Ramsey Campbell
Many consider people like Dean Koontz and Stephen King the premiere horror fiction writers in the world. But all that money couldnt stop a car from running King over. Anyway no one has won as many awards for horror fiction as Ramsey Campbell. Clive Barker has called him a "master of dark fantasy plus his books still scare the shit out of me.
Since the late 1950s Campbell has been publishing short stories and novels that have made many a strong man tinkle his Underoos like a little girl. In the late 1990s he ventured away from horror novels into crime fiction but now hes back with the novel The Darkest Part of the Woods. The new book is about the Price family whose lives have for decades been snarled with the fate of an ancient forest. Now Dr. Price has discovered a hallucinogenic moss that quickly became the focus of a cult and it seems as if the whole forest can now affect the minds of visitors.
Check out Ramsey Campbells official website
Daniel Robert Epstein: You took some time off from writing supernatural fiction. What made you decide to come back to it with The Darkest Part of the Woods?
Ramsey Campbell: To be honest Ive never really been away because Ive always been writing short stories in-between the novels that have been supernatural. Supernatural has always been my first love, and what Ive always enjoyed most about the field is the great heights of Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen and so forth. Those are the sort of things Ive been trying to attain over the years. It would be truer to say that going away from the supernatural was a bit of a forced maneuver in the sense that my British agent at the time persuaded me that supernatural horror just wasnt viable and marketable anymore. She said I should move into something like crime fiction, which I did. The novels became much more like novels I would have written anyway as I got on with doing them.
The Last Voice They Hear was the last of this bunch of non-supernatural novels and I began writing that when my daughter had started to attend the University in York. I would often drive up there to see her and I would pass through Leeds, which is another Yorkshire town. Every time I would pass this certain shop but not know what kind of shop it is. But the name on the awning was Skelton Woods. I thought it might be one guy called Skelton and another called Woods. I remember the first time I saw that in the late 90s I was thinking that the phrase should be Skeleton Woods which I thought would be a great title, and immediately thought that I wouldnt be able to write it now that I wasnt allowed to produce supernatural novels. I could almost have used that title for The Darkest Part of the Woods but the novel moved anyway from anything that would befit that title. But maybe Ill use it for a short story someday.
The Last Voice They Hear was the last of this bunch of non-supernatural novels and I began writing that when my daughter had started to attend the University in York. I would often drive up there to see her and I would pass through Leeds, which is another Yorkshire town. Every time I would pass this certain shop but not know what kind of shop it is. But the name on the awning was Skelton Woods. I thought it might be one guy called Skelton and another called Woods. I remember the first time I saw that in the late 90s I was thinking that the phrase should be Skeleton Woods which I thought would be a great title, and immediately thought that I wouldnt be able to write it now that I wasnt allowed to produce supernatural novels. I could almost have used that title for The Darkest Part of the Woods but the novel moved anyway from anything that would befit that title. But maybe Ill use it for a short story someday.
DRE:
What made your agent think that horror was not a viable market anymore? Was there a dip in sales?
RC:
I think theres been more than a slight dip in Britain. I think horror has shrunk to where it was in the fifties as a mass-market genre. Which is really why PS Publishing has taken over the best in the field. Theres no question in my mind that PS is the major publisher of major horror in Britain. They may be the only serious contender now.
DRE:
I would ask what inspired The Darkest Part of the Woods but I would imagine its a wood that scared you.
RC:
Ive done the odd story before like say Just Waiting, which is set in woodland and In The Trees, which is pretty obvious where that took place. So I have done short stories set in forests. But I really basically just wanted to do a book that would encompass the forest imagery Ive gathered over the years that Ive never got quite around to finding a context for. The interesting thing is that I was actually beginning to work on this novel in the mid-90s when it was suddenly elbowed out of the way by my crime novels. Id started with this fundamental notion of when people begin to lop trees down the power of the forest becomes larger. I did begin to work on it as I said in the mid-90s but I think it benefited from waiting because I was amassing materials since then. I remember being a guest at World Horror at Niagara Falls in 1999 and my editor at Tor Books, Melissa Singer, was in the audience and I asked her whether it was time for me to do a supernatural book again. She endorsed it right there so I was able to tell the audience from the stage.
