Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

The long-awaited Ramsey Campbell interview by all of us

May 20th, 2009

Following our enforced ‘holiday’ on the shores of Lake Hades, Bill, Mathew and I returned to Horror Reanimated to discover the refurbishments unfinished. In an attempt to save money, Bloody Books had hired a firm of zombie builders to do the work. One might say they aren’t the sharpest tools in the box…

So, for our chat with the classic British horror author Ramsey Campbell, we once again found ourselves off the premises. Mr. Campbell suggested we meet in an old Liverpool theatre. On arrival we discovered the venue to be not only deserted but also in a state of decay. The lights didn’t work and by the time we’d found the entrance to the stalls, our torches had grown dim. Snow fell through the holes in the ceiling high above. Many of the seats appeared to be occupied by silent, unmoving figures whose bodies were lumpy and white under the failing torch beams.

We found Mr. Campbell in a front row seat looking quite at home and sipping Chardonnay…

Bill Hussey: Many horror writers are able to pinpoint some traumatic episode or event in their childhood that influences their work – anything you’d like to share?

Ramsey Campbell: Rupert Bear, for a start – specifically “Rupert’s Christmas Tree”, in which Rupert acquires a magical tree that decamps after the festivities and returns to its home in the woods. Perhaps this is meant as a charming fantasy for children, but the details – the small high voice from the tree, the creaking that Rupert hears in the night, the trail of earth he follows from the tub in his house, above all the prancing silhouette that inclines towards him the star it has in place of a head – are surely the stuff of adult supernatural fiction. I read it when I was getting on for two years old and lay awake for nights in utter dread. I think I got my start in the field right there, and many of my preoccupations must derive from my early childhood. Our son’s partner Sharika recently reprinted the story in Rupert: A Collection of Favourite Stories (Egmont, 2007), and so you can see for yourselves how unnerving it is.

Then there was my everyday life. My parents were estranged when I was very young but continued to live in the same cramped house (just two rooms downstairs). My mother was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who believed (for instance) that radio programmes contained coded messages about her. She led me to believe that my father was in many ways a monster, and I almost never saw him face to face throughout my childhood and adolescence. I used to hear his footsteps on the stairs as I lay in bed, terrified that he might come into my room. Sometimes I heard arguments downstairs as my mother waylaid him when he came home, her voice shrill and clear, his blurred and incomprehensible, hardly a voice, which filled me with a terror I couldn’t define. (Being a spectator to arguments made me deeply nervous for decades, though since becoming a parent I’m much more likely to intervene or take sides.) If he was still in the kitchen when it was time for her to make my breakfast she would drive him out of the house; presumably it was unthinkable that I should share the table with him. Once I found I’d broken a lens of my glasses as I’d put them down by the bed the previous night, and was convinced by my mother that he had sneaked into the room to break it. Worst of all was Christmas, when my mother would send me to knock on his bedroom door and invite him down, as a mark of seasonal goodwill, for Christmas dinner. I would go upstairs in a panic, but there was never any response beyond a mutter of refusal. I don’t believe any of this necessarily led me to write horror – I did that because I’d fallen in love with the terror the genre conveyed – but I’m sure my early years influenced the psychological preoccupations of my stuff.

Joseph D’Lacey: Your influences appear to be from a time when the genre had a more literary feel to it. I’m thinking of writers like Le Fanu, of course, but also Blackwood and M.R. James. Are there storytellers outside the genre who you’ve found inspirational too? Would you say you’re ever influenced in new ways by newer writers or is your MO quite crystallised these days?

Ramsey Campbell: Outside it – lord, yes. I hadn’t even finished writing my first published book when I began to read a great deal outside the field. Graham Greene, early Iris Murdoch, Joyce’s Ulysses, Lawrence Darrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs (whose books had to be smuggled into the country from Paris)… Greene was certainly an influence, but above all Nabokov. Lolita was an absolute revelation to me when I read it at seventeen – the lyricism, the joy in language and all that you can do with it, the black comedy brought to bear on a theme you wouldn’t expect to support it. I read everything else I could find by him – Bend Sinister, Pale Fire and Laughter in the Dark were particular favourites.

