n the Nigel Kneale-ishly named Fenny Meadows Retail Park outside Manchester, strange things have been happening at the local branch of the Texts chain of bookstores. Woody Blake, the store's transplanted Yank manager, has been called in the middle of the night to investigate an inexplicable tripping of the store's alarm system. Wilf, a compulsive reader, is suddenly having to tangle with the re-emergence of a severe childhood learning disability. Computers throughout the store show garbage characters and icons on their desktops. Inexplicable typos crop up on store flyers. The store security monitors give glimpses of what appear to be destructive brats running up the aisles knocking stock off the shelves.
Tensions run high. The store is organizing a signing for, and reader's group discussion of, a new book by a high-profile author. A local writer who has written on the history of the area refuses to go near Fenny Meadows. Woody's urgings for the staff to constantly smile border on the coercive. And reps of the chain will be coming by for a visit, which prompts Woody to schedule an "overnight" shift during which the staff will work through to the morning shelving books and organizing the store.
Friction builds among the staff members. Fog never seems to lift from the area. Strange leaks occur, and the talking elevator is changing its voice in a disturbing way. Books are mysteriously defaced—could it be the work of local nasty kids, or someone else? Two mysterious bald men sit for hours reading picture books. A horrible accident takes place in front of the store, in which a staff member is killed. Was it an accident? If not, was it the doing of something not ... human?
The mundane made profound
Ramsey Campbell's gift is his ability to transform the profoundly mundane into the profoundly dreadful. From his landmark collection Demons by Daylight on, Campbell has been taking things that, on the surface, seem barely worth noting and throwing their abyss-dark possibilities into stark relief. Nothing, perhaps, is as ripe for "Campbell-izing" as a modern chain bookstore. Yet The Overnight is frustratingly dread-less.
Campbell uses multiple viewpoints throughout the book, from the aforementioned Woody and Wilf to young single mom Jill to 24-hour-party-person Gavin to young Madeline to thirtyish Lorraine to Angus, Nigel, Ray, Connie, Agnes, Ross ... and so on. While the sketches of each character are vivid, their interactions with each other seem a tad lifeless; multiple points of view yield strangely homogeneous outlooks of the store and of each individual character.
The supernatural menace of The Overnight is splendidly vicious, malignant and vague. However, Campbell fumbles badly with the exposition as to what the menace is (or might be) by having a character, the aforementioned author who has written about the location on which the store is built, clumsily pop into the narrative and drop a few hints without saying anything that the reader couldn't figure out on his or her own, and that doesn't really inform the people he is nominally trying to warn. The menace manifests itself in a deliciously sly way into the world of the bookstore, both as a thing with a physical presence and as an insidious mental influence that reflects the trying nature of working in a place like the fictive Texts bookstore.
The climax of The Overnight, while featuring a few fine and shuddery moments, is curiously lacking in tension; it comes across as a series of happenings rather than a culmination. Despite these shortcomings, The Overnight makes for an OK night's read.
