Demons By Daylight

by Ramsey Campbell

Horror story by Ramsey Campbell

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Weird Fiction, Collections, Fantasy

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Ramsey Campbell is a British writer considered by a number of critics to be one of the great masters of horror fiction. T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today," while S. T. Joshi has said that "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of horror stories has its own singular style and sense of atmosphere. Each story is darkly enchanting and finely written. Some stories are stronger and more fully realized than others, though all are cloaked in a sense of portentousness. Denouements are not always revealed as solid events, but are hinted at through occurrences with suggestible endings. The author creates environments that can be seen in detail by the mind's eye and are as tactile as the book we hold in our hands. Religious beliefs are challenged by a hostile universe, and nature is alluring in its menace. Psychological themes become hallucinatory as memory chases time in hallucinatory ripples. I felt myself in other worlds while between the covers of this collection, and will be sure to seek out much more of Ramsey Campbell's work.

[Mark]

This is one of Ramsey Campbell’s earlier collections, in which he moved drastically far from his Lovecraftian roots and started to develop the psychological horror style he is known for today. It includes one truly phenomenal story (“The End of a Summer’s Day,” which is unsettling in a completely non-graphic way) and a few other decent tales, but the rest were more of a mixed bag. Not a bad book overall, but I’d recommend reading Dark Companions before this one. I found too many of the stories in Demons by Daylight to be excessively vague and/or forgettable; but it's still worth reading for Campbell devotees who want to see what he was writing closer to the beginning of his career.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first introduction to the work of Ramsey Campbell was, I have to say, quite a shock. He's not going to be for everyone, that's for sure. What you have here are not coherent stories relayed in a conventional manner and the horror is not conventionally scary. His stories are more oblique and scary in more subtle ways. They seem to get more cryptic as the collection progresses. The number of stories I feel I fully got my head around were definitely in the minority.

On top of that is his sparce, jagged prose that has to be read to be believed. Imagine the converse of Lovecraft who gave obsessive attention to detail, Campbell on the other hand, is concerned with only imagery and atmoshpere. Imagine watching a movie which is a sequence of still images fading in and out on screen every few seconds, each conveying a key scene or plot development. Campbells stories read a bit like that. Thus the narrative and dialog can be confusing and require careful reading. However the imagery is wonderfully evokative, powerfully conveying the sense of unease and atmosphere.

Reading campbell is not a passive affair, he does not spell everything out, forcing the reader to make deductions and draw inferences in order to make sense of the plot. In addition, the sparce prose requires the use of imagination to fill in the gaps. This will either be a positive or negative depending on what you want from a book.

Those who like a little subtlety in their horror will like what they find here, especially if you they prepared to actively engage with the stories. Those who are more passive readers, who prefer to have things spelled out and the horror in your face will probably not like this at all.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early collection of Campbell's short horror fiction. Arkham House published it first in 1973, and the Jove edition I have was the first US mass market edition, which for some reason dropped a couple of stories from the original and added three different ones. The book is divided into three sections labeled "Nightmares," Errol Undercliffe: a tribute," and "Relationships," the purpose of which escaped me. Curiously, the table of contents lists fifteen stories, but the back cover says there are twelve. The stories are more psychological and dreamlike in nature than the cosmic, Lovecraftian works which he began his career writing, and I found it difficult to keep track of what was -really- happening in several of them. I thought they were well-crafted literary pieces but didn't latch onto any as especially memorable. It reminded me of Charles Grant, but more reserved and very British.

[Katherine]

A pesar que me han gustado muchas novelas y cuentos del autor, esta antología no me termino de convencer en su conjunto y no la recomendaría para leer por primera vez al autor.

Es indiscutible la calidad de la pluma de Campbell, pero el contenido me pareció muy irregular, varios relatos no fueron de mi agrado, y otros estuvieron bien aunque no son impresionantes, pero hay otros que sí me gustaron muchísimo y que recomendaría como Potencial y Los centinelas.

