INTERVIEWS
There's
an audio interview by Rick Kleffel at Spookycon at http://trashotron.com/agony
Part one -
Starting writing, Vladimir Nabokov (Real Audio 5.3Mb).
Part 2 -
Comedy, M. R. James, new novel (Real Audio 6.3Mb).
Intervier by By David
J. Howe
Ramsey Campbell
is one of the most prolific horror writers working today. His work is
distinctive and unsettling, often combining the familiar landscapes of his home
town of Liverpool with a half-glimpsed nightmare world where little girls' faces
run like warm putty, and a creeping, misshapen something is scratching
and mewling just out of the corner of your eye.
Born in 1946, Ramsey's first novel was not published until 1973, but the seeds
had been planted much earlier than that. 'I first got into horror fiction when I
was five years old,' he explained. 'I was walking past a newsagents in Southport
with my mother when I saw an issue of Weird Tales in the window. I wanted
it. I remember the cover vividly: there was a birdlike creature in the
foreground, and in the background, on an otherwise deserted black desert, there
were these two other beings with huge skulls for heads and not very much else to
carry them along, which nevertheless were advancing towards this unfortunate
bird-thing which looked extremely unhappy about the whole situation. My mother
refused to buy it for me and so I didn't get it, but the memory stayed with me.
'As soon as I could, I started reading horror fiction. I got books out of the
library, and when I was ten, I began to collect Weird Tales. It wasn't
until I was about sixteen that I obtained the issue I had seen all those years
ago. The cover actually showed a vulture sitting on a pile of bones with a
couple of skeletons in the background. Nothing more horrific than that, but my
five-year-old imagination had embraced the horror and had created something
beyond that which I had actually seen. 'I wrote my first book when I was eleven.
It was called Ghostly Tales and was dreadful! From there I coasted along
for a couple of years doing more terrible stuff and then when I was fourteen I
first encountered H P Lovecraft. Cry Horror was a collection of some of
Lovecraft's best - and worst - stories, and I read it in a day. I immersed
myself and decided that this was the greatest stuff I'd ever read and thereupon
wrote some Lovecraftian stories to the extent of imitating his style and setting
them in Massachusetts when I'd hardly set foot outside Liverpool. One of the
fantasy and horror fans that I'd been corresponding with, a guy called Pat
Kearney, suggested that I should send my stories off to August Derleth at Arkham
House, Lovecraft's publishers in America. So I did. Derleth wrote back saying
that lots of it was terrible, that I needed to relocate the stories in England
and that I needed to learn how to write like myself rather than to copy others.
At the end of the letter, however, he said that if I was prepared to revisit my
stories with all this in mind, they might be interested in publishing something.
So I duly read through all his recommendations and eventually took them to heart
and started rewriting, and when I was sixteen Derleth published one of them in
an anthology. I couldn't believe it! Here I was alongside people whom I'd
admired ever since I could remember. People like Robert Bloch, William Hope
Hodgson and even H P Lovecraft.'
Ramsey's first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake -
'Which now sells for too much money on the collectors' market!' - was published
around 1965 and was followed by another collection, Demons by Daylight,
in 1973. His first novel, The Doll Who Ate His Mother came along in 1976,
and since then he has written numerous novels and literally hundreds of short
stories.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Ramsey's writing is that it is practically
incomparable to anyone elses'. I wondered what his influences were.
'In one sense, if I am influenced by other people it doesn't bother me; I know
some writers tend to avoid reading other writers' work particularly when they're
working on a new book; I don't. There is a particular example that occurs to me.
There was a wonderful scene in Roman Polanski's Repulsion where Catherine
Deneuve's apartment is beginning to distort and she finds her hands sinking into
the walls. Now I had something very similar in The Influence where the
young girl is trying to get home towards the end. She's walking along this
street of cottages, falls against one of the walls and finds her fingers have
sunk in. Now while I was writing it I realised it was from the film, but I
carried it further and she recoils from the wall and then feels very guilty and
wonders if anyone saw her do this to somebody else's property. I thought that
that new element brought it alive and made it work, so I kept it in. There was
originally another scene in The Influence where faces begin to appear in
the clouds. Between my writing the first draft and rewriting it, I read Peter
Ackroyd's wonderful Hawksmoor and he had exactly the same image, just for
a sentence, so I thought well he's done it, let's take it out, which I did.'
