His Gift is Dread: Getting Started with Ramsey Campbell—Britain's Answer to Stephen King

This is where it all started for Ramsey Campbell.

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants was released in 1964 by Arkham House in an edition of 2,009 copies and was the author's first book. This short story collection steeped in the Cthulhu Mythos, was originally titled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants.

Campbell’s mentor, August Derleth, made a deep impression on his teenage mind, and this collection wasn’t so much a challenge for Campbell, but more of an exciting new creative experience with its own “built-in energy.”

“The first drafts of the earliest stories in that book were slavishly imitative of Lovecraft, or rather of those aspects that seemed easiest to replicate and weren’t in fact so typical of him at all—to wit, florid writing rather than his careful modulation of prose,” Campbell remembers.

After The Inhabitant, Campbell continued to draw inspiration from the bustling world around him in England versus placing his characters in America like Lovecraft.

Campbell still thinks city centers “can be perilous territories even in daylight hours.”

“Far from doing away with the uncanny as some writers in the field used to predict, artificial lighting simply deepens the shadows and lends them restless life. Even crowds may be no protection but rather a concealment if not a potential attacker,” Campbell said.

First published on January 1, 1973, Demons by Daylight (and its diabolically titillating cover) is one of Ramsey Campbell’s earlier collections, where the writer moved far from his Lovecraftian roots and started to develop the psychological horror style he’s known for today.

One of the best stories in the book, “The End of a Summer’s Day,” is still deeply unnerving today.

After learning a bit more under Derleth's tutelage, Campbell’s prose was now influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, specifically Lolita.

“Just as Lovecraft in quantity had been a revelation to me at fourteen, so was Nabokov now—the play with narrative, the extraordinary relish of language, the oblique approach to the themes, the unreliable narration…I then bought everything else of his I could find, and reading it liberated my approach to my own work,” Campbell said.

Graham Greene was another crucial influence during this period.

Campbell often rewards fruitful morning writing sessions by watching a movie in the afternoon. The films of Luis Buñuel (particularly Los Olvidados) and Alain Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad, Muriel) also shaped his writing during this early period.

“Social comment, temporal dislocation, narrative experiment—all these elements and more took charge," Campbell said. “Perhaps above all, where my first book [The Inhabitant] had been a bid to emulate the terrors of a writer I admired, now I began to write about my own experiences and fears.”

The intense first edition cover art and title said it all. The Doll Who Ate His Mother was an EC Horror comic yarn dragged into the skewed world of Campbell.

Stephen King says something in Danse Macabre to the effect that Liverpool is the main character, this slumbering beast.

Campbell sees more of the pockmarks of the world now looking back, but does find some literate qualities even though he mentions it’s “very obviously a first novel.”

“Elsewhere in the book, I fear I indulged my new freedom from the restrictions of short fiction—overindulged it, even, in scenes such as Claire’s walk through Newsham Park, a stroll I often took myself, which has too little to do with the story.”

Campbell thinks the book’s central plot of a “monster created by an unholy merging of black magic, unforgiving Christianity and psychological pressures—is nevertheless strong enough to survive my inexperience.”

The Doll Who Ate His Mother’s plot builds to a powerful climactic scene that the writer pulled from real places he experienced in Liverpool almost 50 years ago.

The Face That Must Die is one of Campbell’s most deeply personal books and a masterpiece of paranoia literature, especially when examining the character John Horridge.

“Bluntly, I’m afraid in many ways John Horridge is a version of my mother, not least in his homophobia. She suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, undiagnosed as far as I know until almost the end of her life, and the book developed from her tendency to believe people were really other people, often famous ones who happened to be passing in the street,” Campbell said.

The self-styled protagonist, Peter, was a version of Campbell he hoped to leave behind through writing the novel. Campbell had a precipitous nightmare LSD flashback before he began writing the book and “was in constant fear of a recurrence.”

“At one point, the words I was writing began to crawl about on the page,” he remembers.