[Adrienne L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Demons by Daylight is Ramsey Campbell's second published collection of short stories. Campbell is one of my favorite short horror story writers, one of the very few who manages to really give me the chills, so I hate to admit that I didn't particularly enjoy this book. His usual style of oblique and disjointed writing is taken to excess here, to the point that, in many of these stories, I couldn't decipher what was actually happening. Some of the stories are better than others, like "The Sentinels" and "The Guy," both of which I've come across in other anthologies.

I always prefer when Campbell leans more into the influence of M.R. James rather than Lovecraft, and I would say this collection has more of the latter. This may have also affected my enjoyment of some of these stories. One tale in particular, "The Franklyn Paragraphs," seemed oddly unfinished. There is still some very effective and atmospheric writing in a lot of these stories, however.

If you are new to Campbell's work and would like to read some of his short stories, I would recommend skipping Demons by Daylight and opting for a collection like Waking Nightmares or Alone With the Horrors instead.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dec 2019: revisiting some old pieces.

The section "Errol Undercliffe: a tribute" contains two stories. "The Franklyn Paragraphs" seems to be one of Campbell's least collected pieces. I vaguely remember enjoying it decades ago, so am curious why it's not in (for example) the Tor edition of Cold Print, or the omnibus Alone with the Horrors. The "lost books/vanished writers" trope is pretty well-worn by now, but this was an early 70s take, solidly situated in its time. Campbell slaps on an extra level of indirection: the narrator is himself, complete with titles of Lovecraftian tales, who is looking into the disappearance of his correspondent and fellow writer Errol Undercliffe, who in turn is investigating the vanished writer Roland Franklyn. Lots of writerly in-jokes and namedropping: Pursewarden (apparently a Lawrence Durrell character?), Sebastien Knight (ha!) and the by now overused Robert Blake. It's briskly executed, with a sly ending; whether you enjoy it or not will depend on how tired you are of these riffs.

The other piece in the same section, "The Interloper by Errol Undercliffe", didn't make much of an impression on me.

Similarly, I've been disappointed with the more celebrated stories ("The Guy", "The End of a Summer's Day", "The Old Horns" etc). Maybe even my vague memories were enough to diminish their effectiveness; after all they're quite short.

I actually did enjoy "Potential", which I don't remember at all. It follows a familiar pattern: guy goes to a lame hippy party, feels out of place, gets talked into going to another, darker event, where weird things happen. Lovecraft is namedropped twice, but none of the supernatural entities or books. And we get a brief mention of Penderecki's Threnody, ha! The ending is actually quite surprising, with a somewhat Lovecraftian twist.

[Die Booth]

I found this collection very hit and miss.

Ramsey Campbell certainly doesn't belong to the 'slasher' generation of horror writers who rely on gore and shock to get their message across, his is an entirely more subtle kind of horror. Even as fond as I am of 'a vague sense of unease' I did find this collection slightly too subtle.

It's undeniable that Campbell is very adept at creating atmosphere and that's what carries this collection through. There's a lot of beautifully written and surprising description, such as "The trees had trapped the twilight. The branches which the sun had dappled were brown stains on the shadows; leaves moved like hives of darkness." Other descriptive passages however fall a little flat; as a whole this collection occasionally come across as rather over-described and lacking in coherant story.
Narrative tends to jump from one scene to another with confusing rapidity. New characters are introduced frequently with little explanation. The reader is left with the feeling of not having read a single full story but rather a series of gently disturbing vignettes that present a weird and grainy snapshot of 1970s Britain.
The stand-out stories are the ones that have a more coherant and less rambling narrative, such as 'The Sentinels' which I found genuinely unsettling. However other stories, I think notably 'The Stocking' and 'The Second Staircase', are far too opaque.

[Armand Rosamilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any collection, there are some great stories and some average ones. Luckily this collection has many more great ones in it. None of them are bad, although it was hard to follow a few because of my decidedly non-British upbringing and having to figure out a few words here and there. I don't think I'm an idiot, but the author is so much smarter than me it feels like it, haha...

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been dipping into this book since April, so I really took my time finishing it. Returning to this book was always a treat however, and rarely did I find a story here I didn't like.

