Welcome to what I hope will be the first of many critical examinations of short fiction. So many of us writers get our start writing stories for magazines and anthologies, and there is a definite art and craft to making great, concise fiction. Hopefully, through these analyses, we can all learn a few of those secrets together.

So, tonight we explore a tale of childish dares and what lurks in the shadowed corners of suburbia. I give you...

This story, which Campbell mentions was inspired by an irrigation tunnel he walked through in Rhodes, follows two young cousins named Tom and Lucas. Tom, being resentful of having to take of the socially awkward Lucas, decides to spend Halloween scaring him. To do this they go to an isolated tunnel where, years ago, a troubled young couple took their lives.

I'm ashamed to admit that, while I have read several anthologies that were edited by him, this is the first short story I've read that was actually written by Ramsey Campbell. He has great descriptive skill, painting the scene and its characters so that they move vividly through one's mind. He proves equally adept at crafting both the mundane and the horrific.

The characters themselves, while well defined physically, are a little underdeveloped. The story is mostly told through Tom's perspective, and because of this the motivations behind Lucas' decisions are a little hard to read. Tom is, of course, your average 15 year old, IE: myopic and a little self-absorbed. Lucas, meanwhile, is at first depicted as slow and possibly mentally disabled. His actions later on go against this, and lead to the story's climax, which we'll address later. Suffice to say, Tom's character isn't very likeable and Lucas is just plain confusing.

I was a little off put by the dialogue in the story. All the characters present are fairly young, so simplistic sentences and statements are to be expected, but the word choices sometimes tripped me up and took me out of the flow of the narrative. It even somewhat gets in the way of the story's climax, which, other than that flaw, is the story's saving grace.

Honestly, I was going to give this story a low rating until towards the end. For future reference, I shall try to refrain from spoilers in these reviews to encourage those interested to read them themselves, so all I will say is that Campbell's use of emotion and tension building leads to a chilling ending, even if the 15 year old Tom's vernacular is not to my taste.

I also feel it needs to be stated that the concept of supernatural horror lying hidden in the dark corners of our mundane locales, places that could be my home town or yours, is inspired. It's certainly not a new concept, but how many ghost stories have you heard that take place in an irrigation tunnel? Now every time I walk or drive by one I'll take a moment to think, to wonder what could be lurking down there.

As I said before, I wasn't going to rate the story very high. I'm not a fan of teenage angst, you'll rarely see me reading a mainstream young adult novel, not that I'm a hipster. The second half of the story saves the day, and I'll impart a rating that reflects so. So, with my tentative rating system (your standard 1 to 5 stars), I'll give Ramsey Campbell's urban horror piece a 3 out of 5. It wasn't perfect, but I will be actively looking for more of his stories in the future.