Current mood:	dissatisfied
Current music:	Xenosaga II | Omega System

A Disjointed Book Review
So I bought myself a book not so long ago, based on a LJ community rec (I think Barnes & Noble, but I can't remember now). I thought it sounded like it could be a hoot, being essentially a horror novel about a book store. Funny, right?

Now, the book is called The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell. Part of the blurb on the back, which is what really hooked me, goes:

Desperate to pass a company inspection, the manager musters his staff for an overnight inventory. When the last customers reluctantly depart, leaving almost-visible trails of slime shining behind them, the doors are locked, sealing the staff inside for a final orgy of shelving.

Honestly, I think it was the "orgy of shelving" that had me chortling. Still, the text on the back seems to be somwhat inaccurate (or I need more sleep).

I had to look up the tense used, because I hated it immediately. If I'm reading Wikipedia right, I think this sucker is "third person singular", but I never was any good at getting the lingo down for this sort of thing.

An excerpt: What time is this supposed to be? He seems hardly to have slept but already there's the travel alarm. No, it's the cordless phone that comes with the house and is forever wandering off. (Page 1, initial sentences)

Anyway, it starts off simply enough with a false alarm. Each chapter is sort of from the viewpoint of one of the people working at the shop (called Texts). From there things escalate with peculiar happenings, things not quite seen, one person losing a fundamental ability, and tempers rising progressively as time goes by. And in the end, pretty much everybody dies a nasty death. Well, I'm honestly not sure about a couple of them. Either I'm just too tired to focus properly, or the tense threw me really badly, or it was left totally in doubt for several people.

Some of the review quotes on the cover are:

"A deliciously creepy bookstore nightmare." — Denver Post

"A creepy, sometimes blackly funny account of a haunted bookshop. The Overnight puts a distinctly contemporary spin on the traditional tale of terror." — The Washington Post Book World

So here's my actual criticism.

Parts of it were a bit icky, I suppose, but nothing that would have me, a person who is rather more or less notoriously squeamish (if it's not me writing it), feel anything other than, "Uh, yeah? Oh, he died. Right, who's next. Is this over yet?" It wasn't creepy, and I certainly don't agree with the "blackly funny" opinion. I sure as hell didn't feel any sense of terror, and Campbell is supposed to be good at what he does.

I was irritated more than anything. Woody, the store manager (an American in this British store), becomes increasingly more dementedly chipper and contrary as time goes by, to the point where I kept asking myself, "Okay, when does this twat die already? I'm so damn sick of 'listening' to him on the store's PA system." Granted, out of all of them (except maybe Gavin) he was the one who probably only slept a couple of hours a night, so his increasingly warped personality makes sense, and his utter lack of empathy for anyone, as well.

You know how many people have floaters inside their eyes? Sometimes you see spots that move around? Well, I've got something like that going on, and I frequently think I see things that I'm not really seeing on a daily basis. It doesn't help that I'm "high strung" (as we would describe the many dachshunds the family owned) and startle easily. I was more disturbed by seeing things in my own peripheral vision than I was by anything in the book. That's how generally boring it all was.

So yeah, I get what was happening in the broadest sense. I understand to some degree exactly what was going on, why these people kept getting more verbally aggressive and confrontational, and even what was causing it. But I found the reason, the cause, to be utterly lacking. It was a let down, and there's no resolution as to why it's like that. Frankly, I'd have been better off reading Stephen King's Pet Sematary again. At least that gave us an actual history of the location in question.

In the end, I'm tempted to find a store that trades in book for credit, just to get his off my already overcrowded shelves.