Campbell got away from the Lovecraftian influence in this book, and really wrote some insidious, menacing stories which are subtle and get under the skin.

"Potential" is a very weird story, the end didn't make complete sense to me however.

"The End of a Summer's Day" didn't exactly scare me the first time I read it, however it took some time to germinate. A few days later, laying in bed thinking about it I know I lost some sleep over that one!

"At First Sight" is effectively scary at many points, but especially at the end.

"The Franklyn Paragraphs" is a story I read in the "Cold Print collection some time ago, all I recall is it was well-written, Lovecraftian perhaps but not overly creepy.

"The Interloper" isn't the best-written story, feels a bit...rushed (?) but it's definitely one of the ones that creeped me out the most.

"The Sentinels" has a good, quiet creepiness about it, atmospheric but not among his best.

"The Guy" is a nice weird tale, creepy ending but not among the best in the collection.

"The Old Horns" has a nice pagan, Machen-esque feel to it, creepy but doesn't always make a lot of sense.

"The Lost" is one of the few stories I didn't care for at all.

"The Stocking" has a good atmosphere and shocker ending, but is another lesser tale.

"The Second Staircase" is OK, but another lesser story where the first half feels like filler for the second. This one embodies Campbell's hallucinogenic feel.

"Concussion" is perhaps the best example of Campbells' hallucinogenic stories, it takes a riff on a familiar (but non-scary) horror/sci-fi theme of "time-slips."

"The Enchanted Fruit" more hallucinogenic writing, not among my favorites, but it does have a good sense of urban anxiety and dread.

"Made in Goatswood" is a story I read years ago in the "Cold Print" collection, good Lovecraftian fare.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ramsey Campbell is one of the best-known and important horror writers of the past 50 years. He's known for crafting a certain kind of tale: quiet and understated, laced with dread, set in British towns and cities of varying degrees of decline and bitterness. He's also a very gracious and thoughtful person, based on the several occasions I've met and heard him.

I grabbed this collection on a Kindle sale. I think I have a copy, but my horror books are still in storage (which is a daily horror not at all enjoyable). Demons by Daylight is a short story collection from the 1970s, and some of the tales really date clearly from that period. My favorite one, "Potential," is - among other things - a snarling satire on contemporary Newage movements.

Campbell has a fine knack for brief, creepy metaphors and similes that spike each story with moments of dread - not as plot points, but as texture. Read carefully, they heighten a sense of unease. They are also excellent visualizations. For example:
"The moon fought back the clouds, like an awakening face."
"An old man picked up papers from the platform, studied, them, dropped them muttering; Carol stared into the tunnel, where trains thrust and vanished like huge mysterious worms."
"He plunged beneath the shadow of the long Pier Head bus station hall, pale as the bore of a blown bone..."

Campbell slides these into otherwise non-horrific language describing scenes:

Barbara thought of Sentinel Hill. They’d driven past at dusk on their way to the pub: the sloughed stone faces mobile with shadow; a few cars, uniformly grey, from which their passengers had climbed to count the stones and count again and descend baffled; a child at the centre of the circle prancing awkwardly and, as she’d slowed to let Doug watch, turning to her a cardboard demon’s face.

At times such language recalls noir and crime fiction:
"a bluebottle was patting its reflexion on the window, trying to escape."
"On waste ground at the edge of Lower Brichester a gutted bonfire smouldered. Children stood about it, shaking sparklers as a dog shakes a rat."
"Through the posts I turned into the forest; the moon was caught by reaching twigs and dragged down."

There is a horror at daily life in much of Campbell's work, a disgust at sensual details and something close to existential nausea or plain outrage at the condition of experience. One story begins thusly:

The man behind the counter of the curiosity shop wore a cloth cap; when he bent his head Terry Aldrich felt he was being served by a toad. The man’s hands were brown and crinkled as the paper in which he wrapped the parcels. The paper flapped: dust billowed round the shop, passing like incense across the window through which the summer sun was dulled as by sunglasses, changing form and leaving particles on clasped leather-bound books, carved vases, ornamental knives, a naked wooden boy frozen in the act of crying praises to the sun or possibly of beating off an attack from above. The hands set the parcel before Terry; he thought that the dim eyes gleamed in derision. Briefly his hand was clasped by fingers drier than the notes he paid.

