Fiction Reviews
The Incubations
(2024) Ramsey Campbell, Flame Tree Press,
£20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 2231pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58929-2
A quietly terrifying folk horror and urban nightmare tale, touching on childhood trauma, alienation, miscommunication, and becoming a social pariah. Add in Nazi-occultism, and demonic folklore for quite a potent cauldron indeed.
The Merseyside village, Settleham and the German village Alphafen are twinned due to both having received heavy bombing during the second World War despite being of no heavy strategic importance to either side in the conflict.
Decades after a long pen-pal relationship arranged by their schools because of their shared pain and loss, Settleham driving instructor, Leo Parker decides to travel to Alphafen to unite with his long-range contact there, Hanna Weber.
While Hanna and her family and neighbours are incredibly hospitable, rolling out the red carpet and refusing to let Leo pay for anything he wants to buy, eat or drink, they seem guarded and cultic. They are particularly evasive about legends associated with the regional Alps, and Leo only gets details on those from a now aging Nazi sympathiser from England. Hitler was fascinated by legends that ‘Alps’, (demonic imps the mountain range was named after) were active in the area. Leo tries to buy a rare antiquarian book that references these ‘Alp-entities’ only to find the German villagers going to great lengths to keep it from him.
As Leo leaves Germany, his life falls apart. Attempting to reunite a lost boy with his parents at the airport, he finds the parents accusing him of trying to abduct the child. They bear their grudge through the flight home where he gets so overcome with anxiety that he tries opening the aircraft door in mid-flight.
Back in Settleham, Leo finds that everything he says and tries to say to a woman he is giving a driving lesson triggers her into thinking he is mocking her dyslexia. He has to quit his job. Then his mother gets unfairly convinced that he hates her cooking. A talk he is invited to give on his trip to Germany is ruined by every photo he shows in his slides having butterflies dominating the pictures (oversized butterflies and other strange insects frequently attack him). The police assume he is a drug trafficker. The misunderstandings pile up on top of one another at a relentless pace.
Leo realizes that his own haunting is also spreading like a contagion, making others fear and loathe him with little provocation. They don’t know what is troubling them, but they do know it only happens because of Leo. He links his increasing ostracisation to repeated efforts by members of the German community to phone him, and tries to dispose of his phone, (which has a frightening tendency to keep findings it way back to him) and this strange behaviour itself makes the police suspicious. The main detective on the case finds that he himself feels uncomfortable and faces strange phenomena due to contaminating contact with Leo. He just can’t find enough evidence of a crime to arrest Leo to get him out of the way and cure himself.
The hero is faced with a dilemma, seek help, only to spread his supernatural malady to those offering support, or cut himself off increasingly from contact with others for their protection as much as his own.
The entities responsible for Leo’s social destruction are never seen, but their impact is all too apparent. Leo induces fear, paranoia and revulsion without ever being anything other than a quiet, polite unassuming man. It is his ordinariness and that readers will relate to him on many levels that makes his story all the more distressing.
Modern horror often fails to allow for modern computer and I-Phone tech, but here, for the middle third of the book at least, Leo’s phone becomes his worst enemy and a major channel for the forces out to get him. It is the slow creepiness against a very real world everyday backdrop that makes this story work so well. There are no big set pieces, no visceral, splatterpunk death scenes, but the horror is very real. Many readers will have lost friends because of simple misunderstandings, assumptions and misinterpretations, a word out of place, etc, with little hope of reconciliation of putting things right. That is the very thing the Alps generate and feed on. Few characters deserve their terrible fate less than Leo does here. Seeing if he overcomes in the end is nerve shredding stuff. It makes for compelling reading throughout.
Arthur Chappell
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