The Hungry Moon

Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels in English Language Selection: 1946-1987 #96

DNF @50%, read the last 20 pages for the climax/ending.

There clearly must something about these long, atmosphere-heavy Horror novels that I just don't gel with. This one is set in a fictional Peak District village called Moonwell which ordinarily would be the kind of setting I love, given my interest in the folklore, fells and wild moors of Britain. However, Campbell includes far too large a cast which is also introduced much too quickly, overwhelming the reader with a bombardment of names within the first 30 pages. The plot concerns itself with a local reporter who has come to investigate local opposition to a missile base above the village. A priest called Godwin Mann is also in town, here to 'cleanse the sins' of the townsfolk -- during which he learns of a well from which the village gets its name. In this well lurks an ancient evil that serves as the primary antagonist of the novel, who cuts the village of Moonwell off from the outside world: its lights, its roads, its phone lines, its radio.

I really struggled to get into this one, truthfully. I never found myself itching to pick it back up which clearly means it failed to get its hooks into me, nor did it feel particularly gripping. Conversely, I found it rather painstaking and undisciplined in a way not dissimilar from my experience with Stephen King's The Shining. Where King at least had only three principal characters, Campbell has around twenty and yet somehow commits the double sin (pun intended) of both bogging the novel down with tedious conversations and making the characters indistinguishable from each other. One of the worst examples of this tedium was the section in which Basil Exposition Nathaniel Needham explains the history of the well to the character of Diana Kramer, where we learn about ancient druidic rituals in a cave pertaining to the moon, paired with the ancient power said to reside at the bottom of the aforementioned well. This put me in mind of Darren Shan's Demonata series, specifically the novels Blood Beast and Bec in which a sacrifice performed by a druid outside a small rural town has locked away incomprehensible evils.

I found Campbell's descriptions and turns of phrase repetitive -- at one point comparing both a pair of goalposts and the lights of the town to matchsticks within mere pages of each other. Whatever intended effect this repetition had -- perhaps to emphasise the small, toy-like proportions of the town compared to the supernatural - did not translate into something effective for me; instead, it made the novel laborious and feel really like its 428 pages. Unfortunately, I think reading King's The Shining recently has soured me on this strain of Horror and consequently I have little to no patience for it. While I could find at least some things to appreciate about King's novel, I am really grasping to identify anything that I liked about this one. There was nothing here for me.

Campbell is hugely respected in Horror circles as a master of the genre, but I frankly did not get the impression I was in the presence a great piece of Horror literature whilst reading this novel. If anything, it was redolent of a pulpy, dispensable airport paperback and if I'd been introduced to this novel through that context I might not have been so harsh on it - but this is on a critic's list of the hundred best fantasy novels of the postwar period; a list that I think it has neither the quality nor the importance to warrant its place on. In terms of a candidate for one of the best postwar fantasy novels in English -- where my critical expectations are already naturally heightened -- this is a 1 star. On its own or as an airport paperback, it's probably a 2 star.