Musings from the Master of Modern Horror

To mark the 80th birthday of Britain's longest-serving living horror author, Ramsey Campbell, BANGLE raised a Corpse Reviver cocktail and seized the opportunity to speak with the man whom Guillermo del Toro called “an absolute master of modern horror. And a damn fine writer at that.”

BANGLE: Your early work was so deeply influenced by Lovecraft's books that you incorporated his mythos into a British setting for your early Arkham House collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake. How did your love of Lovecraft help you forge your own distinct brand of urban, claustrophobic British horror?

RC: I should tell you the British setting was August Derleth’s idea—that’s to say the notion of locating those early tales in Britain was. I’d originally set these Lovecraft imitations in Arkham country, though I’d never been to America (and it showed). I invented some towns to twin in literary terms with Lovecraft’s locations. Foremost was Brichester, which grew to resemble my home town of Liverpool, so that by the time we reach “Cold Print” it’s Liverpool in all but name.

Parallel to this development, and converging with it in that story, my fiction increasingly dealt with my lived experiences, which became central to narratives such as “The Cellars” and many thereafter. There’s a sense in which they’re still influenced by Lovecraft, insofar as he counselled realism in all aspects of (as he termed it) the weird tale other than the fantastic element. I’ve also tried to subsume into my stuff his care with structure—the gradual accumulation of telling detail, the progression from the suggestive to greater explicitness, however restrained—and eloquent modulation of prose.

But I must also acknowledge the crucial example of Fritz Leiber, specifically “Smoke Ghost”, in which instead of invading the urban environment, the weird manifestation is an expression thereof; the familiar city grown uncanny is itself its source.

BANGLE: Your work is celebrated for its surreal, paranoia-inducing atmosphere where the true terror often lies in what is left unseen or misunderstood. In an era where a lot of modern horror leans heavily on graphic violence and visceral shock, do you feel a greater duty or need to champion a slow-burn psychological dread?

RC: While I’m not consciously attempting to counter graphic gruesomeness and crude horror (a conflict that has existed since the early days of the field: see M. R. James and, I think, also Dorothy Sayers as an anthologist versus the Not at Night anthologies, for instance) my tales have if anything recently moved further towards reticence. From early on I’ve tried to adhere to the principle of depicting violence no more explicitly than necessary (which, on occasion, is very: see the razor scene in The Face That Must Die, designed to show how difficult it must surely be for the inexpert to kill someone, or the eye injury in Ghosts Know, based on information gleaned from my dear friend John Probert, then a surgeon, and meant to reclaim the motif from its status as a standard horror trope). I’m certainly not opposed to graphic horror that feeds the imagination (as Clive Barker’s does, for example) rather than acts as its substitute, but my favourite horror tends to be suggestive and based on uncanny dread or psychological or aspires to awe, and those are the kinds I generally try to write. 

BANGLE: Unlike traditional Gothic settings, many of your most unsettling stories take place in gritty, mundane urban environments such as your hometown of Liverpool. What is it about the concrete, everyday world that makes it a more fertile ground for modern horror than a ruined castle?

RC: Its innate menace, dormant or otherwise. In too many cases its lack of soul. Its very familiarity, which feigns reassurance. You might feel uneasy out on your own on a country road at night (leaving aside any threat from careless drivers), but you would often have better (which is to say worse) reason alone in the city. I think the urban uncanny can pick up on and metaphorically represent all this. Again, as in the Leiber tale I cited, a city environment can generate its own species of the supernatural. 

BANGLE: Mary Shelley famously wrote in her 1831 preface to Frankenstein that "invention... does not consist in creating out of voids, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded."

When you look at the "chaos" of the modern world, what raw materials do you think are currently shaping the next evolution of horror fiction?

RC: The omnipresence of the irrational, the prevalence of paranoia, the sense that the world is the plaything of overgrown infants and their cronies, the increasing eagerness to find scapegoats to blame, the growing untrustworthiness of anything presented as fact and by extension the undermining of reality or at least our perception of it—all this is surely a source of terror and a set of themes for the field.

BANGLE: You’ve spent over half a century exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche. What do you believe is the psychological or social utility of horror? Does it serve to purge our real-world anxieties, or is it merely a mirror reflecting them back at us?

RC: More a mirror, I fear, and not even necessarily a distorting one. But I also think it can and should engage and enrich the imagination, not to mention (like good fiction in general) make us—the writer and the reader alike—look again at things we may have taken for granted.

BANGLE: What still terrifies Ramsey Campbell?

RC: See answer 4 and add the vulnerability of children, the widespread willingness to embrace beliefs that promise all the answers in exchange for the right to question, the increasing reluctance of people to intervene when they see or suspect wrongdoing, the growth of the notion that literacy and other standards are less important than they used to be, the sense that the world is sliding into chaos, carried there by extremes of human behaviour… Given all this, why wouldn’t I write horror?

ANCESTRAL (out in November 2026) is Ramsey’s 39th novel in a publishing career spanning more than six decades and garnering more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.

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