 Hi there today on Typical Books. I'm going to talk about The Wise Friend by Ramsey King. It is a typical book. Now I wouldn't say that the back and front match by any means. This is a flametree press edition out 2020 and I found the back looks a lot like Woe is I. Writers would be very familiar with this particular book. It's just got this like penguin classics kind of look. Very bland when the front is quite eye-catching. What caught my eye was not only the name Ramsey Campbell. I have an admission here that I have not read any Ramsey Campbell. I thought I had. I've probably read short stories and things edited by him or things like that, novellas perhaps. I can't put my finger on anything that I'd read by Ramsey Campbell. So this is a call-out to anyone who is a Ramsey Campbell fan. I know you're out there. Please let me know what you think I ought to read. The other thing that caught my eye was the upside-down cross. The blurb is not so much. I think that's kind of bad typography in a way. It just looks unbalanced and awkward to have all of these blurby things when I know you've got a lot of type on the back too but I mean it would have been far more impactful. No doubt winner of the World Fantasy Lifetime and Bram Stoker Awards and countless other awards. This is why I'm so surprised I've not read any Ramsey Campbell. So I had noticed that the channel are you into horror? One of my favorite booktube channels that I as a recent discovery of mine. The same day that he had reviewed this was a day that he had shouted out my channel to as a follower and a subscriber to him. So that's super cool. There aren't any other reviews of this. I've listened to Mr. Campbell talk about the writing process with this book and I have picked up one little tip from him as far as writing goes. He writes all of his fiction in the morning and nonfiction in the afternoon. There's so many days when I'm primed to write and I sit down and I'm like I'm gonna warm up with a blog or something else. It's nonfiction and I am tired out by the time the afternoon hits and I don't get to my fiction and some days he only puts out 500 words, be it longhand or a transcription. I'm not sure which but I'm assuming a longhand actual writing of the first draft is what he's talking about. So don't get hung up on word count and write your fiction as soon as you're excited to be writing in the morning. For me anyway. For me it's the morning when I'm usually planning my day and thinking I'm gonna sit down and write. Just sit down and write. Now this particular story is what many people have termed a slow, slow burn. I think you know I was part way through it and I thought yeah this is really slow and I'm having to do a lot of mental work here and I'll talk about that in a minute but as I read and as the picture was coalescing in my mind of these people, these places, I was thinking this would make a fantastic screenplay. There are other films that this reminds me of and other books but I don't want to name them for fear of giving away some of the the best writing and the best plot points that happen in the later portion of the book the last third or something but I'd say if you want a challenging and thought-provoking read that is insidious and clambering and eerie and creeping to give this a chance. Patrick's Aunt Thalma was an artist whose work turned toward zeal cult. While staying with her and his teens he found evidence that she used to visit magical locations to collect artifacts and even the woods behind her house into the lair of an uncanny presence but after her mysterious death the articles she collected were nowhere to be found. Now as an adult Patrick has discovered her journals together with his teenage son Roy he visits the sites that Thalma described. Each place he visits only brings further terror. His experiences scare Patrick away from the sites but Roy carries on the search without him. Can Patrick convince his son that his terrible suspicions are real or is it already too late to stop what they've helped to rouse? Yeah I was so taken by that description and it's not a fib it's just by the time it's halfway through I'm like this is a lot more to do with their interpersonal relationships between Patrick and Roy and Roy's mother Julia and the memories of Thalma there's a lot of flashbacks to Patrick staying with Thalma and his parents attitudes toward I wouldn't say like I don't want to paint anything that isn't there the relationship between Patrick and Thalma is just very normal aunt and nephew it's very plain but there's something like that other people think is uncanny untoward or awkward about anyone's having anything to do with Thalma for some reason and she's a very normal artist actually when described at face value with what were presented within this book her artworks are not that insane either I mean there's those artists that had painted cats as they delved into deeper and deeper psychosis not taking medication for schizophrenia and how those paintings progressed into the insane they're not things like Clyde Barker who is painting nightmares a lot of the time and those sort of things that look terrifying surreal uncanny and there's things going on in the background that you can discern of deep and Freudian dark meanings with this I believe that these paintings were quite sundry and had these these faces that appeared in the paintings and that echoes throughout this book and in a creepy subtle fashion so if you're looking for creepy subtle Ramsey Campbell I need to read more Ramsey Campbell if this is what we're in for although this comes with this style and the thinking while you're reading I like reading a masterful prose without dialogue tags a lot of the time this has no dialogue tags it's not hard to keep track of who is who speaking except when they're on the phone now maybe I just don't talk on the phone very much and I don't talk to people on the phone very often outside of zoom meetings for work which is very very different than having conversations with my family about important family things where there's multiple people talking over top of one another or people listening to the conversation to me I found it very strange and very off-putting and I found it awkward and I felt that I didn't want to be part of those conversations this goes really well with my having just read House of Leaves if you are a House of Leaves fan and want some sort of story that makes you feel like you're reading the story of someone put into the shoes of a very devout reader of House of Leaves perhaps this will go hand in hand with that I thought it might have had a little more in common with the book I read in between Horror in the Woods which is a splatter a terror and a super quick read a very fast-paced fun read where this has a lot more in common with reading someone like the Navitson record in fact I couldn't stop myself