The Collected Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell Part 108

For a moment she thought only the wind was reaching for him as it bowed the trees and dislodged objects from the foliage-leaves that rustled, twigs that sc.r.a.ped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren't falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some might never have had any skin. She saw their shrivelled eyes glimmer eagerly and their toothless mouths gape with an identical infantile hunger. Their combined weight bowed the lowest branches while they extended arms like withered sticks to s.n.a.t.c.h the child.

In that helpless instant Jacqueline was overwhelmed by a feeling she would never have admitted-a rush of childish glee, of utter irresponsibility. For a moment she was no longer a nurse, not even a retired one as old as some of her patients had been. She shouldn't have put Brian at risk, but now he was beyond saving. Then he fell out of the dark beneath the poplars, in which there was no longer any sign of life, and she made a grab at him. The strength had left her arms, and he struck the hard earth with a thud that put her in mind of the fall of a lid.

"Brian?" she said and bent groaning to him. "Brian," she repeated, apparently loud enough to be audible all the way up the house. She heard her old window rumble open, and Cynthia's cry: "What have you done now?" She heard footsteps thunder down the stairs, and turned away from the small still body beneath the uninhabited trees as her sister dashed out of the porch. Jacqueline had just one thought, but surely it must make a difference. "Nothing caught him," she said.

Introduction To Alone With The Horrors: So Far.

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

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

I've made one subst.i.tution. Previous editions of Alone with the Horrors have led off with "The Room in the Castle", my earliest tale to be professionally published. The idea was to show how I began. Here instead is something rarer to perform the same service. It too dates from when I was doing my best to imitate Lovecraft, but "The Tower from Yuggoth" (1961) demonstrates how I fared before August Derleth took me under his editorial wing. It was published in Goudy, a fanzine edited by my friend Pat Kearney, who later wrote a greenbacked history of Olympia Press. It was ill.u.s.trated by Eddie Jones, another old friend but sadly a late one. At the time it felt very much like the start of my career as a writer; now it looks more like a phase I needed Derleth to rescue me from. At least it's eldritch--it keeps saying as much-- and it also offers cackling trees and curse-muttering streams. The reader may end up knowing how they felt, and my notion of how Ma.s.sachusetts rustics spoke may also be productive of a shudder. Had I conjured him up from his essential salts for an opinion, Lovecraft would undoubtedly have pointed out these excesses and many other flaws. And watch out for those peculiar erections in the woods! I used the term in utter innocence, not then having experienced any of them while awake. No doubt a Christian Brotherly promise of h.e.l.l if one encouraged such developments helped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chicago and San Francisco tales of Fritz Leiber were now my models in various ways. I wanted to achieve that sense of supernatural terror which derives from the everyday urban landscape rather than invading it, and I greatly admired--still do--how Fritz wrote thoroughly contemporary weird tales that were nevertheless rooted in the best traditions of the field and drew some of their strength from uniting British and American influences. One of mine in which I used an actual Liverpool location--"The Man in the Underpa.s.s"--has a special significance for me: it was the first tale I wrote after having, encouraged by T. E. D. Klein's exegesis of Demons by Daylight and by my wife, Jenny, stepped into the abyss of full-time writing in July 1973. To begin with I wrote only on weekdays. Lord, did I need to learn.

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

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

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

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

"The Chimney" (1975) is disguised autobiography--disguised from me at the time of writing, that is. Was it while reading it aloud at Jack Sullivan's apartment in New York that I became aware of its subtext? It was certainly under those circ.u.mstances that I discovered how funny a story it was, though the laughter died well before the end. Robert Aickman described it as the best tale of mine that he'd read, but his correspondence with Cherry Wilder betrays how little he meant by that. Still, it gained me my first World Fantasy Award, and Fritz Leiber told me this was announced to "great applause." Harlan Ellison (also present, I believe) had no time for it. "It was a terrible story," he wanted the readers of Comics Journal to know, "and should not have won the award."

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

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

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

"Out of Copyright" (1977) had no specific anthologist in mind, but Ray Bradbury thought it did, and enthused about it on that basis. "Above the World" (1977) derived much of its imagery and setting from my one wholly positive, not to mention visionary, LSAID experience. The hotel is the very one where Jenny and I spent our belated honeymoon and some other holidays. In the early nineties, a short independent film, Return to Love, was based on the story, though without reading the final credits you mightn't realise; indeed, the t.i.tle gives fair warning. "Mackintosh w.i.l.l.y" (1977) was suggested by graffiti within a concrete shelter in the very park the story uses. When I approached I saw that the letters in fact spelled MACK TOSH w.i.l.l.y. Close by was an area of new concrete, roped off but with the footprints of some scamp embedded in it, and these two elements gave birth to the tale. When J. K. and I were visiting Liverpool locations for the first edition of this book I took him to the shelter, but alas, the legend had been erased from it.

