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
Peter Straub: New Critical Perspectives (edited by Mike Thorn)
In his introduction to John C. Tibbetts’s The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub (2016)—the only academic, book-length study of Straub’s fiction currently in print—Gary K. Wolfe argues that “[p]erhaps more than any author of his generation—Stephen King included—Straub extended the literary possibilities of horror fiction.” Despite Peter Straub’s legacy as a leading figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century horror fiction, and his influence on dark fiction writers ranging from Caitlín R. Kiernan to Stephen Graham Jones, there is currently a scarcity of scholarship on his oeuvre. Since his passing in September 2022, Straub’s work has seen increased attention. Penguin Random House is rereleasing most of his books in 2025 and Subterranean Press is scheduled to publish his unfinished final novel, Wreckage, later this year. Stephen King, who co-authored The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) with Straub, recently announced that he has completed the final instalment in their collaborative trilogy, and in 2022, Emma Straub published This Time Tomorrow, a celebrated novel about her father.
Mike Thorn is collaborating with the University Press of Mississippi to publish Peter Straub: New Critical Perspectives, which will offer the first multiple-authored academic anthology on Peter Straub. This volume will provide an array of critical perspectives on Straub’s robust body of work, addressing the author’s place in the Gothic and Weird traditions and examining his thematic fixations, including national and individual traumas; abusive mentors and authority figures; supernatural manifestations of material misdeeds; America’s mythologizing of serial killers; the fraught distinctions between “literary” and “commercial” fiction; the vexing instability of assumed “truths” and “realities”; and the infinitely complex nature of narrative as such—its formal malleability, its capacity for phenomenological and ontological rupture, its social functions, and its potentials and dangers. The collection will address Straub’s previously understudied pre-Gothic poetry and novels, Marriages and Under Venus, as well as his popularly celebrated and award-winning novels (including Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, and Koko), his collaborations with Stephen King (The Talisman and Black House) and his short stories and critical essays. The book will be geared towards a broad readership—from undergraduate and graduate university students, to interested general readers, to scholars and researchers seeking original insights into Straub, the American Gothic, and horror fiction writ large.
Proposal Submission Details
Mike Thorn seeks proposals of no more than 500 words for essays (5000-7000 words) on or related to the topics listed below (proposals should include descriptive titles and preliminary reference lists). He is especially interested in essays addressing multiple Straub-authored novels and stories, and in analyses of under-studied works, such as Straub’s poetry collections; Marriages; Under Venus; If You Could See Me Now; Mr. X; and In the Night Room. He might consider close readings of individual novels or stories in some cases, but he will give preference to proposals referencing multiple texts. Please include a brief, 100-word personal bio. Send proposals and queries to mikethorn@live.com.
Chapter Topics
Pre-Gothic Straub: On the Poetry and Early Literary Novels: Proposals should address Marriages and Under Venus; they might also draw on Straub’s poetry collections.
The Early American Gothic Sequence: Proposals should address Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story. They might also consider Under Venus.
Narrative Unreliability and Genre-Slipperiness: On Straub’s “Blue Rose” Novels: Proposals should address Koko, Mystery, and The Throat; they might also consider The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories.
Straub Gets Weird: On Straub’s Engagements with H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tradition: Proposals should address the novels Mr. X and Floating Dragon. They might also consider A Dark Matter, The Talisman, or other novels or stories deemed Weird or Weird-adjacent.
American Serial Killer Mythologies: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and A Special Place. They might also consider other novels or short stories depicting serial killers, including the “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat), The Green Woman, Black House, Mr. X, “A Short Guide to the City”, “Ashputtle”, and “Bunny is Good Bread.”
The Metafictional Straub: Intertextuality and Narrative Self-Reflection: Proposals should address lost boy lost girl and In the Night Room. They might also address the preceding Timothy Underhill “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat) and other metafictional works, such as The Buffalo Hunter and The Hellfire Club.
Straub’s Short Fiction: Proposals should address at least one story or novella from each of the following collections: Houses Without Doors; Magic Terror; Interior Darkness.
