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Told by the Dead
2003 Signed, Numbered, First PS Publishing Slipcased Hardcover Edition by author and intro. # 72/200 First Edition In like new condition Like New/Like New Dust jacket is in like new condition. No flaws noted. Book is in like new condition, boards and spine are straight, pages clean. This copy was an original purchase and never read. Like new copy in slipcase of this title
350 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2003
About the author
Ramsey Campbell
868 books1,627 followersRamsey 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."
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 10, 2018
This hardcover is copy 28 of 500 trade editions produced and is signed by Ramsey Campbell. Note: a slipcased edition was also produced.
A foreword by Poppy Z. Brite and an afterword by the author. It won the 2004 British Fantasy Award for best collection.
Contents:
Forward by Poppy Z. Brite
"Return Journey" (2000)
"Twice by Fire" (1998)
"Agatha's Ghost" (1999)
"Little Ones" (1999)
"The Last Hand" (1975)
"Facing It" (1995)
"Never to be Heard" (1998)
"The Previous Tenant" (1975)
"Becoming Visible" (1999)
"No End of Fun" (2002)
"After the Queen" (1977)
"Tatters" (2001)
"Accident Zone" (1995)
"The Entertainment" (1999)
"Dead Letters" (1978)
"All for Sale" (2001)
"No Strings" (2000)
"The Worst Fog of the Year" (1990)
"The Retrospective" (2002)
"Slow" (1985)
"Worse than Bones" (2001)
"No Story In It" (2000)
"The Word" (1997)
Afterword by Ramsey Campbell
A foreword by Poppy Z. Brite and an afterword by the author. It won the 2004 British Fantasy Award for best collection.
Contents:
Forward by Poppy Z. Brite
"Return Journey" (2000)
"Twice by Fire" (1998)
"Agatha's Ghost" (1999)
"Little Ones" (1999)
"The Last Hand" (1975)
"Facing It" (1995)
"Never to be Heard" (1998)
"The Previous Tenant" (1975)
"Becoming Visible" (1999)
"No End of Fun" (2002)
"After the Queen" (1977)
"Tatters" (2001)
"Accident Zone" (1995)
"The Entertainment" (1999)
"Dead Letters" (1978)
"All for Sale" (2001)
"No Strings" (2000)
"The Worst Fog of the Year" (1990)
"The Retrospective" (2002)
"Slow" (1985)
"Worse than Bones" (2001)
"No Story In It" (2000)
"The Word" (1997)
Afterword by Ramsey Campbell
October 30, 2020
A great collection of Ramsey's short fiction, and such a shame it isn't more widely available. There are a number of exciting rarities here for Campbell fans, but after indulging in 'Inconsequential Tales' (which really is only for the dedicated fan - there's a reason these stories haven't been snapped up for reprint after reprint) I have to say this isn't a fan-only collection of obscurities. This is good horror.
Note: Back when I originally wrote this, Told By the Dead was fairly hard to get hold of, but I'm happy to note that PS Publishing currently offer a reasonably-priced paperback edition. The first part of my review then, unnecessarily laments the rarity of the tome, and perhaps could instead lament the fact that too few people have read it…
Note: Back when I originally wrote this, Told By the Dead was fairly hard to get hold of, but I'm happy to note that PS Publishing currently offer a reasonably-priced paperback edition. The first part of my review then, unnecessarily laments the rarity of the tome, and perhaps could instead lament the fact that too few people have read it…
August 9, 2015
A collection from 2003, bringing together tales from as far back as 1975 (though most are close to 2000). Shows some of the variety of Ramsey Campbell’s short story output, from surreal, almost Aickmanesque horror in ‘The Last Hand’, to science fiction horror in ‘Slow’. There’s a millennial feel to several of the tales, which are set in near futures on the brink of social collapse (‘No Story In It’ — a very bleak tale of an ageing writer’s failing career, for instance), sometimes with a rising messiah-like figure, as in ‘Facing It’, a Ligottian tale written after Campbell’s taking part in a late-night BBC discussion on the state of pre-millennial horror. Best of this type, though, is ‘The Word’, a sort of over-the-top satire on the rise and rise of a writer, seen through the eyes of an incredibly resentful and vituperative fanzine-editor — a refreshingly different character for Campbell to adopt as narrator.
