Campbell, (John) Ramsey 1946-
CAMPBELL, (John) Ramsey 1946-
(Montgomery Comfort, Carl Dreadstone, Jay Ramsay, Errol Undercliffe)
PERSONAL:
Born January 4, 1946, in Liverpool, England; son of Alexander Ramsay and Nora (Walker) Campbell; married Jenny Chandler (a teacher), January 1, 1971; children: Tamsin Joanne, Matthew Ramsey. Education: Educated in Liverpool, England. Politics: "Leftist: But I become progressively more cynical about political generalizations!" Religion: Agnostic.
ADDRESSES:
Home and office—31 Penkett Rd., Wallasey, Merseyside L45 7QF, England. Agent—Kirby McCauley, 425 Park Avenue S., New York, NY 10016.
CAREER:
Novelist. Inland Revenue, Liverpool, England, tax officer, 1962-66; Liverpool Public Libraries, Liverpool, England, library assistant, 1966-73, acting librarian in charge, 1971-73; writer, 1973—. Lecturer on films and horror fiction; film critic, BBC Radio Merseyside, 1969—.
MEMBER:
British Film Institute, Horror Writers of America, British Fantasy Society (president), Society of Fantastic Films (president).
AWARDS, HONORS:
British Fantasy Awards for best short story, 1978, for "In the Bag," for best novel, 1980, for The Parasite, 1985, for Incarnate, 1988, for The Hungry Moon, 1989, for The Influence, 1991, for Midnight Sun, 1994, for The Long Lost, and for best anthology/collection, 1991, for Best New Horror (with Stephen Jones), 1999, for Ghosts and Grisly Things, 2002, for Ramsey Campbell, Probably, and 2003, for Told by the Dead; World Fantasy Awards for best short fiction, 1978, for "The Chimney," 1980, for "Mackintosh Willy," for best anthology, 1991, for Best New Horror (with Stephen Jones), and for best collection, 1994, for Alone with the Horrors; Bram Stoker Award, Horror Writers Association, for best novel, 1989, for Ancient Images, for best collection, 1994, for Alone with the Horrors, and for nonfiction category, 2002, for Ramsey Campbell, Probably; Liverpool Daily Post & Echo Award for Literature, 1994; Premios Gigamesh, 1994, for Spanish translation of The Influence; Premio alla Carriera a Ramsey Campbell (Prize for the Career of Ramsey Campbell), Fantafestival, Rome, 1995; Best Novel citation, International Horror Guild, 1998, The House on Nazareth Hill; Grand Master Award, World Horror Convention, 1999; Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, 1999; and Best Non-Fiction citation, International Horror Guild, 2002, for Ramsey Campbell, Probably.
WRITINGS:
HORROR FICTION
The Inhabitant of the Lake, and Less-Welcome Tenants, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1964.
Demons by Daylight, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1973.
The Height of the Scream, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1976.
The Doll Who Ate His Mother, Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1976.
(Under house pseudonym Carl Dreadstone) The Bride of Frankenstein, Berkley (New York, NY), 1977.
(Under house pseudonym Carl Dreadstone) The Wolfman; Dracula's Daughter, Berkley (New York, NY), 1977.
The Face That Must Die, Star Books, 1979.
The Parasite, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1980, published as To Wake the Dead, Millington (London, England), 1980.
Through the Walls (booklet), British Fantasy Society, 1981.
The Nameless, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1981.
Dark Companions, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1982.
(As Jay Ramsay) Night of the Claw, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1983.
Incarnate, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1983.
Obsession, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1985.
Cold Print (short stories), Scream/Press (Santa Cruz, CA), 1985.
The Hungry Moon, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986.
(With Lisa Tuttle and Clive Barker) Night Visions 111, 1986.
Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death, 1986.
The Influence, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1987.
Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell, Robinson (London, England), 1987.
Ancient Images, Scribner (New York, NY), 1989.
Midnight Sun, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1990.
(Editor, with Stephen Jones) Best New Horror, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1990.
Needing Ghosts, 1990.
The Count of Eleven, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1991.
(Editor, with Stephen Jones) Best New Horror 2, Carol & Graf (New York, NY), 1991.
Waking Nightmares, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1991.
Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1991, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1993.
Two Obscure Tales, 1993.
(Editor with Stephen Jones) Best New Horror 4, Carol & Graf (New York, NY), 1993.
Strange Things and Stranger Places, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1993.
(Editor) Deathport, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1993.
The Long Lost, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1993.
The One Safe Place, Forge (New York, NY), 1995.
Far Away and Never: The Fantasy Tales of Ramsey Campbell, Necronomicaon Press (West Warwick, RI), 1996.
Nazareth Hill, Forge (New York, NY), 1996, published as The House on Nazareth Hill, [England], 1996.
The Last Voice They Hear, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1998.
Ghosts and Grisly Things, Tor Books (New York, NY), 1998.
Silent Children, Forge (New York, NY), 2000.
Pact of the Fathers, Forge (New York, NY), 2001.
The Darkest Part of the Woods, PS Publications (Harrogate, England), 2002.
Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death, Tor (New York, NY), 2002.
Told by the Dead, PS Publishing, 2003.
Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, Tor (New York, NY), 2004.
The Overnight, PS Publishing (Harrogate, England), 2004, Tor (New York, NY), 2005.
OTHER
(Editor and contributor) Superhorror, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1976, published as The Far Reaches of Fear, Star Books (England), 1980.
(Editor and contributor) New Terrors, two volumes, Pan Books, 1980.
(Editor and contributor) New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1980.
(Editor and contributor) The Gruesome Book, Piccolo, 1982.
(Editor and contributor) Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James, British Library (Boston Spa, England), 2001.
Ramsey Campbell, Probably: On Horror and Sundry Fantasies (nonfiction), edited by S. T. Joshi, introduction by Douglas E. Winter, PS Publications (Harrogate, England), 2002.
(Coeditor, with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann, and contributor) Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the Masters of Horror, Tor (New York, NY), 2003.
Work represented in anthologies, including Travellers by Night, edited by August Derleth, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1967; Nameless Places, edited by Gerald W. Page, Arkham (Sauk City, WI), 1975; The Year's Best Horror Stories 9, DAW Books, 1981; and The Year's Best Horror Stories 10, DAW Books, 1982. Author of column, "Layouts," British Fantasy Society Bulletin, 1974-77, and "Ramsey Campbell, Probably," All Hallows journal of the Ghost Story Society. Contributor of short stories to fantasy magazines.
Campbell's works have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish. A collection of his manuscripts is housed at the Liverpool Local History Library.
WORK IN PROGRESS:
Secret Stories, a novel.
SIDELIGHTS:
Ramsey Campbell's horror stories are often set in contemporary Merseyside, England, and involve quite ordinary characters. His unsettling, dreamlike prose, however, transforms his work into very effective horror fiction. As Stephen King stated in Danse Macabre, Campbell "writes a cool, almost icy prose line, and his perspective on his native Liverpool is always a trifle offbeat, a trifle unsettling. In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending … or just beginning." Gary William Crawford also found a drug-like sensation in Campbell's prose. "Campbell remains most sensitive," Crawford wrote in Horror Literature, "to a culture obsessed with alienation, Dharma psychology, strange states of consciousness, and sexual and moral anarchy. He renders this world in some of the most effective prose of modern terror fiction: As in a 'bummer,' minute elements of the environment convey a potent, terrifying meaning; news headlines of mass murder, suicide, and rape, snatches of radio dialogue, and flashes of television images are pregnant with subversive meaning; statues, automobiles, neon signs collude as in a psychotic state; and the images that Campbell creates can be labeled quite simply those of paranoia." T. E. D. Klein also found Campbell's style unsettling. Campbell's world, Klein wrote in Nyctalops, is "a world in which anything can happen. Expect anything. Expect the worst. What this leads to, of course, is a kind of dreamlike paranoia that affects his characters' perceptions—not a new thing for horror stories, it's true, except that Campbell does it so much better."
Although he had long enjoyed horror literature—he claims that a horrific scene in Victorian children's book author George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin first drew his attention to the genre at the age of six—Campbell was not inspired to write fiction until reading the work of 1930s horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. His first collection of stories, in fact, is based on the Cthulhu mythos, a malignant pantheon of elder gods invented by Lovecraft for use in his fiction. Campbell borrowed the mythos from Lovecraft as well as the use of rural settings and characters, placing his early stories in the English countryside. Many of the stories he wrote at this time are collected in The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less-Welcome Tenants. Though taking after Lovecraft, the works, according to a writer for St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, "are written with such verve and enthusiasm as to be superior to much work of their kind."
But as Campbell's writing matured, his style became less imitative of Lovecraft's work and more expressive of his own perceptions. "When I began to feel that the Cthulhu Mythos was growing too restrictive," he wrote in The Fantasy Reader's Guide to Ramsey Campbell, "too explicit as a structure, to function in the way Lovecraft wanted (as a means to imply the indescribable) … I decided to strike off into the unknown without Lovecraft's map." David Sutton noted in Shadow that this change is "not a rejection of Love-craft in essence. It is only a rejection of the art of employing the technique of another writer." Campbell's independence was noted in such short stories as "The Cellars," "Cold Print" and "The Franklyn Paragraphs," all written between 1965 and 1967.
An important part of this development was that Campbell began writing stories set in his native Liverpool, and involving the real people who live there. This authenticity has been especially praised. Speaking ofDemons by Daylight, which collects many Campbell's first post-Lovecraftian tales, Klein wrote: "At last we have a collection of tales in which the hero is convincingly human, not a neurasthenic antiquarian or a gentleman of leisure or a mad scientist or an eccentric sculptor. We have instead a fellow who works in a boring office or library." According to a writer for St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, the collection "could be said to have almost single-handedly ushered in the modern age of horror fiction." Speaking of his work in an interview with Fantasy Macabre, Campbell stated: "I feel I've at least tried to be honest about the terrors I write about, particularly to be honest about their sources.…By contrast, my Lovecraftian tales … were a matter of involving myself with someone else's horrors, an attempt to pass on some of the imaginative appeal they had for me."
