequel to the great M. R. James story Count Magnus.
12. “Up Above” (2022) – A woman and her husband leave their young son with her father Paul to watch while they go see a movie. Paul is determined to prove he’s up to the task, so when he hears the boy mumbling something while on the floor above him, he goes to investigate, only to realize locating the boy is much harder than expected and the strange things the boy keeps saying from overhead concerns him even more.
13. “A Friendly Gesture” (2024) – An auctioneer absently returns a wave to a passenger riding on a passing barge who he can’t quite make out. After that he begins seeing similarly vague beings waving to him from various distances with startling regularity making him question whether they are actually human or not. As the story progresses, their insistence upon him becomes so aggressive that it adversely affects his life. This very eerie story appears in Nightmare Abbey issue #6!
Article by Matt Cowan
Horror Delve 