My favourite tales, though, are the ones more rooted in realism, and with a more subtle approach to horror. ‘Never to be Heard’ — a Lovecraftian tale of a hundred-year-old musical score receiving its first true performance — is the best in the book, in my opinion. ‘The Entertainment’ has its protagonist seeking shelter for a night in what he thinks is an ordinary B&B, and having to earn his keep by acting as an entertainer for the old, and slightly loopy, clientele — Campbell in absurdist horror mode. There are a few repeated themes: ‘Agatha’s Ghost’ has an old lady phoning a radio show to complain she’s being haunted, while ‘No Strings’ has a radio phone-in show host meeting a rather unpleasant demise; there are a couple of tales about old films and old cinemas (‘After the Queen’, ‘The Worst Fog of the Year’ — presented, here, with two endings, one rather too jokey), and some about the perils of going on holiday (‘Accident Zone’, ‘All for Sale’)…
23 tales in all, in a varied collection, both in terms of Campbell’s approach, and in how successful the stories are. But I think anyone who likes horror will find a few new favourites.
My favourite tales, though, are the ones more rooted in realism, and with a more subtle approach to horror. ‘Never to be Heard’ — a Lovecraftian tale of a hundred-year-old musical score receiving its first true performance — is the best in the book, in my opinion. ‘The Entertainment’ has its protagonist seeking shelter for a night in what he thinks is an ordinary B&B, and having to earn his keep by acting as an entertainer for the old, and slightly loopy, clientele — Campbell in absurdist horror mode. There are a few repeated themes: ‘Agatha’s Ghost’ has an old lady phoning a radio show to complain she’s being haunted, while ‘No Strings’ has a radio phone-in show host meeting a rather unpleasant demise; there are a couple of tales about old films and old cinemas (‘After the Queen’, ‘The Worst Fog of the Year’ — presented, here, with two endings, one rather too jokey), and some about the perils of going on holiday (‘Accident Zone’, ‘All for Sale’)…
23 tales in all, in a varied collection, both in terms of Campbell’s approach, and in how successful the stories are. But I think anyone who likes horror will find a few new favourites.
August 3, 2026
The Stories
“Return Journey” (2000)
Hilda’s quiet Sunday driving trip turns surreal when she notices a poster for an "Old Time Line" steam railway and impulsively boards a vintage train. The journey quickly turns nightmare when she gets stranded at a desolate terminus and forced onto a darkening, apparently abandoned train taking her back through a mile-long tunnel. Campbell uses ostranenie by stripping a nostalgic, wartime-themed historical reenactment of its cozy charm. Gas masks, typically treated as vintage artifacts or playful props by children on board, are defamiliarized into grotesque, pig-snouted parasites pressing against dark windows. The standard transit through a railway tunnel becomes an underworld descent into buried childhood trauma, where ordinary train mechanics feel like an inescapable tomb.
“Twice by Fire” (1998)
A disgraced former police detective named Lee "awakens" lying on hard concrete between tall, reeking garbage bags in a dark alley, suspended between icy chill and furnace heat. Driven by an instinctive compulsion, he shadows two former colleagues to piece together a tragic arson case, only to uncover his own terrifying culpability in the crime. Campbell defamiliarizes post-mortem state and urban decay by presenting them through distorted sensory perception. Smoke shapes itself into hovering black wings, ash settles like feathers onto bedframes, and melting wax mimics ruined human flesh. By making Lee's internal moral reckoning manifest as a literal fire consuming him from within, the familiar noir city becomes an uncanny purgatory.
“Agatha's Ghost” (1999)
Paranoid, isolated Agatha Derwent calls into a live daytime radio talk show hosted by Barbara Day to announce that she is being relentlessly tormented by the ghost of her living nephew, Kenneth. Campbell defamiliarizes the soothing, mundane medium of daytime radio and everyday domestic clutter. Common items found inside Agatha’s handbag—such as a mousetrap, lighter fuel, dog food, and a brass candlestick—are stripped of their mundane functions and rendered absurdly invasive. Through Agatha’s distorted perspective, the home becomes a trap where locking out her nephew only seals her inside a hallucinatory fire trap.
