The Long Lost
Ramsey Campbell
Headline hbk, 375 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993-4)
An extraordinary twist of fate while on a short break in Wales unearths for David and Joelle Owain a long lost relative, an old woman living out a lonely existence on a bleak off-shore island. Only too pleased to return to Chester, Gwen takes up residence in a nearby retirement home to be close to her new found family, but this is inevitably a rose with a poisonous thorn, and a barbecue for friends sees a conspiracy of disaster against those at the gathering: Richard Vale's computer business is about to lose its premises; a failed marriage sends Herb Crantry spiralling into violent insanity; two couples are embraced by the twin destructiveness of adultery and abortion; and David Owain himself finds the Lolita-like advances of his friend's lascivious teenage daughter increasingly difficult to refuse.
Campbell's circumvention of horror cliché is well to the fore here, a consciously defined evil neatly side-stepped in favour of a snaking, increasingly polluted atmosphere visited upon a plausibly ordinary cross-section of Chester's comfortably middle class. A powerful technique, the great strength of this book is drawn from its author's ability to generate malignancy from the everyday - a brilliantly simple truth that horror, real horror, is less easily isolated in some outside supernatural force than an almost banal rent in the everyday. It forms the greater part of the novel, and for it The Long Lost is beyond reproach, a veritable object lesson in modern horror, be it the accelerating psychosis that engulfs Crantry, or the singular finality of the devastating repercussions for his family of Vale's financial troubles. Astonishing then it is forced to sit within such an obvious and ugly framing device.
From the outset the old woman the Owains' luck upon suffers from a creaking inevitability; a well trained audience is all too immediately aware of Gwen as more than she seems, and they sit it out, waiting on the arrival of her villainous influence. Added to which, the death of a second old woman at the home - dead before she can impart vital information to David Owain - is remarkably crass and cliché-ridden from a man of Ramsey Campbell's undoubted talents. Fortunately, there is some redemption to be gained from the climax, an extended, weirdly surreal business that at least wrests a satisfyingly ingenious revelation from the jaws of banality.
None of which is to say that The Long Lost is a bad novel - far from it. Even though the triteness of the plotting is more reminiscent of a no-hope pretender like James Herbert, few of his contemporaries could even begin to conjure the twin streams of genuine melancholy and sincere despair that run like ice water through the veins of this book. Scratch a certain tardiness on the surface and you unearth some of this author's most exceptional writing to date.