The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell, A Horror Book Review by Benjamin Kurt Unsworth

In a Ramsey Campbell novel, there are some things you come to expect: the mundane made creepy, characters that aren’t likeable but who make perfect protagonists, dialogue that leaps off the page and puts you in a headlock, reminders of how fragile our lives are, and a sense of unease that’s more probing than an alien abduction. With ‘The Incubations’, all of these tropes are on show, and though it’s a book that’s hard to stomach in one go without questioning whether the very air your breathing is trying to kill you, every page nevertheless leaves you salivating for the next one.

Don’t let the title deceive you

This novel isn’t about creepy goings-on on a neo-natal ward – things are far creepier and more disconcerting than that. Events open with the protagonist, Leo Parker, teaching a pupil to drive as part of his parents’ company when suddenly he finds himself making minor word fluffs, more of which ensue the more he tries to stop them, ending up in his pupil accusing him of mocking her dyslexia. It is a prologue that demonstrates Campbell’s love of cross-purpose dialogue, whetting your appetite of what’s yet to come.

Soon, Leo finds himself being pursued by some dogged abstract force, turning the people around him against him, and which fundamentally calls every little thing he says or does into question until even delight in having a meal out forces things to turn sour; we soon learn that the root cause of all this involves a trip to Alphafen, a town in Germany twinned with Leo’s own, from which he has brought something back. Or – so it seems.

The beauty of Campbell’s prose lies in its frustration.

Everything is laid to bare in aggravating, ever-oscillating detail, like an autopsied corpse refusing to stay still. Leo himself, as well as every character he interacts with, feels infinitely human, with even moments such as a psychiatrist’s “eyes start[ing] coming out of her head” becoming the right of humorous and eerie. It’s hard to pinpoint where that line between tones lies; what’s certain is that Campbell knows how to tiptoe along it with precision, and his prose opens everything up to multiple interpretations, all of which will catch you off guard.

To that end, the shadow that history and geography casts over events and people is incredibly forceful, and not merely in the way a ghost story might impinge the past upon the future. Although his authorial trademark vivid descriptions are present too, often with surprising grimace, it is his love of watching the reader squirm most at the fore. Even the most everyday description is treacherous in his hands: “[Kerr] slapped the arms of the chair like a displaced punishment.”

Yet, those who enjoy an evil creature to sink their teeth into

– or rather, those who enjoy an evil creature that’ll sink its teeth into them – fear not! Campbell hands that out too, simply in a far slyer way than you expect. And suffice to say, if you find the restrained glimpse he offers here to be harrowing or unnerving, you can only pray that his imagination never unleashes its full force upon our reality.

Misalignment is the other order of the day, almost an entity by itself, quieter than the author’s other novels but equally as eager to create chaos. Like a light switch flicked rapidly back and forth, none of the moments Campbell illuminates are by themselves creepy, it’s the mix of darkness and light, sanity and paranoia, emotion and grit, that brings out the fear; every decision, every conversation becomes an anxiety-ridden microcosm of language that never quite clicks.

Like so much of his work, it’s chameleonic in how it picks the elements it wants to make creepy, here using everyday occurrence like auto-predictive texts, changing phone plans, public speaking, to instil fear. It’s in everything that isn’t said or stated where something festers, taunting you by never quite painting one cohesive picture, and yet the overall effect, regardless of if its wielder is invisible or not, delivers a frighteningly tangible knife to the goolies.

‘Second Sight’

the bonus short story included, is another wonderful effort. It shares the same spiritual origins as the main novel, of something untoward, left to fester since WW2, manifesting in the present, but in its case finds its focus around a graveyard once hit in a bombing raid and the protagonist is in fact a blind music critic. At its base level, it’s a story which shines a torchlight at the monstrous followed up by shining it back at us with a mirror; underneath though, it’s a demonstration that Campbell knows the workings of the horror genre and how to, in relatively few words, dip into his literary bag of tricks and springboard weirdness into our imagination. If ‘The Incubations’ is the twenty-shot espresso which we are asked to stomach, ‘Second Sight’ is its two-shot latte cousin – bijou, but enjoyable.

It feels right then that ‘The Incubations’ is the novel which spearheads his 60th anniversary in horror, said spearhead not just hitting its mark but burying itself under your skin with an adamant refusal to budge. With his trademark of mixing the mundane with the disconcerting at full throttle here, Ramsey Campbell offers you here the perfect jumping-on point into his universe; and as an homage to himself and the literary predecessors whom he clearly loves, it’s a wonderfully chilling anniversary present to us readers.

The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell

A collectable hardcover edition for Ramsey Campbell’s 60 years in publication.

When a weight landed on his legs he raised his head from the violently crumpled pillow. The bed already had another occupant, and as Leo flung the quilt back so that it wouldn’t hinder his escape the creature scurried up his body to squat on his chest, clutching him with all its limbs like half a spider…

Leo Parker’s stay in Alphafen seems idyllic, but after he leaves, the nightmares begin: an airport turns into a labyrinth, his own words become treacherous if not lethal, and what are those creatures in the photographs he took? Even the therapy Leo undertakes becomes a source of menace.

Perhaps Leo has roused an ancient Alpine legend. Even once he understands what he brought back, his attempts to overcome its influence may lead into greater nightmares still…

The Ramsey Campbell Special Editions. Campbell is the greatest inheritor of a tradition that reaches back through H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the early Gothic writers. The dark, masterful work of the painter Henry Fuseli, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, is used on these special editions to invoke early literary investigations into the supernatural.

The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell, A Horror Book Review by Benjamin Kurt Unsworth