amsey Campbell should never put all of his literary awards on one shelf—the weight of the trophies would probably send it crashing to the floor. Over the years, he has won the British Fantasy Award numerous times, in addition to the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He has won all those honors by doing what he does best: writing terrifying stories and novels.
He was born John Ramsey Campbell on Jan. 4, 1946, in Liverpool, England, where he still lives with his wife, Jenny. He sold his first story, "The Church in High Street," in 1962 to August Derleth of Arkham House for an anthology entitled Dark Mind, Dark Heart. In 1964, Derleth published Ramsey's first story collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants—an impressive feat for a writer who was still in his teens!
Campbell became a full-time writer in 1973, and has developed a body of work that includes many different types of fear fiction—Lovecraftian lore, psychological menace, erotic horror, ghost stories and more. He has written stories set in the universe of the Cthulhu Mythos and in his own community of Liverpool. He is as versatile as he is prolific, and he is still going strong.
Your first story collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was released by Arkham House while you were still a teenager. Tell us about your early association with August Derleth.
Campbell: I'd written a handful of stories imitating Lovecraft as closely as I could. My friend Pat Kearney, the British fanzine editor and later historian of the Olympia Press, and the American fan Betty Kujawa suggested I should send them to Derleth for his opinion. I don't think I expected more than that—certainly not that he would offer to publish them if I applied the detailed editorial suggestions he provided. I was even luckier to get such editing at the start of my career than I was to be published. I'd imitated Lovecraft's occasional stylistic excesses without taking anything like his care with structure; I'd even set the tales in Massachusetts when I'd never been out of England. I rid myself of all that to my and the world's considerable benefit.
Your early work focused on Lovecraftian themes. Do you still enjoy and find inspiration in Lovecraft's works?
Campbell: Very much so. He remains one of the crucial writers in the field. He united the American tradition of weird fiction—Poe, Bierce, Chambers—with the British—Machen, Blackwood, M.R. James. He devoted his career to attempting to find the perfect form for the weird tale, and the sheer range of his work—from the documentary to the delirious—is often overlooked. Few writers in the field are more worth rereading; certainly I find different qualities on different occasions. I recently read "The Outsider" to my wife to both our pleasures. I still try to capture the Lovecraftian sense of cosmic awe in some of my tales, and The Darkest Part of the Woods has a little of it, I think.
Your second and third Arkham House collections, Demons by Daylight and The Height of the Scream, employed psychological themes, with considerable attention to characterization. Were you consciously trying to move away from Lovecraftian themes?
Campbell: As fast as I could. I had to deny him in order to discover my own themes and eventually to rediscover him. August Derleth had advised me to study M.R. James to tone down my excesses, but the great example from within the field was Fritz Leiber. I read Night's Black Agents when I was 16 and saw the contemporary direction I wanted to take. What Fritz did with Chicago, and later with San Francisco, I tried to achieve with Liverpool—the same sense that the everyday can be the source of terror rather than being invaded by it. Still, I'm glad I learned my craft by imitating others while I was homing in on what I had to say for myself.
Your novels The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Face That Must Die address the theme of a dormant evil that lurks just beneath the veneer of everyday life. Is that how you see the world—like an apple with a worm lurking inside?
Campbell: I certainly think the everyday can cloak a great deal that people would rather not acknowledge. I suppose I first dealt with the theme back in 1967, in my tale "The Scar," in the person of the neighbor who won't believe a father could maltreat his children and who drags them back for more. There's some of it in the novel I'm presently writing, Secret Stories.
Your story collection Scared Stiff practically invented the erotic horror genre. What thought processes went into the creation of a book of sexual horror stories?
Campbell: Thought process may be dignifying it a little. My old friend Michel Parry was editing the Mayflower Books of Black Magic Stories and commented to me in a letter that nobody was submitting tales of sex magic. I thought I would, and wrote "Dolls," which so disconcerted his publishers that they showed it to their lawyers for an opinion about possible obscenity. The lawyers cleared it, and I wrote several other such tales for Michel. It was dishonest of me to include so little of my favorite perversion, though. To some extent I rectified this in time for the expanded Tor edition of Scared Stiff. I still have a novel in mind, to be called Spanked by Nuns—a pity George Churchward isn't around to illustrate it.
Your book Midnight Sun features a very unique monster—an ice demon. In fact, monsters play a major role in many of your stories and novels. Would it be fair to say you have a fascination with monsters? And if so, why?
Campbell: I imagine I've always been fond of them. M.R. James' specters appealed to me in their inhumanity, and I fell in love with the paintings of Bosch at an early age—hardly surprising that I relished Lovecraft so much. In my own stuff they tend to be distorted versions or reflections of the characters who suppose themselves normal. In the Dreadstone/Leyton books I wrote—The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula's Daughter and The Wolfman were all of them—I was intrigued to tell much of each story from the viewpoint of the monster.
You've written numerous ghost stories, ranging from the traditional to the erotic. What is it about ghosts that attracts your attention? Do you believe ghosts really exist?
Campbell: Like the monsters, my ghosts tend to be inextricably entwined with the psychology of the characters. If you'd asked me the second question last year I would have given you a pretty negative answer. This year, however, I've had several experiences in our guest room, which my wife and others already thought was haunted. A coin fell from nowhere before my eyes onto the middle of the floor, something I would have taken for a kitten if we had pets sat next to me on the bed twice, and an object the size of a hand but lighter touched me on the shoulder. In the most alarming incident, I awoke to find my wife—whom I was giving time off from my snoring—had joined me in bed, and then I realized that the silhouette next to me under the cover was not my wife. If that was a nightmare, it was certainly by far the worst and most prolonged I've ever had.