Campbell fans should track down the 1983 Scream/Press version of The Face That Must Die, which contains Campbell’s lengthy autobiographical essay “At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour” and its unforgettable photographic illustrations by J.K. Potter. 

The subject matter follows Campbell’s relationship with his mentally ill mother, with a timeline that stretches from the 1950s to the mid-80s.

Campbell’s mother deteriorates throughout the essay to eventually a dark place where she claims planes were spying on her, and faces were staring at her out of vases.

The Claw (first published as simply Claw) has an interesting publishing history. Campbell’s hardcover publishers at the time (Macmillan in New York) had a couple of his books in their schedule, which meant postponing his next novel for them.

Campbell grew restless and frustrated to write one, so his British agent Carol Smith got him commissioned to do one for a different publisher.

“The only stipulation was that it should be under a pseudonym so as not to compete, but I chose one [Jay Ramsey] I thought would be sufficiently obvious to folk who liked my stuff,” Campbell said.

The Claw joins The Nameless (1981) and The Influence (1988) in their dark themes of twisted parenthood. The titular artifact is a talisman of the evil cult Leopard Men of Africa that unleashes murderous impulses from parents to children.

The young character Anna makes the story come alive and owns one of the best lines in The Claw: “The stranger who pretended to be mummy was made up of teeth and nails.”

The threat in Incarnate comes about through one of the most intimate elements of our human makeup: our dreams. (a Lovecraftian obsession).

Dreams are very strange and terrifying, and Campbell’s Dr. Kent calls it “the dream thing,” an alien order of being, trying to take over our waking reality, with our bodies as the means to do so.

A scientific experiment in prophetic dreaming lets loose a diabolical force on Molly, a young television production assistant, and her partner, Martin, who struggle to survive. The book’s dream theme let Campbell follow the narrative thread wherever it took him.

“My old and much-missed friend Peter Straub commented that I’d started to ‘roll with the narrative,’ as he put it, " Campbell notes.

“It was crucial to my development in one respect in particular: I determined not to try to direct the reader’s response (to put it more bluntly, strive to be scary). The key moment was the scene in which the stamp dealer hears and sees stamps begin to talk to him. In the past, I would have striven to render this more frightening, but now I decided its innate disquiet was enough, as was its comic side—whichever way it took the reader was fine by me, and more to the point, it seemed to fit the theme of the novel. Since then, I’ve concluded that you can’t control how the reader responds and shouldn’t try—I shouldn’t, anyway.”

Obsession takes a similar setup to Stephen King’s IT, but the real source of evil in this story isn’t the supernatural, as each of the four characters is ensnared in increasingly bad situations born out of hopeful wishes gone awry.

Campbell was influenced entirely by a dialogue exchange in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky III, when Rocky lost his title and asked Apollo Creed to help him train to get it back.

“Creed says effectively, ‘I'll give you what you want, but you'll have to promise me something, and I won't tell you what it is till you've got what you want.’ Of course, it was that Apollo fought Rocky in a ring at the end with no spectators. Campbell spent the last half hour of the press screening (he’s been a long-time movie critic) scribbling in his notebook, and he had a substantial chunk of Obsession’s mapped out just from that dialogue exchange when he arrived home.

The Satanic Panic of the ‘80s is very much real in the dark fantasy and folk horror masterwork, The Hungry Moon.

Folk horror saw a resurgence in the 1980s. Campbell’s layered plot here is realistic while still mentioning strange folklore, moon chanting, dead lizards, corporal punishment at school, and a general creeping folkloric dread seen in King’s Salem’s Lot or Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home.

When asked how a modern version of The Hungry Moon might unfold, Campbell notes it would be even more insidious than how he originally wrote a story that revolves around Moonwell, a small town located in the moors of northern England, where for generations, the townsfolk have furnished a cave to placate an ancient druidic being.

“Irrationality is just one of the demons or infections the internet has released from within too many of us, or has let people own up to it, or confirmed it,” Campbell notes. 

Similar to Tales From the Crypt before it, Scared Stiff reminds you of the comedy, tragedy, and beauty of sex in the guise of a horror tale.

