The Campbell Mythos

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell; illustrations by Randy Broecker: containing the following stories and essays (dates are first publication, not composition):

• The Stone on the Island (1964): Campbell begins his transition from Lovecraftian pastiches to his own style of horror here, as he mixes an idea from M.R. James, a Lovecraftian island, and his own experiences at work. 
• Before the Storm (1980): Written in the 1960's, the story again shows Campbell mixing cosmic body horror and his own Lovecraftian deities with the daily grind at an office.
• Cold Print (1969): Campbell's first truly great short story by my reckoning. A quest for a particular form of (perfectly legal, now anyway) pornography by a Physical Education teacher takes him to a bookstore he never, ever should have gone into.
• The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973): Fun, disturbing metafiction about a mysteriously vanished horror writer.
• A Madness from the Vaults (1972): Really a deft riff on the sort of stories Clark Ashton Smith used to write, set on an alien world and involving all-alien characters.
• Among the pictures are these: (1985): Campbell describes a series of sketches he made back in the 1960s. Interesting.
• The Tugging (1976): Campbell suggests that this is a too-literal interpretation of the Lovecraftian chestnut about the "stars being right" to bring back certain deities. I like it a lot -- it may be literal, but the images are grand.
• The Faces at Pine Dunes (1980): A great, great story. Its imagery climaxes in something deeply disturbing and chilling; its 20-year-old protagonist is sympathetic and carefully drawn.
• Blacked Out (1985): Fun scare is, as Campbell notes, Lovecraftian primarily because it appeared in his previous Lovecraftian collection Cold Print because the editor wanted to include at least one previously unpublished story. Rarely has a Campbellian protagonist had a more emblematic last name.
• The Voice of the Beach (1982): Maybe Campbell's crowning achievement in writing a Lovecraftian story without any recourse to all the machinery of Lovecraftian terms for 'gods' and creatures and menacing books. It most resembles Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The imagery and situations are sinister, horrifying, vague, and often uncomfortably vertiginous and hallucinatory.
• The Horror under Warrendown (1995): Very funny pastiche turns a famous English children's book series into a source of cosmic body horror.
• The Other Names (1998): Very solid combination of a sensitive character study and a Lovecraftian menace.
• The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash (2010): Funny, satiric examination of one very bad Lovecraft fan.
• The Last Revelation of Gla'aki (2013): Campbell's return to his Lovecraftian god Gla'aki manages to be both disturbing and weirdly soothing at points -- and it does a better job of showing why people might find comfort in the embrace of these terrible 'gods' than any story I can think of after David Drake's brilliant Lovecraft-meets-Joseph-Conrad novella "Than Curse the Darkness."
• The Successor (First draft of Cold Print) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
• The Franklyn Paragraphs (First draft) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
• Mushrooms from Merseyside (2015): Campbell's often hilarious salue to Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth sees the writer summarize all of his Lovecraftian fiction in a series of... limericks.
• Two Poems by Edward Pickman Derby (2015): Interesting early poetry.
• The Horror in the Crystal (Story fragment) (2015): 1960's fragment; interesting.
• Rusty Links (Essay) (2015): A snarky Ramsey Campbell from the 1960's.
• Lovecraft in Retrospect (Essay) (1969/1994): A very pissy Campbell from the late 1960's gets critiqued by the lovable Campbell of the 1990's.
• On Four Lovecraft Tales (Essay) (2013): As good an explanation of Lovecraft's strengths as a writer as you'll ever read, this essay really caused me to re-evaluate certain aspects of Lovecraft's work. It's a concise piece that explains how much more complex Lovecraft's style and structure were than he's generally given credit for from even his greatest admirers.
• Afterword (Essay) (2015): Campbell contextualizes all the pieces in the book. Invaluable, but I want more!

Overall: The stories are great, the non-fiction pieces are great, and the illustrations by Randy Broecker are extremely enjoyable and often very much 'Old School' in an early 20th-century pulp magazine way. Highly recommended.

The Influence of Anxiety

Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell:
Star Books edition (1975, identical to 1973 Arkham House edition): Potential  (1973); The End of a Summer's Day  (1973) ; At First Sight  (1973); The Franklyn Paragraphs  (1973); The Interloper  (1973)   [as by Errol Undercliffe ]; The Sentinels  (1973); The Guy  (1973); The Old Horns  (1973); The Lost  (1973); The Stocking  (1968); The Second Staircase  (1973); Concussion  (1973); The Enchanted Fruit  (1973); Made in Goatswood  (1973).

Jove/HBJ edition (1979): omits The Second Staircase and The Enchanted Fruit; adds The Last Hand (1975), The Telephones (1976), and Reply Guaranteed (1968).

The great Ramsey Campbell's writing shifted almost tectonically between his first and second collections. And all this shifting, which took place over a decade, occurred before he was 25. Demons by Daylight is that second collection, in slightly different forms for its British and American paperback editions (Arkham House originally published it in hardcover in 1973).

Campbell went from being a very young (16!) and gifted writer of pastiches of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos fiction to being a still-young horror writer with a prose style and approach to the supernatural that was, even with this second collection, uniquely his own.

