Ramsey Campbell's Quest to Become the Nabokov of Horror Writing

Among the baby boomers, one horror writer stands supreme. You already know the author
I’m describing. Stephen King has ruled the genre for the last four decades, and his dominance
has been so complete that the only figures who warrant comparison are those iconic horror
writers of previous generations: Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and (perhaps) Richard
Matheson. Yet by commercial measures, even these celebrated masters are left in the dust by
King, who outsells all of them combined.

Even so, King’s preeminence cannot hide the fact the he came of age as part of a high-profile
generation of horror authors born in the 1940s and early 1950s. If King leads the pack, it
hasn't been for want of ambitious challengers to his throne.

How do these contemporaries compete with Stephen
King (born 1947)? If you are Thomas Harris (born
1940), you blend horror and crime fiction in a new
formula for fright, dispensing with the supernatural
and proving, with his character Hannibal Lecter, that
a criminal can scare as much as a vampire or zombie.
If you are Jack Ketchum (born 1946), you aim instead
for success through excess, piling on the gore and
embracing a slasher aesthetic that makes King look
tame by comparison. If you are Clive Barker (born
1952) you craft a counterculture style of horror writing,
a kind of punk rock of genre fiction. If you are Peter
Straub (born 1943), you try to match King at his own
game, with mastery of plot, pacing, character development and other elements of craft.

Then we come to Ramsey Campbell (born 1946), who chose the most ambitious path of all.
Early in his career, Campbell aimed at nothing less than an exemplary blending of horror
writing and highbrow literary fiction. Campbell wanted to have it all—both the mainstream
appeal of genre writing and also the multilayered complexity of modernist literature.

In recent years, we are familiar with this kind of turbocharged
horror story, infused with MFA writing workshop splendor. In
the 21st century, the experimental horror novel is a category of
its own, marked by works such as Mark Z. Danielewski's House
of Leaves (2000) and The Fifty Year Sword (2012), Steven Hall's
The Raw Shark Texts (2007), Helen Oyeyemi's White is for
Witching (2009), Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps
(2007), and Grady Hendrix's Horrorstör (2014). Campbell’s
writing is differs from these examples in various ways. Even so,
he deserves credit as a trailblazer who helped legitimize the
concept of the modernist horror story.

Sad to say, Campbell’s breakthrough work is out of print and
rarely read nowadays. Yet when it was published in 1973, the
short story collection Demons by Daylight shook up the horror
fiction establishment. S.T. Joshi, the most influential critic in
the genre, greeted the book as a masterpiece and acknowledged
it as "perhaps the most important book of horror fiction since
Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others." Stephen King singled out this book as a rare example of
a horror masterwork that "run[s] brilliantly counter to the tradition." King went on to note,
with regard to Campbell, that "the polish of his writing and his mannered turns of phrase and
image make him seem something like the genre's Joyce Carol Oates."

Campbell was only 22-year-old when he published this collection, but he was already a
seasoned pro in the field, having released his first book at age 18. Yet before Demons by
Daylight, Campbell’s role model had been Lovecraft, and his writing style largely derivative.
In his early 20s, he immersed himself in literary fiction, and fell under the sway of modernist
writers William Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Graham Greene, Henry Miller and—most
decisively of all—Vladimir Nabokov. "The real revelation was Nabokov," Campbell later
explained. "His work opened me up to the huge possibilities of language."

I admire Campbell’s boldness in this book, yet his experimental approach was not uniformly
successful. His zeal to find a poetic language for horror fiction occasionally pushed him into
ridiculous or vague expressions. A lover’s kiss is described as "flaps of skin engulfing each
other like the jaws of cannibal snails." A clothesline is "drawn across the sky like the line at
the end of a story." Trees are "cylinders of chocolate about to melt.” Sometimes the prose
even seems to destroy the intended meaning. The man who sees those chocolate trees, in the
story "The Telephone," moves into "the endless cushion of stilled air"—yet, certainly, for air
to form a cushion, you must be moving in the windward direction, not into stilled air. And a
few sentences later, our hero steps barefoot on some sharp rocks and the "emerging stones
crushed his toes like hammers"—but, certainly, a hammer hit evokes a rapid blow from
above, a fundamentally different experience from stepping on something, no? Again and
again in these pages, Campbell delivers phrases that sound impressive or shocking, but serve
to make the description less precise, the story less immediate and potent.

I am more satisfied when Campbell draws on his modernist leanings to create daring new
structures for genre stories. In "The Franklyn Paragraphs," Campbell even shows up as a
character in his own tale, and juxtaposes different metanarrative layers in a manner that
deservedly warrants comparison with Nabokov. The terror in this plot is presented as a real-
life incident written in the form of a story framed in a letter that is presented in a bogus
memoir that purports to be a journal of the author. That’s quite a radical concept for a genre
story, yet "The Franklyn Paragraphs" does not lack for terror or suspense.

The most successful stories in Demons by Daylight show
Campbell moving beyond purple prose and crafting narrative
strategies that unnerve the reader even before the horror
arrives on the scene. At his best, Campbell even manages
to evoke the disruptive ambiance of Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau
Roman. “Concussion,” the most impressive story in this
collection, is one of the strangest horror tales you will ever
read. In an extraordinary gesture of avant-garde intransigence,
Campbell describes most of the story from the perspective of
a man who has broken his glasses, and thus perceives the
world around him as a series of blots and blurs. Adding to the
confusion, Campbell describes two love stories, years apart,
and moves back and forth between them in provocative ways,
sometimes leaping decades mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence. On top of this,
Campbell imposes a series of symbols—some of them drawn from the Hitchcock film
Vertigo, which both figures in the plot, and also serves as a symbolic template for
Campbell’s story. All of this effort might be for naught if Campbell didn't also deliver a
disturbing tale about a romance that hovers between reality and phantasmagoria. Here
the technical showiness of the work is integrated into the horror and suspense—not always
the case with Campbell’s writing—and our author makes a compelling case that
experimental fiction can produce distinctive effects in genre categories, types of
terror that a more conventional approach might not attain.

What did Campbell get for his efforts? He never came close to matching Stephen King’s
success in the marketplace. Yet I am hardly surprised. Indeed, I am amazed that Ramsey
Campbell continued to sell books to readers of horror genre fiction in the aftermath of this
breakthrough in his writing. His books can be slow-going, and Campbell's literary ambitions
often seem incompatible with the proven formulas of pulp fiction. Nor did our author
ever really gain the highbrow legitimization he hoped to attain by following in the steps of
modernist and postmodernist predecessors. But thought Campbell may have fallen short of
establishing himself as the Nabokov or Calvino of horror stories, he played an essential role
in the evolution of the field. Sometimes we need Kings, but in other instances anarchists and
disruptors also bring us into the future. Ramsey Campbell did just that in this strange and
wonderful, if sometimes frustrating, work from 1973.

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

Publication Date: July 12, 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