“Little Ones” (1999)
Struggling primary school teacher Gill follows her overly strict senior colleague, Mrs. Lavelle, back to her freezing bungalow under the guise of offering support, hoping to investigate the woman's bizarre domestic life. Campbell defamiliarizes the concept of family and childhood. The traditional suburban home is presented as a subterranean icebox, while classic antique baby dolls sitting before a flickering television set are transformed into horrific abominations: they are glued together, reeking of pear-drop solvent, and topped with human scalp-grafts of grey hair taken from Mrs. Lavelle's hairbound, decaying husband.
“The Last Hand” (1975)
While traveling on a late-night train to London after a bitter breakup, Martin joins three grotesquely wet, twitching strangers in a compartment for a game of poker, only to discover the game is a trap for his very soul. Campbell defamiliarizes a routine pastime by turning playing cards into an incomprehensible, cosmic cipher. The court cards lose their familiar twin profiles to reveal grinning, full-bodied entities, while high-card combinations form uncanny, threatening anagrams like "THEY DONT USE CARDS". Swarming flies and train noise are blended into an apocalyptic hive-mind soundscape, making a standard British train carriage feel like a plunging vessel into hell.
“Facing It” (1995)
On Halloween morning in New York City, copyeditor Jessica wakes up with a strange sense of dissociation, soon discovering that the entire population of the city is silently marching toward Central Park armed with sharp objects to cut off their own faces. Campbell defamiliarizes the most fundamental element of human identity—the human face. Faces are reframed not as windows to the soul, but as artificial masks preventing true spiritual evolution. The mundane metropolis of Manhattan shifts into a surreal theater where reality splits between a rigid fundamentalist order and an absurd, "Groucho Marx" chaos.
“Never to Be Heard” (1998)
A prepubescent choirboy named Fergal participates in the Easter performance of a long-lost, controversial occult symphony (The Balance of the Spheres) composed by a defunct magician-priest, which utilizes a sub-audible computer tone that corrupts the physical space around it. Campbell defamiliarizes religious music and sacred architecture. The interior of the church—its pointed arches, cylindrical pillars, and stained-glass icons—are re-perceived through the lens of emerging adolescent sexuality and dread as anatomical phalluses, gaping jaws, and shifting, multi-faced horrors. Music ceases to be acoustic harmony and becomes an invasive, physical vibration that alters reality.
“The Previous Tenant” (1975)
A frustrated civil servant and aspiring painter moves with his wife into a fully furnished flat previously occupied by a tragic young woman who committed suicide by leaping from the window. Campbell defamiliarizes domestic space and furniture into erotic, living extensions of a lingering spirit. A carved wooden table leg is perceived as a supple, arched thigh, while a stiff, starched white glove hidden on a bookshelf acts as an active, caressing hand. Campbell distorts ordinary domestic life until curtains form cheekbones and light fixtures morph into spectral limbs.
“Becoming Visible” (1999)
Charles Dunbobbin, a wealthy, arrogant restaurant owner, rudely dismisses a telemarketer over the phone, inciting a campaign of phone harassment from an anonymous narrator who claims to possess total visual control over Dunbobbin's family. Campbell defamiliarizes telemarketing and phone technology, turning the cold medium of the telephone into a weapon of psychic paranoia. Everyday sights—such as a daughter dancing, or someone wearing an overcoat in an office—are stripped of context and interpreted through a twisted, unstable interior logic, turning corporate call centers and suburban homes into arenas of profound alienation.
“No End of Fun” (2002)
Lionel, a lonely retired teacher, visits his cousin's seaside boarding house (now run by her daughter and granddaughter), harboring guilt over a traumatic childhood act he inflicted on his late cousin in a mirror-filled room. Campbell defamiliarizes the traditional British seaside resort. An oval vanity mirror held by marble hands becomes a portal of terrifying post-mortem punishment, transforming carnival rides, boardwalk arcades, and oversized amusement park props into symbols of repressed perversion and decay.
