Alone with the Horrors Read online

  Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991

  Book Jacket

  SUMMARY:

  Ramsey Campbell is perhaps the world's most honored author of horror fiction. He has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. Three decades into his career, Campbell paused to review his body of short fiction and selected the stories that were, to his mind, the very best of his works. Alone With the Horrors collects nearly forty tales from the first thirty years of Campbell's writing, including several award-winners.Campbell crowns the book with a length preface-revised for this edition-which traces his early publication history, discusses his youthful correspondence with August Derleth, and illuminates the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on his work.Alone With the Horrors provides readers with a close look at a powerful writer's development of his craft.

  Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction

  of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991

  Ramsey Campbell

  --------------------------------------i

  Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------ii

  Ramsey Campbell ------------------------------------comiii

  by Ramsey Campbell from Tom Doherty Associates

  Alone with the Horrors

  Ancient Images

  Cold Print

  The Count of Eleven

  Dark Companions

  The Darkest Part of the Woods

  The Doll Who Ate His Mother

  The Face That Must Die

  Fine Frights (editor)

  The Hungry Moon

  Incarnate

  Influence

  The Last Voice They Hear

  The Long Lost Midnight Sun

  The Nameless

  Nazareth Hill

  Obsession

  The One Safe Place

  Pact of the Fathers

  The Parasite

  Silent Children

  Waking Nightmares --------------------------------------iv

  Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------v

  Ramsey Campbell --------------------------------------vi

  ALONE WITH THE HORRORS:

  The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-.1991

  Ramsey Campbell

  TOR^R

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK ------------------------------------comvii

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  ALONE WITH THE HORRORS: THE GREAT SHORT FICTION OF RAMSEY CAMPBELL, 1961-1991

  Copyright ^can 1993, 2004 by Ramsey Campbell Originally published by Arkham House in 1993 in a substantially different form.

  "Introduction: So Far," copyright ^can 2004 by Ramsey Campbell

  "The Tower from Yuggoth," copyright ^can 1961 by Ramsey Campbell, for Goudy 2 (1962)

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor^r is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Campbell, Ramsey, 1946-

  Alone with the horrors: the great fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-.1991 / Ramsey Campbell.

  people. cm.

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-765-30768-5 EAN 978-0-765-30768-2

  1. Horror tales, English. I. Title.

  PR6053.A4855A6 2004

  823'..914--dc22 2003071149

  First Hardcover Edition: May 2004 First Trade Paperback Edition: September 2005

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321 ------------------------------------viii

  For T. E. D. Klein, who helped launch me and wrote tales for me to aspire to --------------------------------------ix

  Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------x

  Contents

  11 Introduction: So Far

  23 The Tower from Yuggoth * 1961

  45 Cold Print * 1966

  59 The Scar * 1967

  73 The Interloper * 1965

  81 The Guy * 1968

  91 The End of a Summer `so Day * 1968

  97 The Man in the Underpass * 1973

  107 The Companion * 1973

  117 Call First * 1974

  123 Heading Home * 1974

  127 In the Bag '1974

  137 Baby * 1974

  153 The Chimney * 1975

  169 The Brood * 1976

  181 The Gap * 1977 --------------------------------------xi

  193 The Voice of the Beach * 1977

  219 Out of Copyright * 1977

  227 Above the World * 1977

  237 Mackintosh Willy * 1977

  251 The Show Goes On * 1978

  263 The Ferries * 1978

  275 Midnight Hobo * 1978

  287 The Depths * 1978

  305 Down There * 1978

  317 T/zeKf * 1979

  329 Hearing Is Believing * 1979

  337 The Hands * 1980

  347 Again * 1980

  357 Just Waiting * 1983

  367 Seeing the World * 1983

  373 Old Clothes * 1983

  383 Apples * 1984

  391 The Other Side * 1985

  403 Where the Heart Is * 1986

  411 Boiled Alive * 1986

  421 Another World * 1987

  433 End of the Line * 1991 ------------------------------------comxii ------------------------------------com11

  Introduction: So Far

  Some horror stories are not ghost stories, and some ghost stories are not horror stories, but these terms have often been used interchangeably since long before I was born. I'm in favour of this. Many horror stories communicate awe as well as (sometimes instead of) shock, and it is surely inadequate to lump these stories together with fiction that seeks only to disgust, in a category regarded as the deplorable relative of the ghost story. Quite a few of the stories collected herein are ghost stories, and I hope that at least some of the others offer a little of the quality that has always appealed to me in the best horror fiction, a sense of something larger than is shown.

  In 1991 I'd been in print for thirty years, and had these thirty-seven tales to show for them--at least, these are most of the ones my editor at Arkham House, the late Jim Turner, and I thought were representative. One of Jim's criteria was that the contents should be stuff only I could have written, a flattering notion that excluded such tales as "The Guide", which otherwise I would have put in. For the record, the book incorporates my British collection Dark Feasts, with the solitary exception of "The Whining", no significant loss.