Campbell’s stories spin up a world where D.H. Lawrence’s equation of orgasms as the “little death” is a real and haunting reality. Campbell's writer friend saw a lack of “sex magic” horror stories at the time.

“The first story (‘Dolls’) came about because the editor of the Mayflower Books of Black Magic Stories, my old friend Michel Parry, protested to me that he wasn’t seeing any tales involving sex magic,” Campbell said. “I compiled in my way, only for the publishers to show the story to their lawyers in case they might risk an obscenity prosecution.

Reassured, they published the story, and I wrote several more for Michel’s anthology.

What interested me most was to explore whether making the sexual themes that often underlie horror so explicit would rob the uncanny elements of power. On the whole, I don’t think it did.”

Ancient Images touches on Campbell’s perennial love for old horror movies. The 1989 book follows a film editor, Sandy Allan, who investigates the history of a lost, possibly cursed, Boris Karloff/Bela Lugosi film after a coworker’s death, exposing dark secrets and ancient cults.

His favorite horror film, which he has watched numerous times, is Night of the Demon. Kate Bush used a clip from the film featuring the line, “it's in the trees, it's coming,” in her hit single, "Hounds of Love.”

Campbell loves the movie, and its various versions inspired Ancient Images.

“[Night of the Demon is] a superbly atmospheric horror film, admirably constructed in the long version, less so in the cut and reorganized release that for many years was the only one available (and was the version I first saw, back in 1960: despite a persistent rumor, the long version was never released theatrically in Britain during its original run),” Campbell said.

The moorlands continued to be an untamed source of inspiration for Campbell during the 1990 novel, Midnight Sun. A palpable sense of desolation and loneliness overtakes this small village setting steeped in the themes of British cosmic horror and Christmas creepiness.

Ben Sterling, his wife, and their children discover something truly evil glittering in the frigid air above their remote home. Campbell continues to love Britain’s nature to this day.

“Coincidentally, just yesterday, I was listening to the concert suite of Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights, which vividly enshrines those qualities,” Campbell said.

“Much fiction in our field from the Gothic era onwards is rooted in a sense of landscape. In my case, following Fritz Leiber’s lead, the landscapes are frequently urban, but now and then, the tale needs somewhere more isolated, and none is more so in Britain than the moors.”

Campbell began to experiment more with new genres in the 1990s and 2000s as the “Paperbacks from Hell” era began to slide in and out of popularity. Far Away & Never was a fun sword & sorcery fantasy side quest for him.

He also wrote a Solomon Kane movie novelization in 2010. Campbell enjoys a lot about the fantasy genre, but as a writer, he enjoys “the chance to give the fantastic free rein.”

“This wasn’t so much the case with Solomon Kane, where I was constrained by the existing material (not a complaint, you understand, just specifying how I worked on those stories),” Campbell said.

“Weirdly, my old friend the anthologist Hugh Lamb commented I could have set the story ‘The Changer of Names’ in contemporary Liverpool. I hadn’t realized the image of the city I’d presented to the world was quite that strange.”

The Darkest Part of the Woods was a return to form for Campbell after some genre experiments. The woods represent many things for Campbell as he looks back on the creation of one of his masterpieces.

“Mystery and disorientation—at least, I’ve experienced both in such settings, along with awe,” he recounts.

“And calm and inner restoration. I used to take a woodland walk whenever I’d finished the first draft of a new novel. In recent years, I feel so compelled to get to the next project that those days [often] no longer happen.”

The family in the novel faces the primordial fears of the forest that stir within from dark rituals, and Campbell takes fiendish joy in slowly doling out scenes where the forest quietly watches you with hooded eyes.

The Overnight shows Campbell’s love for books and libraries but also peers into an unstable time in his family’s life.

“At the turn of the century, I began to feel financially insecure, perhaps as a result of the apparent temporary unpopularity of horror fiction,” Campbell remembers.

