New Campbell collection - Inconsequential Tales

[dem]

very surprised to find this was included!

The Burning: (Ghosts & Scholars 3, 1981: it made Best of Ghosts & Scholars, too!)

Alan Hunter's illustration for The Burning in Ghosts & Scholars #3

Miseryside during the Thatcher years. A time of swingeing cuts, mass unemployment, growing social unrest. Blake has recently been made redundant and it feels as though he's been pronounced obsolete. On November 5th and, with nothing better to do he attends a public firework display in the park.

Perhaps Blake was just depressed yet it seemed to him that while Hallowe'en was supposed to be the feat of the macabre, tonight was altogether grimmer. How else could one describe a night when an executioner's victim was resurrected to be burned a thousandfold?

Earlier in the evening a group of youths pelted the fire brigade with bottles but now a second, far deadlier mob emerge from the trees. Blake is singled out, set upon, gagged with a cloth soaked in petrol and manhandled onto a bonfire ...

for me, one of the author's nastiest, full-on horror stories. It's inclusion in Inconsequential Tales suggests he doesn't consider The Burning among his successes. It worked for me.

[andydecker]

Ramsey Campbell - Inconsequential Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2008, 249 pages)

Cover: Jason C. Eckhardt
Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Contents:
Introduction - Truth or Consequences
The Childish Fear (1966)
The Offering to the Dead (1995)
The Reshaping of Rossiter (1990)
The Void (1993)
The Other House (1972)
Broadcast (1971)
The Urge (1993)
The Sunshine Club (1983)
Writer's Curse (1980)
Property of the Ring (2000)
The Shadows in the Barn (1975)
Night Beat (1973)
The Precognitive Trip
Murders (1975)
Point of View (2000)
The Grip of Peace (1988)
Only the Wind (1990)
Morning Call (1995)
Pet
Hain's Island (2002)
Bait (1983)
Snakes and Ladders (1982)
The Burning (1981)
A Play for the Jaded (1994)

[dem]

Ramsey very generously allowed us to include The Childish Fear and Snakes and Ladders on the Vault Advent Calendar (RIP).