Like many other mainstream horror and fantasy authors, Ramsey does not stick
rigidly to one particular style or theme. His last few novels have all been
different, with different emphasis on the characters, different settings and
different menaces. I wondered whether he was working to some 'game plan'.
'I wish I could tell you! Or maybe in a sense I'm glad I can't, because if I
knew the answer, it wouldn't be surprising to me and wouldn't be so much fun to
do. My feeling is that every novel is a stage in a process. There is a sense in
which Ancient Images was perhaps a stage in clarifying my style, because
I think my writing got a lot sparer after that, and Midnight Sun takes it
further again. The novella Needing Ghosts is different, but I thought it
was, in a grotesque way, very funny while I was writing it. That was perhaps the
moment when I broke through into this comic level, which The Count of Eleven seems to pursue.
'Having said all that, The Long Lost contains some funny scenes, as well
as some dark scenes and some which are difficult to define. There is a sense of
the lurking supernatural which perhaps resolves itself unexpectedly. I tend not
to know what the endings are going to be anyway. I often have an ending in mind,
but that's a safety net. Generally my original ending becomes an intermediate
chapter, or it gets dropped completely. As far as The Count of Eleven went, I didn't really know what the ending was going to be until something like
halfway through the final chapter! That's the way I like it. That's what makes
it exciting.'
Although Ramsey's writing has been highly acclaimed major mainstream success
seems to elude him. I wondered if this was something he was aiming towards.
'Maybe, but it's not intentional. The question you're too polite to ask is "do you write anything other than horror, or will you ever?" The
answer for me has always been "no". It seems to me that horror, as
I'm trying to write it, actually encompasses everything I want to write. But
on the
other hand, if a theme comes along and it takes the book in a direction that
turns out not to be horror, then that's fine.
'Horror fiction, particularly supernatural horror fiction, came out of the
mainstream anyway. In a whole manner of different senses, one of which is that
there's hardly a major writer of short fiction who hasn't written a horror story
or a ghost story at some stage, and often that may be what they are mostly
remembered for. So I don't think it's ever that far removed. What has happened
in the past twenty years or so is that books have been packaged by publishers
into genres and it is this which has caused the split. Obviously there is some
fiction which is pure horror, and there's nothing wrong with a story that sets
out to do nothing but frighten the reader any more than there's anything wrong
with a comedy which sets out to be nothing but be funny or a romance that sets
out to do nothing but make you take out your box of Kleenex. At the same time, I
think that horror fiction is often much more than that and that's certainly the
kind I've always tried to write.'
As well as writing novels and short stories, Ramsey is also an accomplished
editor. He has put together several collections of other writers' work over the
years, and co-edited (with Stephen Jones) Robinson's annual Best New Horror anthology for four years. Continuing this theme is another anthology, Uncanny
Banquet, which collects together stories which have not been widely
anthologised, including a whole novel by Adrian Ross, out of print since 1914.
'What happened with Uncanny Banquet was that the publisher's sales force
suggested I should do this anthology to my editor, Peter Lavery. They suggested
I should compile a collection of, broadly speaking, old-fashioned supernatural
fiction rather than horrific fiction, because they thought there was going to be
a market for such a book. This appealed to me for a variety of reasons but it
also enabled me to achieve a minor ambition, which was to bring back into print
a complete novel, The Hole of the Pit, published for the first and only
time in 1914. It takes up half the book, and my ambition, whenever I'm doing a
reprint anthology is that at least fifty per cent ought to be unfamiliar to
anybody who buys it. So Uncanny Banquet contains that novel as well as a
very rare Walter de la Mare story, A Mote, and a whole lot of other good
stuff. I hope you like it, because if it does well, there's the possibility of
another collection along similar lines.'
Interview conducted
and written by David J Howe.
Copyright David J Howe