Book #18: The Wise Friend by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has settled into a nice groove of late. Sure, there's a formula at work here, but I'll take Campbell doing variations on a theme any time.

Patrick was a fan of his aunt's slightly surreal and peculiarly spiritual art, despite the protestations of his own parents who found her worldview and paintings more than a bit off. Years after his aunt's death in a tragic fall, Patrick's son becomes obsessed with her work, largely through the influence of his new girlfriend.

Over time, Patrick comes to believe there's an old power waking in the woods. It can take human form but can't assume its full magical potential until certain rituals involving the earth from burial sites of various occultists are brought together. Unfortunately, he comes to believe his son's girlfriend is assisting an ancient evil trying to re-emerge. Questioning his own sanity, he desperately tries to stop what is imminent but at the potential cost of alienating his son forever.

Typically well-written with Campbell's hallucinogenic prose and paranoid descriptive style. A breezy summer read for quarantine.

Recent Reads

Imagine getting totally baked with a couple PhDs and a scientifically-minded shaman and having a wide-ranging series of conversations about resacralization of Western civilization and re-forging our species' lost link to Gaia and Nature.

That imagined convo is this book, which is a treat of speculative and badly-needed modern ideation around topics which are too commonly ignored as we all rush to the logical endpoint of neoliberal capitalism.


I love Dixon's late stories as much as I've loved all his others, including early and middle. The constant recursions and revisions, and his naive and hilarious and absolutely individual narrative consciousness make him an absolutely unique voice in modern American letters.


A nicely illustrated novella from my fave horror writer. Lots of puns and linguistic tricks and traps, and features Campbell's curious descriptive style. An out-of-work man finds a job creating a Web presence for a dilapidated bookseller. But nothing is as it seems in an eternal shop where books never leave and neither will the characters.


After a nuclear cataclysm wipes out most of humanity and much of the Earth, an alien species attempts to preserve and introduce humans back to their home. But they have their own agenda and their own desire for an "exchange" of DNA. Will humanity accept the deal and go back to a new terrestrial Garden of Eden to begin anew? Or will they resist and end up murdering one another all over again? A master of the form writes a compelling moralistic tale in the mode of Ursula K. LeGuin.