“After the Queen” (1977)
Seeking shelter from a rainstorm, Robert visits a local cinema to watch a horror film about waxworks (The Dummies of Horror), only to find the boundaries between the cinema auditorium, the projection screen, and reality dissolving. Campbell defamiliarizes moviegoing and wax figures. The cinema hall’s slant, missing seats, and flickering lights transform the audience into static, waxen dummies. Onscreen scenes bleed directly into the auditorium space, reframing the simple act of watching a film into being hunted by the very perspective of the camera lens.
“Tatters” (2001)
Jonathan Goldman, a corporate videographer, travels to a gentrified riverside warehouse development to film a promotional video featuring local celebrity Stephanie Maple, only to have his audio ruined by a mysterious, tuneless vagrant's song. Campbell defamiliarizes modern urban gentrification. Luxury brick developments and high-end Japanese teppanyaki restaurants are stripped of their prestige and shown as sterile shells constructed over historic misery. A simple chest cold is elevated into a nightmarish breach of social etiquette and bodily horror, while stray newspapers blowing in the wind are defamiliarized into a tattered, crawling creature made of abandoned lyrics.
“Accident Zone” (1977)
While hiking in the Lake District to escape city noise, Blake encounters a traffic safety mirror erected at a dangerous hairpin turn flanked by wrecked cars and warning signs. Campbell defamiliarizes road safety equipment and emotional energy. A standard convex road mirror is reframed as a psychic reservoir that records and concentrates human panic, fear, and aggression. Water droplets bead into toothy, grinning faces within the reflection, making mundane traffic infrastructure feel like an active, carnivorous entity.
“The Entertainment” (1999)
Stranded during a torrential rainstorm in Westingsea, Tom Shone takes refuge in a decaying boarding house populated by decrepit senior citizens who mistake him for "the entertainment" and demand he perform a puppet show. Campbell defamiliarizes seaside comedy traditions and Punch-and-Judy style puppetry into ritualistic horror. Puppet props—tufted, dry skulls and rotting fabric—are rendered as necrotic extensions of Shone's own fingers. A simple meal of blended mush and a clown-decorated cake are reframed as cannibalistic, institutionalized grotesque rituals.
“Dead Letters” (1978)
An employee working in a dead-letter office or postal sorting center becomes obsessively entangled in undeliverable mail containing dark personal secrets. Campbell defamiliarizes the postal service and written communication. Abandoned envelopes and written words lose their functional purpose and take on an eerie, physical weight, turning routine administrative sorting into a macabre unearthing of lost lives and human decay.
“All for Sale” (2001)
A man navigating aggressive commercial real estate or consumer culture finds that every aspect of his urban landscape is being systematically commodified. Campbell defamiliarizes real estate and marketing language. Slogans, price tags, and property listings become existential threats, presenting human identity itself as a temporary item cleared out to make room for the next buyer.
“No Story in It” (2000)
A struggling author grappling with severe writer's block and financial anxiety attends a convention, slowly losing his grip on reality as his domestic worries merge with the absurd futility of his creative life. Campbell defamiliarizes the creative writing process as a parasitic condition. Words, pages, and publishing jargon are presented not as tools of art, but as a suffocating, physical weight, turning mundane authorial anxiety into an existential nightmare.
“No Strings” (2000)
An isolated individual becomes involved with a set of strange, unstrung puppets, finding that the physical boundaries between the performance, the puppeteer, and the object dissolve. Campbell defamiliarizes inanimate toys and marionettes into grotesque caricatures of human physiology. By stripping away the "strings"—the visible cause and effect—Campbell renders simple theatrical props into uncanny, self-willed shapes that threaten human autonomy.