Elaborating further on this subject, Campbell once told CA: "Most of my terrors are rooted in modern life, contemporary psychology, often in cities. Some writers believe that horror fiction is a way of concealing oneself or one's feelings—they've said so—but I'm trying to be honest. I don't view my stories as escapism, exactly the opposite. I believe that horror fiction cannot be too frightening or too disturbing." Michele Slung in the Washington Post commented, "Campbell's two great strengths as a writer of horror fiction, are his talent for not quite describing the monstrous forces and events that propel his plots and his ability to blast any of the reader's lurking complacency when he does go into detail."
His works after Demons by Daylight abandoned the feel of the Lovecraftian pantheon, except in his novel Midnight Sun, where a man tries to summon an ice creature who will most likely destroy the world. Instead, critics noted that Campbell's themes expanded to include love, sexuality, gender, and the interrelationship between dream and reality. This direction lead him to such novels as the surreal Needing Ghosts, Incarnate, and The Face That Must Die, in which Campbell writes from the mind of a serial killer, leading readers to understand the twisted logic of the narrator. The Face That Must Die was also noted by critics as bringing to the fore Campbell's treatment of the horrors of the city.
During his long career Campbell has proven his versatility, inspiring a Publishers Weekly writer to credit him as "the most protean of horror writers," one capable of producing "quiet terror in the classic tradition … eccentric horror that plays for laughs, [or] fiction that uses the genre as a staging ground for deft psychological and sociological commentary," such as his 1994 novel, The Long Lost. That story turns on a modern British couple's rescue of a dying old woman from a strange, deserted town in Wales. After welcoming her into their home, they begin to experience chaos in their neighborhood. The old woman seems to rejuvenate as a result of the mayhem around her, but the supernatural element of the story seems almost secondary to "the tracing of what happens when conscience gives way to license," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer of the novel.
Campbell does away with the supernatural altogether in The One Safe Place, described as "his grimmest novel yet," by a Publishers Weekly contributor. The book is a thriller that indicts the judicial system for failing to protect victims. The Travis family is targeted by criminal Phil Fancy and his family in an escalating series of events that culminates with the kidnaping of twelve-year-old Marshall Travis, who is drugged and tortured by Phil's son, Darren. The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that "ultimately, Campbell persuades the reader that the loss of innocence that Darren embodies and that he inflicts upon Marshall is more horrifying than any supernatural menace."
Campbell enters the mind of a serial child killer in Silent Children, another suspenseful thriller, singled out as the author's "best in nearly a decade," in a Publishers Weekly evaluation. The story concerns Leslie Ames and her son Ian, who move into a house with a grisly past. When they rent a room to a writer of horror stories, they have no idea of the man's connection to the house's terrible history. "Campbell establishes his characters in sharp, precise slashes of chapters," said the Publishers Weekly reviewer, who found the book's climax "a tour-de-force of suspense."
Like Silent Children, Pact of the Fathers is in some ways a family drama: a daughter must face the betrayal of her father. Daniella Logan, a psychology student, investigates her father's death and the disappearance of some of his posessions, only to discover her father's involvement in a strange cult. Her new knowledge puts her in danger, and she flees to the Greek Islands, only to become imprisoned by a friend of her father's. Campbell "tantalizes the reader with irresistible hints of occult machinations," noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.
The Darkest Part of the Woods also includes a family mystery, though it hearkens back to his earlier works, and the setting of the story is familiar to readers of his Lovecraftian fiction. American Dr. Lennox Price had intended to study victims of the strange hallucinogenics that grow in Goodmanswood, but when he and his family settled in the nearby community, he, too, fell to the power of the woods. His family, too, falls under the strange and compelling power of the woods—all but his eldest daughter. The woods await her, however, and when she begins to explore the madness of her father, she discovers the ruins of a tower that once belonged to the magician Nathaniel Selcouth; but something older and more ominous lives there as well. Campbell "is at the top of his form here, infusing every scene and scrap of dialogue with a sense of inescapable menace," wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. A writer for Kirkus Reviews called the novel "Campbell's masterpiece," and praised the book as "magicall fresh and memorable."
Critical evaluations of Campbell usually judge him to be one of the best horror writers of his generation. "Campbell is one of those rare writers whose every word is worth reading," wrote S. T. Joshi in Extrapolation. "Good horror writers are quite rare," King stated, "and Campbell is better than just good." Jack Sullivan of the Washington Post Book World maintained that although Campbell is "still not as well known as he deserves to be, [he] is surely the most sophisticated stylist in modern horror." Klein simply declared: "I think Campbell reigns supreme in the field today."
Campbell's work in pushing the boundaries of the horror genre was a quest evident to him as early as his teens. It was then he became convinced that "terror was far larger and more diverse than the genre specializing in it, though that isn't in any way to repudiate the latter," as he remarked in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghosts, and Gothic Writers. "I'm for largeness and variety," he continued, "and that's why I continue to write in the field—because I haven't found the limits. It can encompass comedy and tragedy, it's capable of functioning as satire and social comment, it stretches from psychological terror to visionary horror, to which I should like to see more of a return. It can also be a lot of fun."
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
Ramsey Campbell contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:
HOW I GOT HERE
When does a memory become the memory of having had one? I seem to remember that before I started school I was able to recall lying in my pram. It was parked in the sunlight by the coal shed at the back of the house. Another recollection lasted longer: sitting on the sofa in the front room of that small house in suburban Liverpool while my mother read aloud to me from a "Rupert Bear" annual. These weren't comics in the usual sense, because the images didn't include speech balloons or captions; instead a paragraph of narrative was printed at the foot of the page, while each drawing was accompanied by a simpler version in verse for the less literate. My mother's small forefinger—I suspect it must have been tanned with nicotine—underlined each word she read. For some years I remembered the moment at which I grasped how the symbols she was indicating related to her speech. Either immediately or at the next session I began to read the book aloud to her. I believe I wasn't yet two years old.
Reading "Rupert Bear" stories gave me my first taste of terror in fiction. One of the many presents I found in a bulging pillowcase at the end of my bed at Christmas 1947 was a copy of More Adventures of Rupert. Since the stories include "Rupert and Koko," in which the little bear befriends a black boy ("How funny his black face looks on the white pillow!" Rupert's mother exclaims, while the verse reads "Their bedtime comes along too soon / For Rupert and the little coon"), I don't think it would be published now. The tale that haunted my nights, however, was "Rupert's Christmas Tree," in which Rupert acquires a magical tree that decamps after the festivities and returns to its home in the woods. Perhaps this is meant as a charming fantasy for children, but the details—the small high voice from the tree, the creaking that Rupert hears in the night, the trail of earth he follows from the tub in his house, above all the prancing silhouette that inclines towards him the star it has in place of a head—are surely the stuff of adult supernatural fiction. I think I got my start in the field right there, and many of my preoccupations must derive from my early childhood.
For years I believed that my first memory dated from when I was three years old. I suspect that's because of its understandable vividness. I recall little about my father up to this point, although I have a random memory of his telling me that early in the morning you could see ladies' fingers in the sky—I imagine he meant clouds turned pink by the dawn. He used to take me out on Sundays, and on the only occasion that has stayed in my mind we walked across the line at the end of a platform at Broadgreen Station instead of using the pedestrian bridge. When we came home he told my mother, to her horror. They had a hearty argument above my head that ended with her ordering him out of the house.
The front door contained nine small panes of glass, reaching from chest level to the top of the door. My father blocked the door from outside as my mother tried to close it; presumably they were struggling for the last word in the argument. My mother's hand went through one of the panes. I remember her dripping bright red blood and crying out that he had deliberately closed the door on her hand. The sight of blood except for my own has distressed me ever since. A neighbour—Gladys Trenery from next door—looked after me while her husband took my mother to hospital. I suppose they humoured her to calm her down, but then I thought they were accepting her version of the incident. Since my father had fled, I tried to set the record straight. What did I know about it? I was only three years old. I don't think it's fanciful to relate one of my recurring themes—the difference between perception and reality—to this.
I forget the aftermath, but years later my mother said that she had subsequently asked me in front of my father if I wanted to go out with him again. How could I have said yes when it might have led to another such scene? It feels as if that was the last I saw of my father, though it may not have been. Certainly relations between my parents grew steadily worse, until soon they met hardly at all. One reason must have been that my father (who was in his late forties, my mother having been thirty-six when I was born) felt robbed of his only son.
Divorce wasn't easy in the 1950s, not least because my mother was a Catholic. I accompanied her as she trudged from lawyer to lawyer in a futile quest for legal aid to help her make a case for a divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty, of which she provided a lengthy written account. Apparently I would have been circumcised for medical reasons when I was three months old, but my father objected that it was "a devilish pagan custom performed by Roman Catholics to gratify their sadistic tendencies." I gather that my parents ceased to sleep together four years after I was born, one reason apparently being that my father took to making macabre threats during or after sex. My mother wrote that "he ran the side of his large hand back and forward across my throat, as though with a knife; he then pressed lightly on my throat with his two hands; his heavy body was on top of me so that I could not move—he said in a deliberate, cold voice: 'What a nice little throat you've still got.'"
Soon her failure to obtain legal aid convinced her that the lawyers were conspiring to thwart her, perhaps on instructions from the police, since my father was a policeman; many people in Liverpool (which she hated) were in on the secret too. After her death I found her notes for a novel she was planning at the time, in which her neighbours were given fictitious names and classed according to their attitudes to her—"snoopers," "kind but afraid for themselves," "were nice but obviously worked on," "passer-on" (of gossip about her, presumably). Sometimes her view of them infected me, and I remember once shutting my eyes with disdain as I rode towards and past a couple of them on my childhood scooter, to a crash I was apparently too introverted to foresee. By now my mother detested the house for its smallness, and frequently told me how much better her family home in Huddersfield had been. She insisted that my father had tricked her into living in our house by promising it would be temporary, though in fact she had written to him shortly before their marriage that she would live there always. They kept each other's letters, and I found them after they died.
