The Overnight
British Fantasy Society: Best Novel nominee (2005).
The bookstore's shelves are put in order every night, but every morning, books are found lying all over the floor, many damp and damaged beyond repair. The store’s computers keep acting up, and even when the machines are off, they seem to glow with a spectral gray light.
Things
soon go from bad to worse. A salesclerk abruptly loses his ability to
read. One employee accuses another of making sexual advances. A
hit-and-run in the parking lot claims a life. The security monitors
display half-seen things crawling between the stacks.
Desperate
to pass a company inspection, the manager musters his staff for an
overnight inventory. When the last customers reluctantly depart,
leaving almost-visible trails of slime shining behind them, the doors
are locked, sealing the staff inside for a final orgy of shelving.
The damp, grey, silent things that have been lurking in the basement and hiding in the fog may move slowly, but they are inexorable. This bookstore is the doorway to a hell unlike any other.
Ramsey Campbell
John Ramsey Campbell (born 1946) is a British horror writer.
Since Ramsey Campbell first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today", while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."