  I've made one substitution. Previous editions of Alone with the Horrors have led off with "The Room in the Castle", my earliest tale to be professionally published. The idea was to show how I began. Here instead is something rarer to perform the same service. It too dates from when I was doing my best to imitate Lovecraft, but "The Tower from Yuggoth" (1961) demonstrates how I fared before August Derleth took me under his editorial wing. It was published in Goudy, a fanzine edited by my friend Pat Kearney, who later wrote a greenbacked history of Olympia Press. It was illustrated by Eddie Jones, another old friend but sadly a late one. At the time it felt very much like the start of my career as a writer; now it looks more like a phase I needed Derleth to rescue me from. At least it's eldritch--it keeps saying as much-- and it also offers cackling trees and curse-muttering streams. The reader
may end up knowing how they felt, and my notion of how Massachusetts rustics ------------------------------------com12

  spoke may also be productive of a shudder. Had I conjured him up from his essential salts for an opinion, Lovecraft would undoubtedly have pointed out these excesses and many other flaws. And watch out for those peculiar erections in the woods! I used the term in utter innocence, not then having experienced any of them while awake. No doubt a Christian Brotherly promise of hell if one encouraged such developments helped.

  Substantially rewritten as "The Mine on Yuggoth", the story appeared in The Inhabitant of the Lake, my first published book. In 1964 I was several kinds of lucky to find a publisher, and one kind depended on my having written a Lovecraftian book for Arkham House, the only publisher likely even to have considered it and one of the very few then to be publishing horror. In those days one had time to read everything that was appearing in the field, even the bad stuff, of which there seems to have been proportionately less than now, but I'll rant about this situation later. Suffice it for the moment to say that much of even the best new work--Matheson, Aickman, Leiber, Kirk, as vastly different examples--was being published with less of a fanfare than it deserved.

  I mentioned imitation. I've made this point elsewhere, and I do my best not to repeat myself, but this bears repeating: there is nothing wrong with learning your craft by imitation while you discover what you want to write about. In other fields imitation isn't, so far as I know, even an issue. It's common for painters to learn by creating studies of their predecessors' work. Beethoven's first symphony sounds like Haydn, Wagner's symphony sounds like Beethoven, Richard Strauss's first opera sounds remarkably Wagnerian, and there's an early symphonic poem by Bartok that sounds very much like Richard Strauss, but who could mistake the mature work of these composers for the music of anyone else? In my smaller way, once I'd filled a book with my attempts to be Lovecraft I was determined to sound like myself, and Alone with the Horrors may stand as a record of the first thirty years of that process.

  In 1964 I took some faltering steps away from Lovecraft and kept fleeing back to him. Among the products of this was "The Successor", one of several tales I found so unsatisfactory that I rewrote them from scratch some years later. In this case the result was "Cold Print" (1966/67), whose protagonist was to some extent based on a Civil Service colleague who did indeed ask to borrow my exciting (Olympia Press) books but found Genet dull as ditchwater, in the old phrase. I had also just read the first edition of Robin Wood's great book on Hitchcock's films, hence the way the tale accuses the reader of wanting the coda, as though I hadn't wanted it myself. ------------------------------------com13

  Another 1964 first draft was "The Reshaping of Rossiter," a clumsy piece rewritten in 1967 as "The Scar." Looking back, I'm struck by how even at that age I was able to create a believable nuclear family from observation, though certainly not of my own domestic background. Perhaps I can also claim to have been writing about child abuse long before it became a fashionable theme in horror fiction. Certainly the vulnerability of children is one of my recurring themes.

  I had my first go at "The Interloper" in 1963 and a fresh one in 1968. In the first version the boy tells his tale to a child psychiatrist who proves to be the creature of the title. My memory is that the psychiatrist was none too convincing a character, even though I was taken to see one at the age of seven or so, apparently because I rolled my eyes a lot and suffered from night terrors. By contrast, the final draft of the tale was a strange kind of revenge on the sort of schooling I'd had to suffer at the hands of Christian Brothers and their lay staff (not all of either, I should add--Ray Thomas, my last English teacher, had a genius for communicating his love of the language and literature); the incident involving the teacher and the poetry notebook actually happened, and the red-haired mathematics teacher was fully as much of a stool as I portray, though the book in question was the first draft of The Inhabitant of the Lake.

  All this rewriting, and other examples too, had made me surer of myself. "The Guy" (1968) saw just one draft. It was an attempt to use the traditional British ghost story to address social themes. Geoff Ryman has suggested that M. R. James's ghosts were attempts to ignore the real terrors of life; whatever the truth of that, I saw increasingly less reason why my stories should (though it can be argued that my Lovecraft imitations did). My tales were becoming more autobiographical, and "The End of a Summer's Day" (1968) has its roots in a very similar bus trip I took to such a cave with my exfiancee of the previous year. I've heard quite a few interpretations of the story. For the record, I've always taken the man in the cave to be a projection of Maria's fears about her husband, which of course doesn't mean the encounter can be explained away.

