The Influence

By Ramsey Campbell

Book Overview

Queenie is the ageing matriarch of the Faraday family, and even death can't break her hold over her eleven-year-old granddaughter Rowan. She's buried with a locket that contains a lock of Rowan's hair, and soon afterwards Rowan is befriended by a mysterious uncannily intelligent girl of her own age. Only her aunt Hermione suspects how sinister this is, but will retrieving the locket save her niece? By the time anyone sees what effect the ghostly influence on Rowan is having, it may be too late for her. if the child who takes her place in the family isn't Rowan, Rowan may be somewhere else not quite like our world... FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1787583724
• ISBN13: 9781787583726
• Release Date: October 2019
• Publisher: Flame Tree Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Feel the Influence of Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell shows once again that he is an undisputed master of horror. He takes the things that go bump in the night and throughs it in your face. A great modern ghost story that will tingle the spine a send a chill deep to the core.

One of the finest and most chilling modern ghost stories

THE INFLUENCE is perhaps the best demonstration yet of Campbell's skills as a novelist. Like INCARNATE and THE NAMELESS before it, this book sees Campbell writing at the peak of his abilities both as a sensitive chronicler of ordinary lives threatened by unpredictable forces, and as a literary conjuror of spine-chilling spectral terrors. In addition, this may be Campbell's most understatedly eerie novel since THE DOLL WHO ATE HIS MOTHER; but even so, some particularly frightening scenes and images in the latter half of the book may well be among the scariest that Campbell--or any horror writer, for that matter--has committed to paper within the last fifteen years at least.Offering a haunting perspective on death and dying and a unique, skewed vision of what may lie beyond that proves both chilling and chillingly plausible, THE INFLUENCE is ultimately an intelligent, moving, terrifying meditation on loss, regret, and our need to come to grips with our own mortality--the result being arguably Campbell's most perfect novel so far.