The 90s have been a curious time for the acknowledged master of the supernatural. His last book - The Long Lost - contains just about the least edifying plotting Ramsey Campbell has ever put on the page, while at the same time featuring some of the hardest, most heart-rendingly bleak writing he has ever accomplished. It's a strange mix. The One Safe Place is equally unfamiliar: there are no ghosts, no evils in this novel beyond those that are all too real and all too contemporary. The corruptions and depravity at the heart of this book are all man-made -not least the bestiality video one of the kids watches with rapt horror and childish fascination.

Susanne Travis is an American academic appointed to teach a course on violence at a British university. She comes over from Florida with her husband Don and their young son, Marshall. At first life in Manchester is fine - Susanne is successful in her job; Don establishes his business selling antique books; and Marshall is happy in his new school. Then a minor motoring incident ends with a gun being pulled on Don. The man responsible is caught and sent-down, but in fine Deliverance-style his family won't let things be. Soon the Travis home is invaded and there are more court appearances, more long sentences, until eventually - inevitably - people have to die.

Some of this is nasty. This is an eloquently nasty book. And a damn big book. A lot of pages. Maybe too many pages. Campbell spends a relatively short while establishing events, and then the latter half - an acid trip, as curious and surreal and downright cruel as any recent book - seems to drag slightly towards the over-drawn end. Without it though the real standout points wouldn't stand out quite so far. And there are two astonishing moments in The One Safe Place. Moments that pull the reader up sharp. Shocking moments, as brilliantly put on paper as they could be rendered on film. When he sets his mind to it, Ramsey Campbell is an extraordinary writer.

But The One Safe Place is also the most angry, sour book the ever-pleasant Campbell has written. And the most political. In her course, Susanne Travis makes extensive use of a collection of video nasties, and that's the other strain of this book - there is an overheated TV discussion on the merits of violence in movies, and the Travis house is raided by police after seizing anything in a video sleeve, from the banned to the innocuous to Marshall's US-certificated Indiana Jones flicks. Campbell has never before felt the need to be as explicitly upfront as this and it makes for passionate reading. (Noticeably he is flipping the usual tabloid equation of victim/aggressor on its head here: the violence of the book is largely visited upon the viewers of suspect videos, not by them.)

There's a lot of dark strains running through these pages, not least the spectre of the Bulger killing that hangs over things like the proverbial ghost at the feast. Kids in here are no better, perhaps even more scheming, than the adults that surround them. Drugs, prostitution - real horrors pollute the world of Marshall's evil, manipulative twin Darren Fancy, and still the adults talk over and over about those damn videos. (Campbell's portrait of the Manchester working class may be a little patronising, but the point is made.)

The One Safe Place is a long way from The Long Lost or a relatively safe, spooky novel like Ancient Images. It's dark, brooding, incensed and saves a dark, brooding, incensed sting for its climax. It feels like a book that its author had to write, and as such makes for tough, demanding, important reading.