Two novels occupied my time for the next three years, to the exclusion of any other fiction. While picnicking with the family in Delamere Forest to celebrate having finished Incarnate I thought of the basis for "Just Waiting" (1983), and the genesis of a new short story felt like a celebration too. My touch here and in "Seeing the World" (1983) is lighter than it used to be, or so I like to think. That doesn't mean what's lit up isn't still dark.
"Old Clothes" (1983) was an attempt to develop the notion of apports. I'm as loath as Lovecraft ever was to use stale occult ideas, but I think this one let me have some fun. In 1984 Alan Ryan asked me for a new Halloween story, and "Apples" was the result. It became the occasion of one of my more memorable encounters with a copy-editor, though only after the American edition had respected my text. The British paperback version of the tale proved to have suffered something like a hundred changes. The excellent Nick Webb, the managing director of Sphere, had the edition withdrawn and pulped. Had I not written "Out of Copyright" by then, I might well have turned it into a tale about a copy editor. Of course not all such folk are interfering bloody fools, but perhaps an example of what befell "Apples" is in order. Where I'd written:
His dad and mum were like that, they were teachers and tried to make him friends at our school they taught at, boys who didn't like getting dirty and always had combs and handkerchiefs ...
The copy editor thought I should have written
His mum and dad were like that. They were teachers and tried to make friends for him at our school, where they taught boys who didn't like getting dirty and always had combs and handkerchiefs ...
I rest my case, and my head.
"The Other Side" (1985) was an attempt to equal the surrealism of J. K. Potter's picture on which it was based. The last thing I wanted to do was end the story with his image, since the combination would have had much the same effect as the infamous Weird Tales illustration that gave away one of Lovecraft's best endings. The image can be found on page 97 of J. Kdd`so superb Paper Tiger collection Horripilations, which also contains (among much else) his illustrations for the aborted limited edition of The Influence.
Kathryn Cramer asked me to write a story in which the building in which it took place would (I may be paraphrasing) itself figure as a character. She certainly didn't mean her letter to potential contributors to be disconcerting, but she pointed to several stories of mine as epitomising her theme, which made me feel expected to imitate myself and daunted by the task. I struggled to come up with an idea until circumstances gave me one, as happens often enough to let me believe in synchronicity. The Campbell family had just moved into the house in which I now write, but we hadn't yet sold the previous one, to which I daily walked. I forget how long it took me to notice that here was the germ of "Where the Heart Is" (1986).
"Boiled Alive" (1986)--a title I hoped folk would recognise was meant to be intemperate--was also conceived in response to an invitation, this time from David Pringle of Interzone. When I try to write science fiction my style generally stiffens up, and so I attempted to be ungenerically offbeat instead. That isn't to say I don't think it's a horror story: I think all the stories in this collection are. I'd certainly call "Another World" (1987) one, and it too was invited, by Paul Gamble ("Gamma") when he worked for Forbidden Planet in London. His idea was an anthology of tales on the theme of a forbidden planet, though when Roz Kaveney took over the editorship she chose stories simply on the basis that the author had signed at the bookshop. I had, but I cleaved to the theme as well.
As for "End of the Line" (1991), what can I say? It is, but may also have begun a lighter style of comedy in my stuff. Whatever the tone, though, it's still pretty dark in here. I hope the jokes are inextricable from the terror. However, it was less with laughter than with a sneer that a hypnotist who claimed to reawaken people's memories of their past lives once advised me to study his career for when I "started writing seriously," rather as if those responsible for The Amityville Horror had accused, say, Shirley Jackson of having her tongue in her cheek when she wrote The Haunting of Hill House. I see no reason why dealing with the fantastic requires one to write bullshit, and I submit this collection as evidence.
In the thirty years covered by this book I saw horror fiction become enormously more popular and luxuriant. I use the last word, as tends to be my way with words, for its ambiguity. There's certainly something to be said in favour of the growth of a field which has produced so many good new writers and so much good writing. One of its appeals to me, ever since I became aware of the tales of M. R. James, is the way the best work achieves its effects through the use of style, the selection of language. On the other hand, the field has sprouted writers whose fiction I can best describe as Janet and John primers of mutilation, where the length of the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters betrays the maximum attention span of either the audience or the writer or more probably both. There are also quite a bunch of writers with more pretensions whose basic drive appears to be to outdo one another in disgustingness. "It is very easy to be nauseating," M. R. James wrote more than sixty years ago, and the evidence is all around us. However, I hope that in time the genre will return to the mainstream, where it came from and where it belongs.
What to do? Nothing, really, except keep writing and wait for the verdict of history. The field is big enough for everyone, after all. I came into it because I wanted to repay some of the pleasure it had given me--particularly the work of those writers who, as David Aylward put it, "used to strive for awe"--and I stay in it because it allows me to talk about whatever themes I want to address and because I have by no means found its limits. Perhaps in the next thirty years, but I rather hope not. I like to think my best story is the one I haven't written yet, and that's why I continue to write.
Ramsey Campbell
Wallasey, Merseyside
1 December 2002
Foreword To Cold Print - Chasing the Unknown (1984)
The first book of Lovecraft's I read made me into a writer. I found it in the window of a Liverpool sweetshop called Bascombe's. I was fourteen years old then, and went there every Saturday to search through the secondhand paperbacks at the rear of the shop once I'd made sure there was nothing in the window. Sometimes, among the covers faded like unpreserved Technicolor in the window, there would be a bright new book on which to spend my pocket money: an issue of Supernatural Stories written by R. L. Fanthorpe under innumerable pseudonyms (Pel Torro, Othello Baron, Peter O'Flinn, Oben Lerteth, Rene Rolant, Deutero Spartacus, Elton T. Neef were just some of them), a Gerald G. Swan Weird and Occult Miscellany whose back cover advertised studies of torture and flagellation and execution 'for the nature student.' But that Saturday, among the yellowing molls and dusty cowboys, I saw a skeletal fungoid creature, the title Cry Horror, the author's name I'd been yearning for years to see on a book. For a panicky moment I thought I hadn't half a crown to buy the book, dreaded that it would be gone when I came back with the money. I read it in a single malingering day off school; for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but the greatest writer I had ever read.
Some (Stephen King and Charles L. Grant among them) would take that to prove that Lovecraft is an adolescent phase one goes through - certainly a writer best read when one is that age. I can only say that I find his best work more rewarding now than I did then. Grant claims that 'when you grow up you discover that what attracted you when you were fourteen was his rococo style and very little else,' but I don't think it was so in my case; certainly I don't agree that 'the style makes the stories.' Indeed, I think that's precisely the trap into which too many imitators of Lo veer aft fall.