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| I'll admit that I stole this image from the Liverpool Daily Post. |
If you consider yourself a serious reader of fiction but don't know who British horror novelist Ramsey Campbell is, it's time you were introduced. I have written of Campbell before; below is an excerpt of that post:
Ramsey Campbell is widely considered to be one of the best (if not the
best) horror writer currently active....[I've included] some quotes about the writer himself:
"Britain's most respected horror writer." -Oxford Companion
"Campbell writes the most terrifying horror tales of anyone now alive." -Twilight Zone Magazine
"Campbell is literature in a field which has attracted too many
comic-book intellects, cool in a field where too many writers--myself
included--tend toward painting melodrama. Good horror writers are quite
rare, and Campbell is better than just good." -Steven King
"Ramsey Campbell is one of the modern masters of horror...He has a
genius for infusing horror into the everyday, piling up small moments of
dread and confusion and fear until they become insurmountable." -Tim
Pratt, Locus
"The greatest living writer of horror fiction." -Vector
"Ramsey Campbell is the best of us all." - Poppy Z. Brite
"The best horror writer alive, period." - Thomas Tessier
"The most sophisticated and highly regarded of British horror writers." - Financial Times
I could go on, and believe me, I'm tempted to. But I think you get the
idea. Of his multitude of books, there are thousands upon thousands of
positive reviews. Most of them go beyond the average, "So scary I had
to leave the lights on!" or "Skin-crawling terror!" (whatever that
means.) You get the sense in reading these reviews that there is
something not being expressed. Absolute phrases like "greatest" and
"most" are rarely used in the world of review, for they can sound
extreme or ignorant. And yet here we have dozens--if not hundreds--of
individuals proclaiming "he is the scariest", "he is the most
sophisticated", and of course "he is the best." Of all the reviews I
have read of Campbell, the one has come closest to my personal feelings,
and it seems, to those who have tried to express their awe for
Campbell's work is this:
"It doesn't seem enough to say that Ramsey Campbell is a master of the horror genre." - Publishers Weekly
What is it about Campbell's work that makes it so great? He takes his time to set the stage; he tells you all about
the world the story takes place in usually long before things get truly
weird. He transforms everyday objects and scenarios into items and
encounters dripping with implicate menace. The protagonists are real;
in fact, they are just like you. For you, too, would be slow to see the
danger around you in the same situations these characters are in. You,
too, would not want to believe that such horrors were even possible. Campbell is about as far away from buckets-of-blood-shock-o horror as
you can get. The books are not spectacles or "thrillers" in the typical sense. They are
private moments of sinister confusion. They are deliberately slow.
They manipulate you more than you would like to allow. Once, I read a
line in a book of his which was innocuous at first, but when I
understood the double meaning several lines later....I was terrified by what had almost happened. In that
moment, it was not a story or a book, it was the very real possibility
of a gruesome death, or worse. I was surprised (to say the least) to
find two or three tears has leaked out of my eyes. Not tears of sadness
or joy; tears of fear. His implications alone are terrifying...
Hopefully that gets you excited about the uncommon honor we have today here at Great Work Review; I had the pleasure of interviewing the man himself. This is an exclusive interview for GWR. Below is the entirety of that interview. I am truly grateful to Mr. Campbell for taking the time to do this with me. I'm sure you will find his insight into art and horror more than interesting.
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When did you first get interested in writing? When did
you realize you could make a career out of it? Was there ever a time when you
seriously considered doing something else, if so, what?
I still
have my first attempt at a novel – Black Fingers from Space by John R.
Campbell (aged 7½), and illustrated by him too. The interested, not to say
unwary, reader can find in my collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably all
the chapters I wrote. Before I was twelve I was already writing my first
completed book, Ghostly Tales. The
stories in it were patched together like Frankenstein’s monster from fragments
of fiction I’d read. Lovecraft gave me a focus when I was fourteen – something
specific to aim to equal, not to say imitate – and August Derleth provided the
encouragement and more importantly the editorial advice. By eighteen I had a
book out, but it wasn’t for another nine years that I actually thought of
writing as a career. Foolhardiness helped, and my wife helped more – if she
hadn’t been teaching fulltime we wouldn’t have been able to afford my leap into
the unknown. It wasn’t for another five years that I actually started to make a
living. Before going fulltime I should explain I had a day job – four years in
the civil service followed by another seven in the public libraries in
Liverpool.