The entire location of "The Show Goes On" (1978)--the cinema, I mean--is no more. It was the Hippodrome in Liverpool, and I thought I'd failed to do it justice in an earlier tale, "The Dark Show". It was built as a music hall, and behind the screen was a maze of pa.s.sages and dressing-rooms, as I discovered with increasing unease one night when I missed my way to a rear exit. Eventually I reached a pair of barred doors beyond which, as I tried to budge them, a dim illumination seemed to show me figures making for them. Homeless folk, very possibly--they didn't look at all well--but when, years later, I was able, as a film reviewer, to attend the last night of the cinema and explore its less public areas, I never managed to find those doors again.

Only global warming is likely to do away with the location of "The Ferries" (1978), though the spring tides drive small animals out of the gra.s.s onto the promenade--at least, we must hope they're small animals. "Midnight Hobo" (1978) also had a real setting, a bridge under a railway in Tuebrook in Liverpool. As for Roy and Derrick, they were suggested by a relations.h.i.+p between personnel at Radio Merseyside: Roy was my old producer Tony Wolfe, and Derrick--well, I really mustn't say. Roy's grisly interview with the starlet was based pretty closely on one I had to conduct with a member of the cast of a seventies British s.e.x comedy. According to the Internet Movie Database, she made one more film.

Angela Carter has suggested that the horror story is a holiday from morality. It often is, especially when it uses the idea of supernatural evil as an alibi for horrors we are quite capable of perpetrating ourselves, but it needn't be, as I hope "The Depths" (1978) and others of my tales confirm. I've always thought of this one as a companion piece to my novel The Nameless. Jaume Balaguero's fine film demonstrates how much of that can be stripped away, but I think the central metaphor of giving up your name and with it your responsibility for your actions and your right to choose is more timely than ever--indeed, perhaps it's time I wrote about it again. "The Depths" is concerned with the process of demonisation, another way of finding someone else to blame. I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself; the worst writing in my field gives me any number of excuses.

"Down There" (1978) very nearly joined my other unfinished short stories. I tried to write it when our daughter was just a few weeks old. I felt compelled to write even under those circ.u.mstances, but my imagination couldn't grasp the material for several days. I was about to abandon the effort when the image of a fire escape viewed from above in the rain came alive, and so did the tale. The early pages of the first draft had to be taken apart and thoroughly reworked, but there's no harm in that--in fact, it has become increasingly my way. Alas, it wasn't when I wrote "The Companion".

With a little more s.e.xual explicitness "The Fit" (1979) might have found a place in Scared Stiff (two stories from which have been deleted from the present book, but you can find them in the expanded Tor edition of my tales of s.e.x and death). Whereas those stories explore what happens to the horror story if s.e.xual themes become overt, "The Fit" may be said to squint at the effects of Freudian knowingness. f.a.n.n.y Cave indeed! I'd originally written "The Depths" for my anthology New Terrors, but when Andrew J. Offutt sent in a story that seemed to share the theme, I wrote "The Fit" as a subst.i.tute for mine.

My memory suggests that "Hearing is Believing" (1979) was an attempt to write about a haunting by a single sense. "The Hands" (1980) came out of an encounter in the street with a lady bearing a clipboard. I'm reminded of the slogan on the British poster for Devils of Monza: "She was no ordinary nun." Indeed, the real lady wasn't one at all--I suppose some lingering Catholicism effected the transformation for the purposes of the tale. This seems as good a point as any to mention my forthcoming novel Spanked by Nuns.

"Again" (1980) appeared in the Twilight Zone magazine under T. E. D. Klein's editors.h.i.+p, although I gather Rod Serling's widow took some persuading. One British journal found the tale too disturbing to publish, while a British Sunday newspaper magazine dismissed it as "not horrid enough." Who would have expected Catherine Morland to take up editing? The story saw a powerful graphic adaptation by Michael Zulli in the adult comic Taboo, which was apparently one reason why the publication was and perhaps still is liable to be seized by British Customs.

