Reviews for Theology for Non-Theologians

The average rating for Theology for Non-Theologians based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-17 00:00:00 Shane Johnston This is great. Remember all those horrible/wonderful 80s horror paperbacks? The ones with the puffy text and the die-cut covers that open to reveal a flyleaf scene like this: Savvy friends have been telling me to read Ramsey Campbell, as one of the best examples of of this sort of thing, for years and they were entirely correct. This is pretty faultless vacation reading (literally picked up on vacation from the wonderful Green Hand Books in Portland Maine, in this edition, to the sound of the clerk sucking in her breath and saying "oooh, he's so creepy", and then read entirely on the car/train trip home. My annoyances with horror writing (enumerated in greater depth elsewhere against the lure of dread-inducing atmosphere and the freedoms of non-realist plotting) are that so much falls into predictable tropes, isn't scary, and overplays its hand into self-defeating ridiculousness. Despite the obviously ridiculous plot (malevolent dead aunt has designs on her grand-niece), and general lack of actual scariness, this does just ooze atmosphere all across the western-middle coast of England and Wales with a fantastic sense of eerie place, and one long unerringly dreamlike travel sequence that accomplishes exactly what I might ever hope it would. In the lead-up, a familiar (dangerously predictable) pattern is established, but by halfway the book has secretly jumped tracks from anything I could anticipate to its great enhancement. Campbell also moves between his family of cast members quite fluidly and manages to write a convincing enough mother-daughter story at the heart of this, while fleshing out the subtext with a study of toxic classism. The overriding goal here is clearly to entertain above all else, so Campbell never digs too deep, but it's not an empty exercise either. So I'm very pleasantly surprised and will definitely be seeking more dazzlingly die-cut Campbell artifacts whenever such should fall into my hands (which may not be often enough -- other readers have clearly caught on well before me, because I never see his novels second hand.)

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-09 00:00:00 Vincent Lombardi Ramsey Campbell has done better.