Re: Reviews for 10/27/2003

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Arage) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> The below appears in 999 edited by AL SARRONTONIO 
> 
> The Theater by Bentley  Little 

> ... I kept thinking to myself that this is what
> Ramsey Campbell ought to strive to achieve in his similarly themed
> stories.

That's a funny sort of thing to say, for any number of reasons, most
of which we just don't have time to go into here.

Nevertheless, suggesting that this story, or any story by Bentley
Little, for that matter, achieves something, or possesses qualities,
that Ramsey Campbell should strive to emulate in his fiction, and
perhaps even envy as a writer, is one of the most absurd claims I've
run across in all the many and wildly scattershot criticisms of
fiction the internet has so far spilled forth onto this blasted
computer. But that point has been addressed well and succinctly enough
before me (though I'd add that even the Cheap Trick reference strikes
me as being rather excessively generous; I'd probably have opted for
something more along the lines of the band Oasis to sit on Bentley's
side of that scale--a band of no actual value or musical distinction,
whose songs consist of predictable leaden guitar riffs and simple,
repetitive, tuneless melodies, but who've won frequent unwarranted
comparisons to The Beatles, regardless.)

In fact, this story, "The Theater", in particular, of those Little
stories I've read, provides as straightforward an illustration as any
I aware of, of the "talent gap" that exists between these two writers.
The beginning of the story, starting with the discovery, in the back
room of a store somewhere, of a hidden door leading into the ruins of
an empty theater, is clearly an attempt to recapture something of the
slowly building, subtle, formless terror of Campbell's fiction, and
specifically of his "similarly themed" haunted theater story, "The
Show Goes On". And here, as even the most rushed comparison of the two
stories would clearly demonstrate, Little falls flat on his face.

Where Campbell allows his story a chance to breathe and grow into
something more substantial than a sketch, Little rushes right into the
spook show after only the most perfunctory of nods to
"characterization", motivation and setting; where Campbell's
illustration of instinctive, or unconscious, responses and intimate
thought-processes gives the behavior of his characters a certain depth
of plausibility, even inviting a degree of reader empathy or
self-identification where possible, Little's characters move
automatically through their motions like faceless pieces guided across
his checkerboard plots; and where Campbell's careful, precise language
develops through insinuation and accumulation of detail a quality and
a degree of menace beyond the power of straightforward description
alone to communicate, Little, in a misguided aspiration towards same,
is forced to resort to laughable, almost juvenile attempts at odd and
grotesque imagery that end up being memorable more for sheer silliness
than for any terrifying qualities.

So, in short, I disagree with your conclusion.