But she finds nothing to connect with Angela, only a white-haired woman dressed in black who seems to be spying on her from the sidewalk and the abandoned, empty building itself. Until one day, she picks up the phone and hears a voice call her 'Mummy' after that, she becomes obsessed with the idea that Angela is alive and still being held captive by the people who abducted her.īecause the disembodied, girlish voice (can it really be Angela?) directs her to a house with a bricked-up gate off the Portobello Road, Barbara, despising herself for gullibility, goes there to reconnoiter. But it is now nine years later, and she has buried her memories in her work.

A successful London literary agent, she does have two tragedies in her past: the heart-attack death of her young husband and then the kidnapping-murder of her little girl, Angela. The heroine of 'The Nameless,' Barbara Waugh, is an ordinary enough woman. How much more do we fear things that refuse to allow us to identify them, even a book sitting on the bedside table! Not only is the unspeakable evil cult at the center of the book's web without a name, but by titling the novel after them - i.e., no name - he makes the title part of the plot.

Now, with his new novel, 'The Nameless,' Campbell's gone in the other direction. I consider 'The Doll Who Ate His Mother,' by horror writer Ramsey Campbell, to be one funny-sinister, flatly surreal, it's better than the book. There are lots of book titles that are, in themselves, works of art.

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