The Incubations Ramsey Campbell 9781787589308

A collectable hardcover edition for Ramsey Campbell's 60 years in publication.

When a weight landed on his legs he raised his head from the violently crumpled pillow. The bed already had another occupant, and as Leo flung the quilt back so that it wouldn't hinder his escape the creature scurried up his body to squat on his chest, clutching him with all its limbs like half a spider...

Leo Parker's stay in Alphafen seems idyllic, but after he leaves, the nightmares begin: an airport turns into a labyrinth, his own words become treacherous if not lethal, and what are those creatures in the photographs he took? Even the therapy Leo undertakes becomes a source of menace.

Perhaps Leo has roused an ancient Alpine legend. Even once he understands what he brought back, his attempts to overcome its influence may lead into greater nightmares still...

The Ramsey Campbell Special Editions. Campbell is the greatest inheritor of a tradition that reaches back through H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the early Gothic writers. The dark, masterful work of the painter Henry Fuseli, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, is used on these special editions to invoke early literary investigations into the supernatural.

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and still lives on Merseyside. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes him as "Britain's most respected living horror writer". He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla'aki, The Pretence and The Booking are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal are what they sound like.

His novels The Nameless, Pact of the Fathers and The Influence have been filmed in Spain. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Published sixty years after Ramsey Campbell's first story - The Inhabitant of the Lake - appeared, The Incubations is an enthralling story encompassing Nazi obsession with the supernatural, mixed with Lovecraftian threads and woven together in the author's inimitable style. The sense of creeping dread that pervades Campbell's work is well to the fore and keeps the reader hooked and guessing to the end.

What I love about Ramsey Campbell is his fiction provides that old-fashioned understated, sinister creepiness, without losing modern sensibilities. No one does it as well as Ramsey Campbell, and here's the proof.

The Incubations begins with mundane failures and terrors and spools out into an extraordinary, unsettling tale of paranoia, fear, and imagination. Ramsey Campbell's trademark impeccable prose pulls the reader into a downward spiral that will leave you questioning your own memory and perception. I savored every disorienting page.

It's a demanding role, being Britain's premier writer of horror fiction, but it's one that Ramsey Campbell has comfortably filled for decades now - and, in fact, he is among the world's finest practitioners of the art. The Incubations coruscates with all of his celebrated skills: the command of subtle and allusive narrative, the elegant use of language and - most of all - the ability to pleasurably disturb the reader at the deepest level. It's proof that Campbell remains at the top of his game.

An unputdownable feast of folk horror and fiendish creatures.

A masterclass in paranoid prose, The Incubations presents us with Ramsey Campbell at the height of his powers. I can think of no other living writer so adept at creating nightmares from vaguely apprehended shadows, cross-purpose attempts at conversation, and the awkward perceptions of society's perennial outsiders.

Encounter the Alps as you've never imagined them... Ramsey Campbell and folk horror make for a formidable combination! Embrace your deepest fears and come on in...

[A] fearsomely compelling read from beginning to end. [...] Ramsey Campbell, who is celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of his first book, shows with The Incubations that he remains the premier writer of weird fiction in our time, and perhaps of all time.

In his new novel The Incubations, Ramsey Campbell yet again successfully delivers what most horror writers spend a lifetime failing to achieve: he instills in his readers the sense that his fiction is coiling its loathsome tendrils around their minds and drawing them inexorably into a netherworld of inescapable, dread-inducing nightmare.

An exceptional piece of work. The Master that is Ramsey Campbell just keeps on getting better and better - how is that even possible?! Highly recommended.

The Incubations is top-flight Campbell, displaying the depth of his vision and the seemingly limitless nature of his reach. The author is fond of saying that after all these years he still hasn't found the limits of the horror genre. May his search long continue.