Can Horror Fiction Go Highbrow?

Ramsey Campbell demands our respect as the most precocious horror writer of his
generation. He started writing his first novel (unfinished) at age 7. He completed a book-
length collection of stories at twelve. As a teenager, he began publishing tales, and got the
attention of August Derleth, the influential champion of H.P. Lovecraft and founder of
Arkham House. Campbell’s first collection of stories was published at age 18. By his early
twenties, he was a seasoned pro, and a leading candidate to inherit the mantle of Lovecraft
and expand that author’s Cthulhu Mythos.

Yet Campbell now balked at this likely destiny. He
broke away from Lovecraft’s influence, and for a time
even denounced that profane prophet of Providence.
Campbell discovered modern literary fiction, and began
learning from the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Graham
Greene, William Burroughs and Henry Miller. He had
already learned the ropes as a commercial writer, but
now he set higher standards for his work. He wanted to
combine the visceral intensity of pulp fiction with the
verbal pyrotechnics of the 20th century literary masters.

In his late 20s, he was ready to reinvent himself. He even changed his name. Up until
this point, he had published under the name J. Ramsey Campbell. But now he dropped
the initial—later he even had his first name, John, legally removed. But a far more
striking transformation took place in his prose. By the time he published his second
collection, Demons by Daylight, in 1973, Campbell was drawing more on Nabokov
than following the formulas of genre writers. S.T. Joshi, an influential scholar
specializing in dark genre tales, announced that this volume was "perhaps the
most important book of horror fiction since Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others."

Joshi's praise was not sufficient to keep this collection in print, but Campbell continued
to write and publish at rapid clip. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, he issued 13 novels
and 8 collections of short stories. But this large body of work may have outrun the
audience's ability to digest it. Joshi would eventually complain that Campbell "does not
have even a fraction of the popular following of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice
or Peter Straub," and add that he "is more often praised than studied."

By the time of The Nameless (1981), written when Campbell was in his mid-30s, our
author was no longer the wunderkind of horror, but a recognized luminary in the field.
Yet he fights against the constraints of genre fiction on
almost every page in this book. Supernatural beings are
crucial to the plot, but are pushed out of sight except when
their presence is absolutely necessary. Instead Campbell
focuses on psychology, mood and ambiance. Indeed, much
of the storyline is built on waiting and anticipation, and the
anxieties they bring.

Barbara Waugh, a literary agent, lost her daughter Angela
nine years ago. The girl was kidnapped by a stranger from
her school, and her body was discovered a few days later.
But was that really the corpse of Waugh's daughter? Now,
almost a decade after the event, Waugh starts receiving
strange phone calls from a young lady who claims she is
Angela. She wants her mother to rescue her from a cult that
keeps her under tight control, although the details she
provides are sketchy and insufficient to track her down.
The police dismiss the phone calls as a hoax, or perhaps
a setup for a later request for money from an impostor. Waugh decides that she must
take matters into her own hands, and rescue Angela from her captors.

Much of the suspense in this book is built around waiting for the phone to ring. That’s
hardly a promising gambit, but Campbell is determined to build most of this book on
undefined terrors. In fact, the villainous cult members here don’t even possess names.
Waugh eventually tracks down an investigative reporter who has been trying to identify
the people who may have taken her daughter. "While I was researching fringe groups
I kept coming across rumors of people who had no names," the journalist tells the
distraught mother. "The earliest rumor I can trace was current in London in the late
forties. Then the rumors go to Dartmoor, Manchester, Inverness, Liverpool, London
again, Newcastle, Birmingham, Sheffield and back here to London. You see, there’s no
geographical pattern, and as far as I can trace, the times never overlap." Unlike most
extremist groups, this one doesn’t seem to have pamphlets or manifestos. It simply
exists, for reasons unknown, and apparently with the goal of remaining unknown.

Has any suspense writer relied upon such a vague adversary: a nameless group, out of
sight, with no known doctrine, no apparent goals, no home, and no identity either to the
organization or its members?

But if Campbell violates genres expectations in plotting, he is even more of renegade
when it comes to prose style. No horror writer of recent memory works harder on
passages describing landscape, sky and setting. These are usually formulaic parts of
genre fiction, tossed off in a perfunctory manner while readers wait for the 'action'.
Campbell, in his mature period, doesn’t see things that way. He fills up his descriptive
passages with extravagant metaphors, rapturous poetic sentiments, and bizarre
comparisons—sometimes demonstrating literary flair, at other junctures just seeming
to show off.

Turn to a random page—in this case, page 91. Here’s what you find. Oncoming traffic
"quivers like jelly." Houses on a street "cluster like barnacles" and sing their "morning
song of vacuum cleaners." When the protagonist passes a Kodak office building,
Campbell notes that its façade looks like "two dozen strips of unexposed film." The
Nameless is filled with these kinds of passages, so much so that they stand out as
defining elements of Campbell’s style. Let other horror writers—say, Jack Ketchum
or Cliver Barker—pore on the gore; Ramsey Campbell piles up the metaphors and
modifiers.

I admire Campbell’s commitment to literary flair in a field that rarely cares about
such matters. He has clearly labored over these sentences and paragraphs. Yet that
makes me all the more surprised when he shows such clumsiness in other aspects
of the author’s trade. There’s a lengthy passage in this book involving a man trying
to meet up with the nameless cult near a motorway in Glasgow—and it eventually
results in a chase on foot and a violent confrontation. It’s filled with descriptors,
such as "Beyond a cobbled slope which led down from a gap between the overpasses,
the path curved again between bushes….Another empty ramp led up to the pavement
opposite the place where he’d waited.” Even after reading and rereading, I struggled to
visualize the setting. But Campbell piles it on, describing a complex choreography
involving ramps, pillars, a terrace, a concrete path, walls, buildings, bushes, railings,
slopes, several different roads that might intersect or perhaps run parallel to each
other, etc. He really ought to have included a photo or a drawing, because the
description is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't visited this part of Glasgow.
The result is that one of the key passages in the novel—and one of the few that
involves action rather than waiting—is undermined by the lack of clarity in the
exposition.

At his best, Campbell is an inspiring writer, and operates at a far greater level of
sophistication than most of his peers. Yet The Nameless testifies both to how high
this author was trying to reach, and also to what remained outside his reach. That said,
this book ought to be studied by others attempting to elevate horror and fantasy to
new plateaus. Just as Ramsey Campbell learned from Lovecraft, and took his formulas
to new places, others might find the same springboard from Campbell himself. Mixing
genre and highbrow literary concepts is very fashionable nowadays, but Campbell was
anticipating this trend forty years ago. To a great extent, he laid the foundation for the
legitimization of horror stories in the current day—as witnessed by works such as
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves or the scary
stories of literary masters Joyce Carol Oates and William T. Vollmann. Ramsey
Campbell's works still have much to teach us, and when he falls short, we ought to
remind ourselves that it was usually because he was aiming so high.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: November 14, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood

Week 38
The M agic Toyshop
by Angela Carter

Week 39
The O ther
by Thomas Tryon

Week 40
N ever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Week 41
G host Story
by Peter Straub

Week 42
J ohn Dies at the End
by David Wong

Week 43
T he Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen

Week 44
The C ipher
by Kathe Koja

Week 45
L et the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Week 46
T he Nameless
by Ramsey Campbell

conceptual fiction
Exploring the Non-Realist Tradition in Fiction

Can Horror Fiction Go Highbrow?

Ramsey Campbell could have gained renown as the successor to
H.P. Lovecraft...but then he decided he wanted something different