Ramsey Campbell - The Face that Must Die

His hand splayed a stack of newspapers across the counter, spreading headlines – NEW MURDER SHOCK – and razor blades. A dozen repetitions of the identikit drawing stared up at him, an unnatural family – as though the man had infected a dozen victims until they looked like him. (p. 13)

The Face that Must Die is a serial killer novel filled with malice and social commentary. As we learn in Campbell's afterword, Horridge (the star of our rather horrific show) is in large part based on Campbell's schizophrenic, misogynistic, homophobic mother. Coming off of the novel's ending, this is not as much of a surprise as one might think. Horridge is repugnant but all too believable. His views are egregious and caustic, yet human – Horridge is humanity reflected in the most putrid of grimy, stained, gore and shit stained pools, and yet there's something about his portrayal that makes him impossible to dismiss.

What makes The Face that Must Die so convincing is that it's not a novel about larger than life characters. This is not a book about a genius cannibal doctor; this is not a tale of a criminal mastermind. Horridge is disabled and paranoid, utterly unable to tell delusion from reality. He has no plan. He is a monster, but he is never an excused monster, never a character made so extravagant or set up so elaborately that his actions lose the trappings of reality. As Poppy Z. Brite says in the introduction:

[He had] a bleak childhood but not a freakish one. Like most of his real life counterparts, Horride is simply an ineffectual creep, his disposition toward mental illness stirred by a nasty experience or two, who eventually wills himself into being dangerous; he's never explained or excused. (p. 3)

Horridge is not an extraordinary man, and he is not an ordinary man reacting to extraordinary circumstances. He is simply a man (a weak, hate-filled, arrogant man) that is broken by altogether average, albeit unfortunate, circumstances and becomes an all too average demon. The only part of Brite's summation that I'd disagree with is saying that Horride ever "wills himself to be dangerous." Horridge despises homosexuals and those around them, yes, but it's not something that he sets out to act upon. In fact, the events of the novel are almost uniformly tragic accident rather than sadistic plot.

The Face that Must Die is a comedy of errors with the humor replaced by the horror. Nothing in this novel is smooth. Horridge travels with a limp, and he's always self conscious of how he's being perceived. Early in the book, he tries to see a movie. He dislikes brushing past row after row of people in the dark, so he shows up early – but he's in the wrong theater. He's hot and prickly (p. 33) every step of the run to the proper theater, and when he gets there he's forced to shove his way past crowds of loathsome people, past: hair that twittered away, cloth that squirmed; a pool of tobacco smoke drifted sluggishly about his face. A soft drink carton crunched beneath his heel. (p. 33) And then he finds out that he hates the movie.

The power of the book comes from such scenes, the murder's merely a symptom of the main character's twisted psyche. Horridge's mind is a frightening place to spend time. His world is oppressive, and every circumstance is misconstrued.  Horridge's home, Cantril Farm, was designed to confound him. The radio operator is mocking him. The people on the bus are tormenting him. The man standing beside him came here specifically to be beside him, and perhaps Horridge's being followed for a reason…

Horridge's views feel horrifically real due to their vitriol. Horridge does not have one reason to dislike gays or blacks; he's practically bursting with reasons. Horridge's internal rant (monologue feels far too tame a word) is livid and rife with contradictions, too impassioned to realize that it's making no sense. He has a thousand and one terms for what he fears. Characters are "sly as a homosexual," (p. 201) but homosexuals are also blundering. Homosexuals are perverse for fucking other men, but the women around them are depraved for what sexual deviancies they must get up to with their homosexual lovers. The homosexuals are flaunting and breaking the law, but they also control society. Even sexuality between a man and a woman is something to be feared, something to be controlled, and a society driven by its obsession with "painful orgasm" (p. 66) is obviously a depraved one, one populated by nothing but "creatures." (p. 243) It's the rage that makes the words feel real. Horridge is too vivid to be ignored, not the sane but (potentially) objectionable words of a social conservative but rather a rabid dog frothing at the mouth – he is mad, and yet his fear feels human all too human, not sympathetic in the least but loathsomely understandable all the same.

Bizarrely enough, Horridge's does not go into the novel with the intention of harming homosexuals. Quite the opposite in fact, even if his reasoning is reprehensible. A man is killing gays in Liverpool, and Horridge is convinced that the killer is a homosexual corrupting others and then killing them. Trying to do the right thing (or at least his idea of it), Horridge sets out to force the killer to confess. The man that Horridge decides must be the killer is Roy Craig, a denizen of a house on Aigburth Drive. The other lodgers there soon become a foil to Horridge, a brief taste of sanity amidst the killer's quest. Often, in scenes when Horridge and another character interact, Campbell will show us the event from both pairs of eyes in consecutive chapters. The transitions between the timelines aren't always smooth, but the contrast is the heart of the novel.