For most of my childhood my father was heard but not seen. My mother told me things about him, referring to him solely as "him" in a tone of loathing: though he was a policeman he dressed like a tramp, he spoke several languages but made no use of them, he wrote letters in my name and hers to the Christian Science Monitor (religion therefore being one of their early conflicts, and his use of Americanisms to me another), he'd got her lost on a fell in the Lake District during their honeymoon (an incident she grew to believe meant he'd tried to kill her), he'd once substituted tooth powder for salt in the cruet and poisoned the family except for himself, he came downstairs in the mornings and damaged the already dilapidated furniture, he blew his nose with his fingers in the bathroom sink (for years she would go in the bathroom every night as soon as his bedroom door closed and I would hear her ritual cry of disgust), he'd thrown a toy of mine in the fire when I was making too much noise with it, she'd given up the love of her life for him.…He left her housekeeping money on Fridays, and she cooked his breakfast last thing each night and left it on the table. Now I imagine him coming downstairs in the mornings to be faced by congealed fried egg and bacon seven hours old in the chilly kitchen with its stone-flagged floor (hardly surprising if sometimes he went and kicked the furniture), but then his unseen presence was infinitely more powerful than anything I might be told about him. For nearly twenty years we didn't meet face to face, although he continued to live in the house.
I used to hear his footsteps on the stairs as I lay in bed, terrified that he might come into my room. Sometimes I heard arguments downstairs as my mother waylaid him when he came home, her voice shrill and clear, his blurred and incomprehensible, hardly a voice, which filled me with a terror I couldn't define. (Being a spectator to arguments made me deeply nervous for decades, though since becoming a parent I'm much more likely to intervene or take sides.) If he was still in the kitchen when it was time for her to make my breakfast she would drive him out of the house; presumably it was unthinkable that I should share the table with him. Once I found I'd broken a lens of my glasses as I'd put them down by the bed the previous night, and was convinced by my mother that he had sneaked into the room to break it. Worst of all was Christmas, when my mother would send me to knock on his bedroom door and invite him down, as a mark of seasonal goodwill, for Christmas dinner. I would go upstairs in a panic, but there was never any response beyond a mutter of refusal.
I mustn't give the impression that my entire childhood consisted of nothing except terror, even if it was an underlying motif. You may not notice how strange your own childhood is while living it, at any rate for a while. Because the house at 40 Nook Rise was the only place I'd lived, I saw nothing remarkable about it. It was part of Wavertree Garden Suburb, an idealised community built in the first decade of the twentieth century alongside Thingwall Road. My father's family had moved to the house from Glasgow, and may well have seen it as idyllic; my mother had lived in a much larger house in Huddersfield, and it's no wonder if she found this one claustrophobic. So did I when I last returned to it not many years ago; reality had overtaken my perception of it and its surroundings after decades of failing to do so.
As a child I thought it was the size it ought to be, and the back garden seemed immense. It contained two apple trees I used to climb, and a silver birch. To the right lived the Trenerys, to the left the unmarried Misses Cropper. The territory beyond the end seemed close to boundless; it contained allotments on the right and the garden of the Forrest family beside them. Brian Forrest was some years older than I, and talked to me over the privet hedge. He must have seen a Western, for he often said "Ay, señor." More than once he invited me around to play with him, but my mother wouldn't hear of it; she didn't care for him or almost any of the neighbours' children. I don't think she knew that when I was three or so, some of the older girls called me into one of the arched passages that led between the pairs of houses and asked me to show them my penis. There would have been precious little for them to ogle, but that wasn't why I fled.
I was apparently four when I started attending Christ the King Roman Catholic School. I believe my mother gave me the notion that I would impress the teachers by being able to write. Imagine my chagrin at being told that I was holding the pencil the wrong way! I learned the approved grip quickly enough and have used it ever since. Indeed, that middle finger is growing numb with decades of writing and typing.
Before long I made an acceptable friend at the school. She was Pauline Godfrey, who lived perhaps half a mile from my home. We often played together, but I think it was usually at her house; my mother was so ashamed of ours that she tried to keep people away from it, my friends included. One day Pauline and I decided to go for a walk without telling anyone. On Thingwall Road a man in a front garden asked where we lived. "Don't say down the drain or I'll spank you," he added. We insisted with enthusiasm that we did, and I for one was disappointed when he didn't carry out his threat. (I'd had just one spanking at the age of four from my mother, and was shocked by how much it hurt, but soon tried in vain to provoke a repetition of the experience.) No doubt these days the man would be arrested as a paedophile or at the very least harassed by vigilantes. We continued onwards to Queens Drive, a dual carriageway, and made our way up it to Child-wall Fiveways and along a second carriageway to rejoin Thingwall Road at the far end. It was a whole afternoon's adventure, and I think we gradually realised how much panic we might be causing, but our reappearance hand in hand seems to have assuaged the worst of our parents' wrath. I can't help visualising us in terms of an advertising poster common at the time that displayed such a pair of innocents.
In the first stages of the disintegration of the marriage my parents used me as a go-between. I was six when my father bought tickets for my mother to take me on holiday to the Lake District, but when I gave her the tickets my mother tore them up and threw them at his feet. Me, I'd been looking forward to the holiday. The next day we enacted the identical scene. Instead she insisted on saving up to take me to Grange over Sands, where she'd stayed on her honeymoon, or Southport, where her widowed mother had moved from Huddersfield; sometimes we stayed with her sister and brother-in-law in Yorkshire. It was in Southport that I discovered my taste for the weird.
I believe I was seven by then. In those days it was normal for general stores to sell books and magazines. One summer day in Seabank Road, one of the broad side streets of the Victorian seaside town, I saw a magazine in a window. The cover appeared to depict a bird-like creature cowering in terror of two monstrosities—huge human skulls for heads and very little in the way of bodies—approaching it across a black desert. If the cover looked like that, what extraordinary things would the magazine contain? At seven I wasn't allowed to find out, and so the image and the name of the publication—Weird Tales—haunted me for years. A decade later I identified the issue for November 1952. The cover shows a vulture perched on some bones with two admittedly evil-looking human skeletons in the background. It seems to me that back in 1953 my mind was already bent on improving on the terrors I encountered and rendering them even more grotesque.
Perhaps I preferred visions to everyday terror. Apart from my home life, schooldays were taking their toll, or my mother's nervousness on my behalf was. She was especially bothered, I think, by having seen the headmaster slap some unfortunate's face for talking to a friend in line while parents watched from outside the schoolyard. Had I begun to suffer from nightmares? I know she was unhappy because I had a tendency to roll my eyes in public, but I doubt that she chose to take me to a child psychiatrist. I suspect that our doctor advised that she should.
She was always hostile to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. One reason was that in the heat of at least one argument my father had threatened to have her sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and on another occasion he'd invited neighbours to come and look at his "mad wife," but I suspect that her aversion may have dated from before the marriage—why, we'll never know. The child psychiatrist can't have changed her attitude. She was especially suspicious when he took a rectal smear, presumably to check for evidence of child abuse. When she demanded what he was doing I explained it was a smear, to which he responded "You'd make a good detective." Of such odd moments is fiction made.
I gather from my medical records that I was found to be imaginative but mentally fit. The suggestion was made that perhaps my mother was more in need of treatment, but if this was put to her, she would certainly have been unreceptive. Instead she tried to solve the problem by sending me to a private school, Ryebank.
The problem may have been that I was missing quite a lot of school. Asthma—psychologically based, I suspect—was the reason or at least the excuse. Almost the only memory of my time at Christ the King is of sitting with my classmates in the field outside a classroom while a schoolmistress read us a chapter from a book. I recall that whoever the young hero was, his adventures were intensely suspenseful, but I never learned what led up to this episode or happened after. I'm surprised I didn't ascertain the title of the book. Perhaps the teacher refused to tell me in case that would persuade me to attend more school.
Enrolling at Ryebank involved being interviewed and then, as I recall, having to wait in the grounds while the headmaster and my mother talked. She must have been very unhappy with Christ the King to remove me to a school that wasn't Catholic, even if special classes were provided for those pupils who were. While outside I was accosted by some boys from the senior half of the school, who poked some kind of fun at me—possibly at my size, since I was on the way to growing marvellously obese. I wince to remember retorting "I won't stand for it." How pompous of a seven-year-old was that? "Sit down for it, then," came the crushing riposte.
Either shortly after changing schools or in the summer holiday between them I began a novel, perhaps as a celebration. This was Black Fingers from Space by John R. Campbell (aged seven and a half), and illustrated by him too. The interested, not to say unwary, reader can find in my collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably all the chapters I wrote. It may have been this effort that prompted me to tell some adult at the bus stop by the school that I wrote books and planned to have them published in America. My comments were relayed to a member of staff, Miss Toomey, a fearsome Irishwoman, who demanded in front of my schoolmates if England wasn't good enough for me. Once she caned the whole class with a ruler for some offence that even then I failed to grasp. Perhaps I wasn't among the main culprits, since the anticipation proved to be worse than the sting when it finally reached me. Miss Toomey was also fond of telling unruly pupils how she had once spanked a rebellious girl on stage in front of the entire school. The reader must decide why this should have lodged in my memory.
By now my grandmother was living intermittently in the Nook Rise house. She'd given up her flat in South-port to divide her time between her two daughters. When I was seven my father threatened to brain her with a heavy crucifix that hung above her bed, and apparently referred to her as Mrs Merrifield (who had been executed that year for poisoning the woman whose companion she was). I remember her only in glimpses: her singing "Just a Song at Twilight" to me in a high sweet voice, her groaning loudly on the toilet (a performance that emphasised the smallness of the house), her praying—"Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault"—and beating her breast so loudly I could hear it in my room. She would ask me if I was learning gozintas yet at school ("Two gozinta four, four gozinta eight") and about something I took to be called globigerina oos. Not until secondary school did I grasp that it was ooze, a deposit found under the sea.