Two novels occupied my time for the next three years, to the exclusion of any other fiction. While picnicking with the family in Delamere Forest to celebrate having finished Incarnate I thought of the basis for "Just Waiting" (1983), and the genesis of a new short story felt like a celebration too. My touch here and in "Seeing the World" (1983) is lighter than it used to be, or so I like to think. That doesn't mean what's lit up isn't still dark.

"Old Clothes" (1983) was an attempt to develop the notion of apports. I'm as loath as Lovecraft ever was to use stale occult ideas, but I think this one let me have some fun. In 1984 Alan Ryan asked me for a new Halloween story, and "Apples" was the result. It became the occasion of one of my more memorable encounters with a copy-editor, though only after the American edition had respected my text. The British paperback version of the tale proved to have suffered something like a hundred changes. The excellent Nick Webb, the managing director of Sphere, had the edition withdrawn and pulped. Had I not written "Out of Copyright" by then, I might well have turned it into a tale about a copy editor. Of course not all such folk are interfering b.l.o.o.d.y fools, but perhaps an example of what befell "Apples" is in order. Where I'd written: His dad and mum were like that, they were teachers and tried to make him friends at our school they taught at, boys who didn't like getting dirty and always had combs and handkerchiefs ...

The copy editor thought I should have written His mum and dad were like that. They were teachers and tried to make friends for him at our school, where they taught boys who didn't like getting dirty and always had combs and handkerchiefs ...

I rest my case, and my head.

"The Other Side" (1985) was an attempt to equal the surrealism of J. K. Potter's picture on which it was based. The last thing I wanted to do was end the story with his image, since the combination would have had much the same effect as the infamous Weird Tales ill.u.s.tration that gave away one of Lovecraft's best endings. The image can be found on page 97 of J. Kdd'so superb Paper Tiger collection Horripilations, which also contains (among much else) his ill.u.s.trations for the aborted limited edition of The Influence.

Kathryn Cramer asked me to write a story in which the building in which it took place would (I may be paraphrasing) itself figure as a character. She certainly didn't mean her letter to potential contributors to be disconcerting, but she pointed to several stories of mine as epitomising her theme, which made me feel expected to imitate myself and daunted by the task. I struggled to come up with an idea until circ.u.mstances gave me one, as happens often enough to let me believe in synchronicity. The Campbell family had just moved into the house in which I now write, but we hadn't yet sold the previous one, to which I daily walked. I forget how long it took me to notice that here was the germ of "Where the Heart Is" (1986).

"Boiled Alive" (1986)--a t.i.tle I hoped folk would recognise was meant to be intemperate--was also conceived in response to an invitation, this time from David Pringle of Interzone. When I try to write science fiction my style generally stiffens up, and so I attempted to be ungenerically offbeat instead. That isn't to say I don't think it's a horror story: I think all the stories in this collection are. I'd certainly call "Another World" (1987) one, and it too was invited, by Paul Gamble ("Gamma") when he worked for Forbidden Planet in London. His idea was an anthology of tales on the theme of a forbidden planet, though when Roz Kaveney took over the editors.h.i.+p she chose stories simply on the basis that the author had signed at the bookshop. I had, but I cleaved to the theme as well.

As for "End of the Line" (1991), what can I say? It is, but may also have begun a lighter style of comedy in my stuff. Whatever the tone, though, it's still pretty dark in here. I hope the jokes are inextricable from the terror. However, it was less with laughter than with a sneer that a hypnotist who claimed to reawaken people's memories of their past lives once advised me to study his career for when I "started writing seriously," rather as if those responsible for The Amityville Horror had accused, say, s.h.i.+rley Jackson of having her tongue in her cheek when she wrote The Haunting of Hill House. I see no reason why dealing with the fantastic requires one to write bulls.h.i.+t, and I submit this collection as evidence.

In the thirty years covered by this book I saw horror fiction become enormously more popular and luxuriant. I use the last word, as tends to be my way with words, for its ambiguity. There's certainly something to be said in favour of the growth of a field which has produced so many good new writers and so much good writing. One of its appeals to me, ever since I became aware of the tales of M. R. James, is the way the best work achieves its effects through the use of style, the selection of language. On the other hand, the field has sprouted writers whose fiction I can best describe as Janet and John primers of mutilation, where the length of the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters betrays the maximum attention span of either the audience or the writer or more probably both. There are also quite a bunch of writers with more pretensions whose basic drive appears to be to outdo one another in disgustingness. "It is very easy to be nauseating," M. R. James wrote more than sixty years ago, and the evidence is all around us. However, I hope that in time the genre will return to the mainstream, where it came from and where it belongs.

