As a die-hard fan of Ruth Rendell's novels it grieves me somewhat that I just cannot take to her short fiction, and it's not for want of trying! I came to this one after "The Copper Peacock", which also left me feeling flat and so what-ish, and I was hoping that this would be better. But no. Her short pieces simply do not have the eyebrow-lifting masterly shocks and twists that come with her long fiction, nor your involvement with the plot. The short stories are predictable to the point of being turgid, and her characters simply aren't interesting enough to carry us along. The title story, the opening novella to the piece, is the kind of thing that I feel Stephen King could do standing on his head (if he was so inclined anyway!), and to much better effect. Ambrose Ribbon is a fussy middle-aged bachelor, who spends his lonely existence buying books and correcting them for mistakes, and then sending letters lambasting the authors for their shoddiness (has this happened to Rendell then? was the question I kept asking myself when I read it). When Ambrose decides to take on a horror fantasy writer he gets more than he bargained for. He becomes convinced that the book is haunting him, (mind-bogglingly dull is that), and all the time it is his guilt that he murdered his overbearing mother coming out. Very ho-hum. It is completely devoid of surprises, suspense, or any kind of chilling effect whatsoever. Where your flesh should be creeping you will be pinching yourself to stay awake instead! "Computer Seance" tries immensely hard to be a jokey piece with a cruel Saki-style punchline, but it's let down entirely by being predictable (again!) and mercilessly unfunny. I have to confess I gave up after that. I'll be sticking to her novels in future.
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