I think this style is the real strength of much of Campbell's fiction. I don't want to summarize the plots here, because they can be fairly slight (a group of people visit a scary place and bad things happen) and predictable. These are gems of mood, draughts of dread to sample.

This time, I'd recommend the stories about horror writers, "Errol Undercliffe" and "The Franklyn Paragraphs." They offer a nice insider's glimpse into the genre, showing a mix of satire and affection. "The Guy" looks like a piece about class differences then wrong-foots us. "The Lost" starts with a classic Brits-visiting-the-creepy-continent plot and nicely reverses.

I did want to like "Concussion" because I've suffered three of my own (oh yes), and because the drifting plot was impressive, but it dragged on too long for a short story.

"Potential" remains my favorite. It's remarkably compressed. It begins with a hippie/Newage scene, then escalates into something much greater. The last pages are excellent, reminding me of Thomas Ligotti.

[Zantaeus Glom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed most of these stories immensely, and Campbell writes with a bravura, oblique style which at best engenders a cloying,unsavory atmosphere; but sometimes I did find myself a little alienated by his idiosyncratic style of prose. (no fault of Campbell's artistry, just personal taste)

My favorites were: 'The end of a summer's day' - A brief, yet wonderfully unsettling nightmare. 'The Franklyn Paragraphs' - This made the collection for me; truly sublime weird fiction in the classic Lovecraft, Ashton Smith vernacular. There is a macabre passage where the main fellow visits this extraordinarily unpleasant domicile, and meets this dusty old maid, who is quite the character! (a beautifully written vignette) 'The Old Horns' - This grimpen tale reminded me a little of Algernon Blackwood; with nature itself as nemesis; in this specific case, a wholly malefic bog, which is home to these singularly nasty-sounding, blobby-headed wraiths! #shudder# (a sublime tale of phantasmagorical weirdness with some wonderfully evocative passages)

I think I will dip into Campbell's eloquent, sepulchral grimoire every now and again, but I won't read the short stories all in one sitting next time; I will savor them like one would a wee dram of an especially complex single malt; as I feel they would work best when enjoyed sparingly; as they lost a little of their refinement consumed so hurriedly.

Ramsey Campbell is one of those rare contemporary artists who can readily evoke an authentically macabre Gothic milieu along with the likes of the legendary Poe, Blackwood, and M.R James. And I would be very surprised indeed if any fan of elegiac, weird fiction didn't find their nerves iced by at least one of Campbell's splendidly malignant treats!

[Alan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm absolutely shocked that this is a collection of Ramsey Campbell's stories. For the life of me, I could barely understand what was happening in any of them. Mostly, they consisted of people having banal conversations and somehow the reader is supposed to glean what's going on by reading between the lines. Except in most cases there's only confusion or nothing of consequence actually happening. And most of the tales have no inkling of terror, except for something hinted at on the final pages. Really, these stories feel like either parts were missing or they were aborted ideas that were somehow scooped up and thrown together to make a collection. If you want to read something by Campbell, there are many much better books than this one.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection that revolutionized cosmic horror! Smoke lots of weed when you read this! Wish I could have read it when it first came out in the 70s, I can easily imagine cranking some Pink Floyd and dropping acid and reading this until I stopped being able to see the words properly.

[Noeli Cobaya Debiblioteca · Rating 2 out of 5]

No me gusto demasiado aunque quizás lo estoy subestimando

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is very different from ‘The inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants’ which was the first collection that Campbell released. His prose improved greatly and developed into something dreamlike and very unsettling.
You can see that Campbell found his own style and he really ran with it, the stories are wonderfully weird and very well written. I often found myself confused due to the stylistic choices but I found that this added to the atmosphere.
My favorite story in the collection was 'Concussion' which wasn't really a horror story but a bizarre Lynchian fever dream that was utterly compelling.
I'd highly recommend this collection to both new and old fans of Campbell.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent first introduction.

