A-Z Wednesday: The Doll Who Ate His Mother: A Novel of Modern Terror

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules:
Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week.
Post:

1. A Photo of the Book
2. Title and Synopsis
3. A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
4. Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: D

My “D” Book is:

The Doll Who Ate His Mother: A Novel of Modern Terror
by Ramsey Campbell
(New York: Jove/HBJ Books, 1978)
Paperback, 191 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780812516548, US$1.75

“It’s superb. Grand Guignol in the great manner. This is the chilling best!” —Robert Bloch

From the Cover: A woman’s car hits a lamp-post and her brother loses his arm in the crash, literally. She then finds a nightmare unleashed in Liverpool, with overtones of witchcraft, possession, and cannibalism.

My Thoughts: I first came across this book when reading Stephen King’s treatise on the horror genre, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), in which he says of Campbell and Campbell’ novel:

“As with Robert Bloch, the last thing you would suspect is that he is a writer of horror fiction, particularly of the grim brand he turns out. Of The Doll Who Ate His Mother he has this to say—some of it bearing directly on the difference in the amount of endurance needed to do a novel: ‘What I wanted to do with The Doll was to invent a new monster, if that is possible, but perhaps the big thing was to actually write the novel, since previously I’d been doing short stories. In 1961 or ’62 I made notes for a story about a black magician who was going to take revenge on his town or village for some real or imagined wrong it had done to him. He was going to do this by using voodoo dolls to deform the babies—you’d have the standard pulp-magazine scene of the white-faced doctor coming out of the delivery room saying, “My God, it’s not human…!” And the twist was going to be that, after all these deformed infants had died, the black magician was going to use the voodoo dolls to bring them back to life. An amazingly tasteless idea. At about the same time the Thalidomide tragedy occurred, making the story idea a little too “topically tasteless” for me, and I dropped it. It resurfaced, I suppose, in The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which eats its way out of its mother’s womb’” (356).

King goes on to describe more about the story, and it is—in essence—a story of cannibalism (continuing our theme from last week) among other themes, and having the interest I do in cannibalism, I set about trying to find myself a copy of Campbell’s novel. This was a harder feat than it seems … this was about eight years ago, and I wasn’t as savvy in the ways of the internet and rare books as I am now, and so I began hunting (and haunting) the shelves of Seattle’s used book stores in search of Campbell’s novel. After about three and a half months of searching, I finally came across of copy of the book in one of the stores and immediately bought it. This is what I had to say then (in my proto-book blog, which went out fanzine style in email form):

Anyone familiar with suspense and horror in the late 60s and 70s will think of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, for example, and recall that Satanism was a common trope of the times, as expressed elsewhere in the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare(s) of the mid-70s and later. That is to say, Campbell’s novel fits in nicely with its decade. And that’s basically what this novel evokes... a kind of distant or detached view of these events in Liverpool – almost as if one is watching a recreation of it on the Discovery Channel, and not witnessing the actual events. This, however, is not to say that the story lacks that emotional connection, Doll’s atmosphere is very heavy and there are quite a few cringe-inducing scenes within the course of the story, and truly manages to frighten the reader with the “ripped-from-the-headlines” feel of the narrative. This is not some creature from the Great Beyond, or vampires coming out of the night, this is the “man-monster” that has risen to attack humanity. The monster from within, so to speak. Stephen King lauds Doll and speaks extensively on the book and its contribution to the horror genre in his 1981 treatise on that genre, Danse Macabre (see review 04/02) [pages 355-359 of the same]. On a personal note, I was very excited about reading this book, due in part to King’s endorsement, and due in part to my own efforts to “backfill” my horror/Sci Fi education, and spent quite a few month’s hunting this book down (it’s out of print in the US) but finally found it in a used book store just outside of Seattle in Lake Forest Park. Again, as I said in my review of Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos above, I love book-hunting in used book stores and coming across that gem in the rough book, and Ramsey Campbell’s The Doll Who Ate His Mother is just that, a diamond in the rough book that, while difficult to get into, is well-worth the effort. Though I will qualify that statement by saying that this book is only for true fans of the classic horror genre.

I haven’t read Doll since that initial foray in 2003, but I may have to revisit it soon, not only because I’d like to re-experience what I experienced then, but also because of the fact that as I have furthered my academic career and have been making a name for myself in modern gothic novels, both American and British, The Doll Who Ate His Mother is such a fundamental book in that genre that I really need to re-familiarize myself with it, and soon.

In close of this post, I will reiterate what I said back in 2003, that The Doll Who Ate His Mother is a “book […] only for true fans of the classic horror genre.” That much I remember about my initial reading.