The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
This horror novel by acclaimed fright master Ramsey Campbell takes place in a setting that is decidedly not scary: a large American chain bookstore that has just opened a location in a new strip mall in England. But when the staff pulls an overnight shift to get the store ready for an important visit from the home office, strange things start to happen -- and booksellers begin to die.

From the Publisher

The bookstore’s shelves are put in order every night, but every morning, books are found lying all over the floor, many damp and damaged beyond repair. The store’s computers keep acting up, and even when the machines are off, they seem to glow with a spectral gray light.
Things soon go from bad to worse. A salesclerk abruptly loses his ability to read. One employee accuses another of making sexual advances. A hit-and-run in the parking lot claims a life. The security monitors display half-seen things crawling between the stacks.
Desperate to pass a company inspection, the manager musters his staff for an overnight inventory. When the last customers reluctantly depart, leaving almost-visible trails of slime shining behind them, the doors are locked, sealing the staff inside for a final orgy of shelving.
The damp, grey, silent things that have been lurking in the basement and hiding in the fog may move slowly, but they are inexorable. This bookstore is the doorway to a hell unlike any other.

Library Journal

Woody has come from America to England to manage a new branch of Texts, a book megastore. At first, only small things seem to go wrong: machinery malfunctions, books are misplaced, and the ubiquitous fog seems to seep into workday communications. When a staff member dies from a hit-and-run accident and another loses the ability to read, events take a more sinister turn, culminating in an overnight stock party to prepare the store for its visiting owners-or to bring everyone together for an evening of terror. The prolific Campbell excels in displaying the horror of the everyday. His slice-of-life characters and fast-paced plotting give a cinematic feel to this tale of modern terror. For most horror collections. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Amusingly damp horror in a fog-bound British bookstore. Don't touch that shelf! Despite his many titles and high standing among lovers of babbling madness, Campbell (The Darkest Part of the Woods, 2003, etc.) reveals in his acknowledgments that he found himself short-funded in March 2001 and went to work at a British branch of Borders. He avers that none of the folks in his novel resemble fellow book-shelvers met during those days in the darkest part of the royalty woods. Woody Blake, an American manager for Texts bookstores who has put shops shipshape in New Orleans and Minneapolis, has now been sent to Fenny Meadows Retail Park in northern England to open a giant new Texts store. In the States, such haunts are usually built on an Indian burial ground, but this one is on a fenny meadow-which means things get very misty. And that's not all. Overnight, books leap from their rightful shelf to that opposite. They resist nightly tidying up after closing hour and lie splayed about come morning. People order books, but orders vanish from computer screens or the book lands among the discards, its inner pages lost and print blurry. Blurry print spreads like a virus. Books get grubby, damp, slimed. Weird damp fog-things (well, squat gray jellies) slurp about the aisles at night. A hit-and-run kills store worker Lorraine in the car park. Another worker, mind-wiped, can no longer make sense of words. And now the bosses are coming for a Christmas-rush inspection of Woody's work. Horrors: this calls for an overnight with the whole staff pitching in to put the store in order. Power fizzles, something invades and blurs the grey computer screens. And can the inspectors even find the shop in the soddenfog on this sinking soggy tarmac? The mud, the mud! Whole villages long ago sank from sight right here. An appealing little fancy. Display this upfront.

Product Details