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