....I've never faltered in my conviction that horror is a branch of literature, however much of it lets that tradition down. I started writing horror in an attempt to pay back some of the pleasure the field has given me, and I haven't by any means finished. I don't expect to choose to, ever.
* * *
....Ramsey Campbell emerged at a critical juncture in the history of horror fiction. The distinguishing feature of horror, fantasy, and supernatural fiction, as opposed to mainstream fiction, is the freedom it allows an author to refashion the universe in accordance with his or her philosophical, moral, and political aims. The result, as Rosemary Jackson has pointed out, is a kind of 'subversion' whereby the laws of Nature as we understand them are shown to be suspended, invalid, or inoperable; and this violation of natural law (embodied in such conceptions as the vampire, the haunted house, or less conventional tropes such as incursions of alien entities or forces from the depths of space) often serves as a symbol for the philosophical message the author is attempting to convey. Unlike science fiction, however, the horror story often foregoes any attempt at a scientific justification of the supernatural phenomena; and the degree to which an author can convince the skeptical reader of the momentary existence of the unreal is frequently an index to his or her skill as a practitioner of the form.
--S.T. Joshi, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (2001)
* * *
* * *
Exploring Dark Short Fiction: A Primer to Ramsey Campbell
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Commentary by Michael A. Arnzen
(2021, Dark Moon Books)
A Primer to Ramsey Campbell is a celebration of what the author does best. For sixty years, he has written the finest short horror fiction. Time has not staled his skill, curiosity, or wit.
Below are my thoughts on the five stories published in A Primer to Ramsey Campbell. I have also quoted salient critical remarks from A Primer's Michael Arnzen, PhD, and from the brief author memoir also included.
* * *
My Roots Exhumed by Ramsey Campbell (2021)
....the aesthetic taste I developed first was for terror. My earliest memories of reading are of being frightened—which is not to say that everything I read scared me, but that I remember the reading that did. I was no older than four, and may well have been younger, when I encountered More Adventures of Rupert, the 1947 volume of a British children's annual. One illustrated story, "Rupert's Christmas Tree," introduced me to supernatural horror.
Consider the imagery. The title page of the story shows the silhouette of a small spruce tree prancing uphill against a lurid moonlit sky, an image that haunted me for many years. The tale itself has Rupert, a young bear in a red pullover and yellow check trousers, searching for a Christmas tree in a forest near his rural home. Having rescued a mysterious little old man from a tangle of brambles, he's rewarded by being led blindfolded to a secret plantation from which he chooses a tree that mysteriously reappears outside his home. ("The tree is coming," he tell his parents, a decidedly ominous announcement.) It is first seen by the glow of a flashlight, an image I remember giving me a premonitory chill. After the Christmas party, Rupert hears a high-pitched laugh from the direction of the tree, and (to quote one of the couplets with which the illustrations are captioned for slower readers)
As Rupert lies awake that night,
Again that voice gives him a fright.
By now I too was distinctly apprehensive. He leans out of the window and hears "a little scratchy noise in the dark shadows." Downstairs he finds that the tub in which the tree stood is empty, and a trail of earth leads out of the house. Much to my infant dismay he follows it and sees what I dreaded—"the tree, using its roots for legs, moves rapidly away into the gloom." The panel that was altogether too much for me shows the tree clinging with clawlike roots to a rock against a moonlit sky and leaning towards Rupert the ornamental fairy that is the best it can do for a head. The moral of the tale appears to be that he shouldn't have been so inquisitive, but that was lost on me. What strikes me now is the macabreness of the imagery—the small unlocatable voice, the noise in the night, the trail of earth, the scrawny silhouette. One trusts that the reticence of the telling was intended to prevent the youthful reader from being too distressed, but it had precisely the opposite effect on me.
So, before long, did "The Princess and the Goblin," George MacDonald's fairy tale. The descriptions of the animals that had mutated in the goblin mines—"the various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments"—strike me as reminiscent of the early scenes at the farm in Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." Lovecraft had read at least MacDonald's fantasies for adults, but I wonder if the goblin novels might have been part of the childhood reading of M. R. James, with whom they share the technique of showing just enough to suggest far worse (at least to me).
Not even the best-loved tellers of fairy tales always reassured me: the Grimm Brothers may have, but not Hans Christian Andersen—the fate of the brave tin soldier and his beloved seemed cruel enough to be real, the spectre of Death and the strange heads that peered over the edge of the emperor's bed in "The Nightingale" were capable of invading my bedroom at night, and the angelic spirits that bore up the little mermaid came too late to make up for her having to feel as if she trod on sharp knives at every step. Perhaps I was destined to believe more in knives than angels.