  The Chicago and San Francisco tales of Fritz Leiber were now my models in various ways. I wanted to achieve that sense of supernatural terror which derives from the everyday urban landscape rather than invading it, and I greatly admired--still do--how Fritz wrote thoroughly contemporary weird tales that were nevertheless rooted in the best traditions of the field and drew some of their strength from uniting British and American influences. One of mine in which I used an actual Liverpool location--"The Man in the ------------------------------------com14

  Underpass"--has a special significance for me: it was the first tale I wrote after having, encouraged by T. E. D. Klein's exegesis of Demons by Daylight and by my wife, Jenny, stepped into the abyss of full-time writing in July 1973. To begin with I wrote only on weekdays. Lord, did I need to learn.

  "The Companion" dates from later that year, and is set in New Brighton, just along the coast from me as I write, in all but name. The town did indeed contain two fairgrounds, one derelict, for a while, but I fiddled with the geography a little for the purposes of the narrative. Of all my old stories-- there are many--that I keep being tempted to tinker with, this may well be the most frustrating. The second half seems effective enough to make me wish I could purge the earlier section of clumsiness. Damon Knight looked at the story for Orbit and declared that he didn't know what was going on in it half the time. I admit it was one of those tales it seemed more important to write than to understand, but then ever since my first viewing of Last Year in Marienbad I've felt that an enigma can be more satisfying than any solution. Too many horror stories, films in particular, strike me as weighed down by explanation.

  Admittedly there's nothing enigmatic about "Call First" or "Heading Home," both from early 1974. They're perhaps the best of a handful of pieces written for a Marvel comic that originally proposed to print terse tales of traditional terrors with a twist as text `twixt the strips. By the time this proved not to be, I'd had fun writing stories in emulation of the EC horror comics of the fifties. I've long felt that a story that ends with a twist needs to be rewarding even if you foresee the end, and I hope that's true of this pair.

  "In the Bag" (1974) is a ghost story I submitted to the Times ghost story competition, though it wasn't written with that in mind. I rather hoped it might appear in the anthology derived from the competition, but the judges (Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith, and Christopher Lee) must have decided otherwise. However, it did gain me my first British Fantasy Award. As David Drake has pointed out, the punning title is inappropriately jokey--a lingering effect of writing the horror-comic tales, perhaps--but I try not to cheat my readers by changing titles once a story has been published.

  "Baby" (1974) is set around Granby Street in Liverpool, later one of the locations for The Doll Who Ate His Mother. It owes its presence in this book to my good friend J. K. Potter, who designed and illustrated the Arkham House edition. He expressed amazement that Jim Turner and I had omitted the tale, and provided an image to justify his enthusiasm.

  "The Chimney" (1975) is disguised autobiography--disguised from me at the time of writing, that is. Was it while reading it aloud at Jack Sullivan's ------------------------------------com15

  apartment in New York that I became aware of its subtext? It
was certainly under those circumstances that I discovered how funny a story it was, though the laughter died well before the end. Robert Aickman described it as the best tale of mine that he'd read, but his correspondence with Cherry Wilder betrays how little he meant by that. Still, it gained me my first World Fantasy Award, and Fritz Leiber told me this was announced to "great applause." Harlan Ellison (also present, I believe) had no time for it. "It was a terrible story," he wanted the readers of Comics Journal to know, "and should not have won the award."

  "The Brood" (1976) had its origins in the view of streetlamps on Princes Avenue from the window of Jenny's and my first flat, which we later lent to the protagonists of The Face That Must Die. When my biographer, David Mathew, recently attempted to photograph me in front of the building, a tenant demanded to know what we were up to. This was one of the rare instances where I found myself assuaging someone's paranoia.

  "The Gap" (1977) indulges my fondness for jigsaws. You'll find me playing cards and Monopoly too, not to mention Nim, at which only my daughter can beat me. Role-playing games (I leave aside the erotic variety) have never tempted me, however, though in my inadvertent way I generated a book of them (Ramsey Campbell `so Goatswood) published by Chaosium. As for the tale, it depressed Charles L. Grant too much for him to publish, although he did anthologise some of the others herein.

  "The Voice of the Beach" (1977) was my first concerted attempt to achieve a modicum of Lovecraft's cosmic terror by returning to the principles that led him to create his mythos. The setting is a hallucinated version of the coast of Freshfield, a nature reserve almost facing my workroom window across the Mersey. Recently I made a book-length attempt at the Lovecraftian in The Darkest Part of the Woods. I continue to believe that the finest modern Lovecraftian work of fiction--in its documentary approach, its use of hints and allusions to build up a sense of supernatural dread, and the psychological realism of its characters--is The Blair Witch Project.

  "Out of Copyright" (1977) had no specific anthologist in mind, but Ray Bradbury thought it did, and enthused about it on that basis. "Above the World" (1977) derived much of its imagery and setting from my one wholly positive, not to mention visionary, LSAID experience. The hotel is the very one where Jenny and I spent our belated honeymoon and some other holidays. In the early nineties, a short independent film, Return to Love, was based on the story, though without reading the final credits you mightn't realise; indeed, the title gives fair warning. ------------------------------------com16