Porches “sprout tubular metal scaffolding,” and doors and suitcases are invested with agency (“The porch door had opened. His descriptions are crazy-making, full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. But Campbell was done with Lovecraft by the age of 23. A far more fruitful way to think about his writing is to take seriously what he wrote in an essay at the end of his second novel, The Face That Must Die, “The object of writing is to tell the truth.”Ĭampbell writes the way schizophrenics think. His first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was set in the Cthulhu mythos, and his first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, contained nothing but variations on Lovecraft, with their locations changed from New England to plain old England. Lovecraft and his early career as a Lovecraft impersonator. His style is his substance.īorn in Liverpool, much has been made of his childhood devotion to H.P. More than that, Campbell seems determined to induce these symptoms in his readers. His characters are gripped by depression, their perceptions can’t be trusted, inanimate objects are conscious, living creatures behave like automatons, personalities are overridden and replaced, consciousness is detached from physicality. Campbell writes horror that gets its mileage by deploying the effects of mental illness. Not in the sense that it’s arrow-through-the-head wacky, nor in the sense that it’s over the top, but in the clinical sense of the word. David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers
In this contribution to the Weird Writers series, Hendrix examines a story by an author who influenced him as a horror writer. Grady Hendrix is a frequent contributor to Tor.com and author of the recent 80’s-inspired horror novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. Ramsey Campbell (1946 – ) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. There is no ranking system the order is determined by the schedule of posts. This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site.
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