“When I learned that the Borders bookshop chain was about to open a local branch, I went to work there. [My wife] Jenny returned to teaching full time, not the first occasion we depended on her—we had for the first five years of my bid to make a living as a writer. The bookshop management arranged my hours so that I could write every day. but I really needed to devote my time to writing, so I left the shop after six months.”

Campbell thought the short stint at Borders might give him a short story, but when he set about writing down the experiences, they gave him enough material for a novel.

The Grin of the Dark, a mad pretzel of silent film comedy and horror, originally concerned itself with a baddie from a silent serial, and Campbell even had a title for that version: The Sixth Face of the Spider.

“At some point, I decided the notion of a comedian was richer,” Campbell said.

“In my book on the Three Stooges, Six Stooges and Counting, I argue that of all the genres comedy is the one to which the audience most needs to grow attuned to enjoy a specific comic style. Perhaps that’s a form of allure. Incidentally, avatars of the Stooges turn up in this novel (at the Amsterdam cash machine) long before I undertook to write my monograph or indeed even knew I had so much to say about them. Of all Hollywood comedy teams, they may be closest to Tubby Thackeray as lords of misrule.”

Be careful what you say because it will eventually turn on you. Anger and hate are some of the most palpable emotions a horror writer can convey in his stories, and Campbell dives deep into both from the perspective of online commentary for the satirical horror book Think Yourself Lucky.

Campbell has personally commented on a few critical fan posts online of his writing, which get various reactions from readers, “ranging from the embarrassed to the combative and shades between,” according to Campbell.

Think Yourself Lucky is a cautionary tale of psychological horror that picks at that scab of online discourse until it bleeds.

The title also contains a double meaning since another character tosses the well-known phrase at travel agent David Botham, who may have a dark monster inside him just waiting to take over.

Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach is Campbell’s vampire novel. It’s a genre that, for many years, Campbell thought he would never tackle since he didn’t have anything to say on the subject.

“I owe the seed of the entire book to the gentleman who runs off-road trips on Zakynthos, where we were staying in 2014 at the Roula Apartments in Alykes,” Campbell said.

“As he drove through a young folk’s resort (which was almost entirely deserted in daylight), he made a passing comment, and in less than a minute, I had the idea that grew into this novel. I spent much of our day trip scribbling notes. His name, I believe, was Iannis Tepmoneras. Thank you once again, Iannis!”

One of Campbell’s ambitions for the book was to recapture the vampire theme “from undue familiarity and restore it to terror.”

“I must acknowledge that at the back of my mind, Lovecraft’s reclamation of the monstrous in 'The Shunned House' was looming.”

The decades-spanning premise follows Dominic Sheldrake from childhood, to protecting his family in middle age, and confronting past haunts as an older man.

The cosmic horror trilogy The Three Births of Daoloth came from Campbell’s old friend Pete Crowther of PS Publishing.

“[Pete] gently urged me to write a supernatural horror trilogy,” Campbell notes.

“The prospect was close to unique, though there had been Clare McNally’s Ghost House trio in the 1970s. My attitude was and is that I shouldn’t write a trilogy unless there was a reason for it to take that form, not just a long novel sliced in three. Eventually, it occurred to me that each volume could take the characters forward several decades while the cosmic infiltration grew stronger. Founding it on my experience of Liverpool in the 1950s gave it a firm start, and I committed three years to it. Meanwhile, and coincidentally, Jeff VanderMeer [brought] out his Southern Reach trilogy, but there’s more than enough room for us both.” 

Dominic Sheldrake’s childhood in 1950s Liverpool takes reference from some of Campbell’s schoolboy exploits. The best friends Roberta and Jim (he fondly refers to them as “The Tremendous Three”) are young detectives uncovering some incredibly dark things growing under a church in the aftermath of the WWII blitz.

The Searching Dead and its two sequels are some of Campbell’s best novels. Born to the Dark, the second book in the trilogy, follows Dominic Sheldrake into adulthood.