What to do? Nothing, really, except keep writing and wait for the verdict of history. The field is big enough for everyone, after all. I came into it because I wanted to repay some of the pleasure it had given me--particularly the work of those writers who, as David Aylward put it, "used to strive for awe"--and I stay in it because it allows me to talk about whatever themes I want to address and because I have by no means found its limits. Perhaps in the next thirty years, but I rather hope not. I like to think my best story is the one I haven't written yet, and that's why I continue to write.

Ramsey Campbell.

Wallasey, Merseyside.

1 December 2002.

Foreword To Cold Print - Chasing the Unknown (1984).

The first book of Lovecraft's I read made me into a writer. I found it in the window of a Liverpool sweetshop called Bas...o...b..'s. I was fourteen years old then, and went there every Sat.u.r.day to search through the secondhand paperbacks at the rear of the shop once I'd made sure there was nothing in the window. Sometimes, among the covers faded like unpreserved Technicolor in the window, there would be a bright new book on which to spend my pocket money: an issue of Supernatural Stories written by R. L. Fanthorpe under innumerable pseudonyms (Pel Torro, Oth.e.l.lo Baron, Peter O'Flinn, Oben Lerteth, Rene Rolant, Deutero Spartacus, Elton T. Neef were just some of them), a Gerald G. Swan Weird and Occult Miscellany whose back cover advertised studies of torture and flagellation and execution 'for the nature student.' But that Sat.u.r.day, among the yellowing molls and dusty cowboys, I saw a skeletal fungoid creature, the t.i.tle Cry Horror, the author's name I'd been yearning for years to see on a book. For a panicky moment I thought I hadn't half a crown to buy the book, dreaded that it would be gone when I came back with the money. I read it in a single malingering day off school; for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but the greatest writer I had ever read.

Some (Stephen King and Charles L. Grant among them) would take that to prove that Lovecraft is an adolescent phase one goes through - certainly a writer best read when one is that age. I can only say that I find his best work more rewarding now than I did then. Grant claims that 'when you grow up you discover that what attracted you when you were fourteen was his rococo style and very little else,' but I don't think it was so in my case; certainly I don't agree that 'the style makes the stories.' Indeed, I think that's precisely the trap into which too many imitators of Lo veer aft fall.

I was one of them, of course, having already done my best to imitate Machen and John d.i.c.kson Carr. If I avoided the trap to some extent, I did so unconsciously -did so because I didn't merely admire Lovecraft, I was steeped in his work and his vision throughout the writing of my first published book. I began it as a way of paying back some of the pleasure his work had given me, some of the sense of awesome expectation that even reading some of his t.i.tles - 'The Colour out of s.p.a.ce,' 'The Whisperer in Darkness' - could conjure up. No other writer had given me that so far. I wrote my Lovecraftian tales for my own pleasure: the pleasure of convincing myself that they were almost as good as the originals. It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans, the Londoner Pat Kearney and the American Betty Kujawa, that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House.

'There are myriad unspeakable terrors in the cosmos in which our universe is but an atom; and the two gates of agony, life and death, gape to pour forth infinities of abominations. And the other gates which spew forth their broods are, thank G.o.d, little known to most of us. Few can have seen the sp.a.w.n of ultimate corruption, or known that centre of insane chaos where Azathoth, the blind idiot G.o.d, bubbles mindlessly; I myself have never seen these things - but G.o.d knows that what I saw in those cataclysmic moments in the church at Kingsport transcends the ultimate earthly knowledge.'

So began 'The Tomb-Herd,' one of the stories I sent Derleth. Since his death, a regrettable element of fantasy fandom has devoted a good deal of energy to defaming him. The honesty and courage of these people may be gauged by their having waited until Derleth was unable to defend himself and by the way they often conceal their smears in essays ostensibly on other subjects. For myself, not only did I find him unfailingly helpful and patient and encouraging when I most needed this support, but in retrospect I'm doubly impressed -that he could find anything worth encouraging among the second-hand Love-craft I sent him. Here are a few more choice pa.s.sages from 'The Tomb-Herd': 'The house which I knew as my friend's, set well back from the road, overgrown with ivy that twisted in myriad grotesque shapes, was locked and shuttered. No sign of life was discernible inside it, and outside the garden was filled with a brooding quiet, while my shadow on the fungus-overgrown lawn appeared eldritch and distorted, like that of some ghoul-born being from nether pits.

