Fiction Reviews
Ancient Images
(1989/2023) Ramsey Campbell, Flame Tree Press, £20.00, hrdbk, 296pp, ISBN 978-1-78758-763-2
I’m aware of Ramsey Campbell by reputation as an elder statesman of British horror, of course, but have never read him before picking up this reprint of Ancient Images, first published back in 1989. As a latecomer to horror I have much ground to make up.
The novel commences with the unusual death of Graham Nolan, a professional film buff and buyer who specialises in tracking down lost pictures from cinema’s first golden age. No sooner has he come into possession of Tower of Fear, a suppressed British horror film starring both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, then he seemingly jumps to his death. The film itself cannot be found and many question whether it existed at all.
Nolan’s demise is witnessed by colleague, friend and editor Sandy Allan, who finds that she cannot rest easy without confirming the film’s existence and restoring Nolan’s posthumous reputation. But as she investigates with the help of his notes, her familiar world increasingly recedes. Members of the cast and crew she tracks down all seem deeply marked by their experiences, while Sandy’s feeling of being somehow watched increases.
All the evidence she gathers leads her to the small farming town of Redfield, complete with tall, sinister tower, and the aristocratic family of the same name that presides over it. Is this the original of the tower in the film? Why did the Redfields prevent the film’s release back in the 1930’s and can they be behind its disappearance once again?
Ancient Images is – among other things – a horror novel about horror films, but it wears any metaness lightly. Sandy’s romantic interest is a film critic of course, we do learn a fair amount about Tower of Fear and the golden age of black and white horror along the way, and we even get a brief glimpse of the lives of the writers of a video nasty fanzine (called Gorehound, because of course it is).
But Campbell is too good a genre writer to let these nods and winks disrupt the flow of the narrative. The trope of the evil or cursed film is these days a familiar one thanks to The Ring and other efforts, but Ancient Images doesn’t lean that hard into this. Tower of Fear itself is more plot McGuffin than anything else, while the book itself pivots half way through into Wicker Man-adjacent pastoral shenanigans.
Reading this is – I presume by design – a peculiar, brooding experience. The repetitive sense that Sandy is being watched and the emphasis on the drabness of life in late 80’s London sets one up very well for her transition later in the novel into the uncanny. It’s not showy, but it is an excellent piece of prose styling from a writer at this point more than 25 years into his career.
It has dated a little – what novel written in 1989 has not? But as an exemplar of Campbell’s work, as well as a sophisticated exercise in quiet horror flavoured with cinephilia, it certainly stands up.
Tim Atkinson
You can see Ian's take on Ancient Images here.
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