Among the baby boomers, one horror writer stands supreme. You already know t he 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 w riters 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 a uthors 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 e stablishing 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.
Campbell wanted to have it all—both the mainstream appeal of genre writing and also the multilayered complexity of modernist literature.