Ramsey Campbell (born 4 January 1946) is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for over sixty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.
Since he first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T.E.D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today",Klein, T. E. D. "Ramsey Campbell: An Appreciation", quoted in Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2001) by S. T. Joshi and Robert Hadji has described him as "perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition",Robert Hadji, "[John] Ramsey Campbell" in Jack Sullivan (ed), The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (NY and Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1986), p. 67 while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood." In a 2021 appreciation of his collected works, The Washington Post said: "Taken together, they constitute one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction."
Early life
Campbell was born in Liverpool, England, to Alexander Ramsey and Nora (Walker) Campbell. He was educated by Christian Brothers at St Edward's College, Liverpool. Campbell's childhood and adolescence were marked by the rift between his parents, who became estranged shortly after his birth.S.T. Joshi, "[John] Ramsey Campbell" in Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz (eds). Supernatural Literature of the World, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 203 Campbell's father would consistently leave the house early in the morning and not return until night, and consequently, Campbell said, he did not see his father face-to-face for nearly twenty years; when Campbell became old enough that his schedule would lead to occasional chance encounters with his father, his father would always hold the door closed so that they would not come face-to-face. Campbell said he never got the chance to ask his father why he did this. Years later, Campbell's mother developed schizophrenia, an experience he has discussed in detail in the introduction and afterword to the restored text of The Face That Must Die.Campbell, Ramsey. "At the Back of My Mind: A Guided Tour", introduction to The Face That Must Die (1990), pp.vii-xxv, and Afterword (pp.236-238). Other autobiographical pieces regarding Campbell's life appear in Section V, "On Ramsey Campbell" in his essay collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably: 30 Years of Essays and Articles (ed. S. T. Joshi), as well as in the novella The Enigma of the Flat Policeman (2020).
According to Campbell, his mother "wrote a great deal, novel after novel, but was largely unpublished aside from a handful of short stories in writer's magazines." She encouraged her young son to send his writing off from an early age. Growing up in post-war Liverpool, Campbell avidly consumed the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Franz Kafka, Fritz Leiber, Graham Greene, and the cinema of film noir.
Career Ghostly Tales Campbell cites Rupert the Bear as one of his earliest supernatural influences. He tells The Guardian of a story he read in 1947, entitled Rupert's Christmas Tree:Rupert acquires a magical tree that decamps after the festivities and returns to its home in the woods.... Perhaps this was meant as a charming fantasy for children, but the details – the small high voice from the tree, the creaking that Rupert hears in the night, the trail of earth he follows from the tub in his house, above all the prancing silhouette that inclines towards him, the star it has in place of a head – are surely the stuff of adult supernatural fiction. I think I got my start in the field right there, and many of my preoccupations must derive from my early childhood.Campbell's earliest tales were written when he was 11 years old (1957–58) and were influenced by a magazine from Bolton, Lancashire, called Phantom. These early tales formed a self-illustrated collection of sixteen stories and a poem entitled "Ghostly Tales". Campbell intended to submit these to Phantom, but his mother, who regarded literary success as a possible way of financing her escape from her disastrous marriage, persuaded him to wait until he had a whole book to show to publishers. His English teacher, Brother Kelly, used to have him read his stories to the class. Campbell (as John R. Campbell) submitted Ghostly Tales to "numerous publishers" including Tom Boardman junior; Boardman rejected it as they did not publish ghost stories, but his rejection letter included encouragement to Campbell to keep writing.Ramsey Campbell, "It Came from the Past", Ghostly Tales: Crypt of Cthulhu 6, No 8, whole number 50, Michaelmas 1987, edited by Robert M. Price), p. 3 This collection of juvenilia was published thirty years later, as a special issue of Crypt of Cthulhu magazine titled Ghostly Tales: Crypt of Cthulhu 6, No 8, whole number 50, Michaelmas 1987, edited by Robert M. Price. Though the stories are mostly mainstream spectral lore, one story ("The Hollow in the Woods") can be considered a very early mythos yarn.
Another issue of this magazine Crypt of Cthulhu No 43 (Hallowmas 1983), titled The Tomb-Herd and Others collects various early stories, including some early drafts of tales later published revised in Campbell's first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964). The manuscripts of Campbell's early tales are housed at the Local History Library of the Liverpool Public Libraries.
