“The Words That Count” (1976)

This Ramsey Campbell story is purely a gimmick story, but as it happens it’s a gimmick I’m a little susceptible to. It reminded me of a detail I liked in a story by Margaret Irvin, “The Book,” where a possessed man’s prayers come out backward, in reverse word order. In this story, as explicitly spelled out in the last paragraph, the first word in every paragraph is the Lord’s Prayer in reverse word order. So the first word of the story is, of course, “Amen.” The conceit entirely eluded me in a story that wasn’t entirely making sense anyway, so making that explicit at the end is important. It brings home a certain aspect of the story to explain it, but formally it also weakens the story. A lot of things are definitely awkward here, perhaps most notably the first three paragraphs, which read like throat-clearing. The story features a pamphlet, as it’s called, with recognizable words from the Lord’s Prayer (e.g., “trespassers”) and a bizarre fundamentalist patriarch. Mostly it’s muddled, but also desperate and unpleasant, as the pamphlet appears to hypnotize the first-person narrator, daughter of the patriarch. The story may also be another example of a sad case where people had no idea how bad conservative Christianity was going to get. It’s unsettling because it’s unpleasant and confusing, and it gets a nice charge of the uncanny (at least for me) with the revelation of the gimmick. Unfortunately, that does not come until the end of the story, which until then veers between a trite treatment of conservative Christianity and impenetrability. Under other circumstances I might have abandoned it as early as the first paragraphs, which are terrible, and it doesn’t get much better from there. But as I say I’m susceptible to the trick of prayers in reverse word order as a symptom of demon possession. The Margaret Irvin story is much better. Interestingly, the story Campbell compares it to is W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat.” I don’t read that story the same way Campbell does, but I think another story by Harvey, “The Beast With Five Fingers,” has similar effects, featuring a man’s left hand writing with pen and paper unbeknownst to the owner of that hand. Things like that are practically impossible to do, which is where the kick of the uncanny comes in for me. You probably know the Lord’s Prayer. Try saying it backward—“amen, evil, from,” etc. It’s harder than you might think. I don’t like to imagine that religion is part of the effect here, but I suppose it could be.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

“Mackintosh Willy” (1979)

By way of something like due diligence I note first that this Ramsey Campbell story won a World Fantasy award for best short fiction. Huzzah! But I’m not sure of it myself. I may have to face that UK writer Campbell, now I’ve read some dozen or more of his stories, is a blind spot for me. My complaint is that his stories are generally way too much into a kind of cerebral “restrained horror” vein, where everything is quite normal, except one or two things are slightly off. The idea is that you notice these one or two things and their implications and then you spin off into rabbit-holes where the terror only enlarges. If only it worked so well. This story offers up a memoirish incident from childhood remembered by an adult. Mackintosh Willy might be a homeless person surviving in a ramshackle abandoned shed in a public park, or he might be a figment of a boy’s imagination, or he might be something more sinister, otherworldly, and evil. Campbell tries to tilt the story in the direction of the last, but my money is on the first—a homeless person, mocked, feared, and reviled by visitors to the park like the boy and his friends. Campbell is so circumspect that anything unsettling about the incidents simply does not come off for me. There’s an intimation that one boy may have mutilated Mackintosh Willy’s corpse, but it’s very uncertain, as is Willy himself. I struggle because The Dark Descent, which includes it, is largely reliable, “Mackintosh Willy” won that award, and Campbell has a perfectly respectable reputation as among the best horror writers of his generation (born in 1946). Indeed, Dark Descent editor David G. Hartwell waxed rhapsodic about Campbell in 1987, calling him “perhaps the most important living writer in the horror fiction field” and praising his abilities across the totality of horror, “from the Lovecraftian to the Aickmanesque.” That’s a heavy burden of expectations to lay on readers (not to mention the writer himself) and, in another century, sadly, I am not seeing it bear out. In the case of this story, I think I get that it’s the very uncertainty of Mackintosh Willy’s existence at all that is intended to be unsettling, but it seemed like a pretty slender reed to me on which to hang the whole thing. The good news about cerebral writers like Campbell and this restrained style of horror is they’re often quite lucid. The less good news is they don’t always seem to understand the main points of writing horror and thus the stories don’t always really land. Perhaps needless to say—and I’m not done with Campbell yet—YMMV.

Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Story not available online.