by S. T. Joshi
(From Penumbra No. 9)
GARETH WOOD. At Night, White Bracken. York, UK: Stairwell Books, 2024. 229 pp. $20.00 tpb.
GARETH WOOD. To Those from Below. York, UK: Stairwell Books, 2026. 229 pp. $20.00 tpb.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL. Ancestral. London: Flame Tree Press, 2026. 245 pp. $26.95 hc.
Ramsey Campbell recently recommended to me these two novels by Gareth Wood. I have no idea whether Campbell is an actual mentor of Wood; I suspect not. In the acknowledgments to At Night, White Bracken Wood writes poetically: “Thanks to the great Ramsey Campbell for his kindness, his words on the novel and, above all, for creating the enormous, weird ocean on which my small ship can sail.” Those “words” to which Wood refers are, apparently, the generous (but well-deserved) blurb for the novel, in which he notes how it leads “to an awe-inspiring vision that verges on the cosmic.” But Campbell and Wood are well aware that the “ocean” in question is (if I may change the metaphor) Campbell’s prodigious mining of the trope of urban horror—a trope that Wood, a native of Birmingham, has sought to excavate for himself, and has done so with grim effectiveness.
Wood is not exactly a novice. He published a trilogy of horror novels in 2012–14, set in Canada, where he apparently spent some of his adolescence. He began a science fiction trilogy with Black Horizon (2016), although I am unclear whether he ever finished (or published) the two remaining volumes. In any event, the two horror novels under review have much to recommend them, although they are far from perfect.
At the outset of At Night, White Bracken we seem very far from the cosmic. A man identified only as Cooper, seeking to counteract his anomie as a petty criminal in Birmingham, is inspired by an online video to hunt down pedophiles and rough them up; in addition to his friend, Danny Solomon (from whose perspective the novel is told), he enlists the aid of an even shadier colleague, Hickey. But Hickey, aside from participating in the beating up of the “nonces” (the English slang term for pedophiles), carves a cryptic symbol on their lower back. In one instance Cooper and Hickey seize and kidnap a wealthy pedophile, Theodore Watkins, whom they believe to be the head of an entire cadre of child molesters and take him to a remote region in the north where Hickey has a cabin; it is becoming increasingly unclear what Hickey’s purpose in this enterprise really is.
Wood is singularly gifted in portraying the urban landscape of poverty and despair that appears to characterize certain parts—and certain classes—of Great Britain:
Our front garden was overgrown. The pathetic wire fence had buckled in a thousand places and the gate was missing. A hollowed-out lawnmower sat in the centre of the grass. A testament to dead intentions. The rusted hulk seemed perfectly at home here in Balsall Heights. Like a jacked car with its wheels nicked, it was just one more sedentary wreck with nowhere to go.
This is, of course, the environment that Ramsey Campbell has made his own over decades, with such masterful tales as “Cold Print” and “Mackintosh Willy” and such novels as The Face That Must Die and The One Safe Place. Some of Wood’s descriptions are so phantasmagorically horrific that this comfortably ensconced middle-class American reviewer can only hope they are grotesque caricatures or exaggerations; and there is some question as to whether the plight of the working class in England is entirely the result of the government’s heedlessness, or whether some responsibility resides in the individuals’ own latent resentments, bitterness, and seemingly innate racism and misogyny. But this is not the place for a sociological diatribe.
What happens now, however, is that Danny begins to detect the presence of hideous monsters that increasingly threaten them. A young woman, Shanice, who has been aiding the men in their pedophile-hunting has seen the monsters also. Danny now feels that “the woodland itself had begun to change”; and then he snatches a clear view of the creatures:
The figures weren’t tall, but strange, bolete muscles seem to swell from their frames. Some were unmistakeably male. Their withering pricks and balls clutched tight to the apex of their thighs as they shuffled towards me.
Others, I assumed female, or without gender entirely, remained smooth at their abdomen, into their crotch. Only swollen veins and the ridges of defined muscles were visible on their lithe bodies.
What could they be, and what connection do they have with Hickey? When, later, Danny sees that around the neck of one creature is a “garland of human heads,” in which “the faces were alive,” we are clearly approaching the realm of cosmic horror.
At Night, White Bracken is a work that unsettles the reader at every turn. The extra-judicial purpose of Cooper and Hickey in hunting down pedophiles, and the hideous tortures that Hickey inflicts upon Watkins, are loathsome, but since the victims cannot evoke the reader’s sympathy, we are left with a sense of hopelessness at the vicious interplay of pursuer and pursued. And those “figures” that increasingly dominate the latter part of the book have an agenda that far surpasses mere violence on individuals and threatens to bring about a worldwide cataclysm.