DRE:
What affect did doing those crimes novels have on the horror novel?
RC:
I dont see it that way. When I think about it very early on with writing novels I had alternated supernatural horror with non-supernatural horror like psychological horror. My second novel, The Face That Must Die, was not a supernatural book and there were other ones over the years. Those just felt to me like natural novels I would write. Im a believer in the idea that themes present themselves to you when you are technically equipped to deal with them. It wasnt until I was able to write those books that the ideas came to the foreground. I dont make the distinction between horror and crime. I think horror is a hugely encompassing field.
DRE:
The hallucinogenic moss scene in The Darkest Part of the Woods is done very well. So well that it makes me think you have done hallucinogenic drugs.
RC:
Absolutely I have. Yeah in the mid-70s there were a couple of years, which were my acid years. Marijuana also and psilocybin, the magic mushrooms Ive been very fond of. Effectively those are like acid but with acid if you take a direction you dont want to take, you have to spend an enormous amount of energy redirecting yourself into a path you want to take. Psilocybin just needs a little bit of gentle coaxing to reach its pitch. Its very easy to control.
DRE:
Is that something youve done recently?
RC:
Psilocybin has been a bit more recent. Not for some years but certainly in the 90s I would celebrate finishing a novel by going off and walking in the woods somewhere. You might very well say thats where that imagery is coming from in the double sense.
DRE:
If I were to buy drugs I would have to call certain people. Where does a famous author buy them? Dont name names or anything.
RC:
[laughs] We have our local people. Dont you worry its very easy. Increasingly now in Britain you can buy psilocybin legally in shops. Its illegal to prepare it for consumption but you can get it. Equally you can buy potent marijuana skunk seeds in perfectly legitimate shops. Im pretty convinced were going to see some decriminalization of cannabis in Britain soon. I could be wrong but they are certainly downgrading its criminal seriousness and I suspect people growing their own is going to be something theyre not so concerned about.
DRE:
I know you have always been an HP Lovecraft fan and many people describe your work as Lovecraftian. I wonder if thats a compliment or do you feel you wear the people you admire too much on your sleeve?
RC:
Its definitely a compliment and a very considerable one. For me I think The Darkest Part of the Woods is one of the few Lovecraftian things Ive written that Im pleased with. I do feel that gets as close to what I admire most about Lovecraft that I can get. It obviously has tiny Lovecraftian references buried in it for the people who want to spot them, the feel of that kind of cosmic terror, which is closer to awe than disgust.
DRE:
Would it make you happy to not emulate someone you admire?
RC:
Yeah but I dont think everything I write is Lovecraftian by a long shot. I think it reads more like me now than it does imitation Lovecraft but Id happily aspire to the people I most admire. I think thats one way you become more of yourself as a writer.
DRE:
Lennox Prices daughter has a role in this book. What keeps you coming back to writing about young people?
RC:
Its partly because Im a parent. Its true that I was writing about young people before I ever had kids so I suppose its a concern in someway that I dont want to forget what it was like to be young. I also think the vulnerability of children is something we need to be aware of and obviously once you become a parent you get intensely aware of that in all sorts of different ways. But also one of the recurring themes, the father who becomes the monster, thats my fears of not being able to live up to the responsibilities of being a good parent. I can use my own childhood as an excuse but I wont. I do think there is that sense in the back of my mind that I wont be good enough. I might become worse than not good enough and become dangerous to my kids. I dont think I have because they have grown up to be wonderful people but that was always in the back of my mind.
DRE:
When you try to come up with a way to frighten people do you think of something that frightens you?
RC:
No its completely the other way around. I dont try to come up with something that frightens someone else. This is how it makes me feel when I imagined it. Im really trying to articulate it for myself. I dont have the reader in mind when I am writing, I am the reader.
