The Booking

Set in a dingy used bookshop in an unnamed British town, Campbell's eerie novella depicts a two-man war of wills that spirals into a struggle for sanity. Abloose Kiefer is an unemployed librarian who offers to help modernize Books Are Life by selling its stock online. Alfie Brookes, the store's proprietor, is a cantankerous relic who distrusts modern technology and believes that it has him constantly under surveillance. Brookes lets Kiefer have his way, but Kiefer is dismayed to find that as fast as he can sell books, the exact same copies find their way back onto the shelves. And the longer that Kiefer stays trapped inside the claustrophobic confines of Books Are Life, the more vulnerable he becomes to Brookes's paranoid fixations. Campbell's descriptions of the store's distorted, labyrinthine interior contribute to his tale's aura of skewed reality, and the ambiguity-rich banter between Brookes and Kiefer conveys a sense of uncertainty and instability that perfectly prepares the readers for the story's unsettling final revelation. (June)