“The Worst Fog of the Year” (1990)
A pedestrian attempts to navigate familiar city streets during an unusually dense, suffocating winter fog that completely obliterates all landmarks. Campbell defamiliarizes fog from a simple weather condition into an active, tactile erasing agent. Streetlights become useless, drowning blurs, while familiar curbs, doorways, and pavement edges morph into unnavigable, alien terrain where physical geometry collapses
“The Retrospective” (2002)
Trent, an arrogant architect, suffers an unplanned travel delay in his dreary childhood hometown and decides to visit a newly opened local history museum while neglecting his aging, confused parents. Campbell defamiliarizes nostalgia and local history museums. Instead of neatly organized historical artifacts, the museum displays familiar childhood locations (schools, alleyways, homes) stretched out, warped, disproportionate, and inhabited by uncanny, static figures—turning the act of "remembering the past" into a physical, inescapable trap.
“Slow” (1985)
A traveler encounters an isolated rural landscape where spatial movement and natural decay seem to operate at a terrifyingly sluggish, altered velocity. Campbell defamiliarizes time and biological movement. By slowing down speed and perception, organic growth, vegetation, and subtle human gestures take on the unsettling quality of alien organisms, making the natural countryside feel fundamentally hostile to human consciousness.
“Worse Than Bones” (2001)
A man researching old secondhand books or municipal records stumbles across references to historical suffering that begin to manifest physically in his immediate surroundings. Campbell defamiliarizes historical records and old paper into corruptive materials. Written descriptions of decay acquire weight, texture, and smell, proving that memory and paper can be far "worse than bones" in retaining human agony.
“The Word” (1997)
An aging, bitter horror author attending a science fiction/fantasy convention becomes consumed with jealousy toward a young, overnight literary success story. Campbell defamiliarizes the chaotic environment of fan conventions. Hotel corridors, panel rooms, and fan interactions are warped into a claustrophobic, Salieri-like nightmare where written language ("the word") is stripped of its communicative value and made to feel like a disease.
“Afterword” (Told by the Dead) (2003)
In this reflective closing piece, Campbell contemplates the nature of horror writing, mortality, and the ghosts that inhabit both memory and fiction. Campbell defamiliarizes the authorial voice itself, presenting the storyteller not as an active creator, but as a passive medium through which the "dead" tell their unvarnished, terrifying stories.
“Return Journey” (2000)
Hilda’s quiet Sunday driving trip turns surreal when she notices a poster for an "Old Time Line" steam railway and impulsively boards a vintage train. The journey quickly turns nightmare when she gets stranded at a desolate terminus and forced onto a darkening, apparently abandoned train taking her back through a mile-long tunnel. Campbell uses ostranenie by stripping a nostalgic, wartime-themed historical reenactment of its cozy charm. Gas masks, typically treated as vintage artifacts or playful props by children on board, are defamiliarized into grotesque, pig-snouted parasites pressing against dark windows. The standard transit through a railway tunnel becomes an underworld descent into buried childhood trauma, where ordinary train mechanics feel like an inescapable tomb.
“Twice by Fire” (1998)
A disgraced former police detective named Lee "awakens" lying on hard concrete between tall, reeking garbage bags in a dark alley, suspended between icy chill and furnace heat. Driven by an instinctive compulsion, he shadows two former colleagues to piece together a tragic arson case, only to uncover his own terrifying culpability in the crime. Campbell defamiliarizes post-mortem state and urban decay by presenting them through distorted sensory perception. Smoke shapes itself into hovering black wings, ash settles like feathers onto bedframes, and melting wax mimics ruined human flesh. By making Lee's internal moral reckoning manifest as a literal fire consuming him from within, the familiar noir city becomes an uncanny purgatory.
“Agatha's Ghost” (1999)
Paranoid, isolated Agatha Derwent calls into a live daytime radio talk show hosted by Barbara Day to announce that she is being relentlessly tormented by the ghost of her living nephew, Kenneth. Campbell defamiliarizes the soothing, mundane medium of daytime radio and everyday domestic clutter. Common items found inside Agatha’s handbag—such as a mousetrap, lighter fuel, dog food, and a brass candlestick—are stripped of their mundane functions and rendered absurdly invasive. Through Agatha’s distorted perspective, the home becomes a trap where locking out her nephew only seals her inside a hallucinatory fire trap.