The influence of H. P. Lovecraft and The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants Campbell first encountered the works of H. P. Lovecraft at age eight (1954), via the story "The Colour Out of Space", which he found in the Groff Conklin anthology Strange Travels in Science Fiction, and within the next few years read "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror", encountered in the Wise and Fraser anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. At the age of twelve, Campbell attempted to write a novel titled Broken Moon, influenced by Arthur Machen, but it petered out after fifty pages.Stefan R. Dziemanowicz. "An Interview with Ramsey Campbell" in S.T. Joshi, ed. The Count of Thirty: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell, West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993, p. 15 By the age of 14, he discovered Lovecraft's Cry Horror!, a British edition of the collection entitled The Lurking Fear, and read it in one day, finding the fiction's sense of awesomeness as well as horror extraordinarily appealing. He had also read Arthur Machen's major horror stories by this age, and some works by John Dickson Carr, which led him to write, at 14 years old, a 100-page Carr pastiche (unfinished) titled Murder By Moonlight.Stefan R. Dziemanowicz, "The Ramsey Campbell Interview", Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror No 3 (Fall 1991), p. 19-20. This piece was published in 2020 as The Enigma of the Flat Policeman, including annotations from the adult author reflecting on his psychological state at the time of composition.
On leaving school at age sixteen, Campbell went to work in the Inland Revenue as a tax officer (1962–66). Campbell sold various early stories to editors including August Derleth and Robert A.W. Lowndes. His concept of what was possible in the Weird genre was highly influenced by Lovecraft for the next few years. In December 1961, Campbell completed the story "The Church in High Street" (previously titled "The Tomb-Herd") which he sent to August Derleth at Arkham House, an imprint singlehandedly responsible for preserving the legacy of H P Lovecraft. Derleth accepted the story in February 1962 and it became Campbell's first professionally published tale, appearing in the Derleth-edited anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart. Campbell wrote various other tales of the Cthulhu Mythos between 1961 and 1963. Derleth gave Campbell invaluable advice on improving his writing style (their correspondence has been published in a single volume from PS Publishing).
Forming his literary apprenticeship with stories modelled after Lovecraft's themes, Campbell's first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964), published when he was eighteen years old, collects his Lovecraftian pastiches to that date. Campbell has written, "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."Ramsey Campbell. Alone With the Horrors Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1993, p. ix The title story of the collection introduces Campbell's invention of a tome of occult lore similar to Lovecraft's forbidden Necronomicon, The Revelations of Gla'aki (see Books of the Cthulhu Mythos).
Campbell's first stories to be published in his native Britain were "Reply Guaranteed" and "The Stocking", which appeared in Tandem Horror 2, an anthology compiled by Richard Davis from stories which he intended for the BBC horror series Late Night Horror and were left unused when that series was cancelled.
Severn Valley
The Severn Valley is the setting of several fictional towns and other locations created by Campbell, part of the Cthulhu Mythos started by Lovecraft.
In his early writings, Campbell used the setting of Lovecraft's stories, in the fictional New England area of the Miskatonic River valley. At the suggestion of fellow Lovecraftian writer, August Derleth, he rewrote many of his earliest stories, which he had originally set in the Massachusetts locales of Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth, and moved them to English settings in and around the fictional Gloucestershire city of Brichester, near the River Severn, creating his own Severn Valley milieu for Lovecraftian horrors.Campbell, Ramsey. "Chasing the Unknown", introduction to Cold Print (1993), pp.11-13. The invented locale of Brichester is the main town of Campbell's Severn Valley, and was deeply influenced by Campbell's native Liverpool, and much of his later work is set in the real locales of Liverpool and the Merseyside area. The River Severn is an actual river in Wales and western England. Campbell's stories mention various real-world locales, including the Cotswold Hills, Berkeley, and the A38 road. These references place "Campbell Country" in the southern part of Gloucestershire, roughly between the cities of Gloucester and Bristol. This area is more correctly referred to as the Vale of Berkeley or the Severn Estuary; the real-world Severn Valley refers to an area around fifty miles (80 km) further north. His later work continued the focus on Liverpool; in particular, his 2005 novel Secret Stories (published in the U.S. in an abridged editionJoshi, S. T., Classics and Contemporaries, Hippocampus Press 2009, p.131. as Secret Story (2006) both exemplifies and satirizes Liverpudlian speech, characters, humour and culture, while Creatures of the Pool draws on the city's geography and history.
Inclusions Some of his stories about the fictional Severn Valley can be found in the following anthologies and collections:
Cold Print