The Fictives and Plosives of Ramsey Campbell

 

FIRST A BIRD by Ramsey Campbell

A six year old boy follows his kick-sandalled ball into what his now sleeping grandfather had earlier, perhaps pretentiously, called a ‘glade’, thus demonstrating a pecking-order of intellect with the boy’s parents, too, who are also now asleep outside the glade, as he, like the boy in the previous story above, is gradually absorbed by the coagulant uncrisp bog but then released by an ancestor’s sacrifice of self, but here the same boy is absorbed by the crisper fricatives and plosives of the glade-christened domain wherein a would-be bird in a bush worth two outside it does coo ‘yous’ at him and other such self-awareness tricks in a whole series of thrown voices that obliquely make this book be absorbed onward along its meaningful path of uncertain identities.

The full context of the above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/08/uncertainties-v/