The Grin of the Dark (2007)

It's very rare for me to get a really creepy feeling from a novel these days but this one did just that for me. All the way through it gives you a feeling that there's a lot more to life than just what's on the surface, and that it wouldn't take very much at all to draw it to the surface. Clowns, of course, are automatically creepy but here we have a very intelligent reworking of the creepy old clown story. Tubby Thackeray is actually a comedian working in the silent black and white film era, while Simon Lester is a writer employed by a publisher to do a kind of biography of the man and his films. Unfortunately for Simon there's a little more to it than just a publisher offering a writer a project and things soon turn very weird indeed for our protagonist.

A very well written novel, and one that fully deserves it's 5 star rating. I'll be leaving it a couple of years and then re-reading it, which is something I rarely do what with there being so many novels I'd like to get to, but this is truly deserving of that future re-read. Do yourself a huge favour and pick this one up ASAP. It's brilliant.

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I've had mixed experiences with Campbell. His short stories have occasionally been brilliant, but more often obscure or underwhelming. Nonetheless, the best of his work has been sufficiently intriguing for me to seek out the bulk of his work in the hope of finding something similar.

This was my first novel of his and I'm happy to say that it's excellent, a masterful slow-burning work that ranks alongside the best in the genre. Like a lot of his short stories, there's a certain off-ness to the prose that works very effectively to unsettle and dislocate the reader's senses. Campbell uses the novel length format to ramp this up to almost unbearable levels and there were times when I began to feel genuinely uneasy; a sure sign of a great horror novel.

There are only a couple of things that stop this from being a five star novel. First, the work is a little too slow and subtle at times, at least for this reader. Secondly, Campbell makes no attempt to draw the reader in. You need to work and be committed to get the full effect. Not necessarily a criticism of the work as a whole, but I put a lot of stock in readability and Campbell lets me down a little here.
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Too unfocused to be really effective. The main idea is engaging and some of the scenes are brilliant, such as what Simon does in Amsterdam to raise a little money (I can see why Campbell and the eds didn’t want to cut them), but at around 400 pages the pace devolves from moody to glacial, and in the end the reader has to drag it bodily over the finish line. I really wanted to enjoy this one but I couldn’t because the author got in the way.

I found this to be a particularly cruel story; by the time I was halfway through it I could only stand to read one chapter a day. It lacks (unless you've read the dust jacket) any suggestion of supernatural horror until the last chapter or two; prior to that it's basically a mystery, and when the horror is finally revealed you discover that it began earlier in the story that you suspected. The resolution is not believable and every last one of the characters is unlikeable. I did give it an extra star because the words are put together extremely well, but even that's not enough to recommend the book.

It brought to mind F. Marion Crawford's short story "The Dead Smile" (1899). ( )

Please see review on my blog, Underground Man: http://undergroundmangeomatt.blogspot.com/2008/11/book-review-grin-of-dark-by-ra... ( )