Events that only might happen, or even that the audience was assured would not, troubled me as well. In "The Princess and the Goblin" the princess had only to fear that an old castle staircase up which she could flee a stilt-legged creature "might lead to no tower" for me to be obsessed with what could have befallen her then.
....Sometimes I saw reasons for terror where nobody else may have. In Disney's film, the entire scene in which the seven dwarfs perform a song and dance to entertain Snow White was rendered terrifying for me by the sight of an open window that framed a space too dark, too suggestive of the possibility that something frightful might appear....
....above all it was M. R. James whose work suggested that nowhere was safe: not one's bedroom, where a sheet might take it into its head to rear up, nor the bed itself if you were ill-advised enough to reach under the pillow.
....Let me suggest that reading the fiction may have been my method, however unconscious I was of this at the time, of dealing with the experience of terror by discovering some aesthetic pleasure in it. In time, as the intensity of the effects of reading it began to lessen a little, I was able to develop a clearer notion of what I valued in the field.
....Two books were especially important in shaping my view of it: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser, and Best Horror Stories, edited by John Keir Cross. Crucially, neither book drew its material wholly from the ghetto the genre had started to create for itself. Wise and Fraser have Poe next to Balzac, Thomas Hardy between Bierce and "The Monkey's Paw," Hemingway beside John Collier; in the Cross book Angus Wilson keeps company with M. R. James, Faulkner with Bierce, and I was given my first flavoursome taste of Graham Greene. Crucially, over forty pages are occupied by "Bartleby," Herman Melville's tale of psychological horror, in which the eponymous clerk is destroyed by his own apathy. It is the longest story in the book, and Cross apologizes in his preface to those readers who feel cheated by its inclusion. I was only eleven, but I didn't feel tricked out of any portion of the fifteen shillings I'd saved up to buy the book, which shows that my concept of the genre was already pretty large. Reading "Bartleby" satisfied some expectation....
....[Lovecraft's] career was an exploration of numerous different modes of horror fiction in search of the perfect form.
....nights devoted to catching up on horror films in decaying Liverpool cinemas in the midst of blitzed streets that became my personal Gothic landscape....
....the instant dislocations of Last Year in Marienbad, a film that (along with the tales of Robert Aickman) convinced me that an enigma could be more satisfying than any solution.
....it was my mind that was narrow, not the genre, whose edges I've yet to find, and whose power at its best to convey awe I continue to strive to achieve. For the past few years I've tried to follow the fine example of Brian Aldiss in allowing as much of the whole of my personality into my tales as possible....
* * *
Th Companion (1976)
Stone is an appropriate name for the protagonist of "The Companion." Campbell exceeds Shklovsky's wildest dreams in making his Stone "stoney." Alone and a loner, Stone gives little away, even to himself in his ongoing inner dialogue. He strikes the reader as the minus-man that could populate a story by Camus, or a Gold Medal paperback noir novel.
As "The Companion'' proceeds, Stone becomes one existentially with his social invisibility. The ticket taker at the funfair talks with him, but by the time Stone takes his seat on the ghost train there is no one to note his last full minutes of life have commenced. No one living, anyway.
Stone has a job and spends his vacations visiting traveling fairs: the transient pursuing the ephemeral. Is it any wonder he sees his long-dead parents on the midway? And that he does not see them together as a couple, but as figures singular as himself?
Is adulthood the process by which even the self-sufficient must wrangle with those who wish to take our hand? Are we not permitted to distract ourselves in peace? Stone, early in the story, seems satisfied to live as a ghost at the meager banquet of his own life. In the end, when he finally meets his companion, its source turns out to be no place but the banality of himself.
THE COMPANION: A COMMENTARY
Michael Arnzen, PhD
[....] Everything is moving of its own accord. The protagonist is so passive he might as well be scooped by the Mersey as well. This inversion of human agency with the agency of the unseen world of objects conjures the chilling frissons of uncanniness to the point that the entire tale could be said to be a kind of amusement park ride. The companion is your own fear. It rides beside you throughout.
[....]But it is the passive Stone who is inactive, seeking out amusement in being transported by this machinery. The menace of the automatons, the organic purposefulness of inorganic machinery, begins to make the entire world feel like it is operating with its own purposes, and literally transfers these "uncanny" sensations to the reader.
