Yatterings

What is it that you thinks makes a good horror story? You’ve worked within many facets of the genre over the years.

A sense of dread, a sense of structure, an imaginative engagement with the material. Essentially a body of lived experience, experienced in the imagination. A great many horror stories, not just horror but many fictions, have the sense of writer having recycled a great many things that he has read, the characters are behaving in the same way as many other horror characters. A primary thing I think of any good fiction is that you’re writing about how these people would react in these circumstances. Obviously I’m on about a particular kind of horror fiction. Lovecraft, for example, is not based on a character to that extent, its based on the essential situation, there’s little characterisation but a great deal of atmosphere. I suppose the kind that I go in for is concerned with the effect of the situation on the character.

Bad horror fiction recycles received material. This isn’t to say that you can’t use the tropes of the genre. The mysterious old fiction is more difficult to do now since the book is likely to be scanned and out there on the Internet which of course is a new development for fiction to take. There’s no reason why you can;t draw on

This is a slight contradiction in what I’ve been saying but I passionately believe in knowing your tradition that you’re coming from, actually read the great fiction in the field, getting to know what other writers have done and build on it. I think the best writers do that. You can certainly see that Lovecraft is the first writer to unify the British and the American traditions. On the one hand you’ve got Blackwood and Arthur Machen, on the other, you’ve got Poe and Beards. He drew on all these, and M R James actually, and having built on these elements he then forges something quite new. A few years comes along Fritz Leiber, he actually puts together Lovecraft and James in, for him, a very urban and modern American setting. So once again, he creates something quite new but its rooted in the work of the best in the field.

How difficult do you think that it is?

Poe was the first modern writer to refine the Gothic. Hs short stories are, if you like, compacted Gothic novels. He’s an obvious example. In Britain, Sheridan LeFanu was doing something similar. He wrote some late Gothic novels, like Uncle Silas, he refines it down to novella length with the emphasis on the psychological.

How difficult is it now, since the horror tropes are so well known, to write something new and interesting?

You can still do it. Look at the individual writers we’ve got right now, like Mark Samuels, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlin Kiernan. You can see where they are coming from. In Caitlin’s case for instance, its that of Bradbury and Lovecraft which is an unusual combination but she puts it together in a wholly individual way, a very contemporary way. Its partly from her characters being very modern, there’s also to the perceptions are new, the material, even when it hints of Lovecraft, she’s doing some individual things with it.

Where do you think that genre is going since the New Weird and people like China Mieville mixing everything up?

That’s been going for a long time. Clark Ashton Smith, a century ago, was marrying extreme strangeness and real horror. Usually it isn’t likely to work that well since horror derives its power form the familiar being invaded by the unspeakable or the other in some way. If you have something like Smith which is exotic and fantastic in itself then you might expect the horrific elements not to work that well but they do. The best writers, if they want to use that method, can make it work.

So do you think that horror works in defamiliarising itself with the familiar?

That’s one aspect. Not the only thing. Fritz Leiber was, in many ways, the turning point. On the whole before Fritz, the familiar environment would be invaded by the monster. In Fritz’s stories the everyday environment was actually the source of the horror. Obviously, another step forward, was the forbidden, the denied, was likely to turn into some more monstrous form and haunt them.

You publish both with big and small presses. Do you think that genre is turning to small presses or is that more an accident?

I like doing it. In the case of PS, you’ll find increasingly the PS edition differs from the American mass market version because I’ve done some other editing to the other version. I don’t necessarily prefer one version over the other but increasingly the PS is likely to contain more material. Secret Story, which was Secret Stories in the PS version, the PS edition is 60 pages longer and a couple of complete chapters are not in the American edition. I actually quite like both versions, they have different merits.

Now as far the whole business of small press. As far as horror goes, I think we’ve reached on of the natural states of the field. When I was growing up in the 50s, there were a few bestsellers like Dennis Wheatley, a few anthologies appearing from mainstream publishers, and people like Arkham House who were keeping the field alive by small press publishing. The thing the small press tends to do is to keep the book in print until the last copy sells out which is the opposite of what most mainstream publishing does. As I say, this is what I was seeing fifty years ago.

What would you say to anybody aspiring to be a horror, or a weird, writer now?

Just tell the truth as you see it, speak from your own experience. Tell us something that we didn’t know or remind us of the things we did or had forgotten. Above all be honest. Don’t write the way somebody else writes, learn from them but you must find your own voice and your own themes and then you’ll be a writer.

So keep writing and redrafting when it doesn’t work. Absolutely. I’m a great believer in rewriting

Books by Ramsey Campbell