The title isn't totally accurate. I've read a few of Campbell's stories here and there, but never a full collection. Having a full collection of his work to read has given me a greater appreciation for his style and pacing. Ramsey's horror is a visceral madness hiding in the mundane. It is a thing waiting for a character to look out their peripheral vision at just the wrong angle, and then it reconstructs the world around that. This is a wonderful book.

[Debra]

Stephen King recommended author and book.

Noted as "important to the genre we have been discussing" from Danse Macabre, published in 1981. Author discussed in chapter 9.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond-excellent short stories by Ramsey Campbell. So disturbing I can hardly describe these to you. Just read them.

[Jim Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oblique, condensed and strange, these stories form a collection that stands among the essentials of modern horror development. 'The End of a Summer's Day' is the highlight.

[Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Demons by Daylight (1973) was Ramsey Campbell’s second collection of short stories, following on from The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). Truth be told, I’ve never really got on with that debut; it’s cod-Lovecraftian prose puts me off. That said, it was an achievement for a sixteen year old. This second book is a different prospect, having discovered Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene, the still young Campbell changed his style wholesale.

The stories are split across both Campbell’s Liverpool, where psychological horrors abound and Brichester, the city at the heart of his take on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Opening story, Potential, is firmly lodged in 1960s counter-culture, where a young man walks into a hippy gathering, and is befriended by another attendee who suggests another place that may be more to his liking. What begins innocently enough leads to horror of cosmic proportions. That it opens the collection suggests Campbell is flag-planting his territory with this new approach: the Lovecraftian influence remains, but the delivery is going to be different.

So different, in fact, that Campbell finds space among the stories for some meta-fiction, with The Franklyn Paragraphs, an enjoyable romp - and spin on the Lovecraftian mythos - with the author himself on the trail of missing novelist, Errol Undercliffe. The Interloper, a story purportedly by Undercliff also appears. Lovecraft isn’t the only model as The End of a Summer’s Day, one of the collection’s standouts for me, brings Robert Aickman to mind. A short tale about a newly-wed couple on their honeymoon taking an excursion to a cave. It pulls the rug out from under the couple, with no explanation. Where the ending seems slightly innocuous, it gains from a further reading, where a throwaway line midway suggests a greater tragedy to come.

Such subtlety is part of Campbell’s trademark here; he’s not the type to hold readers’ hands in the dark. His narratives require patient ingestion and invite cross-referencing of details. The spaces between the narratives require their own level of consideration. With each reread they open up without ever fully revealing their hand. Campbell is so in tune with his characters’ psychological states that we are often never even sure if the horrors are real or tricks of the mind. With abrupt time jumps between paragraphs even linear narratives feel disorienting. Add to this particularly off-kilter perceptions, such as a bus “swallowing its queue” or, when a man wanders among trees (“branches wept on him”), and we have a constant sense of unease.

Some stories, despite reading them several times, are sadly baffling; too abstruse as to be fully satisfying. However, Concussion, a lengthy fantasy where an elderly man and a young woman on a bus have a week-long fling in the past is a gem that rewards multiple reads. It’s a sustained fever dream, flitting in and out of reality, memories, and other influences so that we are never truly grounded in what may be going on.

Though there are killers and ghosts, and even a take on garden gnomes in Made in Goatswood, nothing feels conventional. The Enchanted Fruit luxuriates in nature writing as a man takes from an unusual tree with consequences. The Sentinels looks to standing stone lore, and The Stocking is a grounded and nasty tale of office flirting, though its reference in The Franklyn Paragraphs arguably pulls it into Campbell’s wider mythos.

The most unusual thing about Demons by Daylight is how long, for a book less than two hundred pages, it took me to read. I found myself reading the stories over and over, searching for the key detail that would unlock the tale. Campbell’s stories feel dense, thanks to layers of detail and references, mostly literary and cinematic, but they do reward patience, mostly. Yes, the collection feels uneven, but this book is a young writer finding his new style. This year he’ll have been publishing books for sixty years, so it’s clearly served him well.