Dominic is married to his wife Leslie, and they have a young son named Toby, who’s been experiencing bizarre dreams and seizures when he sleeps. For Campbell, he relishes actual nightmares in real life as “free surrealist films,” ready to inspire his next work. 

“I ask Jenny not to wake me up even if I’m emitting uneasy sounds, because I believe nightmares have their own built-in release mechanism and will set you free if they become too terrifying. One recurring motif in my dreams over the past few years is that my phone goes wrong. Twice now I’ve dreamed it did and then realized this means I’m dreaming, only to fear that I won’t be able to escape the dream. Last time I started shrieking ‘I’m dreaming’ to [wake] myself and eventually did, but when I told Jenny about it, I realized I hadn’t [woken up] after all. Perhaps we are still in my dream.” 

Looking back, Campbell enjoyed pulling from his real-life experiences for the book and letting his characters breathe over a longer span of time.

“Actually, one aspect of the trilogy I especially relished was how it let all the major characters develop, not least the Noble family and indeed the cult, expanding from secret activities in the first volume to an open public presence in the third without, I think, sapping the sense of the mysterious and cosmic. And I grew especially fond of Bobby Parkin, who surprised me quite a bit as she grew up.”

Campbell can convey far more real emotion to the cosmic horror than he was able to conjure up in his teen years with The Inhabitant of the Lake.

The Companion and The Retrospective are treasured short story troves that Ramsey Campbell fans online adore. They both gather up a heavy portion of his best short stories, but he wanted to include even more, which ultimately spun off into a novella-centric companion collection, The Village Killings and Other Novellas. “The title story is exclusive to the book. It’s a combined tribute to and critique of authors such as Agatha Christie. Her novels are often cited as cozy crime, but I’d suggest they’re cozy paranoia, enticing us into a mindset where we suspiciously examine every character and every turn of phrase in case they harbor sinister secrets,” Campbell notes. 

His main thought for both collections was to update Alone with the Horrors, which only tracked his storied career up to 1991. 

“The PS collection (note the initials) was originally conceived as a single jumbo volume, but wieldiness supervened, and we split it more or less down the middle,” Campbell remembers. “To be honest, my other principle was simply to collect favorites together in one place, including a few early ones (“The End of a Summer’s Day,” “The Companion” and others) whose clumsy prose tempts me to do the rewrites they should have had in the first place—but if I started doing that I suspect I would rob them of the power they seem to have had for some readers, and in any case I feel they’re too remote to touch.”

Fellstones is another return to the fertile ground of folk horror for Campbell.

The main character, Paul Dunstan, is another resentful man wrestling with a return to his past. He reluctantly agrees to travel to the Staveleys in Fellstones, a halcyon village outside of Liverpool that is named after seven stone monoliths that stand in the middle of town.

Campbell agrees Fellstones is “another bid to reach for the cosmic and to link it with a kind of ancient monument widespread in Britain. I also had some fun with having found a context for my layman’s observations about classical music (which is to say from the Baroque onwards). I think underlying this was the simple ambition to write the kind of supernatural tale I most like to read, and in a few passages (the village play, for instance), I came close.”

The concept of incubation suggests a process of hidden growth under our mortal skin.

The Incubations novel begins with a scene where Leo, a driving instructor, takes a client to her driving test when he suddenly loses all sense of language. His voice just utters sounds, and this disorienting beginning continues through the rest of the book.

Throughout The Incubations (original title: It's Gift is Dread), Campbell examines a slow corruption blooming from the dark seeds found under each of its main characters.

“I think the weaknesses are already buried in the characters as in all of us,” Campbell said.

“Contagion—well, I imagine that’s still at the backs of many of our minds. I actually dealt with the pandemic in the previous novel, The Lonely Lands. I hadn’t originally planned to write about it, but it occurred to me that it could hardly be more relevant to that book’s exploration of sudden loss and the afterlife. I’d say one dread that underlies The Incubations is the revival of hostilities we hoped had been laid to rest in peace—certainly a kind of contagion, even a dormant plague. It could hardly be more relevant now, I fear.”