Product Description

Charlotte Nolan and her cousins may not have ended up in the jobs they hoped to have when they were teenagers, but they've made their way in life. Charlotte works for a London publisher, Ellen cares for the elderly, Hugh has left teaching to work in a supermarket while his brother Rory is a controversial artist. Then more than their jobs begin to go wrong as something reaches out of the past for them. What has it to do with the summer night they spent on Thursaston Common? If the dreams they had that night are catching up with them, how is the Victorian occultist Arthur Pendemon involved? Before the nightmare ends more than one of them will have to enter what remains of Pendemon's house and confront what still lives there in the dark.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #354468 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover
Who could have believed that a night's camping on Thurstaston Common would lead to a haunting of such power and reach. After ten years Charlotte Nolan and her cousins unwittingly disturb something that should never have seen the light, their very dreams are filled with a suffocating darkness and each is pursued by an undefined figure that seems to have slipped straight out of a nightmare. Together, they must investigate an occult mystery stretching back one hundred years and confront the malevolent force that was once a man.

Praise for The Grin of the Dark, also published by Virgin Books, and winner of British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award for Best Novel.

Campbell's work has always drawn upon the menace and the macabre that lies in the mechanics of the everyday, and it is this fear that The Grin of the Dark harnesses to astounding effect
Scifi Now

Exemplary ... Campbell's lingering disquiet takes full hold
Death Ray

(Ramsey Campbell) has a genius for infusing horror into the everyday, piling up small moments of dread and confusion and fear until they become insurmountable
Tim Pratt in Locus

Extremely disturbing
Poppy Z Brite

About the Author
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as 'Britain's most respected living horror writer'. He has been awarded the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association. His regular columns appear in All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society.

Customer Reviews

Campbell gives us another unsettling tale!
Ramsey Campbell has produced decades of dark literature that often enters the realm of horror but rarely have the traditional in-your-face moments of fright and gore that typically accompany other novels written in this genre.

With "Thieving Fear", Campbell has written one of his most disturbing and unnerving novels to date. Four young Brits, all cousins, embark on a camping trip to Thurstaston Common and come upon an opening in the ground that reveals an ancient evil. This evil being, aptly named Pendemon, invades all four of their lives and the tale takes on a story within a story feel that is frightening in and of itself. Difficult to follow and with the feel of "The Blair Witch Project" directed by David Lynch, "Thieving Fear" will confound and unsettle you right up to the last page.

Not Worth The Effort of Picking Up
I have read quite a few Ramsey Campbell novels in the past, and have always enjoyed them, which is why I chose this book. What a mistake...

This book is slower moving than a one-legged tortoise. I skipped a lot of pages, hoping against hope that the story would pick up and start to engage me. I ended up hating all the characters and resenting the time I wasted wading through this dirge of a novel.

It is classed as a horror novel, I just think it was a horrific disappointment.

I have rated this book one *, because there was no option to give it none, which is all it deserves.

Plodding, Dull - It Could Have Been Far More
Thieving Fear was the first Ramsey Campbell novel I read, and unfortunately it came as a big disappointment. I can understand what the writer was trying to achieve, and it is worth acknowledging that it is well written. Unfortunately, the pace is so plodding and the overall atmosphere so depressing that you lose interest in the main characters long before the novel reaches its slightly predictable end.

There are moments of fear, and some of the experiences of the main characters are disorientating and unsettling. In particular, the plot strand about weight loss and weight gain is well played and shows the cunning of the evil at the heart of the novel. But in making the horrors of the novel so domestic, Campbell makes them almost too normal to be interesting. The characters in the book also seem to be far too slow and incapable to deal with the mounting horror, and with more than one of them I was hoping they would just get a grip and get over it.

The novel feels like a book to fill a hole in a schedule rather than a novel that deserves to exist in its own right. Since reading this, I have read other things by Campbell, and can honestly say he has much better work. But if you are where I was, and looking for your first Campbell book, then I'd advise starting elsewhere.