"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell takes up nearly eight pages of text, plus a full-page illustration on the main-title page. There is also a small illustration in the interior of the story. This one seems out of place in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in that it was not created by the artist who did all or most of the others. This small interior illustration is of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It also appears to be very old and probably in the public domain.
There is an epigraph at the beginning of "Concerto in Five Movements." This is the third in the Cosmic Horror Issue and the second from H.P. Lovecraft. I carried out an online search for the text of this epigraph but did not find it. Maybe it's from an unpublished work. The closest thing I found to it is actually from Percy Shelley's poem "Adonais," specifically in the forty-fourth stanza, in which these two lines appear:
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil.
The epigraph used in Mr. Campbell's story:
"The lighter the legend, the darker the truths it may veil; & the most innocent tale told to children may disguise dread secrets."
You could almost break that sentence in prose into lines of verse. In any case, there is significance in the epigraph considering the events of the story, also the inclusion of an image of the Pied Piper. There may also be significance considering Ramsey Campbell's signing of a letter four years ago in support of transgenderism, which is, as we know, very much about grooming and recruiting children into its numbers by giving them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, most especially by cutting off their breasts and genitals in a ghastly and horrifying attempt to change them into the other sex.
You could consider transgenderism an "innocent tale" that disguises "dread secrets." It's worth noting that, this week, Mr. Campbell's native country indefinitely banned puberty blockers for children. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the use of the drugs "a scandal." I should point out that transgenderism is also a movement, thought not in the same sense of the word Mr. Campbell uses in his title. However, like the Pied Piper with his music and his piping, transgenderists lead children to tragedy and grief. In "Concerto in Five Movements," the Pied Piper is in fact referred to as "a recruiter."
* * *
Ramsey Campbell is the most well-known and accomplished of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue. He was born on January 4, 1946, in Liverpool, England. That was the same year in which F. Paul Wilson was born. I don't think it any mere coincidence that the two best stories in this issue were written by men born in the 1940s. I'm from a later generation, and I have to say that there is something largely missing in creators of our generations. We just don't seem to have what it takes, and I don't have an explanation for that. One possibility is that those born in the 1940s grew up with little exposure during their formative years to television. Maybe Newton Minow was right when he called television "a vast wasteland."
* * *
"Concerto in Five Movements" is set in the present day, presumably in England. There are proper nouns in the story, but no product placement. That's refreshing and perhaps reflective of a lack of early exposure to television on the part of the author. These nouns are the names of composers and places and other cultural things. In fact, Mr. Campbell's story is cultured, a welcome relief from one story in particular in this issue, which is, unfortunately, practically dreck and too much influenced by television.
The main character in the story is a cellist named Claudia. In addition to being a musician, she is an investigator of sorts. The subjects of her investigations are the legend of the Pied Piper and a musical work about the Piper composed by a man named Keppel, whom I presume to be fictional. She finds that "[o]ne commentator maintained the musician [the Pied Piper] had belonged to a cult that had led the children deep into the forest to use them in a secret rite of sacrifice," thus a Lovecraftian undertone arises in the story. But I can't help noticing a parallel with transgenderism, too, which is also a cult and which also leads children away for purposes of sacrificing them. It's not their hearts that are cut out, though.
Claudia has a friend named Ekondu, an African name with a favorable connotation. I couldn't help but think of the pre-Christian name Enkidu when I read it, though. Maybe allusions to the non-Christian world or to pre-Christian times is part of Ramsey Campbell's purpose.
To be concluded . . .
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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