This question might be difficult to answer in some ways,
but I’m quite interested in your take on this. You have garnered very high
praise from hundreds of reviewers and (perhaps more significantly) from your
peers in the field of fiction writing. Many people have gone so far as to call
you, “the best living,” “the scariest writer,” “Britain’s greatest horror
novelist,” and, “the best of all time.” What is it about your work or style
that people respond to?
Well, you should really ask them. But I’ve had quite a
lot of readers say that once they’ve read a fair amount of my stuff they find
themselves seeing aspects of the world in its terms or, I would hope,
recognising what I’ve drawn attention to. What I hope is that my tales make us
(the author included) look again at things we’ve taken for granted.
I think a lot of North American readers (myself included)
are familiar with your work thanks to the recommendations given by high-profile
writers such as Stephen King and Peter Straub. Would you agree with that? I’m
interested in your opinion of King’s work, as well as Straub’s.
I’m very fond of both. Peter’s a great elegant stylist
who has created his own literary form, an insidiously uneasy mating of the
supernatural and the crime story. Steve impresses me more and more as a great
moral writer, an enviably fluent storyteller, a real taker of risks (who else
would dare call his books by titles such as Misery
and Desperation?), an innovator
who hasn’t yet received due credit for it that I’ve seen, and crucial to the
development of the modern horror novel. I could enthuse at more length about
both, believe me – well, I have in introductions to their books (imminently Pet Sematary).
Is there a writer currently working who you feel doesn’t
have the credit he or she deserves? Who and why?
There are quite a few candidates, but let me choose just
one – the British novelist Steve Mosby. He’s categorised as a crime writer but
can equally be regarded as a horror novelist – an uncommonly disturbing one.
His work is characterised by narrative play that never detracts from the
suspense or the moral rigour of the tale. I’d say the perfect start to reading
him is Black Flowers, which even has
a touch of the uncanny in the tainted landscape where some of the events take
place. But all of his books are very well worth knowing – The 50/50 Killer is the one he suggests as a starter, and that’s
splendid too.
I know you started out writing Lovecraftian stories
(please correct me if I’m wrong about that), but now you certainly have a style
which is all your own. Was that something that you consciously developed, or
something that more-or-less cultivated itself over time?
It was pretty well instinctive but also the product of
influence. Even in that first book of mine (The
Inhabitant of the Lake, certainly Lovecraftian) I was already moving away
from modelling my style on his (which, let’s remind ourselves, are very
various, much more so than his detractors acknowledge) in tales such as “The
Render of the Veils” and the ones that followed. But I was now reading widely
outside the field. Graham Greene enthralled me and became an influence, but the
real revelation was Nabokov – Lolita
when I’d just turned seventeen and then every other book of his I could find.
His work opened me up to the huge possibilities of language, and even “The
Stone on the Island” shows how liberated I felt. I managed to get what I wanted
to do right in “The Cellars”, and then got it wrong in a couple of years’ worth
of first drafts, which I eventually rewrote and collected in Demons by Daylight (they also included
“Cold Print” and “The Scar”). The rest – well, I hope I’m still developing.
As I mentioned earlier, I also want to be a novelist
and—like you—I am drawn to the horrific, the strange, the frightening. My wife,
as well as various friends of mine, have asked me why I’m specifically
interested in horror. You’ve been a major figure in the industry for decades;
are there certain traits you’ve noticed among writers of horror fiction? Any
insight into what it might be that attracts some individuals to it, but not
others?
It’s a cliché, but we seem to be quite amiable folk on
the whole. Bob Bloch used to mention our grins, and he was a lot of fun
himself. I’d say we’re attracted because it engages our imagination – why else
write it? And it doesn’t engage those who aren’t attracted, any more than
writing in other fields engages me (which is not in any way to belittle those
genres).
They say that behind every great man there is a great
woman. I’m not sure if this is universally true, but you have acknowledged your
wife Jenny in the beginning of many (if not all) of your books, thanking her
for her work as “first” editor and the many other contributions she makes to
your work. How much do you think her insight, knowledge, and influence shows up
in your novels? How integral would you say she is to your writing process?
She’s absolutely crucial, and not just for the reasons
you cite – as I mentioned, she kept us for five years when I set out as a
fulltime writer. Quite a lot of my work is based on her experience – any stuff
about teaching is likely to be owed to her decades in the job, and the Fancy
family in The One Safe Place were all
too typical of the kinds of clans she encountered. She acts as continuity
editor sometimes, and sometimes suggests what might come next or soon. But just
by being with me and reading my stuff she’s enormously supportive – I know too
many writers whose partners never want to read what they write and who wish
they would.