I’m not conscious of being influenced by other writers these days, but who’s to say I just don’t notice? One way I try to keep developing as a writer is to identify some technique or element I depend on and then see what happens if I do without it. I actually began that in my first book – there’s a tale in there (“The Will of Stanley Brooke”) told largely in dialogue, with only neutral adjectives, no Lovecraftian language at all. It isn’t very good – I didn’t have the grasp of character it needed – but it was a start.

Bill Hussey: Your career as a horror writer has spanned decades. In that time what are the biggest changes that have taken place in the form?

Ramsey Campbell: I’d say the growth of the horror novel. The old wisdom persists that the short story or the novella is the ideal form for horror fiction, but I do think the novel has developed considerably since Steve King and others started to work at it. That’s not to say there weren’t great earlier examples – Matheson, Bradbury, Shirley Jackson come to mind, not to mention Frankenstein and Dracula. But as a vehicle for expression the horror novel can incorporate satire, comedy of various shades, social comment, psychological enquiry and much else, and since the seventies there have been quite a few impressive explorations of its possibilities.

I don’t find other developments as significant. The face-off between subtlety and splatter has been going on at least since M. R. James and Montague Summers condemned American gruesomeness as represented by the Not at Night anthologies, and I suspect it’ll continue for as long as we have horror fiction. I’ve nothing against either – just against lack of imagination. Clive Barker and David Schow and others have all written highly explicit fiction that enriches the imagination rather than trying to take its place. That’s my criterion.

Mathew F. Riley: You follow your own path when creating stories of unease, but do you take an interest in current trends in the horror genre? What are you thoughts on the popularity of the zombie as a horror sub-genre; and your thoughts on the increasingly-seen doom-laden scenarios of the apocalypse and the post-apocalypse?

Ramsey Campbell: To be honest, I’m not very interested in the conventional monsters. That isn’t to say nothing new can be done with them, but probably not by me. I’m interested in getting inside their minds, but you can’t have much from a zombie’s viewpoint, it seems to me. As for the explosion of apocalypses – well, I imagine it expresses many people’s sense of the precariousness of their existence. Better an apocalypse in fiction than in religious fanaticism, anyway. Mind you, Ballard was creating superb examples decades ago.

Joseph D’Lacey: We recently posted a review of Thomas Ligotti’s ‘My Work is not yet Done’. I was delighted by his use of language and the subtlety of his exposition. What’s your impression of this man’s work?

Ramsey Campbell: I think he’s a remarkable writer – not just one of the best in the field today but in the field ever. He has a unique vision and has crafted a style that expresses it perfectly. I’d place him alongside Machen and Lovecraft and a very few others who have managed to create something profoundly personal (not to say disturbing) in the tale of supernatural terror.

Mathew F. Riley: As a postscript to your entry in The Book of Horror Lists, and your editorial in the latest Prism, please can you list 5 UK horror writers that you consider to be ‘expanding the genre’; and in what ways are they doing so?

Ramsey Campbell: M. John Harrison has been doing it for decades and still is – treating occult themes with a remarkably bleak contemporary vision that’s inextricable from his observation of life. Joel Lane is equally keen-eyed and uses the fantastic to illuminate social and political issues that beset us. Mark Samuels is Britain’s master of urban weirdness (difficult to differentiate from urban horror, and there’s some of that in his work, but he often uses mundane life as the seed of a decidedly personal, though by no means unpersuasive, view of the world).  Gary Fry uses his considerable knowledge of psychology and philosophy to produce horror fiction that’s intellectually very stimulating. And if I may claim her as British – she’s certainly graced these isles for quite a time – Lisa Tuttle may be too original and intelligent and literate to have any obvious imitators, but besides having all those qualities and a highly individual vision she does what all good horror should do, however you define it: disturb.

Joseph D’Lacey: What are your feelings about the current Horror renaissance taking place in the UK? Perhaps you feel that Horror never died in the first place…

Ramsey Campbell: That’s right, Joseph, I don’t! But I’m delighted to see that it’s creeping back into the public consciousness. I think the genre goes through various phases that keep coming back. When I started reading in it in the fifties very little new horror was being published as horror. Small presses (in particular Arkham House, as significant back then as PS Publishing is now) were keeping it alive. There was the odd short-lived magazine, the occasional anthology, the infrequent popular success. Sound familiar? Eventually we had the boom of the seventies, followed by the inevitable eventual implosion. (The same thing befell science fiction in the fifties.) At my great age I tend to take the long view. Write the best you can and, if it doesn’t achieve much immediate success, hope that it lasts.

