"The Nameless," Ramsey Campbell

"At last the rain pattered away. The circular blade of the sun tore a gap in the clouds. Gerry dug her second pair of shoes out of her bag, then she squelched through mud and drooling grass towards the Euston Road. All the buildings looked washed and put out to dry; the roofs of cars steamed like blocks of ice. She hurried to the station, which was beginning to feel like home."

Horror novels get a bad rap. Maybe not quite as bad as romance novels, but definitely worse than mysteries (which are increasingly elevated by the number of "literary" writers delving into them, like Banville and Chabon) and, thanks to the Harry Potter, worse than fantasy, which requires a similar suspension of disbelief on readers' parts. Perhaps because I was raised on ghost and monster stories, I feel bad about this. However, a bad mystery at least usually has on its side a plot that propels a reader toward some kind of resolution to a puzzle, where a bad horror novel usually just makes the reader cringe. Stephen King is a good example of where horror novels can be either so satisfying or so absurd. King's early books are imaginative, peopled with vivid characters, fast-paced with intense climaxes, and the supernatural elements feel organic and plausible. King's later books are flimsy, cartoonish, with almost universally wretched endings, as King breaks the bond of trust with a reader willing to believe in the supernatural by pushing the endings so far into the realm of the ridiculous that they poison the whole integrity of the novel.

I read "The Nameless" because my father was getting rid of his Ramsey Campbell books and I was interested. Although the characterization wasn't particularly strong, and the main character was not particularly compelling, Campbell is a far above average writer, a master of description, and the book appealed to me on a craft level, and as an Anglophile. Part of the pleasure of the book was in the details of the London and Glasgow cityscapes, and the grey concrete world of the motorways and marshes where the book's "nameless" lived and conducted their nefarious business. The book wasn't the kind that transcended its genre, the way many mysteries are increasingly doing these days, but it was thoroughly entertaining. Other would-be practitioners could definitely learn a thing or two.