The school in question was St Edward's College, a Roman Catholic grammar school. I'd passed the eleven-plus examination, which suggests that on the whole Ryebank had been good for me. On my first day at the grammar school we new boys were told what its various sections were called. One was Runnymede, but I heard "Running-Me." Mishearings seem to have beset me for some years. When my mother had our house redecorated downstairs, the decorator sent me to buy some paste. I knew its trade name couldn't really be Collapso, but I was too shy to ask him to repeat it. As in a game of Chinese whispers, I asked for this at the shop, and was miraculously rewarded with the item he needed—Lapcell. I wouldn't be surprised if my fascination with the pitfalls of conversation started there. It has certainly given me plenty of material.
I believe that by the time I changed schools 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. Although my mother had balked at Weird Tales, for years she had let me use her tickets to borrow adult books from Childwall Library, which in those days was no more than a narrow unit in a block of shops; it had shelves around the walls and space for just one row of central shelving back to back.
Now that I was eleven I was allowed to buy science-fiction and fantasy magazines, not least Weird Tales. One of the treasures of my collection was Best Horror Stories, edited by John Keir Cross. Besides specialists such as Poe, Bierce, and M. R. James it included tales by Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Herman Melville—his "Bartleby." The editor admitted that some readers might not consider this a horror story, but I thought my pocket money (which I'd saved up to buy the hardcover) well spent. I believe that more than any book this one persuaded me that horror fiction was a huge field, by no means wholly defined by narrow generic conventions, and part of literature. By contrast, when I read a paperback of a thirties Not at Night anthology—the series in which the editor declared she had set herself against literature—I found the gruesomeness of the material no substitute for good prose.
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. She herself had published short stories in a Yorkshire journal before the Second World War, and during the war she wrote her first, largely autobiographical, novel. It was encouraged by my father, whom I gather she met through an advertisement she'd placed under a false name (possibly in a writers' journal) for pen friends. As their marriage deteriorated she set her hopes on writing novels, mainly thrillers, to make her enough money to bring me up on her own. My impression is that they were technically skilful but already dated. She used numerology to work out titles to bring her good luck. In my early teens she took to listening to "The Archers," a nightly radio soap opera, on the basis that the names and actions of the characters represented messages of hope for her. When her manuscripts were rejected she became convinced that the messages had been lies aimed at breaking her down. I think it was then I grew fully aware that all was not well with her.
This was by no means the whole of our relationship. She did her best to make up for my father's absence, though perhaps she never fully realised that his unseen presence was the problem. When I was younger we drew pictures together, played word games and board games and cards and ball games, the last of which must have been a trial for her, since she'd suffered a prolapsed womb at my birth. She encouraged me to write and to finish what I wrote. Her favourite film, to which I accompanied her dutifully on each reissue, was Gone with the Wind, though often when she revisited a favourite old film or book her disappointment would convince her that someone unspecified had changed the text (Edgar Wallace novels, which proved less surprising than when she had first read them, were among the commonest offenders). At home we listened to radio shows together—plays and serials and comedies, though she never liked Spike Milligan's "Goon Show" with its gleeful explosion of taboos—or simply sat by the fire and read (sometimes the same authors: Patricia Highsmith, Ray Bradbury, Cornelia Otis Skinner). I was always enthralled when she told me her memories: of Father Young, a Catholic priest who used to scuttle after her and her sister in Lon Chaney's latest role; of working at Rushworth's department store in Huddersfield where eventually she became a buyer and where her assistants used to confide all their problems to her; her years at the Ministry of War Transport, and the Christmas Day she had been working there alone while a man prowled the deserted street outside; her chaste love affairs which she always terminated; her pet dogs, one of which another dog-owner had kicked to death; the plots in great detail of films she'd admired, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the Mamoulian Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera. … More than once she told me her most terrible memory, of the morning (five days before her birthday, I eventually realised) when she found her father burned to death, having had a stroke and fallen on the fire. Later I discovered she had passed on many of her memories in her several years of correspondence with my father. It was her way of sharing herself, which she did with a very few people—too few.
Ghostly Tales, that first book of mine, bounced from publisher to publisher. 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 of 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."
I was also being encouraged elsewhere. Brother Kelly, one of the Christian Brothers who ran St Edward's, was my first English teacher at the school. When he learned that I wrote stories he had me read them to the class. If he was offended by their grisliness, he kept it to himself; perhaps he found the tale that derived from Dennis Wheatley—I did say earlier that my writing had yet to catch up with my literary taste—commendably Christian. I'm very much afraid I grew resentful when he used my example to motivate my classmates. I considered myself to be the only real writer in the room, and had little patience with stories about, say, football. On one occasion I went to the ludicrous extreme of pretending to read stories from blank pages in a pig-headed attempt to hold the floor.
Brother Kelly was by no means the only good and enthusiastic teacher. Too much of the schooling, however, consisted of dictation—pages of text that the master read aloud with little or no commentary—or copying from the blackboard. I assume the intention wasn't to train us as secretaries. I recall that my boredom grew apparent when we had to write sentences that contained particular words; mine were defiantly gruesome and macabre, though perfectly grammatical.
I was briefly a cellist in the school orchestra. I'd obtained high marks in music lessons, but only by dint of learning the test piece by ear. I barely read music, and my orchestral playing was dismal. I'm reminded of this whenever I hear the suggestion that everyone is a poet or a writer. Of course everyone uses words, but that doesn't mean that most can do so to publishable standard, any more than my struggles with a Bach suite (had I tried) would have been worth inflicting on an audience. I wasn't able to avoid duty in the school choir, however, even after my voice began to change. At least that gave me the background of "Never to be Heard."
I was excused from physical education class, largely because my mother feared that if other boys caught sight of my teeny penis in the changing room, any homosexuals present might find me attractive—a curious notion, but she succeeded in persuading the headmaster to have me dropped from the class. One gym master was fond of a game in which the boys ran about the gymnasium and attempted to smack each other's buttocks while avoiding the same fate. "Smacky bottom!" he used to cry, if I'm not mistaken—he certainly expressed his enthusiasm.
There was also the strap, which was applied to our hands for various offences and which was something of a hindrance to writing. I experienced it often enough that I became fearful of drawing attention to myself in class by offering to answer questions. This aspect of the school was epitomised by Robinson ("Gobbo," as he was generally known), a mathematics teacher who dedicated himself to terrifying pupils, not least with a kidney punch. What he thought this had to do with learning, if indeed he cared, I have no idea. I was never in his class, thank God, but he summed up the dread that became central to my experience of school. Before long I was finding a range of excuses for my mother to keep me off—any hint of illness would usually do, even when I had to invent a symptom. Of course my education suffered even more, but one particular day of malingering began my career.
I was fourteen. At the weekend I regularly walked some miles to Bascombe's, a shop on Smithdown Road that was half devoted to books and magazines. Often I would find prizes in the window, and this time I was awestruck to see a copy of Cry Horror, an entire book by—I had to look twice to be certain—H. P. Lovecraft. I'd read half a dozen of his stories—one of the books I'd borrowed from the library had contained "The Colour out of Space," which I'd found so horrifying I concealed it from my mother—but this was the first complete book of his I'd ever seen (indeed, it was the very first British paperback by him). I paid my half a crown and returned home in a daze with the book, and on Monday feigned sickness in order to read it from cover to cover. By the end I knew this was the kind of fiction I wanted to write.
And I did, altogether too slavishly. Though I'd never left England I set a bunch of tales in Massachusetts, rustic dialect and all. Alongside this I'd joined fandom. I'd discovered a science fiction and fantasy bookseller in Liverpool: Leslie Johnson, who, along with his family, had to suffer my phoning every night for weeks to learn if the Arkham House books I'd ordered had arrived. He introduced me to the Liverpool science fiction group (LiG), and I set about becoming a drunken adolescent. I also became a member of the British Science Fiction Association, and Peter Mabey, the librarian, put me in touch with Pat Kearney, another horror fan. It was Pat who published one of my Lovecraftian tales in his fanzine Goudy, and also suggested that I should send them to Arkham House, Lovecraft's publisher. That's how August Derleth came to read them, and he sent me a two-page single-spaced letter setting out in detail what was wrong with them.
It was the most important editorial letter of my career, and once I'd recovered from the criticism I devoted myself to rewriting the stories and applying the techniques I'd learned to new work.
Meanwhile I was discovering the cinema—to begin with, horror. At fourteen I was able to pass for sixteen, the minimum age for admission to most horror films in Britain in the Sixties; even Godzilla movies were burdened with the X certificate. Initially my mother took me into the cinemas, but soon I acquired sufficient confidence to bluff my own way in. I fear that school homework was too often crowded into second place by the feast of films that had become available to me. I knew many of them from stills and sometimes from whole articles in Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, which I'd been collecting for years. Sometimes I was disconcerted when an image failed to appear in a film, often because the British censor had excised it. Even without stills, I could see that he'd made a mess of the genesis of the werewolf in Curse of the Werewolf. I've been opposed to censorship ever since.
I don't think horror films influenced my writing significantly, but other films did. The very first subtitled film I encountered was playing second feature to The Cyclops, in which a chap enlarged by nuclear radiation pops up behind a mountain with his scalp hanging over his eye. While this made me jump, the supporting film, Luis Buñuel's Los olvidados, stayed with me considerably longer. Filmed in 1950, it's as shocking as the director's work with Salvador Dali, but the surrealism is inseparable from Buñuel's unflinching view of life in the slums of Mexico City. It contains a nightmare that throws an extra light on the realism, while some of the realistic images are so grotesque as to border on the surreal. I think the film's interaction of social observation and the fantastic may have shown me how I could develop as a writer; certainly that's the route I took.
