The Collected Short Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this rewriting, and other examples too, had made me surer of myself. "The Guy" (1968) saw just one draft. It was an attempt to use the traditional British ghost story to address social themes. Geoff Ryman has suggested that M. R. James's ghosts were attempts to ignore the real terrors of life; whatever the truth of that, I saw increasingly less reason why my stories should (though it can be argued that my Lovecraft imitations did). My tales were becoming more autobiographical, and "The End of a Summer's Day" (1968) has its roots in a very similar bus trip I took to such a cave with my 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 Underpass"--has a special significance for me: it was the first tale I wrote after having, encouraged by T. E. D. Klein's exegesis of Demons by Daylight and by my wife, Jenny, stepped into the abyss of full-time writing in July 1973. To begin with I wrote only on weekdays. Lord, did I need to learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Out of Copyright" (1977) had no specific anthologist in mind, but Ray Bradbury thought it did, and enthused about it on that basis. "Above the World" (1977) derived much of its imagery and setting from my one wholly positive, not to mention visionary, LSAID experience. The hotel is the very one where Jenny and I spent our belated honeymoon and some other holidays. In the early nineties, a short independent film, Return to Love, was based on the story, though without reading the final credits you mightn't realise; indeed, the title gives fair warning. "Mackintosh Willy" (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 WILLY. 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 passages 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 grass 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 relationship 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 sex 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 circumstances, 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 sexual 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 sex and death). Whereas those stories explore what happens to the horror story if sexual themes become overt, "The Fit" may be said to squint at the effects of Freudian knowingness. Fanny 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 substitute 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 editorship, 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 bloody 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 illustration 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 illustrations 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 circumstances 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 title 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 editorship 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, Shirley 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 bullshit, 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