'Upon inquiring of this anomaly from the strangely reticent neighbours, I learned that my friend had visited the deserted church in the centre of Kingsport after dark, and that this must have called the vengeance of those from outside upon him.'

I suspect most of us would be strangely reticent if a stranger came knocking at our door to ask why his shadow resembled that of a ghoul-born being, but let's go on: 'In that stomach-wrenching moment of horrible knowledge, realization of the abnormal ghastlinesses after which my friend had been searching and which, perhaps, he had stirred out of aeon-long sleep in the Kingsport church, I closed the book. But I soon opened it again . . .'

Best of all: '(Now followed the section which horrified me more than anything else. My friend must have been preparing the telegram by writing it on the page while outside unspeakable shamblers made their way towards him - as became hideously evident as the writing progressed.) 'To Richard Dexter. Come at once to Kingsport. You are needed urgently by me here for protection from agencies which may kill me - or worse - if you do not come immediately. Will explain as soon as you reach me . . . But what is this thing that flops unspeakably down the pa.s.sage towards this room? It cannot be that abomination which I met in the nitrous vaults below Asquith Place . . . IA! YOG-SOTHOTH! CTHULHU FHTAGN!'

Behold the trap I mentioned earlier - the fallacy by which one can persuade oneself that if one imitates or, more probably, exceeds the worst excesses of Lovecraft's style, one is achieving what he achieved. (One reason Lovecraft and Hitchc.o.c.k are so often imitated is that both display their technique fully rather than concealing it.) But the hyperbolic pa.s.sages in Lovecraft's writing (by no means as numerous as his detractors claim) are built up to; as Fritz Leiber puts it perfectly, they're orchestrated. It's easy to imitate Lovecraft's style, or at least to convince oneself that one has done so; it's far more difficult to imitate his sense of structure, based on a study of Poe, Machen (in particular "The Great G.o.d Pan'), and the best of Blackwood. I think that's the point Charlie Grant misses: Lovecraft's style would be nothing without the painstaking structure of his stories.

Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Ma.s.sachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been gentler if he'd realized I was only fifteen years old, but on the other hand, if you can't take that kind of forthright editorial response you aren't likely to survive as a writer. I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing (then called Dark of Mind, Dark of Heart). Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten 'Tomb-Herd,' which he accepted under certain conditions: that the t.i.tle should be changed to 'The Church in the High Street' (though he later dropped the latter article, along with the prepositions from the t.i.tle of his book) and that he should be a"ble to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several pa.s.sages that are Derleth's paraphrases of what I wrote. Quite right too: as I think he realized, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.

I've included here a selection of tales from that book, The Inhabitant of the Lake. Though prior publication never deters me from revising my stories - revised editions of my novels The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Nameless are soon to appear, and some of the stories in my collection Dark Companions were revised for that book - I've resisted the temptation to improve these earlier tales, partly because I feel too distant from them. Here they are, flaws and all.

"The Room in the Castle' expands Lovecraft's reference to 'snake-bearded Byatis' (am I remembering it accurately?) - Bob Bloch's originally, I believe. 'The Horror from the Bridge' is based, like several of these stories, on Lovecraft's Commonplace Book as it appeared in the Arkham House anthology The Shuttered Room. It's based on two entries: 'Man in strange subterranean chamber -seeks to force door of bronze - overwhelmed by influx of waters' and 'Ancient (Roman? pre-historic?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden & curious?) storm. Something liberated which had been sealed up in the masonry thousands of years ago. Things happen.'

The story is based to some extent on the chronology of events in Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror,' but towards the end I found I hadn't the patience to build as minutely as Lovecraft would have.

'The Insects from s.h.a.ggai' is based on another entry in the Commonplace Book, or rather on my misreading of it. Lovecraft wrote 'Insects or some other ent.i.ties from s.p.a.ce attack and penetrate a man's head & cause him to remember alien and exotic things - possible displacement of personality,' a superb idea I rushed at so hastily that I failed to notice he hadn't meant giant insects at all. (An account of the dream which gave him the idea can be found in the Selected Letters, volume V, page 159.) Of all my stories this is probably the pulpiest. As such it has some energy, I think, but I wish I'd left the note alone until I was equipped to do it justice.

