Exploring Dark Short Fiction #6: A Primer to Ramsey Campbell

By Ramsey Campbell and Michael Arnzen

Hailed by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as "Britain's most respected living horror writer," Ramsey Campbell has authored an astounding body of work for over half a century that embodies the weird, the supernatu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Moon Books
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949491319

Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BY ERIC J. GUIGNARD

ABOUT RAMSEY CAMPBELL

THE PLACE OF REVELATION

THE PLACE OF REVELATION: A COMMENTARY

THE COMPANION

THE COMPANION: A COMMENTARY

THE ALTERNATIVE

THE ALTERNATIVE: A COMMENTARY

ONE COPY ONLY

ONE COPY ONLY: A COMMENTARY

RECENTLY USED

RECENTLY USED: A COMMENTARY

THE BILL

THE BILL: A COMMENTARY

WHY RAMSEY CAMPBELL MATTERS

BY MICHAEL ARNZEN, PHD

IN CONVERSATION WITH RAMSEY CAMPBELL

MY ROOTS EXHUMED: AN ESSAY

BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE FICTION FOR RAMSEY CAMPBELL

ABOUT EDITOR, ERIC J. GUIGNARD

ABOUT ACADEMIC, MICHAEL ARNZEN, PHD

ABOUT ILLUSTRATOR, MICHELLE PREBICH

INTRODUCTION

BY ERIC J. GUIGNARD

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WHEN I THINK BACK ON reading Ramsey Campbell, there’s an impression that he has always been there, a part of the horror genre backdrop. And in a sense he has been, at least as far as my own reading journey has been concerned. I first encountered adult-aged horror literature when I was eleven years old (an elementary school’s book order form through Scholastic offered The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King, heart be stilled!), and from there through junior high, then high school, and then onward I was hooked on stories of the dark, the weird, the fantastic, which rather sums up Ramsey’s writing style entirely.

To put this in context, one of my earliest senses of developing personal freedom in the late 1980s was in visiting used book stores, several of which were in the radius of suburban Los Angeles strip malls where I could ride my bright yellow 12-speed bicycle, or else my mom would give me a lift. I found myself visiting these shops more and more frequently on weekends, thumbing through old comics and paperbacks, anything with an interesting cover or front copy exclamation. My tastes were forming in those early teen years, and I began to seek out dark fantasy and horror magazines and anthologies, and found that every time I cracked open a cover, Ramsey’s name seemed somehow involved. Whether magazines such as Weird Tales, Whispers, or The Twilight Zone, or anthologies such as Tom Monteleone’s instrumental series Borderlands, or any of the inclusions in Year’s Best compilations, showcased annually by such respected editors as Karl Edward Wagner or Stephen Jones, I touched upon a bit more of the voice and world(s) of Ramsey.

It’s certainly a saddening nostalgia today to know those beloved shops of my youth are now a nearly-extinct business, gone the way of corded telephones and video movie rentals. Yet in the face of changing industry, and decades—generations—later, Ramsey Campbell remains, still writing, still relevant, still brilliant. Still the name found in leading magazines, still the name highlighted in anthologies, and showcased front-and-center on bookstores shelves, still an author praised in annual inclusions of Year’s Best compilations. Still here, a part of the horror genre backdrop, as he’s always been and, seemingly, will continue to be in perpetuity.

Hailed by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as Britain’s most respected living horror writer, Ramsey Campbell has authored an astounding body of work (over thirty novels and several hundred short stories, not counting nonfiction books, novelizations, poetry, etc.) for over half a century that embodies the supernatural and the imaginative, much of which is widely considered classics of dark fiction today.

He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including multiple British Fantasy Awards; World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award; Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writer’s Association; Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild; and being made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.

Noted critic Robert Hadji describes Ramsey for The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural as, perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition. Literary scholar S. T. Joshi writes, Future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood. And horror author-phenom Clive Barker adds, Ramsey possesses a vision of the world, and all it contains, unlike any other.

