The Overnight [Paperback]

How do I love this book? Let me break it down:

The first striking and delightful thing about this book is the prose voice -- well, all of them, really. The Overnight opens and closes with manager's POV, but the bulk of the novel is comprised of individual chapters presented through the eyes of specific employees. All the expected personality archetypes are present -- and I say that as someone who lost a couple of years working in a bookstore. You've got your ambitious suck-up, the fussy mother-hen children's section director, a single mom who took the job in part for flexibility's sake, an antagonistically gay man, a grouchy feminist who objects to her perceived corporate serfdom, a sleepy half-competent stoner ... etcetera, etcetera.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear Campbell had been following me around during the years I worked at McKay's. We even had a temperamental elevator, too. Holy moly. The man is a spook.

The second surprising and impressive aspect of the story is how utterly painful it is. The conflicts are so real, and so well-drawn, that I cringed away from them. They itched. I found the plight of dyslexic but dedicated Wilf to be particularly angst-inducing; I've always had a hard time with numbers the way he has a hard time with letters, and it's both humiliating and infuriating. Also beat-your-head-against-a-wall accurate: Connie's persistently regenerating typos. Oy. The head hurty.

The third noteworthy and laudable characteristic of The Overnight is the creep factor. It sneaks in slowly, but certainly. It's always present in that frustrating way that could, in a pinch, by logical people, be explained away by weather or human incompetence. This is the thing -- the story does not rely on stupidity. The Texts employees are rational people (more or less), and they respond to the swelling threat with appropriate actions. The real narrative coup is that Campbell creates a credible threat that overwhelms the staff members despite their competent handling of the situation. It's a tough line to walk -- and it's one that is rarely skirted well.

I've read a bit of complaint here and there that the first half of the book is boring, and I understand the criticism but I disagree with it. The first half is spent establishing (a). character development and (b). the undercurrent of threat ... and while it isn't as action-packed as the second end, I felt that the writing style itself carried me through the slower sections.

Campbell could be composing ad copy for sports socks in his sleep and I'd still hang in there for the ride. He writes with exactly the kind of dexterity that I aspire -- someday, in my finer moments -- to get near enough to tap with a ten-foot pole. The long and short of it is this: I loved this book. It's a polished little gem of fright and filth. It entertained me with its prose, it surprised me with its depth, and it unnerved me with its story.

Excellent stuff.

OK. All Right. There seems to be a gigantic split of opinion on this one. My opinion:

1. What you find fightening is as individual as what makes you laugh. Personally, this literally gave me nightmares. That hasn't happened since I was a kid. But I don't know what scares you: werewolves? vampires? final exams? IRS audits?

2. It must be admitted - Campbell takes an ungodly amount of time getting the book going. I enjoyed the shifting third person limited points of view. I also found some of it mildly funny, and the soap opera elements also interested me. But it is not remotely scary until over half way through. Be prepared for that, don't read it, or skip to the middle. You'll not understand the characters as well if you skip, but it may be the best way for some of you to read this.

3. The ending offers no explanations (although one is sort of alluded to earlier in the book). The fates of all the characters are not detailed, nor do we have a Monday morning wrap-up of what the world makes of what happened in the store overnight. I didn't feel that it needed that sort of ending, but you may.

4. The character of Woody is such an over-the-top American stereotype that it is somewhat distracting. He becomes in effect a secondary villain. I don't remember such scorn for Americans in previous Campbell novels. Post-Iraq War anger, maybe?

If you can deal with these caveats, buy this book and enjoy. Personally I loved it.

I love Ramsey Campbell's writing; like another reviewer posted, his writing style is so rich -- so laden with double meanings and horror (and sometimes humor) on almost every line -- that I would gladly read "The Ramsey Campbell Cookbook." (And indeed he DOES have a nonfiction book out: "Ramsey Campbell, Probably.")

Several of Campbell's stories explore the horrific potential of certain landscapes (sand in his short story "The Voice of the Beach", ice in MIDNIGHT SUN, urban blight in countless short stories). While THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS is set in an almost fairy-tale forest, THE OVERNIGHT is set in a more recognizable, more common, possibly more threatening setting: a brand-new outdoor strip mall surrounded by fields of boggy grass. I was worried at first that the bookstore setting would become self-indulgent (like any of Stephen King's novels with authors for protagonists), but the fact that the main characters work in a bookstore is almost irrelevant; the point, refreshingly to this reader if not to them, is that they're wage slaves and they may as well be stacking bricks. The first half of the novel is a dark satire of this kind of crushing work environment (similar to some of Thomas Ligotti's short stories in that vein). Campbell's novels often focus on a family, but he's obviously put his recent day-job-at-Borders experience to good use in depicting a different kind of group of people: coworkers. (Admittedly, the cast is so large I often had to flip back and forth to remind myself who was who.)

All this gradually and tensely builds to the second half where the novel turns explicitly supernatural in a, let's say, ruthless and expedient manner. Campbell is never "over-the-top" by any means, nor does he overexplain anything, but after his recent novels which kept death & mayhem to a minimum, it feels like a return to his more violent-horror-movie-ish style of the late '70s/early '80s (INCARNATE, THE NAMELESS, THE PARASITE). With so many different characters & perspectives, the novel could be criticized as being too much like a series of short stories, but they're GOOD short stories. It feels like it was as fun to write as it was to read, and the last few chapters are truly anxiety-provoking. Here's hoping it's optioned as a horror movie and Campbell is paid tons of money!