Cosmic horrors would still appear in Campbell's work, along with ghosts and monsters and homicidal maniacs. But the description would be disturbingly off-set from the usual -- Stephen King once likened Campbell's descriptions of reality as being almost LSD-derived in their disturbing, vaguely hallucinatory quality. Everything, even the most simple of objects, has been radically destabilized and gifted with malign life. Sometimes that malign life is subjective. Sometimes that malign life is objective. Sometimes the whole matter remains unclear.

Already at work in this collection is Campbell's wedding of horror and anxiety. That anxiety usually occurs within the minds of his protagonists, and finds some answering echo from the world around them. That answer may be supernatural. It may be mundane but horrific. Or the answer may be unanswerable as to its provenance: is it real or is it entirely inside the mind? Or is the 'or' really 'and'?

Take "The Telephones," for instance. The settings are mundane: a pub, the side of a highway, a succession of phone booths. But the protagonist seems to think he's telepathic. And he may be. But he's also in the midst of a personality crisis about his sexual orientation. And weird things are happening, ultimately never to be entirely answered. It's not a great story, but it's a very good one.

Or take "The End of a Summer's Day." The protagonist's anxiety relates to her belief that she's unworthy of the love and marriage she's found relatively late in life. There's a bus tour with her spouse. There's a cave. Something happens that may or may not be real. My take is that what happens is real, in a supernatural sense, but that it also preys upon the anxieties that could conceivably reflect an unstable mind that's actually invented everything that's happened. A certain portion of Campbell's fiction exists in this gap.

But there's also the windy, twisty supernatural, overtly deployed, to be dealt with. Demons by Daylight contains my favourite dual narrative in Campbell's body of work, "The Franklyn Paragraphs" and "The Interloper"  [as by Errol Undercliffe], appearing jointly under the title of "Errol Undercliffe: An Appreciation."

Campbell himself (well, a character called Ramsey Campbell) narrates "The Franklyn Paragraphs." That faux memoir deals with (fictional) cult horror writer Errol Undercliffe, his disappearance, and the Lovecraftian events leading up to that disappearance. "The Interloper," ostensibly a story by Undercliffe, mixes the supernatural with the anxieties and fears of teenagers as related to the world of adults and authority and their peculiar powerlessness against authority figures who are not what they appear to be. It's a great duo.

The collection begins to flesh out the fictional cosmos centered around the fictional English city of Brichester that would appear a lot in Campbell's work around this time. Brichester, modelled partially on Campbell's hometown of Liverpool, would eventually be superseded by the real city in Campbell's work, though his fictional towns and cities of Brichester, Goatswood, Temphill, and others would continue to appear right up to the present day. These are places in the Severn Valley you don't want to go. But it's great to read about them. Campbell's work would continue to grow and improve after this collection. Still, this is a delight, and a sign of things to come. Highly recommended.

Memories of Glaaki

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell (1964; revised edition 2011): Ramsey Campbell's first published book was the Lovecraftian horror collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, published by Arkham House in 1964 when Campbell was 18 (!!!). This 2011 anniversary edition from Great Britain's PS Publishing (the anniversary being 50 years since Campbell first put pen to paper on the stories herein) is a terrifically well-produced and generous piece of work.

It's obviously best suited to Campbell completists, but it also offers a great deal of insight into the development of Campbell as a writer and into the methods of H.P. Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, August Derleth, who co-founded Arkham House to keep HPL's work, and the work of other horror and dark-fantasy writers, alive.

The original cover illustrator actually got the title agreed upon by Campbell and Derleth wrong, as Campbell explains herein. The intended title is restored here. Along with the original contents of the volume, we also get new commentary from Campbell (Derleth died in 1971), the original versions of several of the stories, a story published elsewhere by Arkham House as a 'teaser' for Campbell's collection, and reprints of several of Derleth's letters to Campbell about the stories Campbell had submitted. Oh, and there are extremely apt new illustrations that capture the flavour of such classic Weird Tales illustrators as Lee Brown Coye.

Campbell's still very much a developing writer here, paying homage to the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and other Cthulhu Mythos scribes. But the original and published versions of several of the stories show how quickly Campbell was capable of developing, especially after he took Derleth's career-changing advice and created his own English environment for his Mythos stories.

Campbell's imaginary Cotswolds city of Brichester and its surrounding, demon-haunted towns of Temphill, Goatswood, and Clotton would serve Campbell well as he swiftly moved from pastiche writer to idiosyncratic, unique wordsmith. Campbell's unique narrative viewpoint would develop with great rapidity -- by 1968, he was writing stories that were recognizably 'Campbellian.' But one can see some of that individuality surfacing in this collection; flashes of what's to come.

Campbell's commentary on his own stories depicts a Derleth who was astonishingly generous with his time -- Campbell got Derleth to read several of his stories with a simple letter. It also takes the reader through some of the missteps that remained in the published versions (Campbell notes, for instance, the peculiar ability of a couple of his protagonists to fall asleep in situations during which no normal human would fall asleep, or his peculiar ideas about American regional history that ended up putting a decaying, ancient castle in rural Massachusetts).

But there's a lot that's compelling about these early efforts, especially for anyone interested in the Cthulhu Mythos and/or Ramsey Campbell. And the volume itself from PS Publishing is a handsome piece of work with surprisingly good copy-editing for this day and age. Kudos! Highly recommended.