“Little Ones” (1999)
Struggling primary school teacher Gill follows her overly strict senior colleague, Mrs. Lavelle, back to her freezing bungalow under the guise of offering support, hoping to investigate the woman's bizarre domestic life. Campbell defamiliarizes the concept of family and childhood. The traditional suburban home is presented as a subterranean icebox, while classic antique baby dolls sitting before a flickering television set are transformed into horrific abominations: they are glued together, reeking of pear-drop solvent, and topped with human scalp-grafts of grey hair taken from Mrs. Lavelle's hairbound, decaying husband.
“The Last Hand” (1975)
While traveling on a late-night train to London after a bitter breakup, Martin joins three grotesquely wet, twitching strangers in a compartment for a game of poker, only to discover the game is a trap for his very soul. Campbell defamiliarizes a routine pastime by turning playing cards into an incomprehensible, cosmic cipher. The court cards lose their familiar twin profiles to reveal grinning, full-bodied entities, while high-card combinations form uncanny, threatening anagrams like "THEY DONT USE CARDS". Swarming flies and train noise are blended into an apocalyptic hive-mind soundscape, making a standard British train carriage feel like a plunging vessel into hell.
“Facing It” (1995)
On Halloween morning in New York City, copyeditor Jessica wakes up with a strange sense of dissociation, soon discovering that the entire population of the city is silently marching toward Central Park armed with sharp objects to cut off their own faces. Campbell defamiliarizes the most fundamental element of human identity—the human face. Faces are reframed not as windows to the soul, but as artificial masks preventing true spiritual evolution. The mundane metropolis of Manhattan shifts into a surreal theater where reality splits between a rigid fundamentalist order and an absurd, "Groucho Marx" chaos.
“Never to Be Heard” (1998)
A prepubescent choirboy named Fergal participates in the Easter performance of a long-lost, controversial occult symphony (The Balance of the Spheres) composed by a defunct magician-priest, which utilizes a sub-audible computer tone that corrupts the physical space around it. Campbell defamiliarizes religious music and sacred architecture. The interior of the church—its pointed arches, cylindrical pillars, and stained-glass icons—are re-perceived through the lens of emerging adolescent sexuality and dread as anatomical phalluses, gaping jaws, and shifting, multi-faced horrors. Music ceases to be acoustic harmony and becomes an invasive, physical vibration that alters reality.
“The Previous Tenant” (1975)
A frustrated civil servant and aspiring painter moves with his wife into a fully furnished flat previously occupied by a tragic young woman who committed suicide by leaping from the window. Campbell defamiliarizes domestic space and furniture into erotic, living extensions of a lingering spirit. A carved wooden table leg is perceived as a supple, arched thigh, while a stiff, starched white glove hidden on a bookshelf acts as an active, caressing hand. Campbell distorts ordinary domestic life until curtains form cheekbones and light fixtures morph into spectral limbs.
“Becoming Visible” (1999)
Charles Dunbobbin, a wealthy, arrogant restaurant owner, rudely dismisses a telemarketer over the phone, inciting a campaign of phone harassment from an anonymous narrator who claims to possess total visual control over Dunbobbin's family. Campbell defamiliarizes telemarketing and phone technology, turning the cold medium of the telephone into a weapon of psychic paranoia. Everyday sights—such as a daughter dancing, or someone wearing an overcoat in an office—are stripped of context and interpreted through a twisted, unstable interior logic, turning corporate call centers and suburban homes into arenas of profound alienation.
“No End of Fun” (2002)
Lionel, a lonely retired teacher, visits his cousin's seaside boarding house (now run by her daughter and granddaughter), harboring guilt over a traumatic childhood act he inflicted on his late cousin in a mirror-filled room. Campbell defamiliarizes the traditional British seaside resort. An oval vanity mirror held by marble hands becomes a portal of terrifying post-mortem punishment, transforming carnival rides, boardwalk arcades, and oversized amusement park props into symbols of repressed perversion and decay.