* * *
The Alternative (1994)
Do middle class professionals share some moral responsibility for the system they manage and defend? Are they the little Eichmanns of infamous phrase? Or will these white collar "guards" revolt against their class interests, as Howard Zinn repeatedly predicted in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary?
"The Alternative" is about a man (named Highton) who has a successful life as husband, father, and accountant for slumlords. But in dreams at night Highton is an unemployed electrician who cannot even provide a tv for the family apartment in a squalid housing project; his teen daughter turns tricks to pay for her younger brother's drug habit.
The dream Hightons live in a property owned by one of the waking Highton's clients, the despicable O'Mara. Successful Highton becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that his dream family actually lives at the property. When he takes a step to reach out to them with cash, the act destabilizes waking life: good fortune flows from one existence to another.
"The Alternative" is not a cautionary tale about the scolding of an Ebenezer Scrooge. It is a remorseless lesson in noir ethics: you can't win, there is no alternative. The dictatorship of capital has a plan for Highton: to pull him apart like a Medieval torturer.
The critic Michael Dirda, discussing Mark Samuels, noted:
[....] His protagonists tend to be writers, scholars, or business professionals, almost always male, without wives or children. I suspect the presence of families would risk causing his stories to grow unbearably painful.
In "The Alternative," Ramsey Campbell unleashes the full fury of that unbearable pain.
THE ALTERNATIVE: A COMMENTARY
Michael Arnzen, PhD
[....]This masterfully constructed tale of doubleness—similar in some ways to his story "Double Room" in The New Uncanny anthology (Comma Press, 2008)—makes sport of what Freud considered the uncanny double—that alter-ego that is a "harbinger of death," or a fragment of our identity that must be dealt with if we are to regain healthy balance—by rendering the setting and the familial relationships all doubles, but only in relation to the singular protagonist at the tale's center. What unravels here is the split between the waking "ego" life of his proper family and the sleeping "id" life of his desperate family. His actions on one side have consequences on the other.
[....]Dreams are wish fulfillments; our psyches get what they want through their own mechanics of the imagination. The reality of the story matters not, for it is a story about Highton's wishes, and his drive to fulfill them. When Highton's wife says, "we want you back," and he realizes she is "referring to the way he had become unfamiliar" the story has revealed itself as a kind of comedic psychodrama. The scene where he is caught trying to rob from himself is virtually a scene from a slapstick film....
* * *
One Copy Only (2002)
"One Copy Only" may be a modest, carefully circumscribed story, but it is nonetheless a masterpiece.
Juvenile court judge Chris Miles tells us the story of how he ultimately succeeded in his quest to find something "that lets me see past the horizon" and experience at least an "imitation of greatness" that he used to experience when reading great fantasy literature.
Books Forever, a second-hand shop run by Ken Gregory, is the portal through which Chris makes his rediscovery. There are costs involved, and for a time the reader fears there may be mortal consequences. After all, this is horror.
Finding and acting upon the ability to float free of life's iron circumstances is at the heart of what critic John Clute has termed the Attempted Rescue motif in his monograph The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror.
Attempted Rescue is a shorthand for any understanding of the personality structure of the mature human being which conceives of that structure as being guardedly recuperative of past stages of the self and of the unconscious.
Clute notes "obsessive.... re-creations of the past" are central to Attempted Rescue. The course pursued by Chris Miles as he explores the shelves and corners and private rooms of Books Forever epitomizes this.
Books Forever looks forward to the spider's nest shop Books Are Life in Campbell's 2015 novella "The Booking." Indeed, questions of doubling and treasured books that cannot be sold or depart the premises occur in both tales.
"One Copy Only" exudes a lapidary beauty akin to some of Machen's late stories: "Opening the Door" (1931) and "The Tree of Life" (1936) in particular.
ONE COPY ONLY: A COMMENTARY
Michael Arnzen, PhD
[....] Although "One Copy Only" seems centered on magical books (especially The Glorious Brethren), that can be read only in the loft above Books Forever, the story is actually about a haunted place rather than the magical objects that line its shelves. The ironic name of this haunted bookstore—Books Forever—suggests that these rare books that our protagonist becomes obsessed with reading are titles produced by the afterlife, and that the loft is a purgatorial space located somewhere between Heaven and Earth. After all, the bookstore owner's father died there, which implies a kind of revenant spirit, one who still refuses to "come down till he'd finished all the books he wanted to read." Moreover, incomplete works by dead authors also can be read there, implying that the dead can finally finish their fragments and famously unfinished books from the great beyond and "publish" these labors of love, as it were, solely through the loft of Forever Books. Thus, the authors who our protagonist discovers here are immortal. It's a genre fan's dream come true!
