Table Of ContentAlone with the Horrors: The Great
Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-
1991
Book Jacket
SUMMARY:
Ramsey Campbell is perhaps the world's most honored author of horror fiction.
He has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, three
Bram Stoker Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime
Achievement Award. Three decades into his career, Campbell paused to review
his body of short fiction and selected the stories that were, to his mind, the very
best of his works. Alone With the Horrors collects nearly forty tales from the
first thirty years of Campbell's writing, including several award-
winners.Campbell crowns the book with a length preface-revised for this
edition-which traces his early publication history, discusses his youthful
correspondence with August Derleth, and illuminates the influence of H.P.
Lovecraft on his work.Alone With the Horrors provides readers with a close
look at a powerful writer's development of his craft.
Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction
of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991
Ramsey Campbell
--------------------------------------i
Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------ii
Ramsey Campbell ------------------------------------comiii
by Ramsey Campbell from Tom Doherty Associates
Alone with the Horrors
Ancient Images
Cold Print
The Count of Eleven
Dark Companions
The Darkest Part of the Woods
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
The Face That Must Die
Fine Frights (editor)
The Hungry Moon
Incarnate
Influence
The Last Voice They Hear
The Long Lost Midnight Sun
The Nameless
Nazareth Hill
Obsession
The One Safe Place
Pact of the Fathers
The Parasite
Silent Children
Waking Nightmares --------------------------------------iv
Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------v
Ramsey Campbell --------------------------------------vi
ALONE WITH THE HORRORS:
The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-.1991
Ramsey Campbell
TOR^R
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK ------------------------------------comvii
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these
stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
ALONE WITH THE HORRORS: THE GREAT SHORT FICTION OF
RAMSEY CAMPBELL, 1961-1991
Copyright ^can 1993, 2004 by Ramsey Campbell Originally published by
Arkham House in 1993 in a substantially different form.
"Introduction: So Far," copyright ^can 2004 by Ramsey Campbell
"The Tower from Yuggoth," copyright ^can 1961 by Ramsey Campbell, for
Goudy 2 (1962)
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor^r is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Campbell, Ramsey, 1946-
Alone with the horrors: the great fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-.1991 /
Ramsey Campbell.
people. cm.
"A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-765-30768-5 EAN 978-0-765-
30768-2
1. Horror tales, English. I. Title.
PR6053.A4855A6 2004
823'..914--dc22 2003071149
First Hardcover Edition: May 2004 First Trade Paperback Edition: September
2005
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321 ------------------------------------viii
For T. E. D. Klein, who helped launch me and wrote tales for me to aspire to ---
-----------------------------------ix
Alone with the Horrors --------------------------------------x
Contents
11 Introduction: So Far
23 The Tower from Yuggoth * 1961
45 Cold Print * 1966
59 The Scar * 1967
73 The Interloper * 1965
81 The Guy * 1968
91 The End of a Summer `so Day * 1968
97 The Man in the Underpass * 1973
107 The Companion * 1973
117 Call First * 1974
123 Heading Home * 1974
127 In the Bag '1974
137 Baby * 1974
153 The Chimney * 1975
169 The Brood * 1976
181 The Gap * 1977 --------------------------------------xi
193 The Voice of the Beach * 1977
219 Out of Copyright * 1977
227 Above the World * 1977
237 Mackintosh Willy * 1977
251 The Show Goes On * 1978
263 The Ferries * 1978
275 Midnight Hobo * 1978
287 The Depths * 1978
305 Down There * 1978
317 T/zeKf * 1979
329 Hearing Is Believing * 1979
337 The Hands * 1980
347 Again * 1980
357 Just Waiting * 1983
367 Seeing the World * 1983
373 Old Clothes * 1983
383 Apples * 1984
391 The Other Side * 1985
403 Where the Heart Is * 1986
411 Boiled Alive * 1986
421 Another World * 1987
433 End of the Line * 1991 ------------------------------------comxii -----------------
-------------------com11
Introduction: So Far
Some horror stories are not ghost stories, and some ghost stories are not horror
stories, but these terms have often been used interchangeably since long before I
was born. I'm in favour of this. Many horror stories communicate awe as well as
(sometimes instead of) shock, and it is surely inadequate to lump these stories
together with fiction that seeks only to disgust, in a category regarded as the
deplorable relative of the ghost story. Quite a few of the stories collected herein
are ghost stories, and I hope that at least some of the others offer a little of the
quality that has always appealed to me in the best horror fiction, a sense of
something larger than is shown.
In 1991 I'd been in print for thirty years, and had these thirty-seven tales to
show for them--at least, these are most of the ones my editor at Arkham House,
the late Jim Turner, and I thought were representative. One of Jim's criteria was
that the contents should be stuff only I could have written, a flattering notion that
excluded such tales as "The Guide", which otherwise I would have put in. For
the record, the book incorporates my British collection Dark Feasts, with the
solitary exception of "The Whining", no significant loss.
