Review: Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach

Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach by Ramsey Campbell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It has been a long time since I read Ramsey Campbell and I am not sure why - on the evidence of 'Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach' Campbell is still a master of chilling horror. 'Thirteen Days...', originally published a couple of years back but now available in ebook, is one of the creepiest stories I have read in a long time, full of foreboding and hair on the back of the neck tension.

Three generations of a family, mildly dysfunctional in that uptight, restrained way peculiar to the English middle-class, holiday together on a Greek island. Unknown to the rest of her family, except her husband Ray, grandmother Sandra is dying and this is likely to be the last time the whole family shares time together. But, from the start, there are signs that the holiday may not be in the ideal location - the island appears to have more cloud than expected and the nearby resort town of Sunset Beach appears strangely quiet during daylight hours, the few people around unnaturally pale for the Mediterranean. Then several of the family experience shared nightmares of nocturnal visitors…

Ramsey Campbell’s prose is descriptive without being florid, the sort of writing you linger over, until you realise the pace is increasing, the feeling of unease is mounting, and there is something there, in the dark… His characters are well-drawn particularly the older couple, Ray and Sandra, and every family has a Julian, the most uptight of the lot, who clearly does not want to be there and whose, seemingly unconscious, bullying of his stepdaughter is painful.

I can’t say that ‘Thirteen Days…’ is a return to form, as I have missed so much, but it certainly made me want to revisit ‘The Doll Who Ate His Mother’ and ‘The Face That Must Die’ and then explore the more recent books that I have neglected.


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