Filmgoing affected my writing in another way. Until my early teens I had very little sense of my birthplace. On the whole I kept to districts (Childwall, Old Swan, the Rocket, Wavertree, Taggart Avenue) within walking distance, all of them respectably suburban. I did take the bus or, until this mode of transport was done away with, the tram to the downtown shops, but much of the city centre was unknown territory, vast enough to make me lose all direction. Now I sought out every cinema that was listed in the Liverpool Echo, enough of them to fill an entire column of the front page with just the titles of their double bills. Many of them were in areas of the city that had been left in ruins since the Second World War. Simply making my way to them was an adventure of constant discovery, and before long their settings began to show up in my tales.
I was also reading far more outside my genre than within. Just as I'd discovered that mainstream films—Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad—could be more disquieting than most generic horror, so I began to value mainstream fiction that disturbed me: Beckett's later novels, for instance, and some by Thomas Hinde—The Day the Call Came, The Investigator. Alongside these I relished Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell and many more. Nabokov—initially Lolita, after which I devoured all of his work I could find—was the greatest revelation. Even in an early tale like "The Stone on the Island" (1963) I'm beginning to share his delight in language and its myriad possibilities.
All this was backed by my family life. In my teens I sometimes came home at the same time as my father, who would hold the front door closed from inside to make sure we never met face to face. Very occasionally, when it was necessary for him to get in touch, he would leave me a note, for some reason in French. My grandmother was now living with us, and I shared my room and its single bed with my mother. It may be that the reason why she didn't share her mother's room was that she refused to believe there could be anything wrong with her sleeping with me: about then she started fulminating Freud and his dirty mind. At least I'd shed my obesity with adolescence or dieting, and so there was more space. Sometimes I would waken in the early hours, my mother snoring beside me, the glow of the dwindling night-light rendering the contents of the room—bed, dressing-table, my mother and myself—as unreal and ominous as their reflection in the wardrobe mirror.
My grandmother died of gangrene when I was fifteen. During her final illness I helped lift her onto the bedpan and had my first glimpse of a female pubis, which appalled me and made me think of a spider. After the funeral my mother told me that she had found one of her mother's toes in the bed. Nevertheless that was where she now slept, which meant I had my own room. I lay in the dark praying that some undefined terror would stay away from me, since I no longer had the night-light my mother had always kept burning, whether in case she had to go to her mother in the night or lest my father came into the room. Some months later she saw her mother at the top of the stairs, wearing a nightgown that, she insisted, crumpled emptily to the stair and was still there when she went up. Now and then she would feel the ghost of her father tap her meaningfully on the shoulder.
The General Certificate of Education (Ordinary Level) was then the first major examination at secondary school. Most people who sat it did so at sixteen years old, but I and others in my class were thought to be worth putting in for it at fifteen. I performed dreadfully, passing only in English language and (barely) in religion, even failing English literature. My skiving was certainly a reason, but I blame the style of teaching too. The following year we flops were taught by staff who, on the whole, were committed to helping us however they could, with very little beating. The best of them all was Ray Thomas, an English teacher who communicated his love of his subject with enormous skill and real feeling. This was probably my favourite year at the school, marred mainly by an encounter with the loathsome Robinson, who found me away from my desk as he was passing the classroom during a study period and slapped my face. I'd been trying to retrieve a book a classmate had snatched while I was writing in it—the first draft of The Inhabitant of the Lake. A version of this incident turns up in a summation of my experience of the school, the opening scene of "The Interloper."
In a sense, alas or otherwise, this mainly enjoyable year came too late. My GCE results were hugely improved—the splendid Brother Butler had even opened my eyes to the pleasures of mathematics, geometry in particular—and the headmaster wanted me to stay on to sit Advanced Level and qualify for a university. He did his best to persuade me, but I'd had enough of school, especially since I couldn't predict who might have taught me if I'd stayed. Besides, August Derleth was recommending me to find a day job that left me time to write, and so I did.
I chose the Inland Revenue and commenced demonstrating my lack of social skills. (During the war my mother had worked for the civil service, but I suspect I chose this branch because others might involve more contact with the public.) On my first interminable day in an enormous room with a thin pervasive smell of cardboard and linoleum I spoke to almost nobody. That couldn't last, since I was a clerical assistant—a kind of office boy who checked other people's arithmetic and filed away their work or fetched files on their behalf—but for a while I was as fearful of drawing attention as I had been in my worst years at school. In time I discovered that some of my colleagues watched films and liked to talk about them, which helped. Talking, however, exposed my ineptitude with girls in ways that I suspect were apparent to everyone except me. While I wouldn't succeed for years in nerving myself to ask anyone for a date, I hung around more than one unfortunate young woman and did my hopeless best to chat her up. That she might have a boyfriend or, in one case, even be engaged seems not to have occurred to me until a colleague drew my attention to the ring on her finger.
Soon I was promoted to clerical officer, only to find that I was terrified of answering the phone. I believe one source of my fear was the notion that my old tendency to mishear words might prove to be lying in wait. I was now dealing with the tax affairs of hundreds of people, but if one of them phoned I did my utmost to be unobtrusive and to let someone else handle it. Of course this couldn't last, and eventually the person in charge of the section insisted I take my own calls. Before long my panic subsided, and I developed an official manner.
Meanwhile I was still attending school. On starting work I'd found that anybody under eighteen was required to continue their education one day a week. My disgust was tempered when Mr Garley, the vice-principal of Childwall Hall County College, turned out to be a Lovecraft fan. I told him that I'd just published a Lovecraftian tale—"The Church in High Street," my first professional appearance—and in no time Miss Last, one of the English teachers, had me read it on tape and sit in her class to be questioned once she'd played the recording. I couldn't have predicted the result. The sound of myself on tape bore no resemblance to the voice I heard whenever I spoke, and if that was how I ordinarily sounded I found it well-nigh unbearable. It took me quite a while to slough off this extra layer of self-consciousness. Even now I'm sometimes thrown by realising how I actually sound, though nobody else seems to mind.
Soon after starting my first job I gave up religion. I'd grown suspicious of it in my last years at St Edward's: what sort of god would lend his name to the kind of sadism (not only physical) that was commonplace at the school? It's a naïve theological question, I know, but it did for me. As for Catholic repressiveness, I'd begun to lose patience with it pretty well as soon as I learned that it forbade my reading certain books. I read all of them I could obtain, along with books banned in Britain that August Derleth sent me—Henry Miller's Tropics and the like. Perhaps my faith finally crumbled when I had an idea in church for a story I was writing: to be precise, an image for "The Mine on Yuggoth," one of the tales I was revising at Derleth's behest. It occurred to me during Communion, and I waited for the thunderbolt or its modern equivalent until I realised none was due. When my mother began to miss church because she didn't like people in the congregation but insisted I continue attending, her example was all the excuse I needed. I went out every Sunday for the duration of a mass, but only to read a book.
Elsewhere I was making yet more wobbly attempts to get a girlfriend. I took Anita, a clerical assistant, out for a couple of weeks. One lunchtime I escorted her through a series of cellars in the business district, and this episode is depicted in "The Cellars," my very first Liverpool story. Later I based the protagonist of "Reply Guaranteed" on her, not as an act of revenge but simply because aspects of her personality had suggested the tale. There was also Anne, a girl I met on a coach back from London, where I'd taken to travelling to watch films that might not come to Liverpool. I must admit that although we talked throughout much of the journey, she had to suggest that I take her out while she was staying with her aunt for a week. She was with a girlfriend, and so I brought along a work-mate, Jim. I fear my inexperience was apparent to all. Our week and its aftermath are central to "Concussion," although I left out the other couple.
In 1964 Arkham House published my collection The Inhabitant of the Lake. Not long after I received copies I became unable to read fiction. I felt compelled to loiter so long on every phrase that by the time I reached the end of a sentence I'd lost any grasp of its sense. The only explanation I can find is that proofreading my book had made me so aware of the discrete existence of words that I was hyperconscious of their presence in other people's prose. I was still able to read film criticism, however. One summer day, after months of struggling to regain my grasp of fiction, I sat in the front garden with an issue of Weird Tales and raced through the lead novelette, "The Hand of Saint Ury"—just another severed hand on the traditional rampage, but an invaluable text while it lasted that afternoon. I never suffered from the condition again, and have passed it on to Wilfred Lowell, a character in The Overnight.
In 1965 I met Kirby McCauley. I'd originally heard from him three years earlier, when he wrote to me care of Arkham House after "The Church in High Street" was published. We corresponded at great length about films and literature and music and much else. He discussed my published work in detail, and was a hugely supportive, though not uncritical, reader. When he decided to tour England he suggested I should accompany him, and we continued our debates even more vigorously. He was a generous and cultured companion, and over the years he helped keep my brain awake.
I was twenty when my mother decided I was old enough to be left alone while she went into hospital for the operation she should have had twenty years earlier, on her prolapsed womb. A neighbour of about her age, Miss Holme, took in my laundry, much to my embarrassment and resentment. Resentment and impatience and indifference were all I felt at the sight of my mother in a hospital bed. Her operation led to complications, but she believed she'd been misled about the operation and its aftermath, and refused to undergo a further operation to repair the damage. She left hospital as soon as she could and tried to sue the surgeon, but couldn't find a lawyer to take the case.
When I suggested that the lawyers weren't necessarily in league with the surgeon, she decided that some enemy of hers had got to me. I don't know if this was the first time I tried to persuade her that things weren't always as they seemed to her: Liverpool wasn't full of people conspiring against her, radio programmes weren't referring to her under an imperfectly disguised name. My friends were turning me against her, she retorted, or I was taking drugs (which I wasn't yet). She would accuse me of trying to drive her into a hospital or a home and make me swear never to have her put away. Increasingly, perhaps defensively, I accepted that this was simply the way she was and that I could do nothing.
