Review: Demons by Daylight

CAMPBELL, Ramsey, Demons by Daylight, A Star Book/W.H. Allen & Co., Ltd., London, 1975.

Octavo; illustrated paperback; 192pp. Moderate shelfwear; retailer’s stamp on first page; tape repair to head of spine. Else, good.

When I was a kid, I remember haunting the book department of a local store and coveting the books according to their covers. Just by looking at them I knew I would never be able to justify purchasing them with my hard-earned pocket money. The moment my parents clapped eyes on them, they would be taken away and that would be the last I’d see of them. So I hung out at the book department, seeing which ones were still there each time and being grateful for one more chance to say hello.

(I’d never read them by the way: I knew instinctively that to read without paying first, was a kind of theft, and I would never stoop to that.)

One of those titles was something called Legion by William Peter Blatty; there was a reference on the dustjacket to the movie “The Exorcist” which had done the rounds of the cinemas a few years earlier and which had caused a big noise: I knew I’d never be able to crack the cover on that one. In fact, just standing there watching it on the shelf was something of a thrill.

There was another title – paperback this time – that always caught my eye: The Height of the Scream by Ramsey Campbell. One look at the fear–stretched features of the woman on the cover was enough to know it would never be mine. I even made sure not to look too closely at it in case some diligent shop steward, or officious shopper, shooed me away.

So I lingered over Demons By Daylight. That was pretty innocuous: just an image of a cracked skull with a big lizard crawling out of the top of it. It was still pretty racy, but no moreso than the average biker tattoo, or anything that Bon Scott had inked upon his person, and he was almost acceptable at this time. Almost.

In the end though, I’d just blow my change on an omnibus re-print of a Superman or Batman medley, issued by Gordon & Gotch in 96-pages of glorious black-and-white, and head home. (In those days, Marvel and DC didn’t have distribution networks in Australia, so we had to make do with these third-hand do-overs.)

Today, Legion rests comfortably on my bookshelf, the same edition as I drooled over those many years ago. Of those tempting Campbells, I now have a copy of Demons in an acceptable condition; my only question is: was it worth it?

Is it just me, or does Campbell’s stuff just seem a little ‘bitty’? Most of what I’ve read seems a little out-of-focus; just scraps with no real substance. I guess it’s somewhat of the same thing I have with Belknap-Long: if there’s no solid set-up, then there’s no real pay-off. In stories such as “The Face at Pine Dunes”, “The Render of the Veils” and “Cold Print”, the stories reveal enough to shock the reader without having to spell everything out: we get enough clues to piece the whole together, into an uncomfortable, but inevitable, whole. (Just to be clear, none of those stories are in the present volume.)

Even the contents page is a bit fluffy here: it’s broken up into three sections – “Nightmares”, “Errol Undercliffe: a tribute” and “Relationships”. Glancing at this list, as a horror aficionado, I’m wondering “what have I gotten myself into?” Perhaps I’ve just bought one-third of a horror-story selection and the rest is some new stuff, experimental work by the author. It gets a little better, happily; sadly, not a lot.

“Errol Undercliffe” is a dismal little morass of gloopy writing that wanders all over the shop without getting to the point. A writing teacher of mine once said that sometimes you need to throw the entire architecture of a story onto the page and then remove as much of the scaffolding as is not required to get your meaning across. That is what I think is happening here. These are notes; not a finished tale.

The rest of the offerings vary wildly in impact: most are simply mood pieces, half-worked things that don’t quite emerge from the darkness. I hate reading something and getting to the end, only to say, “Huh?” That happens all too often with this selection.

I wonder if Campbell should be writing in this genre at all. His characterisations are great; he has a very literary feel for how his actors move and respond in the situations that he devises for them. I just can’t help feeling that the scary stuff is just an addendum, something bolted–on at the last minute to ensure a publisher’s nod. I certainly don’t get the sense that he’s particularly galvanised by the process.

In other stories, for instance “The Tugging” (again, not in this collection), the material reads as though HPL blocked it out and Campbell finished it off. It’s a good Mythos tale, well worth hunting down if you get the chance. I suspect that maybe Campbell began to bridle against the association and decided to forge his own path: that’s fine; as far as I can tell he succeeded in doing that by writing “The Face at Pine Dunes” which is a brilliant beast, completely his own. This selection looks like he’s continued the quest for his personal muse and it’s taking him way out to the fringes of...God alone knows what.

I feel like a seven-year-old kid once more, hanging around with the ‘safe option’. Maybe I should start looking once more for a copy of “The Height of the Scream”? But then again...

Two-and-a-half tentacled horrors for this one.