by Matt Cardin
Campbell became a parent himself for the first time in 1978, and some critics, notably S. T. Joshi, have regretted the increasing focus on middle-class family life in the plots of his novels, preferring instead what they see as the undiluted purity of his short stories. Nevertheless, domesticity continues to be a significant theme for the author, as attested by the late novella The Pretence (2013), about a central character trying to protect his family in the last few hours before some unspecified apocalyptic event.
Campbell’s horror writing also reflects an ongoing interest in and engagement with other media. He was a film and later DVD critic for BBC Merseyside radio for many years (1969–2007), and early in his career he produced novelizations for several classic Universal Horror movies such as The Bride of Frankenstein under the pseudonym Carl Dreadstone (1977). Film itself has a central role in two of Campbell’s original novels. Ancient Images (1988) features a lost, but entirely fictional, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi horror movie of the 1930s in a story about cursed land. The Grin of the Dark (2007) draws upon silent film comedy and transpires to be a narrative about a satanic medieval historian seeking to allow an evil intelligence a portal into the world. Although the subject is, again, a traditional one for the genre, the latter novel also employs electronic mail as a new source of horror. Websites, photography, and the sculptures of Antony Gormley feature in The Seven Days of Cain (2010), while Think Yourself Lucky (2014), with its murder blog, uses the latest trending in social media to uncanny effect.
Such blurring of the boundaries between the real world and a virtual or artificially created one is central to Campbell’s horror fiction. For example, the plot of The Seven Days of Cain concerns Internet characters, including a sadistic, shape-shifting villain, who keep “writing themselves” after their creation, and culminates in a fictional character’s consciousness of her own fictionality and desire for independent existence through being “ashamed of not being real” (Campbell 2010, 143, 306). That this is the photographer hero’s girlfriend lends poignancy: “losing Claire felt like abandoning the best part of himself” (Campbell 2010, 314). However, it also reflects Campbell’s own consistent authorial self-consciousness. Repeatedly, his work centers on writers or booksellers, their relationship with readers, and the processes and consequences of literary creativity. The novella Needing Ghosts (1990), told in the first person and urgent present tense, is perhaps his most confessional if not autobiographical work. The protagonist John Mottershead, a horror writer who, it is revealed, has murdered his own family, is caught in a narrative of entrapment in which he has become the central character of his own story. Writing, the narrator complains, “won’t leave you alone, ever,” and the mind is likened to a predator, “a spider which is trying to catch reality and spin it into patterns” (Campbell 1990, 34). Unable to distinguish between dream and memory, Mottershead appears doomed to repeat the events of a single day, including sinister encounters with public transport officials, bookstores and a writers’ group, and a suicide attempt: “Hadn’t he tried this before,” he wonders, “more than once, many times?” (Campbell 1990, 80). The theme of recurrent nightmare without closure follows a long tradition, exemplified by Melmoth in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), while the self-haunted, unreliable narrator reflects the influence of Aickman.
Despite the appearance of vampires in his recent novel Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach (2015), Campbell’s vision of horror has largely avoided such familiar generic figures in favor of monstrosity of a more human kind. Although shifting between supernatural and nonsupernatural story lines and often returning to old themes, there has been a development from early use of Anglo-American horror motifs to familial concerns and an increasingly sophisticated preoccupation with psychological processes and existential questions. Campbell’s subtle, intensely referential and literary style, his self-description as a horror writer, and his reluctance to allow the parameters of his horror to be easily defined or pigeonholed possibly account for a relative lack of commercial success to date compared to other authors, with Harris, or the even more prolific King, being obvious examples of this. As an editor, Campbell has also championed the work of others. The anthology Uncanny Banquet (1992) revives less familiar texts, including the first reprint of Adrian Ross’s 1914 novel, The Hole of the Pit. Still, Campbell was presented by Liverpool John Moores University with an Honorary Fellowship for outstanding contribution to literature in 2015. His own website, ramseycampbell.com, continues as a forum for discussion of views on horror fiction.
Keith M. C. O’Sullivan
See also: Aickman, Robert; Alone with the Horrors; Blackwood, Algernon; James, M. R.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Birch, Dinah, ed. 2009. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, Ramsey. 1990. Needing Ghosts. Bergvlei, South Africa: Century.
Campbell, Ramsey. 1991. The Count of Eleven. London: Macdonald.
Campbell, Ramsey. 2002. Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Hornsea: P. S. Publishing.
Campbell, Ramsey. 2010. The Seven Days of Cain. Cincinnati, OH: Samhain Publishing.
Campbell, Ramsey. 2013. Holes for Faces. Ashland, OR: Dark Regions Press.