There is a long-standing stigma in certain literary
circles against “genre” fiction (such as horror, fantasy, sci-fi, etc.). When
and why do you think this stigma developed, and why do you think some people
see these genres as inherently separate from “serious” literature?
The field is often associated with its
most disreputable elements. Too many horror
writers seem to have little more ambition than to try and be more disgusting
than one another. I once described such writing as Janet and John primers of
mutilation. Me, I think the best horror fiction is a branch of literature, and
I believe it has just as much scope. One quote sums up the attitude the field
too often encounters. Years ago the husband of a lady who was interviewing me
said “If he’s so good, how come he writes horror?” This said, I don’t think
it’s the whole story – there’s always been a reasonable amount of appreciative
criticism in the mainstream media and in studies of the field. But folk who
don’t know the field may understandably have difficulty in sorting out the good
stuff, especially if it’s all marketed as a single homogenous entity. As to
when it developed – well, we might want to lay some of the blame on Christine
Campbell Thompson, who said of her Not at
Night series “From the first, I set my face against literature.” She hardly needed to say so, with the exception of a few of her
choices (Lovecraft, for instance).
In both Incarnate and in The Face That Must
Die, you take the reader into the minds of highly disturbed people. In both
works you seem to have gone to great lengths to show their point of view in a
way the reader can almost identify with. For example, Horridge’s actions in Face
make sense to him, and—in reading the book—we can understand why. Talk a bit about
that process, and what you find interesting about such an effect.
I think it’s because I lived with it for most of the
first half of my life. My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic (undiagnosed, so
far as I know). From a very early age – certainly no more than three years old
– I had to distinguish what was real from her perception of it. Long before my
teens I was aware of how she would justify and rationalise her delusions to
herself, and I was pretty young by the time I gave up trying to persuade her
that (for instance) a nightly BBC radio soap opera (The Archers) wasn’t full of coded messages addressed to her – some by
well-wishers, others by her enemies under assumed names. I got used to this
quite quickly – it was my childhood, after all, and it didn’t really occur to
me to compare it to others. But I have to confess that Horridge, prejudices and
all, was largely based on her, and my upbringing may well explain why I’ve
continued to be fascinated by how such minds work.
I’ve noticed you like to use themes in some of your
books, which you mirror in the language and word-choice. Examples of this would
be the themes of wheat and dogs in Ancient Images, cold and symmetry in Midnight
Sun, or water and the unknown in Creatures of the Pool. What do you like
about this? What do you feel it adds to your work?
I hope it won’t sound too horribly pretentious if I say I
sometimes feel my stuff puts me in mind of music. I’m not talking about
quality, just form. I can’t really write a tale until I have some sense of a
central theme, and then, as you’ve spotted, I tend to organise the material
around it and use images to articulate it. Particularly in the short stories
and also some of the novels – The Grin of
the Dark, for instance – I think the episodes form a series of variations
on the theme. Sometimes they’re traditional in form – true of most of my ghost
stories, I think – and sometimes, as in “The Hands”, the variations can be less
immediately recognisable as such.
My favorite book of yours is Midnight Sun, which
touched me and terrified me in turns. I’ve even gone so far as to call
it my favorite novel overall, and it’s one I’d love to tackle on this blog in
the future. Can you talk a bit about the process of working on that novel? Do
you yourself see it as special or noteworthy against your other books?
It was probably the hardest novel to write of any of them
– so far, at any rate. In particular the first draft of the opening section
felt like trying to push the burden of the thing uphill day after day. I
actually stopped at the end of that section and reread it to convince myself
that it was even worth going on with the book. I think my ambition for the book
may have been too conscious – to write a novel that depended not at all on
physical violence, even the threat of it, and went instead for awe. I’d say it
was an honourable failure and wish it were much better. Still, I continue to
make my feeble leaps towards awe – The
Kind Folk is the latest one, I suppose.
Which of your books do you consider the best and why?
It’s usually one of the newer ones, and then I begin to
see its myriad flaws. Right now I’m quite fond of The Grin of the Dark as perhaps my most sustained comedy of
paranoia, and also as a book that says something about the way the internet (in
many ways a great boon) releases the monsters within us.
I read once that you said The Parasite was the
worst book you had written, which amused me since it was one of the first of
yours I read, and I quite enjoyed it. Do you still have that opinion? In the
books you think are the worst, what is it about them you feel you failed at
conveying or creating?