I was also twenty when I changed jobs. I'd progressed as far as I could in the civil service without sitting more examinations, a chore I'd determined to leave behind on quitting school. I applied for a post in the public libraries. I don't know if the book I brought to the interview—E. M. Forster's Howard's End—looked like a calculated ploy, but I had no idea that it was the city librarian's favourite novel. Whatever he made of that, I got the job.
In mid-1966 I started work at Wavertree Library. It was close enough to my house that I hurried home every lunchtime for a boiled egg to convince my mother that I was adequately nourished. (While I was at grammar school she'd provided me every weekday with cold sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, packages I'm afraid I soon took to dumping in the schoolyard bin.) I was taken under the wing of Derek Dorrity, the deputy librarian, who remarked on how fast I was learning the skills of the business: hardly a surprise, since I enjoyed librarianship, which in those days had a good deal to do with books. Derek was a diabetic and presumably unaware that the female staff derided him for having taken one of them on a date and tried to kiss her. An intelligent but lonely fellow, he soon invited me to spend a day with him at home, where he played me recordings of classical music before we walked up Bidston Hill. Some years later I heard that he'd hanged himself.
One Saturday in January 1967 a member of staff called in sick, and a substitute was sent from the Sefton Park branch—Rosemary, a flautist. We chatted about culture, and when she learned I was a member of the Merseyside Film Institute Society she asked me to buy tickets for her and another girl. She expressed interest in other films I mentioned, but my timidity might have ensured that things progressed no further if she hadn't eventually asked whether I was inviting her to one of them (Hitchcock's The Birds). I stammered that I was, and three months later we were engaged.
Does that sound precipitate? I fear that both of us were desperate for a partner and unable to stand back far enough from the relationship to see that it was doomed. It was already plain that Rosemary didn't like horror in fiction or film. She began to try and coax me away from it, not least in my writing (I still recall her grimace as she read a passage I'd just penned of "Reply Guaranteed"). I retaliated by attacking classical music for valuing beauty above disquiet, which was both unreasonable and dishonest of me. I think the crux of the disagreement was whether lyricism and horror could co-exist within a work, and my instinct was and is that they can.
After six months Rosemary's parents terminated the relationship, apparently not the first time they had intervened in such a manner. Among the ways they found Rosemary superior to me was her being a professional musician. When I retorted that I was as professional a writer, great was their scorn. Admittedly I had just one book to my name, but a single book from Arkham House meant a good deal to the cognoscenti. Besides, having written "The Cellars" and "Cold Print" and "Reply Guaranteed," I had a clear sense of the new direction I was taking. I was shown the back door and trudged into the night to buy a pack of cigarettes, which Rosemary had persuaded me to give up, or at least to pretend to. After a few miserable days I experienced a considerable sense of release and a rush of creativity that produced both "The Scar" and the final draft of "Concussion." Episodes from my time with Rosemary show up in "The End of a Summer's Day" and "The Puppets" and especially "Napier Court" (in which the unflattering self-portrait is entirely accurate). No experience is wasted if it provides me with material.
Perhaps the most positive result of our broken engagement was that it cured me of desperation. (I hope it had that effect on Rosemary too.) If anything I became almost too relaxed about relationships. I'd been attending British science fiction conventions for some years, despite my mother's disapproval of such goings-on at Easter, and at the 1968 convention in Buxton I was introduced to Jenny Chandler, daughter of A. Bertram Chandler, the veteran science fiction writer. (Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham helped choose her name.) Too little came of our meeting, but next year in Oxford we were more than happy to encounter each other again. Brian Aldiss recommended a fine Indian restaurant for our first meal together—thanks, Brian! Before long we were visiting each other. Jenny lived outside Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, the very county in which I'd set The Inhabitant of the Lake. Visiting the area made me aware that my version of it had been almost as inaccurate as my attempts to depict Massachusetts; the Cotswold hills do not roll gently, believe me. Her mother made me welcome while her stepfather suffered my presence and Jenny's, whereas on Merseyside, since my mother wasn't offering a room, our splendid friends Norman and Ina Shorrock—the very folk who'd introduced us in Buxton—put Jenny and often me up.
1969 saw me into a second regular job: film reviewer for the recently established local BBC station, Radio Merseyside. Tony Wolfe, the producer of the arts programme, originally invited the secretary of a new underground film society to be interviewed, but the secretary wanted a member to support him, and in the end I did most of the talking. The other development that belonging to the society brought me was a police raid at my home after I'd advertised the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom for sale in the newsletter. "Look what you've done now," my mother cried—unfairly, I thought—at my father as she pounded on his bedroom door. The four plainclothes policemen took away other items, not least a book by Samuel Beckett, apparently because it contained the word "arse". Ultimately all the books were returned except for de Sade's, the exact same unexpurgated translation of which can be found in any large British bookshop these days.
I reviewed some of the underground films for Tony Wolfe, who then sent me off to cover mainstream cinema. I've been doing so for Radio Merseyside ever since. Press shows are a welcome refuge from the stench of popcorn and the shrilling or, entirely as irritating, the illuminated text messages of mobile phones. Just as I derived stories of mine from librarianship—"In the Shadows," "Root Cause"—so filmgoing gave me the background for tales such as "After the Queen" and "The Show Goes On" and the novel Ancient Images. For a few months I broadcast my reviews live on a teatime music and chat show that Tony produced, and his differences with the presenter suggested the basis of "Midnight Hobo."
In 1970 Jenny finished training as a teacher and moved to Liverpool, where she rented a bed-sitter. Her landlord proved to be an Irish Catholic who knew the headmaster of the Catholic school where she started teaching. He might almost have been inserted into the narrative as a symbol of the past I'd presumed to leave behind. One Sunday morning he came to the flat and interrogated us in separate rooms: were we sleeping together? You bet we were, but we weren't telling him. I found us a flat in Princes Avenue in Toxteth, and we moved in. Years later I would set tales in the area—"The Brood," "The Invocation," The Doll Who Ate His Mother. A spiky Christ still threatens to leap from the façade of the church on the next block.
On the first day of 1971 we were married in Cheltenham. My mother wasn't there, since she didn't want to stay with anyone she didn't know. For our wedding night Jenny and I were booked into what proved to be Cheltenham's famous gay hotel. At the bar a chap expressed his condolences on my marriage and offered me a lovely vicar for the night. That summer we had a belated honeymoon outside Keswick in the Lake District. Some of our walks gave me the setting for "Accident Zone," while our later stays in the hotel and outings from it were the basis of a better tale, "Above the World."
I think it was actually on the first day of our honeymoon that my father fell (or, according to my mother, was pushed) downstairs at the fireplace manufacturers where he now worked as a clerk, having retired from the police. My mother called me long distance to demand I go back to see him in hospital, but I told her she had to be kidding. I'd been considerably more affected by the news of August Derleth's death just a few weeks earlier. Although we never met, in his many letters August was the nearest thing to a father figure I'd had.
On our return to Liverpool a week later I let a couple of days pass before I made myself go to see my father, and then I couldn't find the hospital. My mother had told me it was behind a department store when in fact it was several streets away from the front of the building. I wandered about until visiting time was over. I wasn't trying very hard to find the hospital.
I did locate it the next day, and my father. He looked old and feeble and unfamiliar; he wore bandages on his skull and a tube up his penis. Only his blurred murmur, which he must have been unable to control, seemed familiar from all those overheard arguments. Jenny said he looked very much as I shall in old age, but I couldn't touch him or understand what he was saying, only feel repelled by my mother's belated concern for him. I left as soon as I could, and a few days later he died.
I attended his funeral in the pouring rain. His sister peered into the open grave and cried "Where's mother?" Subsequently my mother claimed that policemen at the inquest had told her they weren't satisfied that my father had died of natural causes, but I heard no more of this.
The sense of relief I'd experienced on leaving home was short-lived, for my mother and Jenny disliked each other. The spectacle of their mutual politeness made me increasingly tense, not least because I felt as if I was somehow in the middle of all this. My mother's front room seemed unbearably small to me with both of them in it. She didn't want to visit us if she would have to take a taxi home, since she suspected all their drivers of wanting to rape her. Soon I found excuses to visit her by myself, but this only made her more suspicious of Jenny. She frequently accused me of discussing her with Jenny, though in fact over the years she'd managed to inhibit me against discussing her with anyone.
I wrote little new fiction in the first years of our marriage. Being married was the best kind of distraction. I also felt that having completed my second book, Demons by Daylight, I'd reached the end of some stage of my writing and wasn't sure how to go on. I delivered the book to Arkham House in the summer of 1968 and later substituted one story as well as removing the J for John from my byline when I decided to do away with the name. The collection would have been published sooner except for Derleth's death, and I may well have used the delay as another unstated excuse not to write much. Alongside all this I'd discovered cannabis, and soon fell into the habit of smoking a joint every day: Peter in The Face That Must Die is a self-portrait. Things had to change.
They did. Kirby McCauley moved from Minneapolis to New York and became a literary agent, having seen that many of his British correspondents—Robert Aickman and I among them—needed one. Jenny persuaded me that we ought to be buying a house instead of paying rent, and we managed to obtain a mortgage for a staggering sum—could it have been as much as four thousand pounds?—from the bank. Shortly after we took up residence in a terraced house in Tuebrook 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.
I could have been put on display as an example of how not to write professionally. For a great deal too long I didn't start work until about nine in the morning, presumably in imitation of a day job, and on the same principle I took every weekend off. Before putting my pen to the exercise book I would read all of the story I'd written so far. I'd substantially reduced my cannabis intake, not least because it was hard to come by, but I tended to make up for that on Sundays and spend Mondays with a hashish hangover. Nevertheless a bunch of tales resulted from all this, some of them set in actual locations close by—"The Man in the Underpass", for instance, and later "Mackintosh Willy". Kirby sold quite a few of them in time but 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. Now I'm at my desk by seven every morning if not earlier, having worked out at least the first line of the day's prose if it's a first draft. That's every day, including Christmas and my birthday. Any first draft goes with me on holiday or to conventions and continues to be written every morning there. In 1972, with a story called "Litter," I made the mistake of writing the first pages and then waiting until I felt inspired to go on. It's the only time I've suffered from writer's block, which lasted six months.
