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Strange Things and Stranger Places
  
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Strange Things and Stranger Places (Hardcover)

de Ramsey Campbell (Author)
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From Publishers Weekly

The previously published stories in this collection, which also includes a new novella, seem to have languished in obscurity until now for a reason: very few stand out, and none achieve the resonance of Campbell's best horror novels, such as The Count of Eleven. The collection does frequently display his remarkable talent for twisting the ordinary into the darkly surreal, but some of these early efforts lack the taut construction which shapes his later flights of fancy. In "Cat and Mouse" (1972), the narrator decides his new house is "hunting" him before much has happened to convince the reader of this odd conceit. Other stories seem like throwaway attempts at well-worn genres: "Wrapped Up" and "Rising Generation," both written in 1974, respectively run through the usual mummy and zombie shtick. The new novella, "Needing Ghosts," occupies a category of its own, depicting a nightmarish odyssey through a strangely distorted suburban landscape, as a novelist desperately tries to reassure himself that he hasn't simply imagined his entire career. The images are disturbingly inventive, but in the end the novella's harrowing, delusionary pointlessness is so like a bad dream that the reader just wishes it would end. Campbell's fans, however, will admire his venture into even weirder territory and should welcome the collection as a whole.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A middle-drawer miscellany--eight stories and two novellas- -that spans the 20-year career of British horror-writer Campbell. At his best (as in Midnight Sun, 1991), Campbell writes elegant, soul-sucking horror that rivals the genre's finest--but there's none of his best here. To his credit, Campbell admits as much in his introduction, although he does preen about the most recent entry here--the previously unpublished novella ``Needing Ghosts.'' Before reaching it, the reader encounters, first, one of the author's earliest tales, ``Cat and Mouse,'' a lackluster bit of feline terror that does, however, flow smoothly. Next up is the once privately published ``Medusa,'' a true Campbell oddity since it's a science-fiction novella, an unsettling tale of alien encounter. Campbell says it's his strongest work of sf, since ``here and there imagination surfaces,'' and that's about right. Next come four stories inspired by the ghoulish E.C. comics of the 50's: one deals with zombies, a second with mummies, both obviously; ``A New Life'' is a wrenching take on Frankenstein from the monster's point of view, while ``Run Through'' is the collection's only truly scary tale--an eerie mosaic of flashbacks revealing a man pursued by a monster. Three mid-80's stories follow, two of them climaxing with the sort of predictable twist favored by their original publisher, TZ (Twilight Zone) Publications. And then there's ``Needing Ghosts,'' in which a writer takes a dreamlike odyssey through a threatening town and into the mystery of his own life, and perhaps death. It's Campbell at his most surreal--and most self-indulgent: a lament for the writer's lot that mixes horror and black humor as awkwardly as did his most recent novel, The Count of Eleven (1992)--not a happy augury for future Campbell work. With so much Campbell to read or reread, only die-hard fans will want to bother with these scrappy leavings. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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4.0étoiles sur 5 5 stars for "Needing Ghosts"; 3 for the rest of the book, Nov. 5 2003
Par Un client
STRANGE THINGS AND STRANGER PLACES, another welcome short-story collection from horror grandmaster Ramsey Campbell, nevertheless doesn't offer quite enough in terms of quality and quantity to compare favorably with his great earlier collections of short horror fiction, from DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT in the early '70s all the way through to WAKING NIGHTMARES and ALONE WITH THE HORRORS, both dating from the early '90s.

While the stories on offer in this volume are, on the whole, as good as anything being done in horror fiction today--except for one regrettable entry entitled "Cat and Mouse", which doesn't exactly open the collection on a note of high promise--none of them quite exhibits the genius for subtle, intricate, blood-curdling storytelling evident throughout Campbell's work. The best of the shorter pieces here is undoubtedly the truly creepy "Run Through", a story that needs to be read first, described later. A few other stories also offer some decent chills along more familiar lines: an odd new children's toy craze of unknown and possibly sinister origins in "Passing Phase", a lonesome, gloomy detour through a particularly twisted and unwelcoming mirror maze in "The Next Sideshow", and the malevolent miniature escapee from an ancient, broken-down arcade machine in "Little Man". Other stories ("Rising Generation", "A New Life", "Wrapped Up") less successfully attempt to breathe new life into musty old pulp horrors, while the novella "Medusa", possibly Campbell's only published attempt at science fiction, almost succeeds as a strange tale of visionary terror and awe, perhaps hindered by its potentially alienating reliance on oblique language and invented terminology.

But the jewel of this volume is unquestionably its final entry, the remarkable and terrifying novella "Needing Ghosts", whose appearance in this collection marked its first (and presumably only) publication in the US. This extended journey through an eerie twilit landscape where lingering anxieties coexist with nightmare horrors is a crowning achievement in modern weird and horror fiction. The conclusion, which, quite unexpectedly, both completes and intensifies this sublimely hellish vision, is one of Campbell's most powerful and stunning (and that's saying something), offering perhaps the most stoically unflinching glimpse into the heart of the void the world of horror literature has yet put forth. One of the major works of horror fiction from this, or any, era, "Needing Ghosts", all by itself, is worth at least the full price of this collection.

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