Review: The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell

Rating: 3.5/10

When a weight landed on his legs he raised his head from the violently crumpled pillow. The bed already had another occupant, and as Leo flung the quilt back so that it wouldn’t hinder his escape the creature scurried up his body to squat on his chest, clutching him with all its limbs like half a spider…

Leo Parker’s stay in Alphafen seems idyllic, but after he leaves, the nightmares begin: an airport turns into a labyrinth, his own words become treacherous if not lethal, and what are those creatures in the photographs he took? Even the therapy Leo undertakes becomes a source of menace.

Perhaps Leo has roused an ancient Alpine legend. Even once he understands what he brought back, his attempts to overcome its influence may lead into greater nightmares still…

A beautiful looking book, that (personally) tragically fails to live up to Campbell’s name, “The Incubations,” feels bland and pedestrian, something that frankly is more likely to lull readers to sleep than keep them up at night. Even Lovecraft had his sleeper stories (cough cough, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,”) and in this respect, Campbell continues to follow in his predecessors footsteps. I adored his earlier work, and have indulged in some of his contemporary writing too, most recently “The Wise Friend,” however, in my experience, this was a hazy, horror-lite swing and stumble. Regardless, I’d like to thank Flametree Press for getting this one out to me, and Anne Cater at Random Things Tours, for organising.

We follow Leo Parker, who is a driving instructor, and long-time penpal of Hanna Weber, a local of Alphafen, Germany. Since the war, Leo’s hometown has always been paired with Alphafen, where Hitler used to enjoy looking out over the alps, hence why his entire class are tasked with writing to their German counterparts. This includes Paddy Bloore, still resentful of the whole country following the war, who writes a hate-filled and xenophobic letter to Dietriech Gebhardt- a character that Leo has the misfortune of running into all these years later. Having had a strange episode, forcing him to question his ability to both teach, and drive, the pleasant week away spent with Hanna and her parents was exactly what he needed- upon his return to the UK, these issues seem to resurface. Paranoid he has been followed home, particularly following a strange episode in the airport, his confusion grows and worsens. 

Leo is not a character that I enjoyed reading about. I found him, at best, to be as three-dimensional as a cardboard cutout, my feelings toward him painfully neutral- at worst, his attitude and behaviour irritating and intolerable. We are stuck with Leo, who is nobody’s idea of a thrilling passenger on what could have been quite the adventure. The role of these characters in horror, as authors like Delilah S. Dawson are certainly aware, are to make for entertaining kills- not poor protagonists. 

I couldn’t get behind the characters that Campbell was writing about this time, but it is of course undeniable that Campbell does it well. His prose is as descriptive and sharp as ever, even if such penmanship is dulled by what I felt to be an underwhelming plot.

Whilst, as one of the most notorious horror-writing forces, certainly in the UK, if not the world, it pains me to say that the pacing of “The Incubations,” felt less break-neck and like more of a disappointing plod, an endless trawl through a thick fog. The revelations, none of which I deemed hugely… revelatory, are too few and far between to create any kind of gripping narrative. As aforementioned, Campbell is a horror titan, whose writing normally has a vice-like grip, but this time, this weakened to a lukewarm and lethargic grasp. If there is one thing that fiction, particularly horror fiction, shouldn’t be, that’s boring, and that really is why I couldn’t get into this book. 

For die hard disciples of Campbell’s work, who revel in his rich prose, of course the latest from him is worth a look over, but personally I wanted more pounce and less padding, something that lunges instead of ambling. Perhaps “The Incubations,” is Ramsey’s attempt to lull us into a false sense of security before blindsiding us with something genuinely scary later down the line, but for now, it remains a story content to let us linger on the doorstep of terror, without being so gracious as to invite us in.