[Jim Reddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Demons by Daylight is Ramsey Campbell’s second collection of horror short stories. His first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, is a collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories. He was eighteen when it was published. In this collection he moves away from Cthulhu stories. Instead of cosmic horror, the stories are about relationships, repression, and anxiety. They sometimes take place in the brightness of day.

After reading the first couple of stories I started thinking I wouldn’t be liking this collection. The writing flowed and the stories were atmospheric and creepy, but the endings were mystifying. I’d get to the end of a story and think, “What just happened?!” But as I kept reading I got to some stories where the endings, while still a little mystifying, made more sense.

The writing in all the stories is amazing, unlike anything I’ve ever read before. They have a dreamlike quality to them. For example “The Enchanted Fruit” has some of the most beautiful descriptions of a forest that I’ve ever read. Unfortunately after an interesting buildup the story just ends. The stories I didn’t care for all have the same thing in common, I have no idea what happened or the story feels incomplete. I liked about half of the stories.

The author often tries to create paranoia and a dream-like atmosphere by describing distorted images, including bits of overheard conversations, and jumping from one paragraph to the next without transitions. It all seems very experimental and is often confusing. While I feel it didn’t work in every story, it really worked for me in “Concussion,” my favorite story. It’s about an old man struggling to remember past events and the woman he fell in love with. The story has a science fiction twist as past and present become a blur.

Until now I’ve never encountered an author where a number of stories are confusing, but the writing grabbed me so much that I want to read more. The stories that I liked left such a strong impression on me that I’ll be seeking out more of Ramsey Campbell’s work.

Potential (3/5)
The End of a Summer’s Day (2/5)
At First Sight (2/5)
The Franklyn Paragraphs (2.5/5)
The Interloper (3/5)
Sentinels (2.5/5)
The Guy (4/5)
The Old Horns (3/5)
The Lost (3/5)
The Stocking (3/5)
The Second Staircase (2/5)
Concussion (4/5)
The Enchanted Fruit (2/5)
Made in Goatswood (3/5)

[Norman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Campbell removes himself from the pastiche style of his first collection and changes his prose style for one less direct and more kaleidoscopic which when done correctly lends itself to keep the reader engaged in the story and almost as disoriented as the characters, having a cinematic quality as one scene dissolves into another like a memory or a dream. I say when done correctly because Campbell doesn't get it right all the time and some stories here cross the line from artistic and cryptic prose into clumsy, oddly frustrating stories which only confuse the reader and deliver anti climaxes that leave you wondering what was the point of the story if at the end it's not gonna be scary/sensible at all.

Campbell is at his best in the Machen influenced tales like "The Sentinels" and "The Old Horns" where he effectively infuses the landscapes of the stories with an ancient sense of dread, playing up subtle details in the narrative and the landscape to alter the character's perceptions of reality little by little, infusing these pagan legends with a satisfying sense of menace and even better a sense of being incomprehensible to us in their evilness. Another high point in the collection are those tales in which Campbell nails the prose in all of its obliqueness but still manages to inject deep emotion into the narrative, taking us into the inner lives of his characters rendering their sadness, fear and melancholy vividly yet not forgetting to add a very delightful sense of unreality and weirdness to it all, some examples of this are "The End of a Summer's Day", "The Guy" and "Concussion".

Overall an interesting evolution in Mr. Campbells style, with his more mature styling increasing in subtlety and complexity but still missing the spot from time to time, however when all things click he delivers some high quality weird fiction, the types that's haunting and filled with dread like the best mysteries.

[Diane Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

a hit and miss collection of Campbell's early work

This is actually my first Ramsey Campbell book, and I know. What took me so long, right? That being said, I was a little disappointed. I thought, as an established author, this should have been better—I mean, am I the only one who is going to address the number of typos, particularly in The Guy, where double quote marks stood in for apostrophes? And it happened a lot! I mean, come on. I"m not the best at knowing what"s right and what"s wrong on the page, but when it"s as consistent as that, it"s pretty annoying...

