Fiction Reviews
Incarnate
(1983/2026) Ramsey Campbell, Flame Tree Press,
£12.95 / Can$21.95 / US$16.95, pbk, 453pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58770-0
Five people take part in a study of precognitive dreaming, but the future they all dream of is a nightmare. Eleven years later, the dream creature they released creeps into all their lives in shapes they don’t realise are dreams. If it brings the five together again, far worse will be loosed on the world. Can Molly Wolfe, one of the dreamers, track down everyone involved in time to stop it, or is her search doomed to help it achieve its inhuman aim? Is she too unaware of the way the dream creature has insinuated itself into her life? Perhaps nothing that looks real can be trusted anymore. And soon nothing will be real – except the dream world.
If anyone has ever seen the film Constantine starring Keanu Reeves (based on the character that first appeared in Swap Thing), you might think like me that Peter Stormare steals the film as Lucifer, and laments missing the old names he was known by. Similarly, I miss the horror novels of the 1980s. When horror was King, and I just don’t mean Stephen King. I mean the “big ones”, those doorstopper books, big in length and ambition that mixed supernatural terror with rich characterisation and social commentary, written by King and Straub, and McCammon, and Ramsey Campbell. But wait a minute! They’re back, sort of, as Flame Tree Press has brought out a new edition of Campbell’s 1983 novel Incarnate, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985, and remains one of the most ambitious and unsettling books in Campbell's considerable catalogue.
The story begins with a failed experiment. Five volunteers participate in a study of precognitive dreaming conducted by the Foundation for Applied Psychological Research. Something goes catastrophically wrong. The participants share a nightmare so disturbing that the project is abandoned immediately. Eleven years later, the five live in different parts of Britain and have tried to put the experience behind them. Molly Wolfe works as a production assistant for a TV station in London. Helen, now known as Nell, struggles to rebuild her life after divorce and works in a library after moving to London with her daughter. Joyce works caring for the elderly. Freda leads a quiet existence in a coastal town working in a department store, while Danny remains trapped in a life of bitterness, resentment and growing instability and is looked after by his mother while he works as a projectionist in a local cinema. When one of the original researchers contacts them to ask whether they have experienced any lingering effects from the experiment, the past begins to reassert itself in increasingly disturbing ways making it difficult to discern when a dream has ended and when “reality” has reasserted itself. Places seem different, conversations become odd. Physical surroundings involving people, and reflections act strangely.
As someone who has experienced two really vivid dreams recently, one involving being late for work, and another about missing some university exams, I can appreciate where Campbell is coming from with this novel as dreams begin to encroach into the lives of the five volunteers, distorting reality and undermining their senses and rational thought. Campbell is a master of the slow build-up, the gathering of dread, and the feeling of the protagonists that what they consider reality, is a thin sheen, and they have glimpsed another reality, perhaps the true one, through the failed experiment.
Harking back to the 80s, when this novel was written, and in common with giants of the genre at that time, Campbell delivers a multi-viewpoint novel which pulls the main characters together with Molly as the driving character. It very much is a product of the 1980s, and Britain in the 1980s from the effects of a Thatcherite government down to the nitty-gritty of sexism and racism, and the abuse of authority.
Like those other big 1980s horror doorstops, it is a big book coming in at just over 450 pages, but in its favour – for me, at least – the tale is told over sixty-seven chapters and here, as in so many of his novels, Campbell demonstrates his ability to drive a story, to make the reader keep turning the page in a novel which is a slow burn at the start with Campbell flexing all his trademark storytelling muscles through unease, dread, and creating feelings of ambiguity in the reader where they cannot really trust the characters or what they are experiencing as the dream world encroaches into their own.
In an era increasingly dominated by fast-paced horror and cinematic shocks, Incarnate serves as a reminder that some of the most terrifying things are those that creep into your mind quietly and refuse to leave. A deserved winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel when it was first published, and now is your chance to see why. Recommended.
Ian Hunter
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