The Getting It Wrong Drive-by: Ramsey Campbell

Photo by Peter Coleborn

I do not blithely throw the word ‘legendary’ around, so you know Ramsey Campbell deserves it.

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, his first collection was published in 1964 by the Arkham House imprint. His novels have included the wonderfully named The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Hungry Moon, and The Darkest Part of the Woods. His short fiction has been collected in Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Just Behind You, and Told by the Dead. He has edited myriad anthologies, including Uncanny Banquet, NewTales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror with Dennis Etchison and my old (tor)mentor Jack Dann.

He is not only a writer but a film reviewer and a multi-award winner: multiple World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards, the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers’ Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. You name it, he’s got it!  😀

His story in A Book of Horrors is “Getting It Wrong”. He is also an exceptionally strong man, refusing both donuts and danishes – as well as doughnuts.

1. I write horror because …
I began writing horror fiction in an attempt to pay back some of the pleasure the field had given me. I continue because I still don’t feel I’ve found the boundaries of the genre, by which I certainly don’t feel restricted (although the way it has become a marketing ghetto is another matter). I’ve always regarded it as a branch of literature. Two of the anthologies I bought when I was young helped shape my view of it. Best Horror Stories, edited by John Keir Cross, included Graham Greene and Faulkner next to Bradbury and M. R. James, and quite a stretch of it was occupied by Herman Melville’s novella “Bartleby”, a psychological study which, even at eleven years old, I thought entirely at home in the book. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Wise and Fraser, had Balzac as well as Lovecraft, Hemingway alongside Blackwood, Karen Blixen beside Machen. I don’t mean to imply that the specialists are less literate than the mainstream writers, though too often they’re perceived that way.

Perhaps because it was frequently my childhood companion, I value the emotion of terror as highly as any other, especially when (as in the best work in the field) it touches awe. It’s no less valid as an aim in prose fiction than in film, in music, in painting and the other arts. One can enjoy the form that produces the emotion just as well in prose as in, say, music without undermining the power of the work – indeed, such formal appreciation can enhance it. I became aware early on that good horror fiction achieves its effects through the selection of language and the timing of prose. I’m also convinced that the genre is an eloquent medium for discussing the world we make and how we live in it, not to say die. I’ve no plans to leave the field: it’s where I live.

2. You get to be anyone you want for a day – no consequences and you can travel anywhere and anywhen. Where do you go, what do you do and who is your companion?
I’ll remain myself and go to the Fox Theatre in Pomona, California on 17 March 1942. I’ll take my wife Jenny, who would want to be there almost as much as I would.

3. The horror genre could be reinvigorated by …
Rediscovering the ambition to communicate awe that we find in Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft, Klein and others (not that it has entirely deserted the field).

4. Is there a story you’ve read that turned you green with writerly envy?
Yes, and many of them. The most recent is Steve Mosby’s remarkable suspense novel The Black Flower – crime writing with a decided feeling for horrific understatement and an intricately developed theme (more accurately, several of them). In some ways it’s as metafictional as José Carlos Somosa’s equally extraordinary The Athenian Murders, another book that highly impressed me.

5. Donuts or danishes?
Neither – I’ll leave both to my good friend Dennis Etchison. Me, I’ll be tucking into Jenny’s Indian cuisine or another of her many culinary delights.

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