The Doll Who Ate His Mother was published in October 1976 to largely indifferent reviews and worse sales. The solitary way I know to recover from that kind of blow is to write, and so I began another novel, The Face That Must Die. This was based to some extent on my mother's conviction that people around her were other people in disguise. It also drew on my own recent experiences with LSD. Those gave me material for quite a few tales—"Above the World," "The Pattern," and two stories based to some extent on trips I'd taken around the nearby Freshfield Nature Reserve, "The Faces at Pine Dunes" and especially "The Voice of the Beach"—but they'd led to a nightmarish extended flashback from which Jenny and some string quartets, Beethoven's Opus 135 in particular, had to some extent rescued me. Indeed, while writing a chapter of The Face That Must Die I saw my handwriting begin to writhe on the page. I don't recommend this as an aid to composition.
I thought and still think that the novel improved on my first. It traps the reader for chapter after chapter in the mind of the psychotic John Horridge and never attempts to sanitise the experience. For me the horror lies at least as much in his minute-to-minute consciousness as in the violence he commits (which, contrary to rumour, was never toned down in any edition of the book). I was thrown when more than one publisher of my first novel declared that Horridge was the problem and either found him unconvincing or asked me to focus the book on more sympathetic characters. For the first time I baulked at editorial suggestions, and eventually the book was published as a British paperback original, although by then I'd lost so much faith in it that I agreed to cuts and made some myself. Robert Bloch championed even this version, and the first American edition and all subsequent reprints are restored to completeness.
The book wouldn't gain a reputation until the Eighties, however. In 1977 its rejection forced me to concoct a commercial success. This was The Parasite, a novel about astral projection, stuffed with enough occult detail and film lore to have been split into two (possibly better) books. Its best sections are those in which I was sufficiently engaged with the material to forget about the market. We needed it to sell, because although Jenny had been supporting us by teaching, we were trying to have children. Publishers bought it, and it did well enough that from then onward—with the partial exception of The Claw (1983), a pseudonymous commission that my British agent obtained while publishers caught up with my backlog—I was able to write whatever felt like the next development, inevitable in itself, and support my family as well.
In August 1978 our daughter Tammy was born. I almost missed the event, having nipped out for a bite to eat at a nearby Indian restaurant, where I had to leave my credit card while Jenny attempted to keep the baby in as I dashed back to the delivery room. The emergence of this small blood-streaked vociferous creature flummoxed me so much that when I was directed to dab her head I thought that meant the baby's, not Jenny's. Many of the pratfalls executed by my characters are my own.
I have to confess that I'd planned two short stories so as not to be distracted from my writing by the new arrival. I'd reached the point of being afraid I might lose the impulse if I took any significant period off from my work. "This Time" went fluently enough, but when I began "Down There" it proved so reluctant to emerge that it might almost have been presuming to imitate birth. After several days I was ready to abandon it—something I've done with a handful of short stories in progress, though no novels—until an image of rain outside a window brought it to life. Perhaps I was secretly guilty about spending too little time with Tam.
She soon made her way into my fiction. The Nameless contains my first sketch of her and establishes the theme of parental paranoia. Despite being commissioned to order, The Claw soon makes personal subjects central—parents who turn monstrous and the vulnerability of children. The father who's transformed into a monster was already present in stories of mine, "The Chimney" in particular, but now he was me. Children at risk, and the unwillingness of witnesses to intervene, had shown up in my tales as early as "The Scar" (1967), decades before child abuse was to become a standard theme of horror fiction. I hope that writing about ghastly fathers prevented me from being quite as bad, but only our children can tell.
In a couple of years we decided where we lived wasn't ideal. I think the key detail may have been all the broken glass that bestrewed the route to the playground in the park. We moved across the river to Wallasey—beside the seaside resort that had inspired "The Companion" and that would be central to The Count of Eleven—before our son Mat was born in June 1981. Sadly, although this was right for us, it was too much for my mother. Though we'd moved less than six miles, it dislodged the last prop of her sanity.
I felt uneasy when she mentioned seeing faces in the foliage outside her house, although she assured me that she didn't find them frightening. Her state became more evident when we invited her for dinner on her birthday that October. I arranged to meet her at our local railway station, since I hadn't yet learned to drive. I waited several hours, phoning her house between trains, and eventually went home to a phone call accusing me of having played a trick on her. She'd been waiting for me at the station in Liverpool, where, she said, people had taken her for a prostitute.
One night soon after that she phoned me in terror, saying that the room was full of people watching her. For a moment I saw her cramped front room full of people whose faces I would have seen if the moment had lasted any longer. Most of the room was dark, but the figures were lit by a dying glare, exactly the light I remembered from nights in my adolescence when I'd wakened next to her in bed. The glare was enough to convince me that the faces of the figures would have had the clarity of a nightmare if I hadn't instantly shut my mind off from the perception. I couldn't bear to be that close.
Things quickly grew worse. Aeroplanes were being used to spy on her, though perhaps one of the pilots was on her side. Once, when she came for dinner, she took baby Mat for a pet animal. When we gave her a photograph of herself holding Tammy, she refused to believe she was the woman in the photograph, whose nose was too big. Her next-door neighbours had secretly bought her house from her landlord and were trying to take over one of the rooms for their daughter's use. Her neighbours on the far side were social workers who wanted her to look after a mad old woman during the day. She would phone me in a panic to say she was in the house that looked like hers but was miles away from hers. Sometimes she felt she was being drugged to cause her to hallucinate. When I tried to persuade her that none of this was happening she would accuse me of conspiring against her, trying to drive her mad.
Even I couldn't pretend nothing was wrong now, but more than thirty years of not discussing her at her insistence made me incapable of seeking medical advice on her behalf. I felt helpless and increasingly desperate whenever I thought of her. Usually on my visits I had to try and disentangle the truth from her account of something that had happened, or she claimed had happened, since my last visit; often we had violent arguments over nothing at all—sometimes we came to blows. More than once I grew so frustrated that I ran at a wall of the room head first. I wasn't always sane myself.
At about three o'clock one morning the police phoned me, having been called to my mother's house by neighbours because she was shouting from an upstairs window for help against the people who were attacking her. Not long after that, on the theory that living near me in a house she knew I owned would make her feel more secure, I managed to obtain a mortgage for one from the bank. Perhaps this seemed the perfect solution because I was at my wit's end, or because it was so close to the ambition she'd nursed throughout my childhood of owning her own home. I couldn't see (though Jenny tried to make me see) that it was too late for this, which might very well exacerbate the situation. Still, we found a house my mother was delighted with, a few minutes' walk away from ours.
The negotiations for buying it took months, as they will. Meanwhile she kept phoning to say that heads were looking at her out of vases or to plead with me to take her home from the house someone had left her in. She slept downstairs on the couch, because people came into her bedroom and pushed her out of bed. By now I left the phone off the hook when I went to bed, but more than once I woke in the dead of night convinced I'd heard its ringing.
Shortly after the contracts of sale had been signed, my mother decided she didn't want to move house after all: she felt at home where she was, she had friends among the neighbours. (Previously she had insisted that the neighbours were circulating a petition to have her put out of her house because she was only a tenant whereas they owned their homes, but a few were on her side and refused to sign.) I managed intermittently to persuade her, sometimes by making wild promises, and spent the week before the move in packing her belongings, since she was either incapable or unwilling. Spending so much time in that house reminded me of my childhood. Remembering how she'd looked after me made me realise how unrecognisable she was now, and how little was left of our relationship. In the back garden I burst into tears.
At first she seemed happy in her new house and finding out where the shops were, two minutes' walk away. She bought a television, which she'd wanted for many years. I imagined her settling in, making friends, taking strolls along the promenade down to which steps led at the bottom of her street. I was as trapped in a fantasy as she was. It took me a while to notice she was no longer changing her clothes. People had stolen all the rest and replaced it with inferior stuff that she refused to wear, instead tying it in bundles that she hid around the house. I was visiting her every day, and now that I'd learned to drive I took her touring the nearby countryside. None of this helped; it simply let me believe now and then that it was a partial solution. Of course I knew it was nothing of the kind.
By now she often phoned me several times a day to go round and tell the people to leave her alone—the children, my sister, the man who looked like the devil. Often she told me I was there with her, or someone who was pretending to be me, who looked extremely ill and who had her worried sick. Occasionally I persuaded her that she'd just awakened from dreaming. Sometimes I rushed to her house to prove her wrong, but either she denied having called me or the people had just gone: this lady in the corner and the people in the curtains would confirm she was telling the truth, or were they afraid to speak? She knew they weren't really people in the curtains but photographs of people that someone kept putting in the room—hadn't I heard of talking pictures? That was as far as I could argue her back towards reality. What was I trying to do, drive her mad so that woman and I could have her house? Oh no, of course, it wasn't her house, though I'd said it would be. I'd shown her three houses and this was her least favourite, she hadn't really wanted it at all.…She refused absolutely to believe that anything was wrong with her or that she needed help.
I did. For the first time in my life I considered seeking help on her behalf and was too desperate to behave as she had programmed me to. Even so, I spent months trying to persuade her to enroll with our family doctor, until one day I drove her there and dumped her in the waiting-room. She told the doctor I was her husband who had left her for another woman. The doctor agreed with me that something had to be done.
