After the sad loss of his wife Olivia, Joe Hunter begins to hear her voice again, speaking to him from the other side. “I’m not alone.” This chilling statement eventually draws him into the afterlife, a tenebrous place built by their dreams and memories. The more that Joe yearns to communicate with his lost love, the more he threatens the safety of the barrier separating the two worlds. He comes to realise that the afterlife is a world where darkness dwells and shadows lurk and the restless dead strive to return to that of the living.

I’ve been a fan of Ramsey Campbell’s fiction since I first discovered him in the early 1990s. He has such a distinctly unique voice – he often manages to be both hilariously funny and bone-chillingly terrifying in the same sentence – and I’m pleased to report that in The Lonely Lands these magical qualities are still on display. This novel is set during the Covid pandemic, which adds an element of disturbing surreality, and this fact is not there just as a gimmick – the facemasks act as both an unsettling side detail and also an essential plot point. Poor old Joe is a sympathetic central character, and the novel is peppered with brilliantly-drawn, grotesque secondary characters. Campbell’s style – always engaging – possesses a nebulous dreamlike quality, perfectly suited to the nightmarish plots he creates. The narrative jumps around the various timelines, deliberately wrongfooting the reader. I never find Campell’s writing style easy to read, as his meaning is sometimes cleverly skewed by the characters’ dialogue, but this is a good thing really because prose of this quality should be savoured, not skimmed over.

The Lonely Lands is yet another terrific horror novel from one of Britain’s best authors.