Spooky

For the October Love Blippin’ Books challenge (LBB10) @squatbetty invited us to choose a Spookybooky.

After rounding up some likely suspects from my shelves, I decided to tackle Ramsey Campbell’s collection, Dark Feasts, which includes thirty stories, from his earliest publications in the 1960s up to the end of the 1980s. Campbell is one of the more celebrated contemporary horror writers - one of the stories in the collection is hailed by Stephen King as the best modern horror tale - but I hadn’t read any of his work before.

As a British writer, the most appealing aspect of his work for me (as a British reader) was the familiarity of the settings, with most being recognisably placed in Liverpool, the Wirral, North Wales and the Lake District. He also has an affinity for buses, with most of the stories featuring them in one way or another. 

The stories certainly has the capacity to chill (yes, the hairs on my arms stood on end) and effect my psychology. For example, I don’t really recommend starting to read a story that starts at a lonely railway station when you’re sat on your own at 10.30pm at a lonely railway station :-)  

My one criticism is it’s quite a fulsome collection, and took me about two weeks to read, but I finished with a couple of stories this morning, appropriately one of which was set on Halloween. There will be no apple bobbing in my house this evening! 

Happy Halloween!