In this interview, we chat with Ramsey Campbell about creative instincts, happy accidents, eerie children’s tales, and so much more.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include 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. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. His latest novels are Fellstones, The Lonely Lands, The Incubations and An Echo of Children. His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull, Fearful Implications, and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) as well as The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly, while Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is a book-length study of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- The Atrocity Exhibition – J. G. Ballard
- Great Short Stories of the World – Barrett H. Clark and Maxim Lieber, eds.
- “A Dark-Brown Dog”; The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
- The Man Within – Graham Greene
- “The Residence at Whitminster” – M. R. James
- Rosemary’s Baby; The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin
- Tales of Mean Streets – Arthur Morrison
- Lolita; Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
- “The Telltale Heart” – Edgar Allan Poe
- At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub – Bill Sheehan
- Ghost Story – Peter Straub
- The Rupert Bear series – Herbert Tourtel & Mary Tourtel
- “Afterward” – Edith Wharton
- At Night, White Bracken; To Those from Below – Gareth Wood
Mike Thorn 