On this month's Special Page:

An exclusive interview with Ramsey Campbell, who has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ramsey Campbell is a world-renown award-winning English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films. I'd like to thank Mr. Campbell for agreeing to this interview.

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH RAMSEY CAMPBELL

By The Horror Zine's Media Director, Trish Wilson

TRISH WILSON: When you were asked by Michael Washburn from Book and Film Globe if there were any aspects of your work that you think is not understood as well as it could be, you said "wouldn't mind if folk found more laughs in it". What is your take on humor in horror? What is its place in the genre?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: In my stuff the two are often inextricably entwined. In 1973 T. E. D. Klein celebrated the "images both comical and bleak" he found in tales of mine, and I’ll happily credit him with encouraging me to do more to develop this interdependence. It really came to fruition in the late eighties, when I found while writing a novella—Needing Ghosts—that the story was speeding into comedy of paranoia, and I was eager to follow wherever it might lead. The succeeding novel, The Count of Eleven, took me aback by turning into a comedy too, but then for a long time I’ve sought to surprise myself by the act of writing: it’s why I come every day to this desk. I increasingly find that horror and comedy—which have much in common: timing, pacing, an ability to confront difficult issues in (at least sometimes) a stylised fashion—often equally enable me to talk about my various themes. In fact I no longer really make a distinction between them, since one naturally arises out of the other. A while ago I wrote an essay on their relationship, The Grin Beneath the Flesh. One of my favourite films of recent years, Beau is Afraid, splendidly exemplifies nightmare comedy, a term the director used and I previously did.

TRISH WILSON: You've said that you have been deeply influenced by M. R. James, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and H. P. Lovecraft. In what ways?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: James for the succinctness with which he distils dread, conveying more terror in a sentence or even a phrase than most of us can achieve at much greater length. He shows just enough to suggest far worse. Greene was unmatched in my experience for deftly impressionistic detail and an eye for the telling image, not to mention dark humour, and I learned from his example how to pare down my prose. At his best, which was frequently, Lovecraft was unsurpassed for care with structure and eloquent modulation of language. He gave me a model to emulate, however clumsily, when I was fourteen, and I aspire to his sense of awe and cosmic terror still. Three years later I encountered Lolita, and the experience—the oblique approach to the theme, the relish of style and its astonishing linguistic range, the application of comedy to the most unlikely material—liberated my own writing, and I read everything else of his I could find.

TRISH WILSON: How do you reward yourself after a lengthy period writing or when you get an acceptance?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Many years ago, on completing the first or final draft of a novel I’d take a day off. These days half an hour later or less I’ll be pondering what to write next. Acceptances—carry on with whatever work I’m doing. It’s what I am.

TRISH WILSON: What is it about horror that appeals to you?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: The largeness of the field, and how it—whether it be uncanny or psychological or best of all when it reaches for awe, perhaps cosmic—engages my imagination.

TRISH WILSON: How did you come to be interested in H. P. Lovecraft? What does cosmic horror mean to you? 

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: I first encountered his work when I was eight—“The Colour out of Space”. I had no difficulty with the prose, because my precociousness rivalled Wilbur Whateley’s. I’d been reading fluently since I was two, so I got everything that was in the story and found it deeply disturbing, to the extent that I had a sense of reading something forbidden. I imagined my mother looking over my shoulder and saying “No, you mustn’t read that,” whereas I hadn’t got that impression from reading, say, M. R. James. I had a sense of going further with this than with anything I’d previously read.

After that first encounter with Lovecraft, I didn’t find much for years. There were August Derleth’s science fiction anthologies, but those had minor things like “From Beyond” and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, because he had to include stories with some sort of science-fictional bent, whereas the horror anthologies that he edited were not reprinted in Britain. As late as 1960 there had not been one single Lovecraft paperback printed in Britain. And I think there had only been one hardcover collection, The Haunter of the Dark, a compilation from Gollancz in the fifties. Came 1960, and I lit upon a copy of Cry Horror!, originally The Lurking Fear, edited by Don Wollheim for Avon in the late forties, now retitled with a hideously decayed Richard Powers monster on the cover. I skived off school the following day and read it from cover to cover. It includes some minor stuff like “The Moon Bog”, but it also has some of the major tales like “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Colour out of Space”, which I re-encountered at last, as well as “The Call of Cthulhu”. After a day’s worth of nothing but Lovecraft I thought that not merely was he the greatest supernatural horror writer I’d ever read, but the greatest writer I’d ever read. That’s excessive, but after all I was only fourteen years old. Very soon I knew this was what I wanted to imitate, and before long I tried.

As for cosmic horror, at its best it evokes concepts and visions too large to be contained by the narrative, which functions as a metaphor for them. Nobody does that better than Lovecraft in my experience.

