Ramsey Campbell Interview
I’ll begin with a quote from the great comic book writer Alan Moore who said Ramsey Campbell is “Britain’s greatest living horror writer.” Writing in the Daily Telegraph, one journalist said of him: “Easily the finest practising British horror novelist and the one whose work can most wholeheartedly be recommended to those who dislike the genre...His misclassification as a genre writer obscures his status as the finest magic realist Britain possesses this side of J. G. Ballard.”
I don’t think there is anything else I can add except that it is an honour to include this interview with Ramsey on my website. His latest novel is Thieving Fear, published by PS Publishing. More information is obtainable at www.ramseycampbell.com.
Was there a point in your life when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
I never “wanted to be” a writer – I actually believe that one is either a writer (however bad) or not. At eleven years old 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. My writing had yet to catch up with my appreciation of the genre. Let me quote a single representative sentence from Ghostly Tales: “The door banged open, and the afore-mentioned skeleton rushed in.” It must have been out of a mixture of desperation and maternal pride that my mother encouraged me to submit the completed book – the only copy, handwritten and illustrated in crayon – to publishers. Sometimes it ended up with a children’s book editor, one of whom told me it made her feel quite spooky sitting at her desk. (Childish the book may have been, but it wouldn’t be for children even now.) By far the most positive response came from Tom Boardman Jr in August 1958. While Boardman was one of the few British houses to publish science fiction in hardcover, they didn’t take ghost stories, but he concluded: “We should like to take this opportunity of encouraging you to continue with your writing because you have definite talent and very good imaginative qualities. It means a lot of hard work to become an author but with the promising start you have made there is every possibility that you will make the grade.”
Can you tell about your first book ‘The Doll Who Ate His Mother’? Was it difficult finding a publisher?
It wasn’t by any means my first book. It was preceded by collections such as The Inhabitant Of The Lake and my first good one, Demons By Daylight. That one persuaded me I should write fulltime, but believe me, if my wife hadn’t been teaching I wouldn’t have survived in my career. My old friend and correspondent Kirby McCauley was now my agent and kept gently insisting that I should attempt a novel. In January 1975 I did, and completed it by the summer, even though I still hadn’t discovered my ideal method; I would reread each chapter the day after it was finished and call this work. To my delight the first editor who saw the novel – Barbara Orville, once Bob Bloch’s editor – bought it, and so did Piers Dudgeon of Star Books in England, soon followed by Thom Tessier – yes indeed, the writer, then an editor at Millington.
When did you become a full-time writer?
Shortly after my wife and I bought our first house Demons By Daylight was published, and a friend of Kirby’s sent me his exegesis. He was T. E. D. Klein, one of the modern masters of the supernatural tale. His analysis included so much I’d hoped the stories would convey that it persuaded me I had the makings of a fulltime writer. Jenny felt that if I was going to take the risk this would be the time, before we had children, and so in mid-1973 I made the break.
One of your influences is evidently H.P. Lovecraft. What is it about his work that has such a profound impact on you and many of your contemporaries?
If I take Lovecraft to be the most important single writer of the weird, it’s because he unites the traditions that preceded him on both sides of the Atlantic and builds on their strengths. His Supernatural Horror In Literature is not only an appreciation of all that he found best in the genre and a critique of the flaws he saw, but also a statement of his own artistic ambitions. His fiction gives them life. To an extent his reputation is the victim of his most famous creation, the Lovecraft Mythos. It was conceived as an antidote to conventional Victorian occultism – as an attempt to reclaim the imaginative appeal of the unknown – and is only one of many ways his tales suggest worse, or greater, than they show. It is also just one of his means of reaching for a sense of wonder, the aim that produces the visionary horror of his finest work (by no means all of it belonging to the Mythos). His stories represent a search for the perfect form for the weird tale, a process in which he tried out all the forms and all the styles of prose he could. I should admit that my mid-teenage tales were far too slavishly imitative, and worse, they copied the bits that looked easiest to replicate – the Mythos monsters, the explosions of adjectives. Later on – in particular in The Darkest Part Of The Woods – I had a go at Lovecraft’s real aims. I think that’s my best Lovecraftian tale precisely because (as in The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, which was to some extent the template) the Mythos references are minimal.
The Grin Of The Dark has some interesting comments about online critics. What is your opinion of ezines and online magazines?
They seem very much like any other form of published journal, ranging from the professional to the amateur in its best sense to, alas, its worst.
Does it frustrate you that because of sites like Amazon (where anybody can post a review) it seems that most people can call themselves writers these days?