Crawford, Gary William, ed. 2014. Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Joshi, S. T., ed. 1993. The Count of Thirty: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
An Interview with Ramsey Campbell
October 2016
Campbell shares his thoughts and observations about the long-term arc of horror literature from the 1950s to the early 2000s. In addition, he discusses horror as an intensely personal type of writing, the role of nightmares and nightmarish intrusions and irruptions in horror fiction, and the importance of several notable authors in the field, including, especially, H. P. Lovecraft. He concludes by offering some insights about the central characteristics of horror literature that distinguish it from other types.
Matt Cardin: In 2015 you received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Your career as a published author spans six decades. From this seasoned vantage point, what are some of the most significant developments in horror fiction that you’ve seen? What do you regard as some really noteworthy aspects of the field’s literary evolution from the mid-twentieth century up to now?
Ramsey Campbell: The 1950s saw some crucial developments. On the one hand, there was the rise of [the] California school of contemporary horror, a group of writers—Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Charles Beaumont—who founded their sense of the fantastic in everyday reality and in the experience of characters who might live next door if not in the reader’s own house (although urban supernatural horror had come to crucial life some years earlier in Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” where the mundane environment is no longer invaded by the supernatural but is its source, producing an entity manifested in the kind of suggestive glimpse Leiber learned from M. R. James). Shirley Jackson raised the tale of terror to a new peak of delicate reticence, and not just in The Haunting of Hill House. Without these developments I doubt we would have the teeming tapestries of contemporary life that Stephen King creates, drawing also, I think on the traditions of [Edgar Allan] Poe and Mark Twain to convey his highly personal vision. Peter Straub has shaped his own elegant form, a marriage of mystery fiction and horror. T. E. D. Klein demonstrates how cumulatively powerful allusiveness can be in long narratives, while Dennis Etchison pares his accounts of contemporary darkness down to a starkness reminiscent of [Ernest] Hemingway—whose conciseness influenced Bradbury, of course. Thomas Ligotti’s vision is as dark as that of any writer in the field, and perhaps outside it, too, but its sense of the cosmic gives it largeness.
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nbsp; In Britain, the 1950s saw the rise of Robert Aickman, the greatest master of the enigmatic strange tale since Walter de la Mare. In the sixties Thomas Hinde (The Day the Call Came, The Investigator) developed comedy of paranoia, in which dark humor is inextricably bound up with menace. In the seventies James Herbert based The Rats on his own youthful experience and brought a working-class view to the field. In the eighties Clive Barker celebrated the monstrous with his gorgeously gruesome horrors, depicted with a painter’s eye. Later British writers—Joel Lane, Gary McMahon, Simon Bestwick, and others—have used horror fiction to scrutinize contemporary experience, often in political terms. And there’s a strong female sensibility in the field these days, represented by such varied talents as Nina Allan, Sarah Pinborough, Allison Littlewood, Thana Niveau, Lynda Rucker. . . .
MC: Some of your stories and novels have drawn quite directly on your own personal, painful experiences, “Chimney” being a notable example. All writers draw on personal experience, of course, but your practice of it has been particularly intense at times. Do you think there’s something about horror fiction as such that makes it a particularly potent literary vehicle for this?
RC: I wouldn’t separate horror from other fiction that digs deep. The first three novels of John Franklin Bardin may be nominally crime fiction, but they have a powerful sense of paranoia, based on the author’s years with his schizophrenic mother. For that matter, has any horror novel surpassed Samuel Beckett’s L’Innomable for unrelenting dread? In my case it isn’t so much that I choose horror fiction to convey my experience as that aspects of my life find their way into the fiction, often generating it. That’s to say, my love of the genre preceded the themes that have become central to many of my tales—psychological disturbance, the vulnerability of children, the willingness to espouse belief systems that deny the right to question, and so on. I’m sure I would write horror, but my preoccupations shape the kind I write.
MC: Much of your work is characterized by a blurring of boundaries between reality and unreality, wakefulness and dream (or nightmare), and sanity and insanity, with frequent irruptions of the strange, the supernatural, and the uncanny. These are all long-lived tropes in Gothic and horror fiction, as is the basic idea of boundaries being violated or broken. Why should this be? What makes this such a central concern in horror stories?
RC: In my case I must invoke autobiography once more. By the time I was three years old I had to distinguish objective reality from my mother’s way of seeing it, and so it’s hardly surprising if I often write about misperception and about first sights that prove to be something other. More generally, I’d say that disturbing intrusions—whether from without, in the form of the uncanny or the physical or a combination of both, or from the depths of the mind (repressed terrors, the child who we never really cease to be, both of which may lie dormant)—aren’t merely the underlying themes of our field but its core. Surely they’re so widespread because they’re among the basic human dreads, and in many cases the writers are conveying, however metaphorically, some experience of their own.
MC: From the beginning of your career, you had a literary relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. With his legacy growing ever more prominent even as it grows ever more problematic, how do you regard his place in literature and culture, and in relation to your own work? Can you offer any advice or guidance to those who are perhaps wondering what to make of him and how, or whether, to start reading him?