I wrote the first page of 'The Inhabitant of the Lake' and developed writer's block. What released me weeks later was writing "The Render of the Veils' in the garden on a summer morning. It's based on a Lovecraft note ('Disturbing conviction that all life is only a deceptive dream with some dismal or sinister horror lurking behind') but it began my liberation from Lovecraft's style, in the sense that it's told largely through dialogue. I was pleased enough with it to want to name my first book after it, but Derleth felt - rightly, I think - that it sounded mystical rather than frightening. I returned to 'The Inhabitant of the Lake' (again rooted in the Commonplace Book: 'Visit to someone in wild & remote house -ride from station through the night into the haunted hills. House by forest or water. Terrible things live there') with renewed enthusiasm.

Four stories followed that are not included here. 'The Plain of Sound' may be read in the small press journal Crypt of Cthulhu, in an issue devoted to my work. 'The Return of the Witch' was suggested by two Lovecraft notes: 'Live man buried in bridge masonry according to superst.i.tion - or black cat' and 'Salem story. The cottage of an aged witch, wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things' but it developed as a rewrite, virtually scene by scene, of a Henry Kuttner story I had never read and didn't encounter until several years after my story was published.

My story contains a moderately evocative dream sequence: 'He dreamed of wanderings through s.p.a.ce to dead cities on other planets, of lakes bordered by twisted trees which moved and creaked in no wind, and finally of a strange curved rim beyond which he pa.s.sed into utter darkness - a darkness in which he sensed nothing living. Less clear dreams occurred, too, and he often felt a clutching terror at glimpses of the shuttered room amid bizarre landscapes, and of rotting things which scrabbled out of graves at an echoing, sourceless call' and a sudden outburst of paranoia that points rather disconcertingly forward to fiction of mine such as The Face That Must Die: '(Look at the b.a.s.t.a.r.d! He tells you you're possessed, but you know what he really means, don't you? That you're schizophrenic. Push him out, quick! Don't let him come poking round your mind!)' but otherwise I think the story can be allowed to rest in peace.

'The Mine on Yuggoth' was a thorough rewrite of one of the first tales I showed Derleth, 'The Tower from Yuggoth.' I got one of the ideas for the rewrite in church, during ma.s.s, and I suspect that was when Catholicism lost its grip on me, though probably never entirely. 'The Will of Stanley Brooke' was my first punning t.i.tle; the story attempted to tell its tale wholly through dialogue, with no Lovecraftian adjectives at all, but "I remember congratulating myself on the originality of a theme which in fact was Lovecraft's, from "The Festival.' The next story here, 'The Moon-Lens,' has its basis in a Lovecraft note ('Ancient necropolis - bronze door in hillside which opens as the moonlight strikes it - focused by ancient lens in pylon opposite'), as did "The Face in the Desert,' a poorly imagined Arabian tale Derleth rejected from the book and I for this one. More background on the book can be found in Horrors and Unpleasantries, Sheldon Jaffery's anecdotal history of Arkham House.

While Derleth was looking at the ma.n.u.script of my collection I wrote another story, "The Stone on the Island.' For a change, this was based on one of M. R. James's 'Stories I Have Tried to Write': 'The man, for instance (naturally a man with something on his mind), who, sitting in his study one evening, was startled by a slight sound, turned hastily, and saw a certain dead face looking out from between the window curtains: a dead face, but with living eyes. He made a dash at the curtains and tore them apart. A pasteboard mask fell to the floor. But there was no one there, and the eyes of the mask were but eye-holes. What (James wonders) was to be done about that?'

My solution was that it wasn't a mask. The tale may be technically superior to any of the Inhabitant stories, and it reads more like me than Lovecraft, I think. However, I find its adolescent sadism excessive, and so I haven't included it here.

Now began my struggle to leave Lovecraft behind and write like myself - a struggle that caused me to write an article, 'Lovecraft in Retrospect,' condemning his work outright (when what I was really condemning was my own dependence on him). I suspect that writing about his creations had been a way to avoid dealing with my own fears. My impatience with trying to imitate the Lovecraftian structure led to the extreme compression of some of the stories in Demons by Daylight, my second book. One story in that collection, 'The Franklyn Paragraphs,' is based on two notes from the Commonplace Book, and two stories written during that period belong to the Lovecraft Mythos. One, 'Before the Storm,' I didn't feel was worth rewriting in order to fit into Demons by Daylight; it appears here for the first time between hard covers. By contrast, 'Cold Print' was fully rewritten in 1966. Both show my struggles to be myself, I think, and in 'Cold Print' the struggle has pretty well been won.

