Booking, The (Novella)
Steve Dillon
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Written by Ramsey Campbell
Published by Dark Regions Press
I’ve had the advance review copy of Ramsey Campbell’s The Booking for a while but was savoring it until I had some real quality downtime. A recent bout of flu, combined with food poisoning and bed-rest, has given me that time, and an intermittent helping of delirium has helped me along… and I must say it’s almost worth bearing the bug for. 😮
Reflecting the Lovecraftian influence on Mr. Campbell, the opening line hooked me in: “When they found him, this text was all he had.”
After a brilliant opening line, the reader dashes headlong into the story, but then there is a section break and—boom! You hit a wall that you have to climb.
Although I’ve read a lot of Ramsey Campbell, I still find it hard at times to get straight into some of his stories, and this one proved no exception. He sometimes really makes you work through the words to get the sense of what’s happening. Don’t get me wrong… I always find it’s well worth the effort, but I sometimes think new readers may be put off by the opening paragraph of the story proper:
“The scrawny bench might have been designed to discourage lingering. The seat was an uninviting chilly metal lattice, and the back leaned inches away from the vertical. As Kiefer perched on the thin scroll that was the edge of the seat he felt poised to make a getaway— some move, at any rate.”
Overall, Campbell is really playing at home with The Booking. Above anything else, even his knowledge of the horror genre in which he is a past master, the author knows books, libraries, and book shops. Essentially, in The Booking a hard-to-find-bookshop is owned and run by an eccentric bookseller who is in need of a web presence. The bookseller and his protégé—an unemployed book lover—are at the centre of the mystery.
After a few pages, I was enjoying the story but not really carried along with it when the following few sentences really grabbed me and stopped me from closing the book for a couple more hours of much-needed sleep:
“In that case you can swear,” the bookseller eventually said. “Your camera has to be dead all the time you’re here.” Kiefer took a breath to keep down any inadvertent response. “I swear.” “No, swear it,” Brookes insisted, lifting a rickety Edwardian annual for boys off a Bible on the desk. “Swear on this.” Kiefer planted a hand on the holy tome, which felt like a leathery body as cold as the room. “I swear,” he declared with studied steadiness, “the camera won’t be on while I’m in your shop.”
After the above line, Ramsey held me throughout the book with his usual mixture of paranoia, word play, psychology, and human relationships. With books at the heart of things, I will add this to my still-growing pile of “favourites.”
On a final note, Ramsey still surprises me with the beautiful prose which he sprinkles over his work, as with the following line: “When he shut the laptop he had an impression of preserving her image like a flower between the pages of a book.” It’s undoubtedly sentences like this that have contributed to his World Fantasy Association Life Achievement Award, which he earned in 2015 to add his huge collection of awards for horror and dark fantasy.
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Novella
Categorized:Reviews