I've made one substitution. Previous editions of Alone with the Horrors have
led off with "The Room in the Castle", my earliest tale to be professionally
published. The idea was to show how I began. Here instead is something rarer to
perform the same service. It too dates from when I was doing my best to imitate
Lovecraft, but "The Tower from Yuggoth" (1961) demonstrates how I fared
before August Derleth took me under his editorial wing. It was published in
Goudy, a fanzine edited by my friend Pat Kearney, who later wrote a
greenbacked history of Olympia Press. It was illustrated by Eddie Jones, another
old friend but sadly a late one. At the time it felt very much like the start of my
career as a writer; now it looks more like a phase I needed Derleth to rescue me
from. At least it's eldritch--it keeps saying as much-- and it also offers cackling
trees and curse-muttering streams. The reader may end up knowing how they
felt, and my notion of how Massachusetts rustics ------------------------------------
com12
spoke may also be productive of a shudder. Had I conjured him up from his
essential salts for an opinion, Lovecraft would undoubtedly have pointed out
these excesses and many other flaws. And watch out for those peculiar erections
in the woods! I used the term in utter innocence, not then having experienced
any of them while awake. No doubt a Christian Brotherly promise of hell if one
encouraged such developments helped.
Substantially rewritten as "The Mine on Yuggoth", the story appeared in The
Inhabitant of the Lake, my first published book. In 1964 I was several kinds of
lucky to find a publisher, and one kind depended on my having written a
Lovecraftian book for Arkham House, the only publisher likely even to have
considered it and one of the very few then to be publishing horror. In those days
one had time to read everything that was appearing in the field, even the bad
stuff, of which there seems to have been proportionately less than now, but I'll
rant about this situation later. Suffice it for the moment to say that much of even
the best new work--Matheson, Aickman, Leiber, Kirk, as vastly different
examples--was being published with less of a fanfare than it deserved.
I mentioned imitation. I've made this point elsewhere, and I do my best not to
repeat myself, but this bears repeating: there is nothing wrong with learning your
craft by imitation while you discover what you want to write about. In other
fields imitation isn't, so far as I know, even an issue. It's common for painters to
learn by creating studies of their predecessors' work. Beethoven's first symphony
sounds like Haydn, Wagner's symphony sounds like Beethoven, Richard
Strauss's first opera sounds remarkably Wagnerian, and there's an early
symphonic poem by Bartok that sounds very much like Richard Strauss, but who
could mistake the mature work of these composers for the music of anyone else?
In my smaller way, once I'd filled a book with my attempts to be Lovecraft I was
determined to sound like myself, and Alone with the Horrors may stand as a
record of the first thirty years of that process.
In 1964 I took some faltering steps away from Lovecraft and kept fleeing back
to him. Among the products of this was "The Successor", one of several tales I
found so unsatisfactory that I rewrote them from scratch some years later. In this
case the result was "Cold Print" (1966/67), whose protagonist was to some
extent based on a Civil Service colleague who did indeed ask to borrow my
exciting (Olympia Press) books but found Genet dull as ditchwater, in the old
phrase. I had also just read the first edition of Robin Wood's great book on
Hitchcock's films, hence the way the tale accuses the reader of wanting the coda,
as though I hadn't wanted it myself. ------------------------------------com13
Another 1964 first draft was "The Reshaping of Rossiter," a clumsy piece
rewritten in 1967 as "The Scar." Looking back, I'm struck by how even at that
age I was able to create a believable nuclear family from observation, though
certainly not of my own domestic background. Perhaps I can also claim to have
been writing about child abuse long before it became a fashionable theme in
horror fiction. Certainly the vulnerability of children is one of my recurring
themes.
I had my first go at "The Interloper" in 1963 and a fresh one in 1968. In the first
version the boy tells his tale to a child psychiatrist who proves to be the creature
of the title. My memory is that the psychiatrist was none too convincing a
character, even though I was taken to see one at the age of seven or so,
apparently because I rolled my eyes a lot and suffered from night terrors. By
contrast, the final draft of the tale was a strange kind of revenge on the sort of
schooling I'd had to suffer at the hands of Christian Brothers and their lay staff
(not all of either, I should add--Ray Thomas, my last English teacher, had a
genius for communicating his love of the language and literature); the incident
involving the teacher and the poetry notebook actually happened, and the red-
haired mathematics teacher was fully as much of a stool as I portray, though the
book in question was the first draft of The Inhabitant of the Lake.
All this rewriting, and other examples too, had made me surer of myself. "The
