Stop Apologizing, Take Your Copy of The Giving Tree and Go

Note to self: Having spent over a year and a half working at a large chain book store, NEVER EVER read another horror novel where the workers at a large chain book store are driven insane and then eaten by British swamp monsters.

I honestly can’t even tell you if this book sucked or not, because I was too busy suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. At this point, I’m not even positive I read a book at all. Any moment, I might wake up to find the past year some sort of blissful dream, because I’ve merely passed out from exhaustion in the break room at the Barnes and Noble in Marina del Rey. If that’s true, I hope that the part about the mud monsters coming to kill the bookstore employee is also, because man, I really don’t want to get yelled at by customers ever again.

Let’s take a step out of Steinho’s Wacky World of Reading-Induced Nightmares for a moment, shall we? The novel that caused me such mental distress is called “The Overnight,” by British horror author, Ramsey Campbell. Now, this chap seems to have authored quite a few novels in his day, clearly a sign of substantial success. Therefore, either his books are well-written, or entertaining enough to somebody that his publisher kept throwing sacks of cash his way. “The Overnight” discusses that age old quandary: What happens when you build a huge, corporate retail establishment on top of a British fen steeped in evilness. If it were the dark ages, we’d all turn on our fellow villagers and brain them with whatever farming implement we had handy. In the modern world, as Campbell sets up in “The Overnight,” hoes and pitchforks are replaced with emotional barbs and psychological warfare. The cast of characters, who I personally felt were all obnoxious twits, begin simply by bickering with each other. Accusations fly about who messed up who’s section of books, and who isn’t really carrying their weight in terms of work load. By the end, personal vendettas bubble up and turn into physical confrontation. Imagine “Lord of the Flies” set in your local Borders.

The text had a poetic, darkly whimsical style, further exaggerated by Campbell’s decision to write the story in present tense. The result was a fifty-fifty cocktail, partly pretty description and partly pretty pretentious. For example, he describes one bookseller wandering the parking lot, searching for the security guard, saying “His shadow smears itself across the whitish door like another example of vandalism as he reaches for the metal handle.” Smearing a shadow sounds like a messy job. I feel like I should be citing these pages with a proper bibliography and start talking about how Campbell’s use of the vandalism metaphor suggests a belief that the true monsters in today’s society are the misguided, urban youth, and since a shadow is something we all possess, we must acknowledge that potential darkness within ourselves.

Or it could just be a creepy scene about a guy in an empty security guard booth.

Going back to my initial point. What freaked me out the most about “The Overnight” had nothing to do with Campbell’s endless blathering about creepy fog, though I will say, there were more than a few chill-inducing scenes. If I can come up with any criticism, it’s that there was too much of the people as monsters to each other vs. actual mud monsters suffocating terrified booksellers with their slimy, malleable bodies. Now I’m going to contradict myself by saying that the parts that affected me the most though, were those that specifically focused on the stress of regular, old retail life. For example, I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to seriously cry when I returned to the children’s section after break, only to find that a single, tiny unsupervised and evil toddler had managed to destroy my entire area in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. These children are like demigods of destruction and entropy. When Madeleine, the children’s lead in “The Overnight” returns to find her section trashed, only there’s no one in the store but the other employees, what is she to think, but that someone is trying to mess with her? Then to read her anguish, and desperation and sorrow, and for the other characters (all horrible human beings) to simply tell her, ‘Oh! You must not have done as good a job tidying as you thought. You’re just tired and missed a few disorganized shelves,’ well that made me want to cry a little, too.

Then there was the store manager in “The Overnight.” Dear managers who I worked under, thank you for not being as insane and obsessed as this character. Thank you for being human beings with souls! To start with, this fellow’s name is Woody, and while all the other characters are native Brits, Woody is American, which I suppose was Campbell‘s way of explaining his insane capitalist drive. Woody goes around telling everyone to smile and keep working after one of their crew has been run down by a phantom child in a stolen car. When he finds another girl, choked to death after being trapped in an elevator, he carries her body off, not because he cares about her, but because he needs to start cleaning up for when the customers arrive. Of course, it’s the running theme of the book that the evil swampland they work upon is what causes everyone’s darkest inner thoughts to spill over into reality. This makes most of the employees grow antagonistic towards each other, but it just turns Woody into even more of a sales-obsessed, villainous corporate zombie. His condescending tone and constant mocking of workers he feels are performing less than perfectly made me want to go inside the book and harpoon him in the face. The fact that he alone doesn’t get murdered by the mud people is the most disappointing twist ending since M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village.” Now that, Ramsey Campbell, is just plain monstrous.