New Campbell Collection Worthy of His Best Works
Campbell, Ramsey. Told by the Dead. Intro. Poppy Z. Brite. Harrogate, UK: PS Publishing, 2003. 359 pp.
Slipcased hardcover (200 copies), ¶60/$90; trade hardcover (500 copies), ¶35/$50.
by S. T. Joshi
The appearance of a new short story collection by Ramsey Campbell offers a convenient opportunity to survey his nearly four decades as a professional author, for this volume itself encapsulates many of the distinguishing features of Campbell's multifarious work. The stories in Told by the Dead--his first new collection since Ghosts & Grisly Things (1998)--re written from as early as 1968 to as late as 2001, running the gamut from the ghost story to the tale of mental breakdown, from science fiction to grim psychological realism.
Campbell's Lovecraftian apprenticeship, embodied in the engaging but insubstantial Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), gave little indication that, in well under a decade, he would evolve into one of the most subtle, evocative, and quietly terrifying writers in modern weird fiction, but that transformation was complete in Demons by Daylight (1973), a volume that in many ways remains the pinnacle of his work as a short story writer. What makes those tales so haunting is their intense, almost obsessive focus on the shifting moods and sensations of an individual consciousness, to the degree that we can scarcely separate dream, hallucination, or madness from the perception of objective reality. "Return Journey" (1998), in Told by the Dead, is a splendid replication of that early manner, especially in its rapid shifting between past and present. "The Previous Tenant" (1968), the earliest tale in this volume, similarly utilizes the supernatural for purposes of psychological analysis, but here the scope is broadened to encompass the complexity of human relationships: a painter becomes obsessed with the physical tokens (and possibly the ghost) of a young woman who had committed suicide in the apartment he occupies, but his wife's half-unconscious destruction of these tokens points not only to her jealousy of her dead rival but to the difficulty of fusing aesthetic accomplishment with domestic harmony.
Campbell, in such later collections as Dark Companions (1982) and Waking Nightmares (1991), became the poet of urban blight and squalor, and in Becoming Visible (1998) he continues the topos:
I let my bicycle off its chain on the cold sweaty pipe in the Gents and carry it down the worn concrete stairs and out of the side door. A puppy or a rat scuttles down the alley, away from the bins outside the Chinese restaurant, where the kitchen is full of jabbering not much more alien than the talk that surrounds me every day. Above the senseless assortment of roofs the clouds are a slab of grease, holding down the heat of all the drudges who tramp the streets at lunchtime. They've gone home now to pretend they've lives worth living, only some have changed into this season's uniform and are swarming to the lights of clubs and pubs. I pedal past couples stuck together by their hands and imitating dummies in shop windows, past people who've given up pretending that a home is worth the effort and are nesting in the doorways of dead shops. Then there are buildings that are being smashed and burned, and a park with a lake that litter is soaking up and trees that move about so much I have to keep my curtains shut. I cycle through, past two children undressing each other in a shelter, and then I'm where I try to live.
This entire scene evokes the urban paranoia of The Face That Must Die (1979/1983), the first and greatest of his non-supernatural novels. In Told by the Dead, "Agatha's Ghost" (1997) comes close to equaling it in its cheerless portrayal of an elderly woman who believes herself to be haunted by her dead nephew.
Campbell's skill at depicting, insidiously and with a cumulative accretion of bizarre details, the madness of seemingly ordinary people is highlighted in "Little Ones" (1996) and "No Strings" (1998). But perhaps his greatest accomplishment in this regard is "The Word" (1993), a novelette that concludes Told by the Dead. Aside from being a devastating send-up of the dreariness of science fiction and fantasy conventions ("There'll be a woman whose middle is twice as wide as the rest of her, and someone wearing no sleeves or deodorant, and at least one writer gasping to be noticed, and now there's a vacuumhead using a walkie-talkie to send messages to another weekend deputy who's within shouting distance." And later the magnificent one-liner, "The hotel is booked solid as a fan's cranium"), this tale grimly depicts the gradual psychological decline of an embittered critic, Jeremy Bates, who can scarcely conceal either his scorn or his envy of the sudden popularity of a hack science fiction writer, Jess Kray, who achieves immense notoriety with a possibly blasphemous book called The Word. It is no accident that Kray's name brings Jesus Christ to mind, nor that Bates writes a letter signed Jude Carrot (Judas Iscariot). Bates's murder of Kray on a television talk show seems all but inevitable.
Told by the Dead also includes Campbell's harrowing science fiction story "Slow" (1975), as well as several tales, on the borderline between supernatural and psychological horror, depicting the terrors to be encountered in travel ("The Entertainment" [1998] and "All for Sale" [2001]). "The Worst Fog of the Year" (1970) features two variant endings, one supernatural, the other non-supernatural. In an afterword Campbell explains that Karl Edward Wagner, who wished to use the tale in a volume of The Year's Best Horror Stories, objected to the latter ending (which causes the story to conclude with a deflatingly comic anticlimax) and requested that the author write a new one; Campbell did so, much to the benefit of the tale.
Campbell's array of short fiction must now number over 300 tales, which is five times as many as H. P. Lovecraft and a hundred more than Algernon Blackwood produced. While his output of short stories has understandably decreased during the past quarter-century, when he has written a full score of novels, it is gratifying to see that the short narrative--so uniquely amenable to the kind of intense, clutching, nebulous horror Campbell has made his own--is still in the forefront of his aesthetic vision. To be sure, we would be much poorer without such novels as Incarnate, Midnight Sun, and The House on Nazareth Hill, but the absence of such masterworks of concentrated terror as "Mackintosh Willy" and "The Word" would impoverish us even more. Fortunately, we are able to sample the Campbellian narrative in both the long and the short mode, and seem destined to do so for many years to come.