“After the Queen” (1977)
Seeking shelter from a rainstorm, Robert visits a local cinema to watch a horror film about waxworks (The Dummies of Horror), only to find the boundaries between the cinema auditorium, the projection screen, and reality dissolving. Campbell defamiliarizes moviegoing and wax figures. The cinema hall’s slant, missing seats, and flickering lights transform the audience into static, waxen dummies. Onscreen scenes bleed directly into the auditorium space, reframing the simple act of watching a film into being hunted by the very perspective of the camera lens.
“Tatters” (2001)
Jonathan Goldman, a corporate videographer, travels to a gentrified riverside warehouse development to film a promotional video featuring local celebrity Stephanie Maple, only to have his audio ruined by a mysterious, tuneless vagrant's song. Campbell defamiliarizes modern urban gentrification. Luxury brick developments and high-end Japanese teppanyaki restaurants are stripped of their prestige and shown as sterile shells constructed over historic misery. A simple chest cold is elevated into a nightmarish breach of social etiquette and bodily horror, while stray newspapers blowing in the wind are defamiliarized into a tattered, crawling creature made of abandoned lyrics.
“Accident Zone” (1977)
While hiking in the Lake District to escape city noise, Blake encounters a traffic safety mirror erected at a dangerous hairpin turn flanked by wrecked cars and warning signs. Campbell defamiliarizes road safety equipment and emotional energy. A standard convex road mirror is reframed as a psychic reservoir that records and concentrates human panic, fear, and aggression. Water droplets bead into toothy, grinning faces within the reflection, making mundane traffic infrastructure feel like an active, carnivorous entity.
“The Entertainment” (1999)
Stranded during a torrential rainstorm in Westingsea, Tom Shone takes refuge in a decaying boarding house populated by decrepit senior citizens who mistake him for "the entertainment" and demand he perform a puppet show. Campbell defamiliarizes seaside comedy traditions and Punch-and-Judy style puppetry into ritualistic horror. Puppet props—tufted, dry skulls and rotting fabric—are rendered as necrotic extensions of Shone's own fingers. A simple meal of blended mush and a clown-decorated cake are reframed as cannibalistic, institutionalized grotesque rituals.
“Dead Letters” (1978)
An employee working in a dead-letter office or postal sorting center becomes obsessively entangled in undeliverable mail containing dark personal secrets. Campbell defamiliarizes the postal service and written communication. Abandoned envelopes and written words lose their functional purpose and take on an eerie, physical weight, turning routine administrative sorting into a macabre unearthing of lost lives and human decay.
“All for Sale” (2001)
A man navigating aggressive commercial real estate or consumer culture finds that every aspect of his urban landscape is being systematically commodified. Campbell defamiliarizes real estate and marketing language. Slogans, price tags, and property listings become existential threats, presenting human identity itself as a temporary item cleared out to make room for the next buyer.
“No Story in It” (2000)
A struggling author grappling with severe writer's block and financial anxiety attends a convention, slowly losing his grip on reality as his domestic worries merge with the absurd futility of his creative life. Campbell defamiliarizes the creative writing process as a parasitic condition. Words, pages, and publishing jargon are presented not as tools of art, but as a suffocating, physical weight, turning mundane authorial anxiety into an existential nightmare.
“No Strings” (2000)
An isolated individual becomes involved with a set of strange, unstrung puppets, finding that the physical boundaries between the performance, the puppeteer, and the object dissolve. Campbell defamiliarizes inanimate toys and marionettes into grotesque caricatures of human physiology. By stripping away the "strings"—the visible cause and effect—Campbell renders simple theatrical props into uncanny, self-willed shapes that threaten human autonomy.
“The Worst Fog of the Year” (1990)
A pedestrian attempts to navigate familiar city streets during an unusually dense, suffocating winter fog that completely obliterates all landmarks. Campbell defamiliarizes fog from a simple weather condition into an active, tactile erasing agent. Streetlights become useless, drowning blurs, while familiar curbs, doorways, and pavement edges morph into unnavigable, alien terrain where physical geometry collapses
“The Retrospective” (2002)
Trent, an arrogant architect, suffers an unplanned travel delay in his dreary childhood hometown and decides to visit a newly opened local history museum while neglecting his aging, confused parents. Campbell defamiliarizes nostalgia and local history museums. Instead of neatly organized historical artifacts, the museum displays familiar childhood locations (schools, alleyways, homes) stretched out, warped, disproportionate, and inhabited by uncanny, static figures—turning the act of "remembering the past" into a physical, inescapable trap.