TRISH WILSON: August Derleth – although you’ve never met him in person, you corresponded with him via mail. How did you meet him?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Inspired by Cry Horror, 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 asked and expected no 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 to excess 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, and was rewarded when Derleth bought a tale for a new Arkham anthology (Dark of Mind, Dark of Heart, a title that dropped its prepositions prior to publication). Two years later, though he was (understandably) not entirely satisfied with it, he published my first book. Our correspondence is collected as Letters to Arkham.

TRISH WILSON: What advice would you give fledgling writers who wish to write horror? What is it about horror that is so attractive to readers?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Begin by emulating your favourites if you like—there’s nothing wrong with imitating models while you develop your craft: many of the great composers did—but try to develop something more personal when you feel ready, perhaps by seeing what happens if you do without some aspect of your writing you depend on for the duration of a tale. Find what frightens or disturbs or horrifies you and draw upon those rather than labouring to be scary—in other words, don’t try to impose the experience on the reader; rather do your best to convey the imaginative experience you yourself have had. Read widely in the field, not least to give yourself a grounding in the classics, but read widely outside it as well. We all have an optimum period of creativity each day, and it’s worth beginning work then if you possibly can. Mine is from about six in the morning until noon or so. Don’t be too eager to feel you’ve exhausted your creative energy for the day, but if you sense you’re close to doing so, then don’t squeeze yourself dry: better to know what the next paragraph is going to be and start with that next time. Scribble down a rough version of it rather than risk forgetting it. Always have a rough idea of your first paragraph before you sit down to write, and then you won’t be trapped into fearing the blank page. If you must take a day or more out from a story, break off before the end of a scene or a chapter, to give yourself some impetus when you return. Always carry a notebook (which of course your phone may be) for ideas, glimpses, overheard dialogue, details of what you’re about to write, developments of work in progress. If an idea or something larger refuses to be developed, try altering the viewpoint or even the form: if it won’t grow as a short story, it may be a poem. Sometimes two apparently unproductive ideas may be cross-fertilised to give you a story. Then again, you may not be ready technically or emotionally to deal with an idea, and it can improve with waiting.

What else can I tell you? Only to write. Surprise us, astonish us. Enjoy your work. Above all, don’t despair. The frustration you will inevitably experience sometimes, the feeling that you don’t know how to write, may be the birth pangs of something genuinely new.

The appeal of horror—I can’t speak for anyone except myself, and I answered that earlier.

TRISH WILSON: What scares you?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Gullibility. The vulnerability of children. The increasing reluctance of people to intervene when they see or suspect wrongdoing. The espousal of beliefs that deny the right to question. The growth of fundamentalism, which means more and worse of the previous trait. The willingness of the mass (which may well mean all of us) to find scapegoats. The growth of the notion that literacy and other standards are less important than they used to be. The sense that the world is sliding into chaos, carried there by extremes of human behaviour.

TRISH WILSON: What is the best thing for you about being a writer?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: The excitement of creation.

TRISH WILSON: What is the worst thing for you about being a writer?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: The sense that I’ve far more ideas to develop than I’ll ever have time for. Still, better too many than too few.

TRISH WILSON: I've enjoyed your short stories, especially Conversion and Jack In The Box. They were written in the second person. Second person can be difficult to pull off well, but you did it. What made you wish to try that? How are short stories different for you from writing novels?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: The second person narration was meant as a tribute to the use of that method in some EC horror comics, from which those tales of mine derive.

I’d say short stories are more about what you omit, novels what you leave in, though increasingly I try to pare down my novels ruthlessly too.

TRISH WILSON: You're very active on Facebook, especially in horror groups. I've seen the way you've delightfully handled trolls who send you friend requests without bothering to learn who you are. In what ways have you used social media to connect with other writers and readers? What is social media's place in publishing?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Social media—for me, mainly interviews on blogs and such, and I’d give the same answer to the second question.

TRISH WILSON: You have new works out in 2023 and 2024, including your novels The Lonely Lands (2023) and The Incubations (2024) as well as your collection Fearful Implications (2023). How do you stay so prolific without burning out? What can you tell us about your works released in the last couple of years and what is coming up for you in the future that readers may look forward to?

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Let’s not forget Six Stooges and Counting (2023), my study of the comedy team in all its various mutations, a book years in the making and one I’m really quite fond of. As for the others—Fearful Implications collects short stories from the last few years. The Lonely Lands suggests that our thoughts of our lost loved ones may affect their afterlife, perhaps in nightmarish ways, and is also a novel about loss and grief. In The Incubations the protagonist visits a town with which his hometown is twinned, only to bring back a source of Alpine dread that invades the lives of those around him. I’ve recently completed a new novel, An Echo of Children, and pretty soon I’ll be into the next one, The Ancestral. It never ends until I do, I hope.

Here is where to find Ramsey Campbell on the web:

Web site: https://knibbworld.com/campbell/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ramsey.campbell.75

X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/ramseycampbell1

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ramseycampbell.bsky.social