Further, he’s an astute, charming individual (see subsequent section In Conversation with Ramsey Campbell), and gracious enough to participate in this project, the sixth Primer book designed to showcase distinct modern voices around the world of leading dark fiction short stories.

So whether this volume is revisiting with a cherished author you’ve admired for decades, or, perhaps, a first-time introduction to a British—nay, global—literary horror powerhouse, know that Ramsey Campbell has been, and still is, instrumental to the genre, and that in some way he always will be.

Midnight cheers,

Signature

—Eric J. Guignard

Chino Hills, California

January 22, 2021

ABOUT RAMSEY CAMPBELL

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AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

I WAS BORN IN LIVERPOOL in 1946, and have never left Merseyside. For the first twenty-four years of my life I lived at 40 Nook Rise, a terraced house in Wavertree Garden Suburb (a model development built during the first world war). Model it certainly was in the sense of its size—two decidedly dinky rooms downstairs, and three bedrooms somehow crammed with a bathroom into the upper floor. This led to complications once my parents were estranged in my very early years. My father continued to live in the house as a largely unseen occupant, and my mother encouraged me to regard him as dangerous if not monstrous. I admit this lodged in my mind, so that his presence on the far side of doors and his footsteps on the stairs became sources of dread, whereas even as young as three I was able to distinguish most of my mother’s fancies from reality: radio programmes weren’t really full of coded messages directed at her, neighbours weren’t using pseudonyms to write comments about her (not by name) in the local newspapers or conspiring to have her evicted from the rented house . . . Some folk have commented that this was a horror writer’s ideal childhood, and I won’t deny that it has been a fruitful source of material.

In 1968 I met Jenny Chandler (daughter of the science fiction author A. Bertram Chandler) at Eastercon in Buxton, but we didn’t get together until the 1969 convention in Oxford. In 1970 Jenny moved up to Liverpool, and on the following New Year’s Day we were married. She has been my first reader and my support in many other ways ever since—indeed, the best thing in my life. Without her I wouldn’t have risked a fulltime writing career. In October 1961, having bought my first tale that saw professional publication, August Derleth wrote to me  . . . don’t depend on writing alone to make you a living. I did, and while I managed to fare well by leaning on my parents for ten years, I don’t recommend it; when you’re out of school, get yourself a decent, not too harrowing job, and write as much as possible. I took his advice and went into the civil service the following year, shifting to the public libraries four years later. I didn’t take the leap into a fulltime career until 1973, and if Jenny hadn’t been teaching I should never have survived. It didn’t help that at first I treated mine as a five-day job with weekends off. For five years I made nothing like a living, even once I’d written two novels (initially placing only one). In 1979 I manufactured a commercial success—The Parasite or To Wake the Dead, depending on which side of the Atlantic it appeared—and this liberated me to write more personally, although even in the occasional story written to someone else’s specifications my imagination has to be engaged to let me write.

As I frequently say and am proud to, I write horror. I’ve occasionally lurched into science fiction, seldom to good effect, and made the odd foray into fantasy. Half a dozen of my novels have no supernatural element and could be classed as crime, but in their concern with psychological disturbance and the dark depths of the mind I see them as companion pieces to my other tales, natural stages in my progress (whatever that may be). I’ll carry on writing for as long as I’m capable—I’ve too many ideas waiting to be written. If I’ve helped develop my field a little, that’ll do for me.

How did I come into it? Almost entirely by reading, since nearly every horror film then released in Britain carried an X certificate, barring anyone apparently younger than sixteen from the cinema. As not much more than a toddler I epitomised a horror fan—the kind who, having been terrified almost beyond bearing by a tale they’ve read, repeat the experience or seek out a similar one as soon as they’ve begun to recover. My earliest experiences of dread came from Rupert Bear, the British children’s comic series, and from fairy tales—those of Hans Christian Andersen and above all George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, where the restrained descriptions of the goblins’ monsters may have been meant to save children from being too scared, but in my case simply suggested worse than they showed. That’s the technique employed by M. R. James as well, and when I was six I encountered his work and the night terrors it brought. My mother let me use her tickets in the local public library, and well before I reached my teens I was familiar with pretty well all the available classics of the field (though there were some striking gaps: Lovecraft, for instance, was largely unpublished in Britain until 1960).