RC: I take Lovecraft to be the most important single writer of the weird, insofar as he unites the traditions that preceded him on both sides of the Atlantic and builds on their strengths. His Supernatural Horror in Literature is not only an appreciation of all that he found best in the genre and a critique of the flaws he saw, but also a statement of his own artistic ambitions. His fiction gives them life. To an extent his reputation is the victim of his most famous creation, the Lovecraft Mythos. It was conceived as an antidote to conventional Victorian occultism—as an attempt to reclaim the imaginative appeal of the unknown—and is only one of many ways his tales suggest worse, or greater, than they show. It is also just one of his means of reaching for a sense of wonder, the aim that produces the visionary horror of his finest work (by no means all of it belonging to the Mythos). His stories represent a search for the perfect form for the weird tale, a process in which he tried out all the forms and all the styles of prose he could. For modulation and orchestration of prose, for the accretion of suggestive detail that builds to awe and terror—in fact, for his exemplary sense of structure—his best work is worthy of the closest study. In my first book I tended to imitate the aspects of his work that seem easiest to replicate, but I’ve found his example inspiring enough to attempt to scale his heights once more in some recent work. Among the Lovecraft tales I’d recommend to new readers: “The Colour out of Space,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Rats in the Walls,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Shadow out of Time.” All of them convey a sense of powers and presences larger than the prose can quite contain.
MC: What other authors and works would you recommend in general to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important and profound both for this genre and for literature as a whole?
RC: Apart from all those I’ve already cited, Poe and J. Sheridan Le Fanu both compressed the Gothic mode and intensified its sense of the supernatural and psychological. Algernon Blackwood at his finest (“The Wendigo,” “The Willows”) conveys real uncanny ecstasy, as Arthur Machen does more insidiously in his masterpiece, “The White People.” M. R. James can convey intense spectral terror in a sentence or even a phrase that shows just enough to suggest far worse. William Hope Hodgson is the great master of oceanic terror, while his novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land are milestones of cosmic horror.
MC: In the end, what really distinguishes horror from other types of literature? What is its singular, sui generis, darkly beating heart?
RC: Horror is the branch of literature most often concerned with going too far. It is the least escapist form of fantasy. It shows us sights we would ordinarily look away from or reminds us of insights we might prefer not to admit we have. It makes us intimate with people we would cross the street to avoid. It shows us the monstrous and perhaps reveals that we are looking in a mirror. It tells us we are right to be afraid, or that we aren’t afraid enough. It also frequently embraces, or at least is conterminous with, the ghost story. It flourishes here and there in the fields of science fiction and crime fiction, and not infrequently it bobs up in the mainstream, whatever that is. Despite its name, it is often most concerned to produce awe and terror in its audience, but it is not unusual for a horror story to encompass a wider emotional range. This said, I’d suggest that our field is related to real-life horror both directly, in sometimes (I think increasingly often) seeking to examine it, and metaphorically. But let’s not underrate the aesthetic experience of terror: some of the finest work in the field is lyrical. Horror and beauty can be a potent combination.
CARMILLA
Carmilla is a vampire novella written by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). It was originally published serially in the journal Dark Blue during 1871–1872 in a version that included illustrations by D. H. Friston (1820–1906). It was then published in its entirety with an additional prologue in Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), which brought together five of Le Fanu’s short stories. Le Fanu created the character of Doctor Hesselius, an occult detective, to present In a Glass Darkly as a case book of supernatural occurrences. Doctor Hesselius has been identified as the first occult detective in literature. His influence can be seen in pulp horror with characters such as Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin.
The scene in Carmilla when the narrator suffers a kind of waking nightmare of being attacked by a large cat demonstrates Le Fanu’s skill in delivering an authentic chill to the reader. The narrator, Laura, has a sense of awakening in the dead of night. She s
ees something moving at the foot of her bed:
. . . it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. . . . I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.
I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it—I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bed-clothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning. (Le Fanu 1872, 147–149)
Matt Cardin
Source: Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. 1872. In a Glass Darkly, Volume III. London: R. Bentley & Son.
Carmilla follows Laura and her English father, who live in Styria. Following a carriage accident, they take in a young woman, Carmilla. Laura is entranced by her new friend, recognizing her from a dream she had as a child. After Carmilla’s arrival, young women in the village start dying. Laura herself becomes ill and dreams of being attacked by a large cat. Her father takes her to meet an old family friend, General Spielsdorf, whose young daughter has recently died. The general recognizes Carmilla as Millarca the vampire, a descendant of the ancient Karnstein family, who preyed on his daughter. Together with Baron Vordenburg, a vampire expert, the general and Laura’s father stake Carmilla/Millarca in her tomb before cutting off her head. Laura recovers.