I’m assuming you mean call themselves reviewers, yes? I’d cite Harlan Ellison’s dictum that everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. Too many of the kinds of comments you refer to aren’t informed or even literate – small wonder they don’t like literate work. For that matter, you can post a review without having ever opened the book in question. I once had an Amazon review of the almost wholly heterosexual Scared Stiff that condemned it for being almost entirely concerned with same-sex relationships (no reason why it shouldn’t be, but it isn’t). What on earth the writer had in mind I never learned – the review seems to have vanished.
How much of an impact does your native Merseyside have on your work? Are you inspired by your surroundings the way Stephen King is with Maine and Alan Moore with Northampton?
Doesn’t it show?
Do you still keep in touch with Clive Barker? Do you think living in LA has had a positive impact on his writings?
Alas, would that we met more often! The same goes for Pete Atkins and Dennis Etchison and many another friend in LA, not to mention the States. Clive certainly seems to be flourishing in the California sun.
Can you tell me about your role as a critic? What do you write for?
For thirty-eight years I reviewed films – I wouldn’t call it criticism – for BBC Radio Merseyside. They celebrated Liverpool’s year as the European City of Culture by doing away with film reviews and the arts programme. I still write a regular column for Video Watchdog, largely on films that mightn’t otherwise be covered in the magazine. My column of opinion Ramsey Campbell, Probably has migrated to various journals, most recently the journal of the Ghost Story Society. I write another one for the journal of the British Fantasy Society, of which I’m president.
Being a critic and an author, do you find it difficult receiving criticisms of your own work?
Initially, yes, too often, and then I think about them and not infrequently conclude they’re right or partly so. The greatest recent one was Melissa Singer’s detailed criticism of my submitted draft of Pact Of The Fathers. Her email was several thousand words long and almost entirely right. I rewrote the book and dropped quite a few chapters to its considerable benefit.
What is your daily routine?
When I’m at home, which is mostly, I write at my desk in my workroom overlooking the Mersey. I don’t set myself a minimum wordage, but I do write seven days a week, birthdays and Christmas included, until any new piece of fiction is finished. I start before seven in the morning – if for some reason I have to be up before six, that’s the only occasion on which I won’t formally write, but even then I’ll still be drafting material in a notebook. A narrative in progress goes away on holiday or on business with me, and I keep to the same schedule wherever I am. These days I don’t outline so much as gather a great deal of material (especially for a novel) and then try to gain a general outline of the shape it will take before commencing the first draft. That draft is a way of laying out the material so that I can see what I have to work with, and then comes the joy of rewriting it copiously. I try to surprise myself every day with something I didn’t know I was going to write until it suggested itself.
Are there any recent horror films you’d recommend?
Just (well, not entirely) to be perverse, let me say that I thought Dario Argento’s Mother Of Tears much less anonymous than all the bad reviews had led me to believe. The ending is somewhat perfunctory, but so were those of the other two films in the trilogy. And by gum, it certainly revives the excessive Italian horror film as it used to be. Jaume Balagueró’s Rec is very vivid, and the last scene lifts it onto a higher level of real intense supernatural dread. Marc Forster’s Stay isn’t quite a horror film, perhaps, but it’s eerily disturbing. Roy Andersson’s Du Levande (You The Living) inhabits that productive territory between comedy and terror. And Inland Empire proves once again to me that David Lynch makes the most terrifying fiction films of anyone now directing.
What books have you read recently that you’d recommend?
The reading is recent but the books may not be. I was delighted to have two Graham Greene masterpieces still to read on a beach in Crete this year – The Power And The Glory, with its blackly comic scene in which the priest tries to buy communion wine (a scene John Updike cites as horrific in his introduction), and The Honorary Consul, where Greene’s methods and themes are refined even further. I read Thomas Tryon’s The Other for the very first time, having neglected to on the basis of having seen the film, and was delighted – see my introduction to the new Millipede Press edition. And Mark Samuel’s collection Glyphotech (from PS) is splendid – I introduced that too. Don’t worry, I get no royalties for either, so my pitch is purely for the books.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Read as widely as you can. Read the classics of your field and of others too. Observe wherever you go and the people you meet – how they really speak, how they behave. Base your characters on your observations, not on how people have behaved in fiction (especially the conventional kind). Tell as much of the truth as you possibly can. Enjoy language.
What are your next projects?
Next novel into print is Creatures Of The Pool, set entirely in Liverpool, and a new collection, Just Behind You. I’m working on a tale called Chucky Comes To Liverpool, and once that’s done I’ll be taking a year or so to the next novel, The Seven Days Of Cain. Believe me, I’m nowhere close to finished.
Interview by Neil Daniels 2008