The
Parasite – I think it simply
struggles too hard to be as frightening as possible, to impose an experience on
the reader rather than simply allowing me to convey how the material feels to
me. Early in writing Incarnate I made
the decision to stop striving to be scary and to force the material, and since
then I mostly haven’t – if I catch myself at it I do my best to stop.
At the beginning of Midnight Sun, you included a
quote from David Aylward’s The Revenge of the Past: the Cultural Meaning of
Supernatural Literature, reading: “Writers [of supernatural fiction], who
used to strive for awe and achieve fear, now strive for fear and achieve only
disgust.” Upon finishing the book I reflected on that and saw it more as a
guideline for reading the book than as a thematic connection. Aylward is
almost certainly (at least in part) referring to Lovecraft in his creation of
“awe.” What do you think it is about this kind of awe that frightens people?
What has been the effect on the industry in moving away from awe?
I don’t know if it’s frightening so much as elevating to
a level where terror becomes almost a numinous experience. I think of “The
Willows” and “The White People” but also the last movement of Janáček’s Sinfonietta and
also the Agnus Dei from his Glagolitic
Mass (where the orchestral response always sounds to me like an answer from
something utterly and perhaps terribly alien, or else the voice of the void). I
don’t altogether agree with Aylward – surely writers such as Thomas Ligotti and
Mark Samuels still reach for awe. But I think it’s the highest ambition of the
form, and I’d be happy to see more writers attempting visionary horror.
Meanwhile the horror tale is doing much in terms of social comment and
psychological enquiry, though.
I’m not going to delve too much into your work as a film
reviewer, but there is something you said along these lines once about the
cinema that I think deserves some time here. You mentioned that out of all the
horror movies made these days only the darker films of David Lynch really
frighten you anymore. Do you think this is an inherent failing of films, or is
this a problem with the direction the industry has taken? What are some
examples of horror movies which, in your opinion, failed in their goal to be
scary?
I think the failing may be mine, not that of the films.
In any case, horror doesn’t have to be scary – all it needs to do, like all
good art, is to make us look again at things we’ve taken for granted. Disturbing
us is worthwhile too. So, for instance, of late I’ve admired such different
films as Kill List, The Children and Valhalla Rising, all of which seem to me to achieve both. I won’t
single out films that don’t – suffice it to say that a lack of imagination and
inventiveness is liable to leave me unengaged. I don’t necessarily ask for
originality, just a sense that the material has been authentically imagined –
hence I liked The Sixth Sense, for
example. And I don’t demand scariness – just as one instance, I don’t find Tod
Browning’s Dracula frightening, but
now I’ve seen it on Blu-ray I’ve rather fallen in love with the film (which had
previously seemed too distant to reach me, too muffled by the ageing of the
available copies).
You’ve also said that a major problem with many horror
writers today is that they have not read any horror fiction older than
themselves (citing M. R. James as an example of what should be read, if
I remember correctly). Why do you feel it is important to have a knowledge of past
writers when attempting to write?
I think you should be thoroughly familiar with the great
tradition of any field or form you’re working in. Learn from the greats and
build on what they achieved. Lovecraft epitomises how that can be done, as does
Fritz Leiber – two of many essential writers to get to know.
What do you feel is important for fiction writers (in
general) to do or know? What about horror writers specifically?
Tell as much of the truth as you can. And that applies
just as much to horror writers as to any other kind. Write only what engages
your imagination – anything else is hackwork. Find your ideal routine and stick
to it if you possibly can – mine involves starting work about six in the
morning every day (yes, every one).
Any other closing thoughts you’d like to add?
Right now I’m wrangling with the title for my novel in
progress – Bad Thoughts or Think Yourself Lucky? I’ve had quite a
productive year, it seems – one novella out (The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, which seeks to return to my
Lovecraftian roots in a way that isn’t wholly unworthy of his inspiration and
to reclaim some of his original vision for his mythos from all the additions
and distortions that lesser writers such as me have introduced since) and one
to come, The Pretence. And if I can
continue this shameless self-promotion*, I just brought out a new collection – Holes for Faces – in which, though not
by design, all the tales are about youth or age and quite often both.
And finally, what scares you?
Gullibility. The vulnerability of
children. The increasing reluctance of people to intervene when they see or
suspect wrongdoing. The espousal of beliefs that deny the right
to question. The growth of fundamentalism, which means more and worse of the
previous trait. The willingness of the mass (which may well mean all of us) to
find scapegoats. The growth of the notion that literacy and other standards are
less important than they used to be. I hope I needn’t explain why any of that
is frightening when all of it is everywhere you look.
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-MA 10.14.2013