To Those from Below treads somewhat the same ground, but ultimately heads in a different direction. We are once again treated to a cheerless display of a decaying urban environment:
Violence, drugs, murders, rapes, cars that never stopped speeding, dirt-bike kids with skeletal, pill-wracked faces, dead fighting dogs laid out in fag-burned children’s play areas, headless herring gulls stamped on the broken pavements; every city horror you could imagine, all knitted nicely together, feeding the fires of every posh, hate-speak MP looking to politic their way into power. Every step they took was one on the backs of the poorest, the most beaten-up people in the country.
In this dreadful environment, Michael Ray (usually called Mick) seeks a bond with a girl he meets in school, Elisa (Liz) Kean. She lives in a “housing estate” (what Americans call “the projects”) called The Wallows; but, while helping to protect Mick from violent encounters with his classmates, Liz is aware that there are “those from below” who haunt The Wallows. Mick can’t quite believe what she says, even after she shows him a diary that her mother, Wilma Pennyfeather, wrote some time before. She tells Mick of seeing a creature in a pedestrian underpass:
“The mouth was horrible…like when you lift up a stone and all the bugs hurry off, all the worms fight against the daylight, thrashing about, frightened and grimy. But it was the eyes, Mick . . . it was the way it looked at me. They were like cuts, like scagged knees, but just when the scars have started. They were crusty and they split and there was something leaking from them, snotty and …”
This is no doubt evocative of Campbell’s imperishable tale “The Man in the Underpass.”
Things take a more serious turn when Liz’s younger brother, Leon, disappears, and her mother is taken away by the police. Liz begs Mick to help her find Leon, and so begins a chilling sequence in which the pair encounter a succession of bizarre creatures, such as Moss Jack and Uncle Rat-Jacket—who, from their loathsome descriptions, appear to symbolize the grinding poverty in which the luckless tenants of The Wallows and similar places are forced to dwell.
To Those from Below is a bit slow in getting going, but it inexorably builds to a powerful conclusion even as it portrays the ambiguous relationship—somewhere between friends and lovers—of the teenage characters, who then find themselves separated for twenty years before reuniting and resuming the quest for Leon and for the solution of the mystery of what lies below the Wallows.
Wood’s publisher has done the author no favors by what appears to be bad (or, more likely, non-existent) copy editing. Talented as Wood is, he desperately needs a bit of help in matters of grammar, style, and especially punctuation. Granted, much of his prose is a conscious echo of working-class British slang, but even so there are places where judicious editing would have eliminated a litany of annoying errors in both books. And the amateurish cover art that h7as been slapped on both books also does nothing for the books’ appeal.
I have left little space to cover Ramsey Campbell’s newest novel, Ancestral. Here we are in a definitely middle-class milieu focusing on Tim, the eight-year-old son of Lou and Ray Bystone. Led by an imaginative piece of writing that Tim has produced, the family explores Boggart’s Grot, where the stalactites are memorably described: “Beyond the next mass of whitish fangs the ends of the flashlight beams fell short of fending off the dark.” Indeed, the dark begins playing an increasing role in the scenario: is Tim somehow causing gloom to appear all around him? On another outing the family encounters this bizarre phenomenon: “The earth in the middle of the meadow uttered a huge wet cough, spattering the grass with glistening mud.” This reminded me of Lord Dunsany’s piquant line in “Idle Days on the Yann”: “Some monster of the river coughed.”
Some entity—a boggart, apparently—has followed Tim out of the cave, and is now lurking just out of sight. And both the dark and the fog appear to have become animated and are creating havoc. And what of the fact that some neighbors are, seemingly irrationally, accusing Tim of sending nightmares to them? A reporter tells of an “occult map of Britain” that shows that a recently unearthed grave—containing the remains of a relative of either the Bystones or of Lou’s family, the Stantons—is in “a line of potence” that proceeds through the very area where the families live. All these sinister hints and portents lead to horror and tragedy, focused on the hapless boy who only wishes to exercise his imagination in telling what he believes to be harmless stories of fantasy and strangeness.
Ancestral is written with Ramsey Campbell’s habitual care and attention to detail (here is one author who doesn’t need any copy editing!), and with an accumulation of horror that baffles and unnerves as much as it terrifies. Campbell has long mastered the art of using children as foci of weirdness, and this novel will take its place among such of its predecessors as The Last Voice They Hear and Silent Children in this regard. The plight of Tim, who is beset not only by supernatural entities but by schoolmates and teachers who fail to understand him and punish him unjustly, and by parents and grandparents who also seem clueless as to his goals and intentions, is poignantly etched on every page, and we can all identify with the sense of helplessness that children feel when their fate is in the not always sympathetic hands of those who are tasked with caring for them.
As he looks forward to his eighty-first birthday, Ramsey Campbell can still take pride in being far and away the leading author of weird fiction in our time, and perhaps of all time.