Bill Hussey: Being a writer now extends far beyond the word processor. It seems that, to be successful writer, you now have to engage more directly with your readership – setting up an online presence, attending conventions etc. Is this a healthy development and what is your general attitude to the ‘business’ side of writing?

Ramsey Campbell: I’m a bit wary of blogging, though I do it now and then. I think it can too easily become a substitute for real writing – an excuse not to write, something writers are prone to try and find. Convention-going isn’t new by any means – me, I was attending them before I’d written anything worth reading. If you regard them as a way of having a good time with your friends as well as meeting your readership or doing business, they should be fun – they certainly are for me. I actually love reading my stuff to audiences – I can’t ordinarily judge how people will react to what I write, and I enjoy seeing or hearing it for a change. If they laugh that’s best of all.

Mathew F. Riley: Your novel ‘Pact of the Fathers’ was filmed as ‘El Segundo Nombre (2002)‘; and ‘The Nameless’ as ‘Los Sin Nombre (1999)’ – the films appear to have gathered a cult following over the years, justifiably so. Looking back, how involved were you in the process if at all, and what did you think of the finished articles? Did these adaptations provide beneficial for your writing career? And have you other stories under option?

Ramsey Campbell: I wasn’t involved in the process, but the folk at Filmax flew me over to Spain to help promote both films. I liked them, especially Los Sin Nombre, which I think has a real sense of dread – I particularly liked the use of actual derelict locations, Spanish equivalents of the kind I used in the book and elsewhere in my stuff. To be honest, I don’t think they had any particular effect on my career, except that Pact of the Fathers saw a Spanish edition. I hope the films helped the two directors to get to the decidedly frightening Rec, which they co-directed. Nothing is optioned right now – “The Seductress” was done years ago as a rather faithful episode of The Hunger, though.

Joseph D’Lacey: My publisher once asked my wife if she worried about what was going on in my mind. Before that, I don’t think she’d ever thought about it…How does your wife cope with your dark side?

Ramsey Campbell: It’s one of many reasons we got together in the first place (in the late sixties, at Eastercon in Oxford). She has always shared my tastes – she’s a great fan of Val Lewton and David Lynch, for instance. She’s also my first editor, and reads my novels in first draft as the chapters are finished – she often makes useful comments. She and our daughter and son are the best things that have ever happened to me.

Joseph D’Lacey: Having discussed this with many writers, it seems the majority of us – whether consciously or not – revisit certain themes and ideas. Ideas that won’t leave us in peace. Which terrors do you find yourself unearthing like this, in some kind of subconscious cycle?

Ramsey Campbell: You know, I try not to be aware of them in case I start consciously repeating them. But the vulnerability of children often turns up, and also the notion that deep down we’re still the vulnerable children we were. Other recurring themes: the human tendency to find scapegoats, fundamentalism in various forms (political as well as religious), the ghost or monster as something we deny about ourselves (that is, a character in the story does), the willingness to embrace belief systems that will answer all your questions so long as you give up the right to question, the banality of evil (my killers tend to be pretty pathetic, as real ones surely are)…

Joseph D’Lacey: What interests do you have beyond creating within this noble genre? Do you ever wonder what you might have done if you hadn’t achieved success as an author?

Ramsey Campbell: I’d have liked to be a stand-up comedian.

Joseph D’Lacey: What’s the most unsettling work of fiction you’ve ever read and why?

Ramsey Campbell: Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is certainly a recent candidate – in all sorts of ways, including how it’s set out on the page, it both puts you through the experiences of the characters and undermines your certainty in what exactly you’re reading. I also loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, which is gentler but more like experiencing someone else’s prolonged dream than any other novel I can think of. Paul Ableman’s I Hear Voices is a brilliant immersion in the experience of a schizophrenic. But I think I’d finally go for Beckett’s The Unnameable, though his How It Is would be another strong candidate. Both immerse you (me, anyway) in an experience of intense spiritual disorientation that’s especially disconcerting for its boundlessness.

