One of the pillars of the horror genre is the fiction of Ramsey Campbell. The importance and influence of his work can not be overstated. His protagonists are perverts, obsessives, loners, and losers. Often they end up lost in some kind of dark erotic delirium or ambigious nightmare straight out of their own subconscious regrets and fears. Mystery is all-important in his work, leaving the reader lost in the narrative long after they have put the book down. There is a dream logic that flows through his tales like a haze or a fog. Things almost make sense, but it feels like one piece, a piece necessary to understand what is going on is missing. The ominous endings leave you in darkness and confusion.
There is a strong element of Ramsey exploring the darkest recesses of his mind. His fears, his desires, and his obsessions, freely and unashamedly examined and played with in his tales. There is also very clearly his deep love for the horror genre. His playing with tropes and twisting them into his own unique point of view. You can tell Ramsey puts the crafting of an incredible horror tale first, even if it exposes an uncomfortable amount of his inner life. His love of the horror genre shines through his work. He explores the field and what you can do with it, pushing the limits of what can be talked about and dealt with in the genre. What the limits are and how to push beyond them. Ramsey Campbell may be the most important horror author since H.P. Lovecraft.
Campbell’s tales offer no easy explanation. Often ending in darkness and mystery, the reader is left confused, not sure what just happened. His tales linger in the reader's mind. What was that in the darkness? What was that voice in the night? You will never know. You can’t come to terms with what you don’t understand. Which is a vital key to Campbell’s work. There is no winning. You don’t even know what happened. What you are facing. How can you fight the darkness? And what if the darkness is coming from within you? In a way, the darkness and the unknown emerge from the protagonists. Their innermost shameful desires and secret regrets come out, lurking, twisted, and inhuman. There is an almost self-destructive element to his plots, the protagonists rarely are chased by the horrors, rather they go seeking them, and come to meet them, in whatever strange form they have taken. Another way Campbell reveals himself in his work. From absent parents, broken homes, lonely men, sexually frustrated loners, and stressed want to be authors. Inadequate lovers, and troubled couples, there is a realism to Campbell’s work, facing real-world troubles and failures, that balance the abstract deliriums that haunt his work.
Do his characters desire the strange dooms awaiting them? Are they seeking transformations and the corruptions that await the end for them? The violation and transformation of the human body is a central concern of Campbell. Sometimes perverts, horror authors, or neurotics find themselves physically mutilated or metamorphosed into something else, their flesh twisted into new forms and meant for new purpose. Regular people who in the end find themselves to be actually something quite unhuman. Or shown to never have been human to begin with. Sometimes his characters come to realize a hidden truth and find to their horror that life is not what they thought it was, that there is a corruption at the core of existence. His stories are populated by whispering figures in the night, fungal horrors lurking underground, and unearthly doppelgangers who have taken over your friends and family. Chimerical and strange beings lurk at the corner store or your familes dining room table. For all the dooms that come down on his characters, his stories never come across as moralistic. That may be because there are no “good” characters in his work. No good family man overcoming the evil horrors. In fact, he seems to be saying that we all are corrupt. We all in our own ways are perverts and obsessives. A lot of times the horrors are reflections of the protagonist. Nothing can be overcome because life itself is a nightmare.
Clear predecessors to Ramsey’s work are Lovecraft, M.R. James, Robert Aickman, and Fritz Leiber. Also, a strong dose of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov can be seen in his prose style and use of wordplay. He certainly also paid close attention to the maturing of the horror film in the 1960’s and 1970’s and drew inspiration from the best of that new wave of horror film. At the same time, the European art house film around the 1950’s and 1960’s were providing new ways to disquiet and challenge the audience. A quick list of films that you can clearly see an influence on Ramsey Campbell’s work include: Vertigo, Don’t Look Now, Last Year in Marienbad, Belle de Jour, Eraserhead, The Eclipse, Repulsion, and The Innocents.
His early collections, the era of his work that I prefer, are masterworks of the genre. Demons by Daylights was one of those works that changed the shape of horror forever. A seminal work that stands with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, showing a completely new path for horror to take. For me, his most essential books are his incredible run of works between 1973 and 1987. Campbell’s Demons by Daylight (1973) was oblique in its storytelling and sexually explicit, it used a kind of urban realism, the horrors of run-down apartment complexes and dark streets of empty houses that may hide any kind of horror. He then followed that up with the ambiguous tales of obsession and desire in his The Height of the Scream (1976). In this collection, he perfects the combination of abstract surreal atmosphere with emotionally ruined characters. His next collection, a masterwork of tales of creeping dread, Dark Companions (1982) shows Campbell absolutely at the height of his craft. His prose has never been better than here, and many of his all-time greatest works are contained within. Later on, he released Scared Stiff (1987) a collection that put the sex to the forefront but retained Campbell’s signature hallucinogenic style. Highly recommended also is his collection of Lovecraftian fiction, Cold Print (1985), an updating of classic cosmic horror tropes, bringing sexual deviancy and emotionally complex characters to the normally coldly inhuman style of Lovecraft.
You can see Campbell's influence spreading all over the horror genre, whether indirectly in the late 1990’s early 2000’s J-Horror films like Kairo and Cure or directly in the degraded pessimistic fantasies of Thomas Ligotti. His signature tropes of creeping dread and vertigo-inducing endings have spread their tentacles all over the horror genre. He has undeniably changed the tradition of horror literature forever. He helped make horror more personal, more about personal nightmares and deep dives into the darkest parts of one psyche. The diseased mental landscapes of the average man. Blighted urban landscapes that you can see right out your window. Ramsey Campbell shows us how dark the inner lives of people, by revealing the darkness inside himself, can really be. There has never been a better champion for the importance of horror as literature, or a greater practitioner.