conceals these from his mother and never falters in
his efforts to make her last days as comfortable as
possible. Despite the good intentions on both
sides, there are moments of quiet horror when she
has trouble with her memory or her coordination
and needs help performing even the most rudi-
mentary tasks.
The son is particularly upset when he leaves
his mother sleeping on the couch one night and
finds her on the floor when he rises in the morn-
ing. She wakened during the night, could not call
loud enough to wake him, and lacked the strength
to reach her own bed. Mortified, he buys her a
whistle so that she can call him more easily, but as
the days pass he grows to hate the sound of the
whistle, which disturbs his sleep and which almost
always signals the need to perform some onerous
task. The climax comes when he is awakened one
night by the whistle, which he initially tries to ig-
nore. Every few seconds it repeats itself, and he fi-
nally stumbles out of bed to find out what his
mother needs.
He discovers instead that she has died, but
even as he comes to that realization, he hears the
whistle again. It originates somewhere inside her
clothing, and when he investigates he realizes that
it has fallen against her most recent incision, which
has reopened. The whistle is pressing against the
exposed tissue, and this time it is the cancer itself
which is calling him. “The Calling” won the Bram
Stoker Award for short fiction.
Campbell, Ramsey(1946– )
Ramsey Campbell started his writing career in the
1960s with several short stories, most of which
were in obvious imitation of H. P. LOVECRAFT,al-
though he soon began exploring other themes,
often concentrating on the psychological effects of
terror. His early Lovecraftian tales were collected
as The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Ten-
ants(1964), and many of his other early short sto-
ries appeared in Demons by Daylight (1973).
Although he has continued to produce short fic-
tion regularly ever since, his novel-length works
quickly established his reputation as a writer of
quiet but intense horror novels. His first book-
length work, The Doll Who Ate His Mother(1976),
is a mildly ambiguous novel about an evil man who
uses apparently supernatural powers to influence
the mind of a child, and his second, The Face That
Must Die(1979), has no fantastic content.
After publishing several movie novelizations
under a pen name, Campbell wrote The Parasite
(1980), in which a group of children conduct a
playful séance that actually raises a demonic force
that resides within one of their number until its
host becomes an adult. A slightly different version
appeared as To Wake the Dead. The Nameless
(1981) began to establish a common theme in
Campbell’s novels, a core mystery the protagonist
seeks to solve that eventually becomes encum-
bered by the supernatural. In this case a woman re-
ceives a phone call that leads her to believe the
daughter she thought long dead has somehow sur-
vived. Incarnate(1983) is another novel of past be-
havior returning with deadly consequences, in this
case affecting the members of a group who experi-
mented with prophetic dreaming. Obsession(1985)
follows a similar pattern, this time in the form of a
mysterious advertisement answered by several
young people who discover the price they must pay
for success only after several years have passed.
The Hungry Moon(1986) is very much in the
spirit of Algernon BLACKWOOD. A remote English
town conceals the existence of cavern-dwelling
creatures and surviving druidic magic. An elderly
woman desperate to cheat death finds a way to re-
turn from the grave and infect the mind of a young
child in The Influence(1988). Campbell’s most re-
warding novels began appearing in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, in which he rarely resorted to the
more explicit excesses of his contemporaries. An-
cient Images(1989), possibly Campbell’s best novel,
starts with the discovery of a long-lost Boris Karloff
horror film and gradually moves to a remote En-
glish town and a supernatural secret. The Midnight
Sun(1990) pits a writer and his family against an
inhuman malevolent force that resides in a nearby
forest. The plot of The Count of Eleven(1991),
which progresses from an obsession with numerol-
ogy to serial murder, seems disjointed but is actu-
ally quite well-integrated, and the protagonist’s
devolving personality is convincingly portrayed.
The Long Lost(1993) is a less effective story in-
volving a woman with ancient magical powers, andCampbell, Ramsey 45