Mathew F. Riley: Your thoughts on Virgin Books’ decision to put its horror line on hiatus after only 8 releases?

Ramsey Campbell: Alas! A pity. Still, it’s one of the ways the field often works or doesn’t work.

Joseph D’Lacey: All our guests are given the power to make two nominations. The Sword of the Ultimate Darkness goes to the outstanding, all time work of horror in any medium. You may also banish to the Plague Pits forever, the worst example of horror in any medium. Please make your nominations…

Ramsey Campbell: I’ll give the Sword to the first horror film I fell in love with, Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon. I saw it at the cinema when I was fourteen and looked old enough to bluff my way into X (that’s to say, for people of 16 or over) films. It was playing second feature to The Tingler, which I quite liked. The Tourneur came on second – in those days the supporting film played once in the middle of the show while the main feature was shown twice. Before the opening credits of Night of the Demon were over I was enthralled by the introductory voice-over accompanied by Clifton Parker’s great score over shots of Stonehenge. I still think Maurice Denham’s drive through the spectral night is one of the greatest first scenes in all horror film, and by the time he encountered the demon I knew it was a classic (even if the first appearance of the demon is a bit too explicit so early on). I must have watched the film perhaps a dozen times by now, and I’ll watch it again. There’s a very useful book about it by Tony Earnshaw.

As for the worst, lord knows there’s plenty of competition. There has always been a good deal of semi-literate trash in the field, and there’s certainly no shortage of it now. I think I’ll go for someone with a certain reputation rather than lesser lights. I nominate Dennis Wheatley and in particular The Devil Rides Out. It isn’t just reactionary – it seems as if Wheatley regarded everything that threatened his way of life as the work of the devil. It’s nakedly racist – told “He reminded me in a most unpleasant way of the Bogey Man” someone immediately responds “Why, is he a black?” Most of the characters are caricatures if even that, some of them equipped with pantomime accents. At times the book reads like a synopsis of itself – one bizarre chapter precedes most of its telegrammatic paragraphs with the time in hours and minutes in a woeful attempt to generate suspense. Throughout the book characters lecture each other (hence the reader) rather than talk like any kind of human being I’ve ever met – maybe people spoke like that in Wheatley’s day or in his circle. It’s also often bathetic: watching a Black Mass, one of our heroes cries “Phew! This is a ghastly business. I can’t stand much more of it.” That’s what really sinks the book: the clumping prose. It was adapted as a musical – http://www.thedevilridesoutmusical.com/index.htm , and it obviously influenced the inadvertently comic writing of Sean Manchester (the Highgate Vampire man). However, it was the basis of a good film, skilfully written by the great Richard Matheson.

Mathew F. Riley: Are you a book geek?

Ramsey Campbell: Put it this way. One room in our house is a library. And the guest room is more of it. And so is the front room, and my workroom, and the room next to that… I used to collect editions – I had almost the entire Arkham House list up to the early seventies – but when I had to sell most of those to pay for work on our first house I settled for just owning the text instead. I still want books, though – not the text online.

Joseph D’Lacey: Never have I found a cold, dark abandoned theatre so entertaining. I must say I am slightly concerned about all the ghostly white figures who have gathered round to listen while we’ve talked. I think perhaps it’s time we left. Bill? Mathew?

Er, Mr. Campbell?

My God! Something spongy but very strong just grabbed hold of my ankle. Can’t seem to wrench it free. Hold on, some sort of powdery white fungus is growing across my lap and arms. I can’t move.

Hey! Guys? Anyone?

I do hate this job sometimes…

[A note to the uninitiated and some publishing news:

Ramsey Campbell is the author of dozens of horror novels and countless short stories. Among his accolades are British Fantasy, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards as well as The Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He is considered Britain's most respected living horror writer.

His most recent novels are The Grin of The Dark and Thieving Fear. Forthcoming in September is Creatures of the Pool - set in the cellars and tunnels under Liverpool - and a collection titled Just Behind You, both from PS Publishing. The first draft of a brand new novel - The Seven Days of Cain - has just been completed and available right now is a new edition of The Influence.]

Entry Filed under: The Function of Fear