Maturity of reading doesn’t guarantee maturity of writing. However advanced one’s reading may be, writing can unmercifully expose the writer’s level of maturity and experience. Although I was reading Edith Wharton’s Afterward when I was six, at seven I wrote like a seven-year-old imagining childish games. At eleven I set out to write a complete collection, Ghostly Tales, recycling vampires and werewolves and ghosts and cannibals and even a shoggoth borrowed from Robert Bloch. They read like the work of an eleven-year-old with a magpie mind (but so did some work that was being professionally published back then—the wholly hilarious science fiction novels of Terence Haile, for instance). By far my longest story—all of four thousand words—was a potted imitation of The Devil Rides Out, heaven help us.

I think this may at least have taught me to focus on a model rather than simply pinch influences at random. For a couple of years I had a go at imitation, first of Arthur Machen—a few chapters of a novel called The Pit—and then of the detective story writer John Dickson Carr. This time I wrote sixty pages or so and abandoned the project, only to take it up again the following year. Rather than incorporate the first version of Murder by Moonlight or rewrite it, I started afresh, using just the basic plot and a general sense of the original narrative. At some point in the process I turned fourteen and found the first ever British paperback collection of Lovecraft. I was overwhelmed by his achievement and possessed by his influence, which can be seen in some later passages of Murder by Moonlight. I was so impatient to emulate Lovecraft that I abandoned the detective story a second time in order to set about invading his mythos.

I wrote several stories in an approximation of his style, purely to convince myself they evoked some of his cosmic terror. Pat Kearney, a fellow enthusiast, persuaded me to send them to August Derleth for his opinion, and August sent me not merely some essential editorial advice but eventually a contract, which led to my first professional publication. Even in that Lovecraftian book I was experimenting to an extent—one story is told largely through dialogue, not Lovecraft’s approach at all—and once it was done I went off in search of my own writing self, hugely inspired by Nabokov and Lolita in particular, and for the limits of the field and of literature. I haven’t found those limits yet, and I hope I never do. I believe the field is as boundless as our imagination.

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A BIOGRAPHY

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE describes Ramsey Campbell as Britain’s most respected living horror writer. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, The Wise Friend and Somebody’s Voice. He recently brought out his Brichester Mythos trilogy, consisting of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, The Pretence, The Booking, The Enigma of the Flat Policeman and The Village Killings are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories). His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey’s Rambles (video reviews), and he is working on a book-length study of the Three Stooges, Six Stooges and Counting. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks. His novels The Nameless, Pact of the Fathers and The Influence have been filmed in Spain, where a television series based on The Nameless is in development. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.

THE PLACE OF REVELATION

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AT DINNER COLIN’S PARENTS DO most of the talking. His mother starts by saying Sit down, and as soon as he does his father says Sit up. Auntie Dot lets Colin glimpse a sympathetic grin while Uncle Lucian gives him a secret one, neither of which helps him feel less nervous. They’re eating off plates as expensive as the one he broke last time they visited, when his parents acted as if he’d meant to drop it even though the relatives insisted it didn’t matter and at least his uncle thought so. Delicious as always, his mother says when Auntie Dot asks yet again if Colin’s food is all right, and his father offers I expect he’s just tired, Dorothy. At least that’s an excuse, which Colin might welcome except it prompts his aunt to say If you’ve had enough I should scamper off to bye-byes, Colin. For a treat you can leave us the washing up.

Everyone is waiting for him to go to his room. Even though his parents keep saying how well he does in English and how the art mistress said he should take up painting at secondary school, he’s expected only to mumble agreement whenever he’s told to speak up for himself. For the first time he