* * *
Recently Used (2011)
Charlie Tunstall gets the call every man dreads in the watches of the night:
Tunstall thought he hadn't slept when the phone rang. He clutched it and sat up on the bed, which felt too bare and wide by half. On the bedside table the photograph of him with Gwyneth in the sunlit mountains far away was waiting to be seen once more, and beyond it the curtains framed a solitary feeble midnight star. He rubbed his aching eyes to help them focus on the mobile as he thumbed the keypad.
"Hello?" he said before he'd finished lifting the phone to his face.
"Forgive me, is this Charlie?" The sight of Gwyneth's name on the midget screen had raised his hopes, but the voice belonged to somebody he'd never met.
"Charles Tunstall," he had to say, "yes."
"Excuse me, Mr Tunstall. Your name is showing up on this phone as the last person called."
"I know." He couldn't leave it at that, and he said "It's my wife's."
"We hoped so." While the pause after the first word was close to imperceptible, the woman seemed to have to get ready to add "I'm afraid Mrs Tunstall—"
"What? Go on, for God's sake."
Why did he need to interrupt? It only delayed her saying "Your wife has had an accident, Mr Tunstall."
"Recently Used" dramatizes Charlie's night-journey to the hospital to find his wife. His journey is beset at each stage as he struggles to rein in emotions activated by myriad frustrations and fears.
As is often the case in horror stories, the tale's action is only a prelude to the pitiless ouroborosian revelation of its final lines.
RECENTLY USED: A COMMENTARY
Michael Arnzen, PhD
[....]The expressionism in the story feels straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its somnambulist protagonist lumbering around a topsy-turvy world of bent angles and fuzzy boundaries.
Freud would call this story a dramatization of the "compulsion to repeat"—an unconscious and compulsive attempt to retroactively correct or change a past trauma through its imaginative re-enactment in the psyche. It's too late for the protagonist to save his wife. But you have to admire Tunstall for trying....
* * *
....Perhaps it had been a dog or an urban fox, if foxes grew so dark and thin.
The Bill (2021)
"The Bill" is about handbills and the awful promises they might contain. Recipients might throw them away too quickly, losing a chance to be forewarned. "The Bill" is also about terrible acts we cannot expunge, even with a lifetime of compensating behavior.
At the heart of "The Bill" is a solitary man, optometrist Charles Duggan. All day he tests customer eyesite. In darkened exam rooms patients reading eye charts start spelling out minatory messages.
And examining the eyes themselves:
She strained her eyeballs in the various directions he instructed, and he'd almost finished scrutinising the second eye when a smell of something far worse than aged lurched at him out of the dark. He couldn't help recoiling, but not far enough to avoid seeing the eye the lens magnified. Eye was too precise a word for it, though it was more than just an empty socket. It contained a withered fungoid item that didn't so much blink as shrivel further and then swell. All the same, he was sure that it saw him.
At home:
Dinner was half of a chilli con carne and of a carton of rice. Wine helped him see it off but didn't do much for the vintage comedies he tried to watch. All the faces looked too pale, and he could have done without so many secondary characters laughing at the antics of the principals. Their grins struck him as excessively fixed, close to helpless. If he closed his eyes to shut out the sight he nodded off, only to jerk awake with a sense that it was time to perform a task, if it wasn't already too late. "Not yet," he heard himself mumbling. "Not Saturday."
"Needn't be."
The harsh thin whisper snatched his eyes open. It must have been in the film, which was fading to black at the end of a scene, leaving an impression of a figure on all fours that had thrust towards him a face he would have described as sketchy at best. He didn't see how such a character could have fitted into a Marx Brothers film, and in any case he'd lost all sense of what was going on. Downing the last of the wine, he made for bed.
The patience of Duggan's business partner Stack slowly erodes. Duggan explains the childhood source of his turmoil, mixed emotions, and conflicting loyalties. Stack writes it all off with: "By no means old enough to blame yourself. You should stop it here and now, and you'll forgive me if I don't see why it should affect our business."