I had nothing more to do with the Lovecraft Mythos until 1971, when Meade and Penny Frierson asked me to contribute to their extraordinarily ambitious (and, on the whole, impressively successful) small press anthology, HPL. I offered them 'A Madness from the Vaults,' written in 1962 but, I'd felt, too fantastic to fit into my first book. When I turned up the fanzine in which it had eventually appeared I was dismayed to find that its sadism far exceeded that of 'The Stone on the Island.' All I could do for the Friersons was write what was virtually a new story under the same t.i.tle.

'The Tugging' was written three years later, in response to a request for a story for a DAW Books anthology, The Disciples of Cthulhu. That anthology set me thinking of editing one of my own. Just before his death Derleth had told me that he planned to edit New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Arkham House agreed that I should, and I contributed the story 'The Faces at Pine Dunes.'

Editing that book helped me organize my thoughts about the followers of Lovecraft. The great merit of Lovecraft's mythos was always that however much it showed, it suggested more: it was a way of sketching the unknown in terms that fed the reader's imagination -mine, certainly. Perhaps it was inevitable that writers such as myself would attempt to fill in the gaps. I think the most important question to be asked about any story based on Lovecraft is whether it conveys any of the awe and terror Lovecraft's stories did. I've little time for the kind of story which purports to discover yet another genealogical link among Lovecraft's ent.i.ties - this kind of nitpicking may be all right for the fanzines, but hardly a basis for fiction - and much less time for stories that rob Lovecraft's concepts of awe by explaining them away. On the other hand, I admire such disparate stories as Bloch's 'Notebook Found in a Deserted House' (surely the most frightening Mythos tale by anyone other than Lovecraft), Wandrei's 'The Tree-Men of M'Bwa' and The Web of Easter Island, Frank Belknap Long's 'The s.p.a.ce-Eaters' (an oddly moving as well as awesome story about the pupil confounding the teacher), Henry Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats,' T.E.D. Klein's 'Black Man with a Horn,' among quite a few others.

My doubts about the overpopulation and overexplanation of the Mythos prompted me to write 'The Voice of the Beach.' Lovecraft regarded Blackwood's 'The Willows' - in which, as he often pointed out, nothing is shown or stated directly - as the finest of all weird tales. The closest he came to achieving what Blackwood achieved was in 'The Colour out of s.p.a.ce,' which contains none of the paraphernalia of the later mythos. 'The Voice of the Beach' was my attempt to return to Lovecraft's first principles, to see how close I could get to his aims without the enc.u.mbrances of the mythos. Lin Carter looked at the story when he was editing Weird Tales, but rejected it as insufficiently Lovecraftian. For my part, I believe it's the most successful of these stories.

Whether I shall return to Lovecraft as an influence I don't know. Some may feel I've never shaken it off. 'Blacked Out,' the most recent story in this book, is clearly indebted to Lovecraft, though it wasn't written with that intention. (In a sense 'Among the pictures are these' is the earliest piece, a literal description written in 1973 of some drawings I executed in my early teens.) One Edna Stumpf (a name on which I can scarcely improve) rounded off a review of my novel Incarnate, which she very kindly described as 'surprisingly good,' with the words 'My dream is that Campbell take ten years to flush the Lovecraft out of his typewriter. And rewriter (sic) it.' I hope she and any others of like mind will not be too distressed if I don't take ten years off from writing. If some of Lovecraft's sense of wonder remains in my work, so much the better. I hope that at least my attempts to repay the pleasure his work still gives me have not lessened his power.

Merseyside, England 6 July, 1984.

Foreword To Scared Stiff: Tales Of s.e.x And Death.

The Bare Bones: An Introduction by Clive Barker.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. It's an eternally popular subject for painters, and in a sense for writers and filmmakers too. What does the image conjure? A woman, naked perhaps, or nearly so, gazing at us with horror (or, on occasion, with a sublime indifference) while Death stretches a rotted paw to touch her breast, or leans its worm-ridden skull towards her as if to ply her with kisses.

Corruption and s.e.xuality in a marriage of opposites.

The motif is echoed whenever a movie monster takes beauty in its arms, or at least attempts to. Sometimes, of course, the Maiden keeps Death at bay; as often, she's claimed. Whichever, the s.e.xual _frisson__ generated by her glamour is increased tenfold by the presence of the foulness that shadows her.

But the drama of the image--with the Maiden representing innocence and life, and Death the joyless evil that threatens her--is only one aspect of a fascinating confrontation. There are countless sophistications of that theme, the most complex of them more readily rendered in prose, I believe, where the writer can describe both the outer _and__ inner conditions of his characters, than in any other medium.

