Book Review: 'Far Away and Never' by Ramsey Campbell
'Far Away and Never' (139 pp.) was published in October, 2021 by DMR Books, a small press publisher specializing in sword and sorcery books. The cover art was done by Stephen Fabian. It's a reissue of a book first published in 1996 by Necronomicon Press, albeit with the inclusion of an additional story, 'A Madness from the Vaults'. [The Necronomicon Press edition, being long out of print, has rather high asking prices by its sellers.]
'Far Away and Never' is print-on-demand, so I got my copy from amazon within three days of ordering.
I have always found Ramsey Campbell's horror stories to be over-praised and unimpressive. That said, I quite liked the sword-and-sorcery stories he wrote during the 1970s, featuring his 'Ryre' character, for Andrew Offutt's Swords Against Darkness anthologies. All four of the Ryre stories from Swords Against Darkness are here in 'Far Away and Never':
-The Sustenance of Hoak (Swords Against Darkness, 1977)
-The Changer of Names (Swords Against Darkness II, 1977)
-The Pit of Wings (Swords Against Darkness III, 1978)
-The Mouths of Light (Swords Against Darkness V, 1979)
The Ryre stories are a blend of horror and sword-and-sorcery. While they feature the ornate, metaphor- and simile-laden prose style affected by Campbell during the 1970s, they also have functioning plots, something occasionally absent in Campbell's horror stories of that era.
The landscapes through which Ryre moves are dark and disturbing, and the people he encounters in these landscapes often are abject and helpless in the face of particularly unpleasant breeds of monsters. It's up to Ryre to make a stand, although so doing often leaves him in dire straits.
I consider 'The Changer of Names', which sets Ryre loose in an entropy-stricken desert city where a sinister magician operates with impunity and mutilated corpses are found lying in the streets, to be one of the best horror stories of the 1970s. The other Ryre tales also present very well in this regard.
[ An article on the Ryre stories, along with illustrations by Jim Pitts done when they were printed in the UK semi-professional magazine Fantasy Tales, can be found here at the Dark Worlds Quarterly website. ]
Also included in the DMR edition of 'Far Away and Never' are three 'Tond' stories from 1964, 1974, and 1975. These are pastiches of the pup-era writings of Clark Ashton Smith. They seemed to me to be competent pastiches. But then, I cheerfully acknowledge that dedicated Clark Ashton Smith fans are better qualified than I to opine on this subject.
Finally, there is a chapter Campbell wrote for a multi-author novel (based on yet another 'fragment' miraculously recovered from Robert E. Howard's personal effects) intended to be published circa 1977 in a short-lived magazine called Fantasy Crossroads.
Summing up, there is enough worthwhile content in this book to justify a solid four-star rating, and with the Swords Against Darkness books long out of print and very expensive, this DMR printing of 'Far Away and Never' is an affordable way to access the Ryre stories.
If you are a fan of Ramsey Campbell, then 'Far Away and Never' is worth acquiring. But even if you are not a Campbell fan, if you like good sword-and-sorcery tales, then the book will have its appeal.