Ultimately, Duggan returns home one last time. Campbell lets him see the clues around him sharply and in full for the first time:
Confessing his neglect had brought him no relief; it had simply brought memories closer. When he headed for the train, Stack's suggestion dogged him, making him imagine that some of the shop entrances were already occupied by homeless folk or by someone who was using the doorways to dodge ahead of him. Surely nobody like that could be on the train, and he needn't think a dog was. There was no reason to believe one was at large in the streets near his house—at least, he wasn't certain that he heard it in the dark between the lamps, its claws scraping the pavement, if that wasn't a bird pecking in search of food. As Duggan let himself into the house the sewing machine fell silent, though an echo that he hadn't previously noticed made it sound as though it was upstairs. He felt compelled to strain his ears, but couldn't even hear the seamstress.
Once he'd locked his door he headed for the kitchen. He was dismayed to see how careless he'd been. The refrigerator door was open at least half an inch, and he slammed it as soon as he took out tonight's portion of chilli. He'd left an empty bottle of wine on the floor in the main room, a sight rather too reminiscent of the litter a drinker in the street might leave. How drunk had he been last night that he didn't recall scrawling a word in the television listings magazine? It looked as if he'd gouged the word into the page. Whatever he'd decided he should SEE, he would look when he'd hung up his coat. He tramped into the bedroom, only to realise he hadn't even made the bed. A wind set the window scraping in its frame and brought up a smell of earth and decay from the garden as he crossed the room. He took hold of the crumpled sheets and found there was no need to throw them back. The shape that was clenched beneath them did that for him.
It hadn't been the window he'd heard scraping, and the smell hadn't come from outside. The twisted shape was even thinner than it had sounded, and much swifter than an object so deformed and incomplete had any right to be. It swarmed up his body like a spider, and its version of a face lurched at him on very little of a neck....
THE BILL: A COMMENTARY
Michael Arnzen, PhD
Stories like these deserve a second read. The more you re-read Campbell's fiction, the better it gets. There's always more than meets the eye in his prose. Take a look—again—for yourself.
* * *
WHY RAMSEY CAMPBELL MATTERS
BY MICHAEL ARNZEN, PhD
[....]In a Ramsey Campbell story, our psyches are flimsy and leaking life rafts in a sea of unknowable cosmic horror and supernatural purpose—life rafts we either cling to or destabilize in an attempt to keep control . . . and, as is the tragedy of human destiny, usually failing at that because the whole damn thing is going flat as we sink. Death and decay is omnipresent. Spirits are more stable in their smoke than the material of man. The horrors of the body matter only inasmuch as they challenge the mind of his characters—and mind is that unknowable part of ourselves that wrap up our soul and sense of identity, too, leaking into metaphysics. Though he can write the most gruesome of work imaginable, what Ramsey Campbell is interested in is not so much the splattery surprises of gore, but the dread and panic, moving from anxious terror to crippling fear in the face of vast horror.
It may seem like common sense to say a horror writer is focused on fear, but what I see in Ramsey Campbell is a constant attention to the way characters mentally process their anxieties in a way that is reminiscent of Henry James, in its heady preoccupation with character perception and mental processing. Virtually everything in the narrative is a reflection or projection of the character's state of mind. Subjective perceptions strain to comprehend the worlds these characters are immersed in. Logic is challenged and altered, replaced by emotion. Critics would normally call writing like this "psychological realism," where the manners of the mind are foregrounded and stream of consciousness guides and directs the storytelling. But because of Campbell's constant suggestion that there are alternative explanations for reality, and that all men are potentially mad, his work might be termed "psychological irrealism" instead. Less-experienced writers might have difficulties blending the areas of the psyche and the unknowable, the natural world and the supernatural world, but as an author who deftly bridges the weird horrors of the Lovecraftian era over to the postwar culture mired in psychoanalytic theory, Campbell perfectly straddles the "duality" between psychology and the supernatural—impishly dancing in the grey zone between the two—in a way that could be said defines world horror as uncanny in the late twentieth century, and which still remains current today.
[....]And that's why Ramsey Campbell matters. He opens our eyes. Exposes our frail corneas to the darkness, so that our pupils might dilate. We don't want to see. But we must see.
And then, oh so dreadfully perfect, he holds for a second. And then shows us.
* * *
The scope and excellence of Ramsey Campbell's short fiction is worthy of celebration. This book is a fine place to begin.
Jay
13 February 2022
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