Cathy and Peter are our main non-nuts perspectives – and yet, of our three main protagonists, Cathy is the only one that is particularly normal. She's trying to save up money to buy a flat, but her husband, Peter, is reluctant and spends his money on drugs and comics. When not high, his perspective is irritable and rational, but things get interesting when he takes acid three quarters of the way through the book. Suddenly, Peter's perspective dissolves into a shifting nightmare similar to Horridge's life. Despite some interesting moments, though, Cathy and Peter are the novel's weakest link. They're fine where they are as far as being a foil for Horridge goes, but they never feel like particularly convincing characters in their own right. We often lose sight of them for dozens of pages at a time, and when we do see them, Peter earns our mild dislike while Cathy is abstractly okay but too passive to really earn our sympathy.

The Face that Must Die starts as a slow burn and, as it continues, builds to a manic sprint. Horridge is repugnant throughout, but he manages at least a thin veneer of sanity in the opening. Not so as we progress, and, as his grip on reality slips further, his actions become more drastic. The first third or so of the book consists of Horridge's attempts to unsettle Craig. This part is effective, if a bit over long, but it's nothing compared to the creepiness of when the book builds up steam. Anyone who can stop reading in the book's home stretch has super human self control, and the climax itself is excellent.

The Face that Must Die is not an enjoyable read – but it is an excellent read. This is a fascinating horror novel that takes on key issues in the way that only a horror/crime novel can. This is the first Ramsey Campbell book that I've read, but it certainly won't be the last.

Reading in February

Abercrombie's latest is blood soaked, grit under your nails fun – the kind of fun that's had watching two big groups of men smash into each other for three days and watching their honor, morale, and bodies fall to pieces, all described in starkly modern and sarcastic prose. The book's structure was interesting, and it will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Abercrombie's prior work, though I don't think that he's yet managed to reclaim the revelatory power of The First Law.

 Reading an established author's debut is often an interesting experience, as well as a somewhat worrisome one. Are you going to get to see an unfettered and fresh version of the brilliance you've grown to expect or will it be a sodden, meandering mess? In the case of Consider Phlebas, it's a bit of both. Review coming.

The Face that Must Die is a deeply unpleasant novel, a nightmarish trudge through a deranged and hateful mind, a novel filled with innocents who seem unable or unwilling to save themselves and predators that are twisted, loathsome, and, above all, human. It is, in other words, damn fine horror. Review coming.

 As I said after finishing the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), I simply don't understand how the early issues can be immature compared to the later ones. The Doll's House more than the first collection shows signs of relative immaturity, and there were some weaker moments, but if the rest of the series truly does put the beginning volumes to shame it will have to be quite mind blowing indeed. Review coming when I finish the series.

I've had a fairly mixed experience with Hamilton. He's written scenes and arcs that I've loved, and scenes and arcs that I've hated, and so far I've yet to read a book he's written without at least one of each. This, his debut, is a rather different beast. It's far more focused than his later works, though fans of the author's imagination will probably not be disappointed by it here, even if his creations are a tad reigned in. Still, I'm so far unconvinced that the Greg Mandel novels are capable of the same highs as the Night's Dawn trilogy. I suppose Hamilton's still got two books to prove me wrong. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

 Noctuary is a quieter, subtler work than Songs of a Dead Dreamer was, though it's not quite as refined as Teatro Grottesco. Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection was the final part of three, a collection of a good deal of Ligotti's flash fiction. Besides those miniature tales, Conversations in a Dead Language proved to be my favorite of the collection, a devastatingly sad tale that's fairly unique in Ligotti's catalog. Review coming.

 I think it's pretty well established by now that I read Ligotti's work twice, and Noctuary was no exception. On second read, slower building tales like The Medusa and The Tsalal came into their own.

City of Ruin reads like a supercharged version of Nights of Villjamur, expanding on the strengths of that first novel and patching up many of its weaknesses – though that is not to say that it fixes all of the debut's problems. Review coming.

 This is the kind of book where you finish and then have to mull over what you've read for hours, reveling in the spell woven on you. Palmer's writing is excellent, and his story's deliciously bittersweet. Though it had some pacing problems, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an excellent read. Highly recommended, just don't expect anything even approaching typical.

 To make sure that, after my rather scathing review of Frankenstein, I hadn't simply lost all affinity for classic horror, I went back and reread a dozen or so of Poe's finer tales and  found them just as fine the second time around (though, to be fair, it's closer to the fourth or fifth for a few). While I can't say that I'm as devout a follower of Poe as I am of Lovecraft, his mastery is undeniable.  The Masque of the Red Death, in particular, is pitch perfect, a bare handful of pages that couldn't be improved by a collaboration of the genre's top artists given a decade to improve as much as a single image.

 I was excited going into Frankenstein. No, really, I wasn't setting out to spear the classics. I was expecting a stunning read, a book that showed the origins of one of my favorite genres, a book that scared me, a book that made me think. Instead, I ended up bitterly disappointed. Review here.

Catherynne M. Valente's prose is versatile and opulent, and her writing is a tide of images that bears hapless readers to distant, often beautiful and often traumatizing, shores. Ventriloquism is a spellbinding collection, and, since much of its contents can be found online, there's no reason at all to not go immerse yourself in some of Valente's short fiction. Review coming.