 A welcome rerelease for an impressive eighties Ramsey Campbell novel Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell Publisher : FLAME TREE PRESS; New edition (21 Feb. 2023) Language : English Hardcover : 304 pages ISBN-10 : 1787587649 ISBN-13 : 978-1787587649 A Horror Book Review by Tony Jones Over the last few years Flame Tree Press has undoubtedly become the new home-from-home for horror legend Ramsey Campbell, who have released a number of both new novels and repackaged a number of his older works, including Ancient Images, which was first published back in 1989. As a reader I have particularly enjoyed Campbell’s association with Flame Tree Press as the blend of the old and the new fiction is nicely pitched due to the fact that this author’s current output is so strong he does not need to rely upon past glories. However, mining one of the most outstanding back-catalogues in 20th century horror fiction for rereleases such as Ancient Images, The Influence (1988) and the much more recent Three Births of Daoloth trilogy is a smart move, hopefully bringing this unique author to a younger generation of readers. I have been reading Campbell since I was a teenager, which was around the time Ancient Images was first published, but for whatever reason this was not a book I came across during my formative years, or any time since. The plot concerns a woman researching an obscure horror film, and since it was written in 1988 this makes it incredibly different to how one might conduct similar research in 2023. Back then there was no internet, instead there were telephone books, and in the case of this novel also hunting down telephone boxes, getting change for telephone calls, endless calls chasing down leads, hotel rooms with no telephones, and convoluted searches for contacts in address books or time-consuming dead ends. To younger readers this method of ‘research’ might come across as dated or quaint, but I found it both nostalgic and exhilarating. My favourite novel of 2022 was undoubtedly Paul F. Olson’s Alexander’s Song, which was similar to Ancient Images in that it included a long and complex search for a dead author. Olson’s book was also written in the late eighties (and largely dismissed or ignored at the time) before recently being revived by the publishers Cemetery Dance. If Ramsey Campbell has not read Alexander’s Song, I have a feeling he would enjoy it tremendously. In the thirty odd years since Ancient Images was first published the cinematic landscape in the UK has had a major shift in that all of the films which were once labelled ‘Video Nasties’ in the early 1980s and were unavailable or banned are now legal and can even pop up on television. Ancient Images has an element of social commentary from this period, which has long since past into history and there is a funny scene where the researcher visits the home of the editor of a gory horror film fanzine which is vehemently against censorship. It was undoubtedly inspired by magazines I enjoyed in my youth, ‘Deep Red,’ ‘GoreZone,’ or ‘Fangoria’ with other more explicit examples springing to mind. I am also old enough to remember the fact that in those days viewers had to put considerable effort into finding banned or films which were refused BBFC certificates. Imagine the excitement when I finally tracked down a bootleg VHS copy of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and sneakily imported it into the UK, this type of ‘hunt’ shapes the core of Ancient Images as Sandy Allan attempts to track down a horror film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, made in England in 1938 and which was immediately suppressed. I absolutely loved being a back-seat passenger on Sandy’s journey, which turns into an obsession, to find a copy of the long-lost film ‘Tower of Fear.’ In the eighties there were a lot of genuine people just like Sandy trying to track down films which seemed forever out of reach, albeit from the seventies and eighties rather than the thirties. Anybody with more than a passing interest in the work of Ramsey Campbell will undoubtedly know he is incredibly knowledgeable about film and his excellent collection Certainly: A Collection of Essays more than proves the point, as many of these pieces are cinematic in nature. In some ways Ancient Images is a horror film buff’s dream, as it is a fascinating take on the ‘cursed film’ trope, which throws in a lot of true facts, ideas about censorship and it even had me wondering whether Lugosi and Karloff actually did make a film together in the UK. It was interesting that Campbell decided to build his ‘cursed’ film around actors more associated with the golden period of Hollywood, but this allowed him to build a fascinating backstory around the near-mythical Tower of Fear, the accidents which happened on set and the fact that so many of the actors and crew (including the director) had died prematurely. Screen legends Lugosi and Karloff might be from too far back in cinematic history for younger readers, but even now there never seems to be any shortage of books featuring them. Just in the last year I have reviewed two novels Julian David Stone’s It’s Alive and Kim Newman’s Something More Than Night which fictionalise both men in some form or another. After Sandy witnesses the strange death of a media colleague, who had tracked down a copy of Tower of Fear which was then stolen, she sets out to recover the film and prove its existence. Along the way she falls foul of a newspaper film critic and the book illustrates the incredible power such print film reviewers had in the days before the internet. I enjoyed the numerous interviews Sandy has with those connected to the film, whilst she is seemingly stalked by bizarre creatures that sometimes look like dogs and other times like scarecrows. In the end the conclusion nicely fans out beyond the cursed film and has a strange Folk Horror vibe to proceedings. Interestingly, some years later Campbell was to have another stab at the idea of the cursed film with The Grin in the Dark, which ranks as one of my absolute favourites of his. Although Ancient Images is a terrific book it is not one I would particularly recommend to a Ramsey Campbell beginner, try The Grin in the Dark instead for a significantly more contemporary story. But if, like I, this is a title you have previously overlooked it is highly recommended and is an unsettling read, where things often happen at the far edge of vision. Even though it is slightly dated, Ancient Images still holds up well as an entertaining supernatural mystery as the young woman digs deeper into the origins of the film and the bad luck which seemed to follow those involved in its making. As Sandy traipses around Britain looking for the film you will be transported back to Thatcher’s decaying Britain, enhanced by Campbell’s stellar grimy descriptions, and will be thankful you never need to ask a pub landlord for chance for the payphone again! Tony Jones Ancient Images |
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