Sending Employees to Their Horrifying Deaths, One Person at a Time¹

by S. T. Joshi

01/17/2005

Campbell, Ramsey. The Overnight. Harrogate, UK: PS Publishing, 2004. 414 p.

If anyone has practiced the adage of "Write what you know," it is Ramsey Campbell. Early in his career he made the unnerving admission that the crazed murderer in The Face That Must Die (1979/1983) was, in many fundamentals of his character and attitudes, based upon his mother as she descended into madness in her final years. More recently, The House on Nazareth Hill (1996) might--in its intense focus on the troubled relations between a man and his teenage daughter--be seen as a (presumably exaggerated) reflection of his own relations with his then-teenage daughter, Tamsin. And who can forget "The Chimney,: an early tale that chillingly echoes the estrangement of Campbell's parents? No event in Campbell's life, however innocuous, seems out of bounds for fictional treatment; but that event frequently serves as little more than a springboard for imaginative voyagings in the best traditions of supernatural horror.

In the spring of 2000, as Campbell announces in a brief preface to The Overnight, he began working fulltime at a Borders bookstore in Cheshire Oaks. I am sure I was not the only one to be astounded and dismayed when I heard at the time that the leading horror writer of our generation felt the need to take on this work to help support himself and his family. One thinks of Lovecraft toiling away at poorly paying revision work to make ends meet, or Machen grinding out reams of vapid journalism before he received his Civil List pension. Even though Campbell's bookstore stint lasted only a few months, it seemed to reflect badly on a couple of facets of contemporary society: the state of horror publishing, especially in the UK and the inequities of a capitalist system that consistently fails to reward excellence but only rewards popular appeal--even though it reflected supremely well on Campbell himself in his willingness to make sacrifices for his art and his family. We should therefore not be surprised that, in a few years time, Campbell transmuted his reasonably pleasant descent into wage-slavery in the crucible of his imagination, the result being The Overnight, a supernatural novel that ranks high among the achievements of his long and varied career.

We here encounter, in a present-tense narration that Campbell has used relatively infrequently for long works, most notably in the novella Needing Ghosts (1990), a succession of workers at Texts, a bookstore in a small shopping plaza (Campbell calls it a "retail park") in the Manchester/Liverpool area. A setting less promising for the incursion of the supernatural would seem difficult to imagine, but Campbell manages it through shifting narrative perspectives--each chapter is seen through the eyes of a different bookstore worker--and the extraordinarily subtle accumulation of bizarre details.

Texts is run by an American named Woody, whose attempts at introducing a kind of brash, cheerful efficiency are not well received by his largely British staff of young professionals. Interpersonal tensions also add their weight of unease to the narrative: one employee has just left his partner (a fellow employee) and taken up with another co-worker; another employee named Agnes (she pronounces it Anyes) is harried by overprotective parents; another, a gay man named Jake, is predictably harassed by an intolerant bigot named Greg. But these emotional complications are only the unnerving backdrop to increasingly harrowing supernatural manifestations that eventually become too plain to be ignored. A constant and ever-thickening fog seems to hover around the retail park, as computers develop minds of their own, failing to correct typographical errors even after repeated proofreading. Elevators malfunction. Books continually seem to get mis-shelved, and, most disturbing of all, small grey animate objects are half-glimpsed skulking around shelves, in the stockroom, or in the workers staffroom. What could be the cause of these manifestations?

It is here that The Overnight might perhaps be criticized for excessive reticence. Campbell does not wish to spell out the matter in an obvious way, but the hints that are sprinkled throughout the narrative--hints based upon the sinister history of the region as a focal point of violence and death for centuries or millennia--seem just a trifle too vague and imprecise to account for the horrors on display. It also takes a pretty large leap of faith to assume that such age-old horrors, many of which are exhibited during an all-night shelving session that Woody insists upon, lending the book its title, could have the wherewithal to affect the most sophisticated paraphernalia of modern life--from computers to electronic elevators to the very essence of contemporary published books, whose text and illustrations hideously melt into an amorphous mass before one horrified worker's eyes.

But this cavil seems insignificant in contrast to the many deft images of terror and bizarrerie, as well as the gripping sense of cumulative horror that envelops The Overnight. As the novel develops, such seemingly innocuous words as "gritty," "grimy," "fog" and even "smile" take on appalling overtones. The novel may also be open to the flaw of introducing too many characters (we encounter such bookstore employees as Woody, Madeleine, Jill, Connie, Wilf, Geoff, Greg, Jake, Gavin, Ray, Angus, Agnes and Nigel, along with cameos by the authors Brodie Oates and Adrian Bottomley), few of whom seem sufficiently different from one another to take on distinct personalities of their own. But there is a certain perverse fascination in seeing each of these characters killed off one by one toward the end of the novel, in scenes that are narrated by the doomed workers themselves as they encounter a fate they strive haplessly to avoid.

The Overnight also reveals Campbell's finest melding of humor and horror since The Count of Eleven (1991). Aside from some moments of extraordinary wordplay, the novel features moments of pure hilarity, which in some inexplicable way only augment the horror of the general situation. One scene in which the relentlessly cheerful Woody strives to encourage his reserved British underlings to greet their potential customers with grinning smiles and a robust Welcome to Texts! is a comic vignette that Wodehouse could not have surpassed. And Campbell has also developed an enviable skill in portraying the finest shades of emotional nuance in the interpersonal exchanges between his characters. All apart from its merits as a supernatural novel, The Overnight can be read with pleasure as a dissection of the societal and personal complexities of life in the twenty-first century. And the manner in which Campbell successively shifts the narrative voice to exactly those characters whose actions or sensations carry the story forward is a remarkable feat of literary architecture.

With The Overnight Campbell proves what is already beyond the need of proof--that he is the most consistently gifted and rewarding writer of supernatural horror now in practice. He has, in the past forty years, produced hundreds of short stories and a score of novels that have set an increasingly higher mark for other writers to aim at, and with few exceptions he alone has reached that mark with any degree of regularity.

¹This is a parody of the Borders Mission statement: "To be the best-loved provider of books, music, video, and other entertainment and informational products and services. To be the world leader in selection, service, innovation, ambiance, community involvement, and shareholder value. We recognize people to be the cornerstone of the Borders experience by building internal and external relationships, one person at a time." Its use is intended by the editors of Necropsy only as an expression of demented humor.