Description

The Village Killings & Other Novellas by Ramsey Campbell

Hardcover – PS Publishing – 2021 – 374 pages

The Village Killings and Other Novellas is a companion to the two-volume Ramsey Campbell retrospective Phantasmagorical Stories, also published by PS. Needing Ghosts is one of Campbell’s most nightmarish comedies of paranoia, a journey through a world where nothing can be trusted to be what it seems. In The Pretence an ordinary family comes to realise that a profound unnoticed change has overtaken the world—perhaps a kind of apocalypse. The Booking takes us to a bookshop that may extend to the limits of imagination, but why do books and the booksellers never leave the shop for long? The Enigma of the Flat Policeman uses one of the author’s early stories as a lens to examine his life at the time it was produced—his haunted adolescence and his determination to write. Written specially for this volume, The Village Killings sends a detective novelist to investigate a situation you might find in a whodunit and challenges the reader to get there first. It’s a highly personal take on the Agatha Christie tradition, which it finds less cosy than it’s often said to be. Spanning more than thirty years, the collection displays Campbell’s range, from the uncanny to the psychological, the disturbing to the comical.