But then that's an editor's job, so maybe I should cut Campbell a little slack. Maybe it's just the edition I happened to read, who knows? And then I reminded myself that this is a series of shorts from Campbell's early career, and I have to admit that there’s a clear voice and style that reflects real talent. Even if they are sometimes hard to follow or seemingly cut short at the end. It could also be, in part, to my limited exposure to British writing. But not by much.

The germ of an idea that inhabits each story is pretty brilliant in most cases. The Enchanted Fruit is delicious except for the ending that felt incomplete. Made in Goatswood, Concussion, The Stocking, Sentinels, Second Staircase—all worth discussion within the realm of literary horror.

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ramsey Campbell is an acquired taste; more oblique than Stephen King or Clive Barker, and less showy in prose than Lovecraft or Ligotti. Instead, what you get is a foggy psychological atmosphere, the kind which casts everything you read in doubt. Some of the stories, like "The Guy," are immediately gripping, though slightly predictable, horror in the classic British-uncanny style. But others, like "Potential" or "The End of a Summer's Day," leave you scratching your head, unsure if what you think happen is actually what happened.

Do you enjoy that level of ambiguity and foggy mystery? Maybe you do- or maybe, like me, you find it best in small doses. If that's the case, this collection is evenly weighted towards your tastes. Not quite Halloween aesthetic, but the prose equivalent of a cold, foggy November day.

[Frank R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Generally, I do not like to disparage a book, but I felt an obligation to ward off anyone interested in the horror genre from investigating this piece of nonsense! With a title like DEMONS BY DAYLIGHT, you would anticipate some ghastly-gory-gruesome-gregarious fun…negative, Ghostwriter.

As I was reading, I kept thinking I’m not concentrating enough to understand the plots of the stories, but the organization, lack of paragraph spacing (which leads you to believe one thing is continually occurring when in fact, there is a new scene entirely), and general banality of what is taking place is the real problem.

In each tale there is quite a bit of lead up to a “surprise climax.” However, these were all anti-climactic and disappointing. I have read positive reviews of some of Campbell’s other work but this is one of the exceptions.

[Matthew Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling collection of horror stories, mostly set in Campbell’s fictional town of Brichester. Some of the prose in the stories, whilst beautifully written and evocative, I had a hard time following and I had to read back over several passages to try to gain an understanding of what was happening. I feel like the writing isn’t as refined as later works by Campbell with some very confusing passages and perspective and time shifts from one line to the next. I was ready to give the book four stars until I read Concussion which is one of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time and really elevates the collection. As for the other stories, it’s a testament to Campbell’s ability to create an unsettling atmosphere of dread that even though they don’t reach the heights of other works I’ve read, they still deserve a solid four stars.

[Robyn Citizen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a bit of trouble with Ramsay Campbell's style of writing. When it's good, it's near-brilliant hallucinatory, impressionistic fever dreams that somehow indirectly get to the core tragedies and absurdity of human society and psychology. When it's not good, the stories are near incoherent. A solid 1/3rd of the stories in this collection I could not tell you what actually happened or the point of the narrative. The stories can be too circuitous, too meandering in their attempt to create atmosphere thereby losing the characters completely. There are some gems in here which is why I gave it 3 instead of 2 stars but overall it is far inferior to Alone With the Horrors.

[Ryan Pidhayny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe Ramsey Campbell is something of an acquired taste. He is touted as one of the greats of British horror, but his work has just never really clicked with me. A number of his stories are quite good, including a few in this collection, but the majority haven't appealed to me. I find that too many of the stories are confusing and hard to follow, but not as clear as much of the rest of the weird genre. That being said, Demons by Daylight is still a decent collection. If nothing else, it's decidedly non-Lovecraftian, a refreshing change of pace for Campbell.

[Joe Silber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gonna be straight here - I was pretty disappointed in this book. I've read "The Grin of the Dark" by Campbell, which was very very good, and I've read a couple short stories by him that were quite solid as well. At least half the stories in this volume were borderline incoherent. Finished them and couldn't tell you what happened, let alone what the "point" of the story was. I certainly couldn't remember them the next day. The final three: "Concussion", "Enchanted Fruit", and "Made in Goatswood" were solid, but the rest were a mess.