from doing a little bit of research in the Encyclopedia Biblica on Val and you will note that it has an upside down cross it's not necessarily about demons it is about a spirit or a demonic type presence that is not one demon in particular within the hierarchy but a bow a demonic imp more like the yaddering of Yaddering and Jack but someone far more wise this is the wise friend after all there were thus innumerable bowels as many as there were towns sanctuaries natural objects or qualities which had religious significance for the worshipers accordingly we frequently find in the original text the plural bow him the bowels which we must interpret not as many still do for the multitude of idols and the local differentiations of one God but of originally distinct local Nunea the bowels of different places were doubtless of diverse character but in general they were regarded as the authors of the fertility of the soil and to increase the flocks they were worshipped by agricultural festivals and offerings of the bounty of nature how that serve you well once you've read the wise friend also bell cults taking place in high places in the apex of their worship taking place in high places as well so suffice it to say Ramsey Campbell did do a lot of research unless this is just things that he has gleaned over his time and he speaks in this interview that I was listening to about the research that he does and how often the research is gathered together over a longer time that it takes to write the novel years and years until the idea for the novel coalesces and then he sits down to write the novel without too much of an outline it's just something that has taken birth within his imagination as far as a full-fledged story based on what he's gleaned from research and that's an another way that I like to approach story writing and if anything if a loose outline does come out of that just to keep me on a beginning middle and end path I mean that I can totally relate to that so I could see that this sort of research had perhaps been a biosmosis and quite organic over years if not just as opposed to info dumping with something like the gigantic four or five volume in syncopated Biblical or in syncopated demonic or whatever in syncopated yeah you might relate to this particular story something that I found quite enchanting about this was the breezy nature of the way that people interact if not you know I guess in most families this would be taken as quite natural everyone is really curt with one another and really short with one another especially once it becomes apparent that there is some sort of repelling force in between the father and son there's something they don't agree on so then every conversation they have and every conversation about them and around them seems to be centered along around this one feeling that they're not getting along there's something they're not seeing eye to eye on and whether it is what they are gonna have for dinner where they're gonna go for dinner how they're gonna get there if someone wants a ride who they're dating who they're talking to but they're not talking to regardless of all of that is just every conversation starts out with a grumbly kind of attitude although you do get the sense that they are a very fair people and do want to see eye to eye and want to get along in that it is written in a breezy sort of manner for the most part it is very British from a Canadian I and someone who didn't do that good in high school so to speak there were probably things that could stumble upon although I am the kind of girl that uses clamber C L A M B O U R and that's not even a word anymore that is a retired word and I use it in casual parlance like it actually exists so I think that on one hand I'm primed to read something like Ramsey Campbell and I don't trip over the language too too much but I do trip over our language that is far too casual like his remote control finds him something to watch on the television and I had to read that sentence three times I'm like what the hell the remote control doesn't is an ascending creature it doesn't know him it can't choose things you know that sort of attitude is kind of shitty on my part but those who enjoy a little more creative creative writing will really dig this and there was a lot of stuff I really did dig some of the more higher creativity it's like reading ee Cummings and prose is is something that I find it takes mental acrobatics for me so that could be part of the stumbling block and if you're a fan of dialogue tags and need them to guide you through you may find yourself untethered reading a lot of this because it is dialogue heavy and it does rely on the fact that you're used to the tone and cadence of the people speaking doesn't take long to get used to but it does rely upon that quite heavily in the bookscorer the wise friend by Ramsey Campbell got a wonderful 81 despite a few detractions and of course things like it is in fact slow I did trip over things like the remote control finding him a program to watch on television a train announcing that it is indeed a train and strange things like that strange turns of phrase which took me out of the story by the time I was done with this book though I didn't want it to end I wanted to hear more about this character this character that is introduced and originally is able and I wanted to learn more about boys girlfriend I want to learn more about why Patrick and Julia weren't together anymore I want to hear more about Julia's job she works in a research archive and there are a lot of library scenes maybe that's what really spoke to me so I give it a four out of five I enjoyed it very very much makes me want to read more Ramsey Campbell and makes me want to read more about this particular world that Ramsey Campbell has created here and how a lot of these arcane occult and forgotten things like deities imps gods demons beings could live within our world and if there's anything that made me ever want to really have a world like that again it's the Anne Rice Talamasca books the lasher books Talto's books those sorts of things I want there to be a Talamasca and if there's anything that the wise friend needs it's someone from the Talamasca to come and give Patrick a hand so coming up next I have a couple of novellas and things like that I'm doing some e-reading right now so I'm catching up on a few novellas that I had being sent or had sought out so it'll be a one video where I talk about all these shorter pieces and I'm also reading gutter breed by Marty Young right now so after that I'm going to hit James Herbert's haunted classic British horror by great masters so if there's anything that you think I ought to be reading specifically something by Ramsey Campbell and his large body of work let me know also let me know what you've been reading lately and make sure that you have an oaky spooky day