I believe I can thank Jenny's and my children for generating the last two 1988 tales. It was our daughter Tammy who introduced me to the game of Blocko which prompted "The Old School," while both she and our son Matty were fond of Jan Pienkowski's pop-up haunted house book, which set me thinking along the lines which led me to write "Meeting the Author." I should think that you, the reader, have done enough of that for one book by now. British members of any professions or other groups who feel maligned by any of the tales herein should address their complaints to the Fictional Depictions Complaints Commission in the first instance, then to the Royal Commission on Representation in Storytelling. Complainants in other countries should approach the appropriate bodies. Me, I'll blame the copy-editors.
Ramsey Campbell
Merseyside, England
20 June 1990
Afterword To Scared Stiff: Tales Of Sex And Death
NOBODY REBELS LIKE a good Catholic boy, and I spent quite a stretch of my childhood in fighting the repressiveness of my upbringing. I needed to. At an early age I was infected by my mother's blushes at anything that might conceal a double meaning, and anything more explicit than that made me horribly uncomfortable: I squirmed when Bluebottle and Eccles in the _Goon Show__ looked up someone's trousers to see who he was, and felt physically ill when Victor Borge introduced the messy soprano who came in a single pile. I couldn't go through life like that, though I'm sure too many people do, and by the time I reached adolescence at a grammar school run by Christian Brothers I was beginning to grow mutinous. I'd no time for the spinsterish way one master wrinkled his nose at sex in pop songs and denied us a hearing of the Porter scene in a recording of _Macbeth__. No doubt I resented his disapproval partly because pop songs and dirty jokes, some of which would have taken a David Cronenberg to visualise, were all the sexual experience I had. Sex education was thoroughly absent, except for a talk on the ways of the world, delivered on one of my last days at school by a visiting monk who referred to girls' "head-lamps" and boys' "spouts". Still, perhaps the beatings that were frequent at the school were popular with some; in that year's issue of the magazine a school governor reminisces at unhealthy length about them. Myself, I agree with Gore Vidal (and quite a few of its practitioners) in approving of corporal punishment only between consenting adults, a theme I'll return to later.
But my strongest resentment against the church and my upbringing at that time was over the forbidding of books. I had the impression--how accurate I can't say--that as a Catholic I was prevented from reading all sorts of things on pain of some unspecified and therefore daunting penalty. Having persuaded my mother over the years to let me borrow adult ghost books from the library, and eventually, when I was ten, to allow me to buy science fiction magazines and even _Weird Tales__, I now felt ready to confront censoriousness--or at least, I thought I did. This was the year _Lady Chatterley's Lover__ was first published in Britain, and while I don't think any of my schoolmates were brave enough to bring a copy to school, quite a few claimed to have read it; undoubtedly some of them had. The best I could do, however, was to skulk near bookstalls where it was displayed and clutch the three and sixpence in my pocket in a vain attempt to goad myself into picking up the book. It wasn't until I left school that I determined to make up for lost time by reading whatever I liked.
So I bought Nabokov's _Lolita__, having seen it recommended by Graham Greene, and found it liberating in several ways, not least as a writer. In order to write anything lively enough for publication I'd needed to unlearn some of the restrictions I'd been taught at school--you couldn't contract "I had" to "I'd", for instance--but the effect of reading Nabokov was an instant lightening of my style and a greatly enhanced enjoyment of language (a pleasure which, I fear, at least one teacher of English literature had had no apparent time for). Meanwhile my first published stories, imitations of Lovecraft, had begun to appear. Pat Kearney, a friend who published the very first in his fanzine Goudy, told me about the Olympia Press, Lolita's original publisher. A house devoted to publishing books banned in Britain sounded fine to me, particularly since I was incensed to discover that so many books were banned, and so with the advance paid on publication of my first book, I took my mother and myself to Paris, whence I returned with William Burroughs' _The Soft Machine__ and _The Ticket That Exploded__ and a copy for Pat Kearney of a book of bawdy ballads pseudonymously edited by Christopher Logue. How I intended to bluff my way through Customs I have no idea, but a rough and protracted Channel crossing came to what I was able to regard retrospectively as my aid. Faced with the sight of me, wavering and pale-faced and be-spattered with remains of that morning's croissants, the Customs officer waved me through. In the introduction to his bibliography of the Olympia Press, Pat Kearney celebrates this incident with a description that makes me think of Anthony Cronin's last grisly sight of Brendan Behan.
Another source of banned books was August Derleth, my friend and mentor and (in the days when Arkham House was pretty well his one-man operation) first professional publisher, who sent me Henry Miller's _Tropics__ and Lawrence Durrell's _Black Book__. This led me to assume he wouldn't mind if I introduced a different kind of shock into my Lovecraft imitations, but he took the shit out of a line of dialogue. I still think it's what the character would have said, but I see that that may not be relevant to such a stylised form as Lovecraft pastiche. I therefore tried writing for the Olympia Press, who were then publishing a magazine. "A Third-Floor Withdrawal" was an attempt to deal with my adolescent sexual turmoil, and the editor of _Olympia__ gave me the impression that it might have been published except for its brevity (it was about a thousand words in length). I tried again with "The Folding Socket", a plotless fantasy influenced by William Burroughs, which I wrote at my Civil Service desk in the lunch hours. This, I imagine, was too gross for the magazine, which was aimed at the British and American bookstalls. Both stories are lost, and certainly the latter need not be mourned.
Years later--1969, I think--I had a different sort of experience involving Olympia Press. In the first newsletter of a short-lived Liverpool underground film society, I advertised for sale the Olympia edition of de Sade's _120 Days of Sodom__, whose three volumes I'd found somewhat tedious. Of course the nondescript fellow who called at the house to examine the books proved to be a plain-clothes policeman, who had no doubt been planted in the film society so as to keep an eye on things, though I didn't realize this until he returned with three of his colleagues and a warrant to search the house. They were unfailingly courteous, and seemed to be impressed by both my naïveté and my having been published. Weeks later I was invited to the police station to be given a cup of tea and the news that the Director of Public Prosecutions had decided not to prosecute, and almost everything they had seized was returned to me, including Kenneth Patchen's _Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer__ and Samuel Beckett's _Imagination Dead Imagine__, in which page 12 had been marked in pencil, apparently because it begins with "the arse" ("the arse against the wall at A, the knees against the wall at B and C, the feet against the wall between C and A, that is to say inscribed in the semicircle ACB..."). I don't think Beckett had previously been regarded as a pornographic writer. I had to sign away my rights only to the de Sade, a book which caused the policeman to wrinkle his nose in exactly the way pop songs had affected my old schoolmaster.*
*How times change! These days not only the novel but Pasolini's bleak and distressing film of it are openly on sale in Britain.