Writers and Writing in Straub’s Fiction: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and at least one of the Timothy Underhill novels (Koko, Mystery, The Throat, lost boy lost girl, and In the Night Room). They might also consider Ghost Story or other novels and stories representing writers and writing, including Mrs. God, “The Juniper Tree” and “The Geezers.”
Gothic Trauma: Proposals should explore depictions of individual and collective trauma in Peter Straub’s fiction. They might address personal traumas in stories and novels like “The Juniper Tree”, “Bunny is Good Bread”, Julia, If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story, Under Venus, The Hellfire Club,and A Dark Matter, and/or representations of PTSD and the Vietnam war in Koko, The Throat, and “The Ghost Village.”
Nonfictional Straub: Critical Commentary and Curations: Proposals should consider some of the author’s essays and introductions compiled in Sides, Conjunctions, Poe’s Children, “Beyond the Veil of Vision: Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza”, and American Fantastic Tales.
Straub’s Literary Legacy and Influence: Proposals should place Straub’s work in conversation with his literary successors. Proposals should examine one or more of Straub’s novels or stories in tandem with one or more works by Kelly Link, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, or another high-profile fiction writer who has publicly cited Straub’s influence.
Preliminary Publication timeline
Deadline for proposals: November 30, 2025 Deadline for papers: January 1, 2027 Editor feedback: March 1, 2027 Deadline for final, revised papers: July 1, 2027 Manuscript submitted to University Press of Mississippi: September 1, 2027 Tentatively scheduled publication date: September 2028
Editor Biography
Mike Thorn, PhD, is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in American Gothic Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson, The Weird: A Companion, American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the writing-themed Craftwork podcast with Miriam Richer.
Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
I am continuing a new annual tradition. I’ve organized my choices chronologically, with externally and/or posthumously edited collections/anthologies at the end.
Vathek, an Arabian Tale; or, the History of the Caliph Vatek, by William Beckford (1786) The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (1794) The Monk: A Romance, by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796) Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798) Zofloya; or, the Moor, by Charlotte Dacre (1806) Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (1818) Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin (1820) The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg (1824) Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851) Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (1890) The Damned, by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1891) The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895) The Beetle, by Richard Marsh (1897) Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897) The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells (1897) Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904) The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907) The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson (1908) Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912) The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (1915) Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937) The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938) Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber (1943) The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946) This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947) The Scarf, by Robert Bloch (1947 / 1966) Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951) The Bird’s Nest, by Shirley Jackson (1954) I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (1954) The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson (1958) The Breaking Point, by Daphne Du Maurier (1959) The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (1959) Shock!, by Richard Matheson (1961) Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury (1962) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (1962) The Collector, by John Fowles (1963) The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima (1963) Dark Entries, by Robert Aickman (1964) New Stories from the Twilight Zone, by Rod Serling (1965) I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison (1967) Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin (1967) Last Summer, by Evan Hunter (1968) The Obscene Bird of Night, by José Donoso (1970) The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty (1971) The Room, by Hubert Selby Jr. (1971) The Other, by Thomas Tryon (1971) Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (1973) Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy (1973) Carrie, by Stephen King (1974) ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King (1975) Julia, by Peter Straub (1975) The Demon, by Hubert Selby Jr. (1976) Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (1976) Long After Midnight, by Ray Bradbury (1976) The Shining, by Stephen King (1977) The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978) Blood Secrets, by Craig Jones (1978) Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978) Ghost Story, by Peter Straub (1979) Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris (1981) The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983) Books of Blood: Volume One, by Clive Barker (1984) The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984) Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd (1985) The Damnation Game, by Clive Barker (1985) The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns (1985) Songs of a Dead Dreamer, by Thomas Ligotti (1985) Toplin, by Michael McDowell, (1985) The Hungry Moon, by Ramsey Campbell (1986) Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987) Why Not You and I?, by Karl Edward Wagner (1987) The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing (1988) The Girl Next Door, by Jack Ketchum (1989) The Pines, by Robert Dunbar (1989) American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991) The Cipher, by Kathe Koja (1991) Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, by Thomas Ligotti (1991) Something Stirs, by Charles L. Grant (1991) Bad Brains, by Kathe Koja (1992) Skin, by Kathe Koja (1993) The Between, by Tananarive Due (1995) Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates (1995) Traplines, by Eden Robinson (1996) Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (2005) The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009) Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2015) Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016) Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (2017) And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, by Gwendolyn Kiste (2017) Strange is the Night, by S. P. Miskowski (2017) The Seventh Mansion, by Maryse Meijer (2020) We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022) Supplication, by Nour Abi-Nakhoul (2024) Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe (1956) [edited by Edward H. Davidson] Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, by H. P. Lovecraft (2007) [edited by Joyce Carol Oates] Ghost Stories of Henry James, by Henry James (2008) [edited by Martin Schofield] The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, by Clark Ashton Smith (2014) [edited by S. T. Joshi]
In this interview, we chat with Lisa Tuttle about genre history, the ideal protagonist, Harlan Ellison’s writing advice, and so much more.
Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and moved to Britain in the 1980s. Her first novel, Windhaven, co-written with George R.R. Martin, was followed by over a dozen fantasy, science fiction, and horror novels, including three recent books set in the 1890s combining crime and supernatural fiction, featuring the detective duo Jasper Jesperson and Miss Lane; the third volume, The Curious Affair of the Missing Mummies, was published last year. She has also written hundreds of award-winning short stories collected in several volumes, including A Nest of Nightmares, The Dead Hours of the Night, and most recently, Riding the Nightmare. She is the author of The Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986) and currently writes a monthly science fiction review column for The Guardian. She lives with her husband and their daughter in Scotland.
Book and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
Hangsaman; The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery” – Shirley Jackson
The MANIAC; When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamín Labatut
Biography of X – Catherine Lacey
The Seventh Mansion – Maryse Meijer
Babysitter; By the North Gate; They; The Wheel of Love – Joyce Carol Oates
“The novel’s pacing is relentless. You may find yourself breathing only during page turns. Thorn has a real knack for building intensity to a fever pitch and letting the effect carry over into the action. His prose is smooth and his dialogue stretches the anger of juvenile angst without forcing it into unnatural banter. What’s really terrifying about this novel is its fidelity to the suburban experience—that is, what’s scary is how realistic so much of it is.”
Daniel Braum’s new short story collection Underworld Dreams comes equipped with a Story Notes section; within these Notes, the author provides thoughtful reflections on his creative process, narrative intentions, and philosophical interests, among other things. Most prominently, Braum stresses his persisting interest in the ambiguous space between the psychological and the supernatural. Braum’s fiction inhabits this space and engages with the Weird tradition to depict our reality as innately interstitial, slippery, and impervious to “mastery.” By extension, Underworld Dreams repeatedly encourages us to scrutinize the artificial gap between human and nonhuman animals, between subject and world.
This coy, quiet, and unassuming challenge to human exceptionalism resonates throughout. The first story, “How to Stay Afloat When Drowning,” features a disturbing centerpiece in which a group of people brutally torture a shark; later, the story uses its psychological-supernatural ambiguity to blur the distinction between shark and human. “The Monkey Coat” lends attention to the suffering bound up in its titular object (the origin of whose horrors remain unknown).
Braum does not employ this symbolism to bluntly didactic ends; rather, he assesses the artificial divide between human and nonhuman animal to underline broader investigations about the human subject’s relation to the world. For example, the title story sees characters discussing acts of infidelity and dishonesty as reflections of their “monkey in the jungle” selves.
Braum cites Algernon Blackwood’s classic Weird novella The Willows in his Story Notes, and the imprint is visible: Underworld Dreams repeatedly sees its characters encountering eerily numinous spaces and reality-fissures in environments that have evaded global industrialism. Braum finds lots of potential for the ineffable in “natural” spaces, demonstrating a knack for imagery and atmosphere.
There are horrifying moments here (perhaps most notably in the aforementioned “Monkey Coat,” reportedly inspired by advice Braum got from the legendary Jack Ketchum), but this book mostly occupies Weird Fiction’s less macabre terrain. China Melville writes that the “obsession with numinosity under the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction,” and this is the obsession that most clearly characterizes Underworld Dreams. For readers seeking fiction with a strong narrative engine and a bold commitment to the unknown, this collection is one to seek out.
Mike Thorn 