The Darkest Part of the Woods

From Publishers Weekly
A forest haunted by a horror older than time and channeled by one unfortunate family is the foundation of this gripping horror extravaganza, Campbell's first novel of the supernatural in six years. Set in environs fans will recognize from his early Lovecraftian fiction, it focuses on the Price family, who have had an uneasy association with Goodmanswood since patriarch Lennox migrated to England to study its dark legends and succumbed to belief in them. With Lennox institutionalized and serving as cult leader to some of the asylum's creepier inmates, the responsibility to hold the family together has fallen to daughter Heather, a library archivist who traces her father's cryptic remarks about the woods' history to accounts of Nathaniel Selcouth, an alchemist who resided there and who schemed "to create a messenger or servant that would mediate between him and the limits of the universe, both spiritual and physical." Heather's investigations dovetail with sightings by frightened neighborhood children of a grotesque "sticky man" glimpsed among the trees, and strange events that bedevil the family. Campbell (Obsession) is at the top of his form here, infusing every scene and scrap of dialogue with a sense of inescapable menace and manipulating nature imagery in such a way as to give it a malignant supernatural character. A richly textured tale of modern horror with classic roots, it confirms Campbell's reputation as one of the most formidable dark fantasists working today.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The inmates of Mercy Hill in England have visions--the remnants of their 1960s experiences with the hallucinogens growing in Goodmanswood, to which Dr. Lennox Price, intending to study them, fell victim instead. The rest of his family wasn't immune to the woods' allure, either. His younger daughter, just returned from the Americas, went there ostensibly for research for her next book. His grandson discovered himself unable to leave the area, even for a job interview. His ex-wife wandered the woods in search of objects for her art and, after Lennox's death, saw him in the woods' shadows. His elder daughter, though, seems resistant to the madness that plagues the family, yet something in Goodmanswood awaits her, too. At the woods' heart stand the ruins of a tower that once belonged to an alchemist contemporary to the infamous Elizabethan magician John Dee, and there is something far older and more powerful there, as well. This satisfyingly nasty mood piece has one starting at shadows and attending to odd noises in the dark. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"His stories take place in a world full of threat and insinuation, where even the most contemporary objects shine with a sinister light. The world Ramsey Campbell takes for granted is the world of our darkest nightmares."
--Peter Straub

"Ramsey Campbell writes quiet, precise, grim psychological novels--literary cousins of M. C. Escher's disturbing mathematical images. Campbell writes vividly and convincingly about the existence of evil. He continues to break new ground, advancing the style and thematic content of horror fiction far beyond the works of his contemporaries."
--The Washington Post

"Ramsey Campbell distills the sort of pure quiet terror few other writers even know exists. Like Stephen King at his very best, Campbell plumbs the depths of what humans can do to each other. A terrifying, ferocious, and deeply compassionate book."
--Sarah Smith, author of The Knowledge of Water and The Vanished Child

"Campbell continues to produce fiction that astonishes, unsettles, and-in its deeply perverse fashion-delights. No one is better than Campbell at creating-and maintaining-a sense of nebulous, impending doom. Pact of the Fathers is the clear product of a master craftsman with a grim, unflinching vision of the world and of our precarious positions in it. Like the best contemporary horror fiction, Pact of the Fathers is exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure, and leaves a lingering aftertaste behind."
-Locus

"Ramsey Campbell is highly regarded for his sensitive use of the language and his ability to create psychologically complex characters."
--Dean Koontz

"He provides the reader with insights and chills only a master of dark fantasy could achieve." --Clive Barker



Book Description
For decades the lives of the Price family have been snarled with the fate of the ancient forest of Goodmanswood. There, Dr. Lennox Price discovered an hallucinogenic moss which quickly became the focus of a cult. Though the moss is long gone, the whole forest can now affect the minds of visitors.

After Lennox is killed trying to return to his beloved wood, his widow sees and hears him in the trees-or is it a dark version of the Green Man that caresses her with leafy hands? Lennox's grandson heeds a call to lie in his lover's arms in the very heart of the forest-and cannot help but wonder what the fruit of that love will be.

And Heather, Lennox's daughter, who turned her back on her father's mysteries and sought sanctuary in the world of facts and history? Goodmanswood summons her as well . . .



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Campbell's masterpiece. As ever, Campbell places believable characters into fabulously dark situations and lets the situation become more memorable than the characters (Midnight Sun, 1990, etc.). Although this time they're an agreeable group of interesting folks, they too fade once the fun-ride is over. The strongest invention here remains the horror out of space and time that's centered in Goodmanswood, outside Brichester. When the American professor of popular delusions hears of the madness of crowds in Brichester, he goes there and hasn't left since-indeed, he winds up as an inmate of the Arbours, a home for the mentally bombed. Lennox is married to Margo, a painter/sculptor, and they have two daughters: Sylvia, a pregnant vegan who writes books about the weird stuff her father wrote about; and older daughter Heather, who works in a bookstore and is divorced mother to Sam, Lennox's grandson, who hopes to go into publishing (to us Sam would be better off saving trees from publishers). In fact, Sam limps from an ankle he broke while living in a tree and trying to save it from being cut down for a bypass. But-the horror. Some time ago it was noted that a mound existed in Goodmanswood with strange lighted insects flying around it, while several trees around the mound held a lichen that, if touched, gave a person lasting hallucinations-the madness Lennox came to write about. Every now and then, Lennox and a group of fellow hallucinators escape from the Arbours and go off to the mound, along "the path that led to itself." What is the secret of the mound? Far better than the secret, when it's at last revealed in eye-scraping gothic type, is the buildup of a living darkness within the woods, adarkness blacker than night itself, with falling leaves that circle about and return as bits of blackness to their trees. And this is magically fresh and memorable. What happens when you go into the woods, children.


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