Stories that can show us the flesh in all its sensuality, then reveal the bone beneath; or uncover the decay at the heart of an apparently wholesome pa.s.sion; that take us into the wildest realms of perversion, and into the fever of obsession. It's a fruitful area.

But for a genre that derives much of its power from the trespa.s.sing of taboos, horror fiction has been remarkably coy when it comes to talking of s.e.x. In an age when characters in all manner of fiction have forsaken their blushes to fornicate, horror fiction clings to its underwear with a nunnish zeal.

There have been, it's true, many masterworks charged with eroticism (indeed there's an argument that says much of the genre is underpinned by repressed s.e.xuality) but it has remained, for the most part, sub-text. We can take our werewolf with a touch of Freud or without. As long as he doesn't sport an erection (the werewolf, not Freud) as well as snout and tail, we can interpret the image shorn of its s.e.xual possibilities.

For my part, I tend to be of the opinion that such willful naivete is perverse, and that art is best enjoyed, as it should be made, _to the limit__.

Turning a blind eye to what an image may signify--either because the interpretation distresses or confounds us--is not what good fiction should do, nor should it be the response it elicits. It's doubly regrettable, therefore, that so little horror fiction has taken the challenge of s.e.xuality by the b.a.l.l.s.

I've talked of this with writers and fans alike, and many of them evidence some fear that if the undertow of s.e.xual meaning were made manifest the fiction would lose some of its power to persuade. I have argued in return that any fictional forum that requires a willful suspension of the reader's spirit of intellectual inquiry (as opposed to his disbelief) doesn't deserve to survive, and have put my pen where my mouth is (as it were) with s.e.x in a number of my pieces.

Mr. Campbell has done the same, with great success. Here, gathered in a single volume, are several of his stories that marry the horrific with the s.e.xual. I don't use the word _erotic__ here, for I think the s.e.xual material in these tales serves a far more complex function than straightforward t.i.tillation.

For one thing, it is never a narrative aside--an overheated f.u.c.k before the horrors begin afresh--but rather a central and eloquent part of the story's texture. For another, the actors in these scenes (when human) are seldom the deodorized stuff of fantasy, but the same pale-b.u.t.tocked, stale-sweated individuals we all of us greet each morning in our mirrors. Thirdly, and most pertinently, the s.e.xual material is marked by Ramsey Campbell's unique vision, just as everything in his fiction is marked.

Most of you will know that Mr. Campbell has earned his considerable audience, and countless critical plaudits, by creating a world in which much remains unsaid and unseen, and the fear he creates is as much wed to our individual interpretation of what the prose is implying as derived from anything the author explicitly reveals.

This being the nature of his gift, it might seem that graphic s.e.xual descriptions--and believe me, graphic they are--would not sit happily with such obliqueness. Far from it. One of the delightfully unsettling things about these tales is the way Ramsey's brooding, utterly unique vision renders an act familiar to us all so fretful, so strange, so _chilling__. As elsewhere, his pithy prose responds to the challenge of reinventing experience with subtlety and resilience, never slipping into cliche, but always asking us to make fresh sense of the acts set before us.

And so we should, for s.e.xuality is all too often the territory of the sentimentalist or the p.o.r.nographer, too seldom that of the visionary. Yet it's a transforming act, literally. It remakes our bodies, for a time; and our minds too. For a little s.p.a.ce we know obsession intimately; we are at the call of chemical instructions which sharpen our senses and at the same time narrow our focus, so that our perceptions are heightened and refined.

Horror fiction has traditionally had much to say about all these subjects: transformation, obsession and perception. s.e.x, with its ecstasies and its _pet.i.t mort:__ its private rituals and its public corruptions; its way of reminding us that all physical pleasure is rooted in the same body that s.h.i.+ts, sweats and withers, is the perfect stuff for the horror writer, and there can be few artists working in the genre as capable of a.n.a.lyzing and dramatizing such territory as the author of the volume you hold.

As I said earlier, horror fiction has traditionally dealt in taboo. It speaks of death, madness and the transgression of moral and physical boundaries. It raises the dead to life and slaughters infants in their cribs; it makes monsters of household pets and begs our affection for psychos. It shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

And to that list of taboos I now add another list: the forbidden substrata of s.e.xuality. The obsessions with parts and people we keep in our private thoughts; the acts we dream of but dare not openly desire; the flesh we long to wear, the pains we yearn to endure or inflict in the name of love.