“Slow” (1985)
A traveler encounters an isolated rural landscape where spatial movement and natural decay seem to operate at a terrifyingly sluggish, altered velocity. Campbell defamiliarizes time and biological movement. By slowing down speed and perception, organic growth, vegetation, and subtle human gestures take on the unsettling quality of alien organisms, making the natural countryside feel fundamentally hostile to human consciousness.
“Worse Than Bones” (2001)
A man researching old secondhand books or municipal records stumbles across references to historical suffering that begin to manifest physically in his immediate surroundings. Campbell defamiliarizes historical records and old paper into corruptive materials. Written descriptions of decay acquire weight, texture, and smell, proving that memory and paper can be far "worse than bones" in retaining human agony.
“The Word” (1997)
An aging, bitter horror author attending a science fiction/fantasy convention becomes consumed with jealousy toward a young, overnight literary success story. Campbell defamiliarizes the chaotic environment of fan conventions. Hotel corridors, panel rooms, and fan interactions are warped into a claustrophobic, Salieri-like nightmare where written language ("the word") is stripped of its communicative value and made to feel like a disease.
“Afterword” (Told by the Dead) (2003)
In this reflective closing piece, Campbell contemplates the nature of horror writing, mortality, and the ghosts that inhabit both memory and fiction. Campbell defamiliarizes the authorial voice itself, presenting the storyteller not as an active creator, but as a passive medium through which the "dead" tell their unvarnished, terrifying stories.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 26, 2020
Told by the Dead is a 2003 collection of horror stories by Ramsey Campbell. Inside there’s a mixture of style and influences with some almost straight crime stories alongside Ligotti and Aickman pastiches. Personally I would say it’s a slightly weaker collection than Ghosts and Grisly Things for example but as always there are some real gems. Personal ratings are below and reflects my own enjoyment rather than the quality of the stories.
- Return Journey - 7
- Twice by Fire - 4
- Agatha’s Ghost - 5
- Little Ones - 7
- The Last Hand - 6
- Facing It - 7
- Never to be Heard - 5
- The Previous Tenant - 4
- Becoming Visible - 5
- No End of Fun - 8
- After the Queen - 6
- Tatters - 4
- Accident Zone - 7
- The Entertainment - 7
- Dead Letters - 8
- All for Sale - 3
- No Strings - 6
- The Worst Fog of the Year - 5
- The Retrospective - 8
- Slow - 7
- Worse Than Bones - 7
- No Story in It - 8
- The Word - 7
- Return Journey - 7
- Twice by Fire - 4
- Agatha’s Ghost - 5
- Little Ones - 7
- The Last Hand - 6
- Facing It - 7
- Never to be Heard - 5
- The Previous Tenant - 4
- Becoming Visible - 5
- No End of Fun - 8
- After the Queen - 6
- Tatters - 4
- Accident Zone - 7
- The Entertainment - 7
- Dead Letters - 8
- All for Sale - 3
- No Strings - 6
- The Worst Fog of the Year - 5
- The Retrospective - 8
- Slow - 7
- Worse Than Bones - 7
- No Story in It - 8
- The Word - 7
April 23, 2025
I found some of these stories kind of hard to follow - which you will have with this author - but by 'hard to follow' I mean 'outright confusing', but, truthfully, I wasn't really paying attention when I read most of them because I had just previously narrowly avoided sleeping with my landlord's girlfriend and was a little distracted.
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February 4, 2024My rating’s not for the book’s content but for the book itself. The 2019 Drugstore Indian Press paperback is a gorgeous book in all regards except one: the paper. It’s like the stuff they make EZ Widers out of. Literally. Or wicked cheap bibles. Every single page has the page under it bleeding through, resulting in a weird blurry effect.
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