Nothing could be, since my mother refused help. The doctor referred me to the social services, who ran luncheon clubs and day care centres for the elderly. The case worker made two visits to my mother, at the second of which I was present and saw her fail to explain what services she was offering (presumably assuming, quite unjustifiably, that my mother would remember what she had been told the first time). She left after five minutes and put the case away among the dormant files. The few times I went to the social services after that she was usually on holiday, or not back from holiday when she was expected, or off sick. Once she told me that perhaps my mother's hallucinations were company for her. Her colleagues praised her professional competence.
So began the worst year of my life. I realised that my mother never went out of the house by herself, though she was convinced she did. Her calls became more frequent and more terrified, and all I could do was grow used to them, respond indifferently, tell her I'd be round later. I still visited her every day, though by now we loathed each other; either we had violent arguments in which she clung to the idea that nothing was wrong with her, or hardly spoke. Her grasp of language was failing, and often she would refer to something by a wholly unrelated word—she would call a car a house, for instance—or simply trail off, but although I almost always deduced what she meant I refused to admit that I did. I was becoming everything she feared and hated. Sometimes when I took her for a drive I was tempted to leave her miles from anywhere; sometimes I considered killing her, reaching across her on a deserted stretch of motorway and opening the passenger door. Perhaps she would leave the gas fire on unlit or finally wander down into the river.
The doctor could see how I was, and called in the community health officer to visit my mother. He was sympathetic, and more skilful than the social worker at the job she ought to have been doing, but all he could do was visit my mother regularly in the hope of establishing a rapport. Meanwhile my behaviour towards my wife and children grew steadily worse. When we took a fortnight's holiday in the summer of 1982, I made sure the social services knew I was away, but I was hoping that my mother would have to go out shopping by herself or starve to death.
When I came back her house smelled worse and was swarming with flies, but otherwise nothing had changed: the same arguments, the same helpless mutual loathing. She had clearly not been out of the house. She accused me of having stolen her key, and when I showed her she had several copies in her purse, insisted that they didn't fit the lock. She went to the front door to demonstrate, and I watched her trying to turn the lock with a box of matches.
Either I was able to see clearly at last that she needed constant supervision or two weeks' respite had left me even less able to cope. I spoke to the community health officer, who had concluded independently that part of his problem in establishing a rapport was that my mother felt (however bitterly) she could always rely on me. I told her I wouldn't be visiting her for three weeks; if she needed anything she would have to call on the services available, whose phone numbers I posted on the wall above the phone.
She called me a couple of days later to ask if we were still friends. Those were just about her last words to me. Nearly two weeks later I heard from the community health officer. He'd visited my mother's house two days running but had received no answer. I hurried round and let myself in.
The kitchen and most of the hall were flooded by a tap that had been left full on. My mother lay on the sofa, breathing but past waking. She looked decades older. The kitchen drawers were full of liquescent sliced bread, months old. The television was turned over on its screen; a mirror lay smashed in the hall. From the cuts on her hand it seemed she must have punched her reflection in the face.
I called the community health officer and drove to the social services. The case worker was off sick, and the officer I spoke to complained that it was nearly her lunch hour. She tried to make me feel guilty enough about my mother to go away, until I began to scream at her. I should not like to have to rely on most of the social workers I met, and perhaps after all it was to the good that my mother never had.
Our doctor and the community health officer had her admitted to hospital that afternoon. She'd regained consciousness, and was pitifully grateful both to see me and to go into hospital. I hoped this would be the first step towards her going into care, but every time I visited the hospital she seemed worse. Soon she didn't recognise me. Sometimes she lay with her eyes moving back and forth, very fast, like a metronome. I fed her water from a toddler's lidded cup, managing a cupful an hour if she didn't spit it out. Less than two weeks after she had been admitted, the ward sister called to say she had died during the night. I feel she died of my neglect and of my having destroyed her memories.
I was neglectful even after her death. I didn't view her body in the funeral home, not having realised that I could. I didn't place an obituary notice in any newspaper, which meant that none of her friends attended the funeral. She was cremated, and I took the ashes to the family grave in Huddersfield that weekend, only to find that there was nobody to tell me where the grave (which I'd seen once, twenty years previously) was. I set out to look for it, but found after an hour that I'd examined perhaps a tenth of the headstones. I gave up then, planning to come back on a weekday when someone would be in attendance, and wandered aimlessly through the graveyard until suddenly I halted, turned, and found myself looking straight at the family headstone. I had walked to it by the shortest possible route. I should like to think that my mother had managed at last to take me where she wanted to be.
During that last year I wrote much of Incarnate, by far my most elaborate and ambitious novel up to that date—perhaps even up to now. I used to think it was somewhere I could go and still be in control, but that wasn't quite the case. Since it was one of my books that came closest to writing itself, outstripping my initial ideas to create its own intricate structure, I think my need was to lose control, at least to the extent of entrusting myself to the energy of the narrative and the compulsion to write. The first draft was complete before I grasped that one of the several plots concerned a mother who grows alien and terrible. Perhaps I had to overlook this in order to write.
People may think she's still with me. My latest novel, Secret Stories, is about a writer whose mother submits his work for publication without asking him. It's more coincidental than autobiographical, but my entire life is there to be drawn on, and even its earliest stages often give me insights. The foundation of my life now, however, is made up of Jenny and Tammy and Mat. They're all that's best about me, and without them I wouldn't be half the person I am, which means half the writer as well. You can find them in many of my tales—Obsession, The Influence, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven are just some. Jenny is my first reader and editor—the only other person who can read my handwriting—and my constant collaborator. The next piece she'll read is this.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Ashley, Michael, editor, The Fantasy Reader's Guide to Ramsey Campbell, Cosmos, 1980.
Joshi, S. T., Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction, Liverpool University Press (Liverpool, England), 2001.
King, Stephen, Danse Macabre, Everest House (New York, NY), 1981.
St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 1980; September 1, 1992, Elliott Swanson, review of Best New Horror 3, p. 30; February 1, 1993, Ray Olson, review of Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1991, p. 969; October 15, 1993, Elliott Swanson, review of Best New Horror 4, p. 417; June 1, 1998, David Pitt, review of The Last Voice They Hear, p. 1731; June 1, 2000, David Pitt, review of Silent Children, p. 1852.
Delap's F and SF Review, April, 1977.
Fantastic Stories, June, 1977.
Fantasy Macabre, April, 1981.
Fantasy Newsletter, April, 1980; December, 1980.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1997, review of Nazareth Hill, p. 570; May 1, 1998, review of The Last Voice They Hear, p. 599.
Library Journal, February 15, 1982, James B. Hemesath, review of Dark Companions, p. 472; October 15, 1982, review of New Terrors, p. 2004; September 1, 1983, Keith W. McCoy, review of Incarnate, p. 1719; February 15, 1985, Eric W. Johnson, review of Obsession, p. 179; July 16, 1986, James B. Hemesath, review of The Hungry Moon, p. 105; February 1, 1988, Marylaine Block, review of The Influence, p. 75; June 1, 1992, Marylaine Block, review of The Count of Eleven, p. 172; October 15, 1994, Eric W. Johnson, review of The Long Lost, p. 86; July, 1996, Robert C. Moore, review of The One Safe Place, p. 154; May 15, 1997, John Noel, review of Nazareth Hill, p. 98.
Liverpool Daily Post, March 31, 1964.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 18, 1981.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1973; May, 1986, Algis Budrys, review of The Face That Must Die, p. 46.
Necrofile, summer, 1998, review of The Last Voice They Hear, p. 1; spring, 1999, review of Ghosts and Grisly Things, p. 3.
New Statesman, April 3, 1987, Kim Newman, review of The Hungry Moon, p. 31; March 25, 1988, Kim Newman, reviews of The Influence, Cold Print, Night Visions, Cutting Edge, and Dark Feasts, p. 28.
New Statesman & Society, December 7, 1990, Elizabeth J. Young, review of Best New Horror, p. 35.
New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1976.
Nyctalops, May, 1977.
Publishers Weekly, August 26, 1983, Barbara A. Bannon, review of Incarnate, p. 369; October 28, 1983, review of The Face That Must Die, p. 59; December 21, 1984, review of The Nameless, p. 86; February 8, 1985, review of Obsession, p. 67; May 3, 1985, review of Cold Print, p. 67; December 13, 1985, review of Obsession, p. 52; May 30, 1986, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Hungry Moon, p. 56; March 6, 1987, Sybil Steinberg, review of Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death, p. 105; January 15, 1988, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Influence, p. 77; April 28, 1989, Sybil Steinberg, review of Ancient Images, p. 66; October 19, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Best New Horror, p. 48; December 21, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Midnight Sun, p. 43; October 4, 1991, review of Best New Horror 2, p. 78; May 11, 1992, review of The Count of Eleven, p. 55; December 14, 1992, review of Alone with the Horrors, p. 40; May 3, 1993, review of Strange Things and Stranger Places, p. 294; August 16, 1993, review of Deathport, p. 98; October 18, 1993, review of Best New Horror 4, p. 64; September 12, 1994, review of The Long Lost, p. 84; July 1, 1996, review of The One Safe Place, p. 42; May 19, 1997, review of Nazareth Hill, p. 67; April 27, 1998, review of The Last Voice They Hear, p. 43; June 26, 2000, review of Silent Children, p. 55; September 25, 2000, review of Ghosts and Grisly Things, p. 92.
Rapport, January, 1997, review of The One Safe Place, p. 20.
School Library Journal, October, 1992, review of Best New Horror 2, p. 155.
Shadow, fall, 1972; October, 1973.
Washington Post, November 20, 1981.
Washington Post Book World, August 23, 1981; April 25, 1982.
Whispers, March, 1982.
Wilson Library Bulletin, May 15, 1989, review of Ancient Images, p. 87; November, 1989, Gene LaFaille, review of Ancient Images, p. 98; March, 1994, Gene LaFaille, review of Alone with the Horrors, p. 102.
ONLINE
Ramsey Campbell's Home Page,http://www.ramseycampbell.com (November 23, 2004).