Fiction Reviews
The Incubations
(2024) Ramsey Campbell, Flame Tree Press,
£20 / Can$32.95 / US$24.95, hrdbk, 245pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58929-2
This is the ‘collectible’ special hardcover edition, gold and silver stamped and embossed, with an image from a painting by Henry Fuseli (friend of Mary Wollstonecraft) on the front cover and produced to mark horror ‘Grand Master’ Ramsey Campbell’s sixty years in publication.
The story begins with Leo Parker, a driving instructor, who is on his way to pick up a client when he receives a text message from Hanna, an old pen friend who lives in the (fictitious) German town of Alphafen (rendered as Alp hafen, the name, translated, has a particular significance for the rest of the story). Subsequently, the driving lesson goes disastrously awry as Leo’s erratic but increasing mispronunciation of certain words leads his student to accuse him of mocking her dyslexia. Leo himself is hugely apologetic of course, especially after the young woman’s father becomes belligerent and threatens to sully the reputation of the driving school, but he can’t quite understand what just happened. And that sense of befuddlement combined with a certain passivity runs throughout the book, rendering Leo a frustratingly unsympathetic central character.
This is despite the empathy engendered by a flashback to a terrible accident that occurred during his school years, which Leo reveals to his psychiatrist. Leo and a friend were exploring old WWII bomb sites and ventured into a ruined building where his friend, more adventurous than Leo, meets a terrible end. The shadow of that accident looms over Leo, as does the larger one of the war itself over the book as a whole. Hanna’s role as Leo’s pen friend is then explained as being the result of his school’s decision to have the pupils correspond with their German counterparts as part of a post-war town twinning exercise. However, there is something dark and ill-intentioned lurking underneath such noble sentiments as Leo’s girlfriend Emma recalls that as although the town’s mayor and several councillors flew to Alphafen, they never returned. Ominously, the last recorded message from their pilot consisted of simply “Its got in.”
At this point the story jumps ahead to Leo’s visit to Hanna and her parents who live in the pretty little town situated in the shadow of the Alps. Here Campbell uses the family’s stilted English to further enhance the growing sense of unease, as Leo himself finally begins to perceive that all is not quite right, despite the overly enthusiastic welcome that he is given by the collective Alphafen townsfolk. However, that increasingly creepy feeling is unnecessarily disrupted by the sudden appearance of an English neo-Nazi who provides a bit of an infodump by telling Leo that Alphafen was favoured by Hitler and - here I don’t want to give too much of a spoiler - strongly hints at the true meaning of ‘Alp’ and what the townsfolk might actually be up to.
Upon his return, Leo is asked to give a talk about his trip at the local town hall (clearly folk have to make their own entertainment!). This too goes down badly and things spiral increasingly out of control as whatever is affecting Leo spreads to those around him, including his mum and dad (also driving instructors). It gets to a point where the police become involved, in one of the least plausible exchanges in the book, even granted that the officer concerned is a friend of the family.
Indeed, the dialogue throughout feels curiously flat and out of date, as if excavated from the 1950s. However, with the exception of Leo’s reminiscences to his therapist, the story is clearly set in the present day, as is evident from the authorial asides on modern life which to be honest come across as more like curmudgeonly moans than the spiking of current shibboleths. Concomitantly with the dialogue, all the central characters are also peculiarly inert, even in the face of increasingly odd events and again I was left with the feeling that they had somehow been displaced from a more ‘buttoned down’ and unreactive era.
All of this adds up to a rather unsatisfactory read. Although an atmosphere of paranoia is nicely generated the overall impression I had was as if an episode of that old middle class sit com Terry and June ( for those too young to have had it inflicted upon them, see: wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_and_June) had been transported into The Twilight Zone. Perhaps that is just the very thing for some readers, but not this one, I’m afraid.
Steven French
See elsewhere Arthur's review of The Incubations.
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