This novel, The Parasite, is
the third Ramsey Campbell novel I have read, and while I will continue to read
his books, I can’t say that I will ever be a big fan of his. The weird logic I
use is that while his books are wild rides, they do not affect me the way other
horror novelists like Jack Ketchum or Joe Hill do, which get a more visceral
emotional out of me. Campbell is a lot like H. P. Lovecraft, in that he is a
master at creating a dreadful mood that permeates every word that he writes. It
looks and sounds cool, but it gets very tiring soon, which may be why Lovecraft
wrote very few novel length works. This kind of writing works better in
fragments, at least for someone like me who is not used to such heavy wording
in my horror novels. Out of the three Campbell novels I have read, the other
two being The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Face That Must Die, The Parasite
is the best one. It begins in a haunted house, where a young girl named Rose is
attacked by an entity after being locked in a room and abandoned by her
friends. Years later, Rose is a film critic who is mugged in New York City, and
has an out of body experience, which forces her to look to the past event, and
confront an evil that is dangerously close to home. Not to spoil anything, but
if you liked the movie Insidious, which I did, you might like this book, with
many expounded ideas about astral projection being the coolest part of this
novel. But like most Campbell, it is easy to get lost, know who is who, and who
the villain actually is. Like I said, this novel a cool experience, but one
that is incomplete despite it’s qualities.
Rating: 4/5
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