Ramsay Campbell - The Hungry Moon

The Hungry Moon is Ramsay Campbell doing what he does best: slow-creeping dread, small-town rot, and a supernatural presence that feels older than language. The novel centres on Moonwell, a remote English village where a fundamentalist preacher arrives promising spiritual renewal — but instead unleashes something buried beneath the moor, something ancient that doesn’t care about salvation or sin.

As the locals slip into zealotry and paranoia, an oppressive darkness begins to swallow the landscape — not dramatic monsters, just a smothering, ancient force that warps thoughts, twists faith, and feeds on fear. Campbell builds the horror through atmosphere: fog-choked nights, superstition, rituals gone wrong, and a sense that everyone is being nudged toward madness by an unseen intelligence.

It becomes a battle between human fanaticism and an older, colder mythic power — and the awful realisation that both might be equally destructive. Classic Campbell: claustrophobic, bleak, and deeply British folk horror where the environment itself turns predatory.