What differences do you see between British and American horror stories?
Campbell: I don't see any significant differences these days. Any characteristics one might think national are usually true on the opposite side of the ocean as well. Perhaps the traditions have always developed in parallel. After all, Poe was refining the Gothic and concentrating on the psychological aspects around the same time Le Fanu was. Equally, there were ghastly hacks writing British library fiction while American pulp writers did their worst.
You've worked on completing Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories. What was it like, channelling Robert E. Howard? What did it take to get into that mindset?
Campbell: Not much at all. Kirby McCauley, my agent, and Glenn Lord, for the Howard estate, suggested the task when I was in New York for the 1976 World Fantasy Convention. I read one fragment—"The Castle of the Devil"—while waiting to meet Jack Sullivan at the Staten Island Ferry, and by the time he arrived I'd come up with the rest of the plot. I didn't try to imitate Howard's style, but did my best to keep mine out of the way. I'm not sure that I entirely caught Kane's character, though.
You've written under pseudonyms in the past—E.K. Leyton, Montgomery Comfort and Jay Ramsey. You've written novelizations of The Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolfman under pseudonyms. Why did you do that? Why not just use your real name?
Campbell: The Universal monster movie novels were commissioned by Piers Dudgeon of Star Books in London. The original idea was that I should write all six, but two werewolf novels would have been one too many, and since I can't swim, I wouldn't have been much use to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. At the time I didn't know to suggest David Schow. We therefore needed a house name, and I originally suggested Carl Thunstone, but Manly Wade Wellman felt people might think it was hiding him. Dreadstone was the compromise. For the record—and no matter how many times I say this, I seem to need to repeat myself—I did not write The Mummy, The Werewolf of London or The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even Piers can't recall who did. As for Jay Ramsay, it was to disguise my authorship of a single book for a different publisher, though it wasn't meant to fool anyone who might be interested. Eventually the novel involved—The Claw or Night of the Claw, depending on which side of the Atlantic—was reissued under my name.
You've edited the work of others for anthologies and Year's Best collections. How does the fun of editing differ from writing for you? Is it easier or harder than your regular writing?
Campbell: A good deal easier—the material is already there and I don't have to produce it. Well, I did write the final paragraph of a Frank Belknap Long tale, with his agreement. It's fun, as you say, to find the most meaningful arrangement for a collection of stories. The greatest satisfaction may be in discovering or helping new writers. I believe I was the chap who first saw Steve Rasnic Tem and Marc Laidlaw among others into professional print. Most recently I was delighted to bring Gary Fry to the world in Gathering the Bones, along with Adam Nevill in his first non-pseudonymous work. I've just written the introduction to a very good supernatural novel of his, Banquet for the Damned, due from Pete Crowther's splendid PS Publishing.
You've worked with Stephen Jones on some anthologies—did you always agree on selections for the books? If not, how did you settle disagreements?
Campbell: We agreed nearly all of the time. If we didn't agree on a story, it didn't go in.
What books are you reading now?
Campbell: Presently Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby and liking it. Recent pleasures have included Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography Slipstream—very frank on a variety of matters, though not quite as much about Robert Aickman as I hoped, and often moving—and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, thanks to the enthusiasm of my friend Poppy Z. Brite. I loved it, and also her novel The Value of X, which may be set in a similar New Orleans but doesn't derive from Toole at all.
What's in your pockets right now? Any items you carry for good luck?
Campbell: As I sit at my desk, very little. My wife and daughter and son are my luck, and I can't carry them about with me. Whenever I'm out I will be carrying at least two notebooks, one for the novel in progress or about to be, the other for random notions as well as any imminent or current short story. That's one of the few essentials I've learned in more than 40 years in this business—another is always to know what the first line to be written is going to be before I sit down to write it.
If H.P. Lovecraft were alive today, what would he be doing for a living? Do you think he'd enjoy the Internet? Do you enjoy the Internet?
Campbell: I should think he would be doing what any real writer does—writing. I know Dashiell Hammett was a sad exception. I've no idea what Lovecraft would have made of the Internet—he might have been fascinated or seduced by it. I'm both. Borges' notion of the Library of Babel has become reality, pretty well. Of course, one needs to be critically wary of it too, but I find it a great boon for research.
Your work has been featured on British radio. Have any of your works ever made it onto TV or movie screens? Are any slated for production?
Campbell: My tale "The Seductress" was an episode of Ridley and Tony Scott's television series The Hunger, and quite faithful, I thought. Two novels have been filmed in Spain. The Nameless was adapted by Jaume Balaguero as Los Sin Nombre, and very unnerving it is. El Segundo Nombre (Second Name) sounds like a sequel but is in fact a version of Pact of the Fathers by Paco Plaza. This, too, is actually bleaker than the original novel, which suggests that the filmmakers' creative hearts are decidedly in the right place. Both films are available on Region 2 DVDs. The Influence is in development at Universal. Joe Dante's office once contacted my agent about Ancient Images, but nothing came of that—a pity. Many years ago Fred Olen Ray expressed interest in "The Moon-Lens."
What can we expect from Ramsey Campbell in 2004?
Campbell: The Overnight, a new supernatural novel from PS Publishing. A new edition of Alone with the Horrors from Tor with a considerably expanded introduction. Delirium Books will bring out a very limited edition of The Parasite in February with an extra 7,000 words, two chapters that were deleted from the novel. Secret Stories will be done soon, too.
Any last words?
Campbell: At the end of the last century I may have given some people the idea that I'd abandoned my field. I don't think I ever have, and I've certainly no plans to do so.
Back to the top.
