What do You think about The Overnight (2005)?
Any self-proclaimed aficionado of horror, be it in any form, ought to be ashamed of themselves if they aren't the least bit familiar with the brilliant body of work Ramsey Campbell has presented to the world over a period of time long enough to make him equal in ranks to horror literature as, say, Asimov, Heinlein and (Arthur C.) Clarke is to science fiction, what Romero or Argento are to genre film. Do your homework and find out for yourselves, for those of you who don't know any better. Now take the author and exclude him from the mix, and let's look at this book as a work without any presuppositions, as if an unknown submitted an Overnight manuscript to my office and I had no idea who the hell wrote it. That renders me with another bias: I myself was employed at a few book stores at one time or another, was a store assistant manager for a good while. I know what it's like pulling an overnighter in one of those places, in an unfamiliar part of town, working my ass off trying to ready the establishment for an inspection by the corporate top brass the next day. That's exactly what's going on at an English branch of the retail book store chain "Texts," situated in the always abnormally foggy Fenny Meadows retail park. Sinister and shapeless forces lurk there in the fog, and store manager Woody Blake's team of employees must deal with a cavalcade of poltergeist-like mischief that time and again confounds their efforts to have the store in top shape by dawn. That mischief starts to get nasty. Employees begin dying in ways that can't be totally explained and progress "overnight" into an utterly hallucinatory and claustrophobic nightmare. All the while, Woody's office door mysteriously locks him in, keeping him oblivious to the mayhem afoot and the fact that he's loosing his team, one by one, to the shadows that claimed the store and the souls within as their own. All Woody's concerned about, throughout, is whether or not his team are on their toes and dealing with their problems in a timely manner, and always with a smile. Indeed, Campbell's brand of Mythos fiction resurfaces here, and this time before a backdrop of the familiar modern landscape of what it's like working in retail as a minimum-waged average Joe. Under Lovecraftian conditions, of course. A great home-alone, up-late-at-night read, expertly executed with a compact and vivid group of characters under dire situations you wouldn't want to be in. That's merely touching the surface of The Overnight. It makes for a good example of dark literature we should all pay attention to, because that's how it's done. Ramsey's works, in particular The Parasite and the complete edition of The Face That Must Die, were profound early inspirations which motivated my own writing further into the macabre backwoods of telling stories. If it were not for Ramsey's writing and a roundup of a dozen or so others, yes, I'd still be a writer, but at this point I'd probably be only publishing cute poetic anecdotes for a newsletter the bar down the street puts out every month, and that would be the extent of where my professional writing life would be by now, without that sort of inspiration.---originally from "Nick Reads & Reviews"
—Nicholas
Gotta say, that Ramsey Campbell writes some pretty disturbing sh*t .... Not in the Stephen-King-piledriver sense at all (see Under the Dome)... almost the opposite – Campbell crawls inside your head, gets nice and comfy, and then opens up his little box of dark slimy things after it's too late for you to uninvite him. As of this writing, I am about 75% of the way through both this book, and Silent Children, and I have, shall we say, paused for a while, because both tales have gotten to the point where they have become more or less relentlessly disturbing, in a way that King or D. Koontz hardly ever is. King, for example, always breaks up his horror with humor. But there is nothing funny going on in the last 30% of The Overnight, and it requires a certain grim dedication to, even relish for, the sheer horror of the situation, to keep on reading in earnest. I do intend to do this! But I want to do it when I'm in the proper frame of mind, so that I can properly appreciate the horrific sequence of events for which Campbell has so carefully, even lovingly, prepared us.A word of mild warning: Some readers will find said "preparation" to be intolerably "slow" or "boring" or "pointless". I say this without having read any other reviews of the book because, as I say, I haven't finished reading it yet, and I don't wish to be confronted with anything even remotely resembling a "spoiler"! But let me say, the comments of anyone who makes this sort of remark really should be taken with a serious chunk of salt; I do believe it says more about their troublesome attention spans than it does about the book they're reading, and more about their unwillingness to invest more than a minimal amount of energy in a book in return for its "payoff". Most readers who are in that category probably haven't even gotten that far in this review, I imagine. But if you are, and if you have, please forgive me for intentionally making fun of you, but also consider the possibility that The Overnight, and Ramsey Campbell in general, may not be "your cup of tea". Not entirely sure it's mine, either ... but we'll see.UPDATE: Finished the book, and my rating stands, although the ending did pack more of a punch than I expected ... another example of Campbell's insidious writerly ways of shocking the reader but saving the most unsettling shocks -- appropriately enough -- for the end.
—JerryB
I love bookshops. I love the feel of being surrounded by books. They transport you into worlds you would otherwise never visit. Ramsey Campbell worked, for a couple of years, in a branch of Borders, in Cheshire and his inside knowledge of the mundane routines of shelf-stacking and stock rotation are put to good use here. Especially when things start to happen during the performance of those daily tasks.It starts with a fog. seemingly innocuous enough at first - well, the store is on a retail park called Fenny Meadows - marshland all around providing a magnet for low lying, swirling mists. But this fog persists, it gets worse. It invades, insinuates itself and provides a highly effective cloak for whatever is lurking in its shadowy depths. The author builds the plot and characters deliciously. A mysterious death, staff behaving oddly - or are they? Wonderful tension between the characters that we can all relate to in a working environment. The action moves forward. By now there can be no doubt in the reader's mind that something is about to go horribly wrong for the staff of Texts. Then comes the overnight shift... Wonderful reading. Highly recommended.
—Catherine Cavendish