DRE:
How vivid is it for you when youre writing?
RC:
It depends on the story I think. Certainly something like the finale of The Darkest Part of the Woods or the scene when they are exploring the cellars of the abandoned tower are very strong in my imagination. The scene where his memories are falling away certainly did disconcert me when I was writing it. That makes me feel like I am doing something right. Occasionally there will be something I write I find difficult to write then reread. Like the razor scene in The Face That Must Die and in The One Safe Place where one of the central characters is kicked to death in the middle of the street with passersbys driving by and no one intervenes. I found that extremely harrowing to write because it seems perfectly conceivable it would happen that way.
DRE:
I wasnt able to find too much about your mother. Is it true her mind went into a certain state?
RC:
Well she was an undiagnosed schizophrenic so things certainly got worse as she got older. She was inhabiting a completely invented paranoid world. I wrote about it at length in my non-fiction book [Probably].
DRE:
Do you find that theme seems to crop up in your work? Like for example, the man losing his memory in The Darkest Part of the Woods.
RC:
Yes there is that but also in a more general sense of reality constantly being under threat. That perception is a very fragile thing. From a very early age, like three years old, I had to sort out the fact that what my mother perceived was not necessarily real and that reality was something objectively present that she was not getting.
DRE:
I know you had some serious father issues because you didnt meet him until you were in your 20s.
RC:
Until he was dying. That in itself is not so much a major thing but often I was in the same house as him and not meet him. That was pretty strange. Effectively he became a source of absolute terror because he was a faceless presence. I only heard him in the night coming up the stairs or a voice coming in the front door.
DRE:
What were you like as a teenager?
RC:
I was as rebellious as your ordinary teenager gets. My particular way of rebelling has stayed with me because I am passionately opposed to censorship. Back in those days if you wanted to read Naked Lunch you had to import it from Paris. You couldnt buy it in Britain or America at that point. From my mid-teens I was smuggling books into the country. It was sort of a literary rebellion closely followed by movie going rebellion because I wanted to get into X-rated films, which were mainly horror movies. I was there devouring every horror film I could. I remember seeing Psycho and that was kind of a baptism of fire because it was so terrifying. I knew the truth about Norman Bates because I had read the novel but Hitchcock still makes it intense. Curse of the Demon was the very first horror film I fell in love with. That always remains a classic for me also the Hammer and Quatermass movies. Christopher Lee was quite horrifying as Dracula. I very much admired those films as well.
DRE:
What kind of music were you into?
RC:
I was very much a Beatles fan. But also Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane and other psychedelic bands were favorites.
DRE:
How has horror fiction changed recently?
RC:
Well in the past 30 years the horror novel has become a much more eloquent form. Its been developed into a perfectly legitimate genre of its own. There were a few masterpieces previously for instance, I still feel the Haunting of Hill House is the greatest novel in the field.
DRE:
Do you have any tattoos?
RC:
My son does but I dont.
DRE:
I know you have an official website. Do you spend a lot of time on the internet?
RC:
Oh yes, far too much time in fact. But I intend to write a novel about the internet soon so I call it research. Believe me Im in the vortex everyday. I do have a frequently asked questions on my site but its not really up yet so I need to make time to do that.
DRE:
Ive read your books for quite a few years now and I never knew that youve won more awards for horror fiction than any other author.
RC:
Thats what they say.
DRE:
What does that mean to you?
RC:
Its more than an honor to get them of course. When I get despondent and discouraged about my stuff, which is frequently, I could always look at that shelf full of little heads of Lovecraft and Cthulhu and I feel somewhat better.
DRE:
How do you get despondent about your work?
RC:
Sometimes I feel its never as good as it had to the potential to be. Thats why I do the best I can but nevertheless there is always something out there you never quite reach so you try it with the next one.
DRE:
Have you met many of your Goth fans?
RC:
Not really. I met many people in the beginning of last year at the Spookycon and believe me there were more tattoos and piercings per person than Ive ever seen before.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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