Are there any real life films that served as your inspiration? Two of your novels, ANCIENT IMAGES and THE GRIN OF THE DARK, involve the search for suppressed movies. It seems to me that back in 1953 my mind was already bent on improving on the terrors I encountered and rendering them even more grotesque.Ģ. The cover shows a vulture perched on some bones with two admittedly evil-looking human skeletons in the background. A decade later I identified the issue for November 1952. If the cover looked like that, what extraordinary things would the magazine contain? At seven I wasn’t allowed to find out, and so the image and the name of the publication – Weird Tales – haunted me for years. The cover appeared to depict a bird-like creature cowering in terror of two monstrosities-huge human skulls for heads and very little in the way of bodies – approaching it across a black desert. In those days it was common for general stores to sell books and magazines, and one day in Southport (a seaside report near Liverpool) I saw the magazine that may have started my career, in a sense (though I was already reading adult tales of terror borrowed from the public library on my mother’s tickets). Have you tracked down that issue, and if so, did it live up to your early impressions of it? I read that seeing the cover of a Weird Tales magazine on a newsstand when you were young sparked your interest in the horror genre. In short, Ramsey Campbell is an icon of the genre.ġ. How do you sum up Ramsey Campbell’s amazing career? He’s written hundreds of short stories, well over thirty novels, edited numerous anthologies, and has won more awards than any writer in the field, including British Fantasy Awards, World Fantasy Awards, The Stoker Award, The Grand Master Award of The World Horror Convention, The Horror Writer’s Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and The Living Legend Award of The International Horror Guild.
He is, without question, my favorite writer, so I was tremendously honored he agreed to this interview. His ability to consistently craft masterful tales of horror and unease is awe-inspiring and ignited my desire to write my own tales of terror. A also fell in love with his amazing short pieces, so much so that I now consider his collection ALONE WITH THE HORRORS my all time favorite horror book. MIDNIGHT SUN, INCARNATE, NAZARETH HILL, THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS, and THE GRIN OF THE DARK were a few of the fantastic novels that followed afterward. I was instantly hooked, and it set me off in search of more. I first discovered Ramsey Campbell in 1989 when I selected his novel ANCIENT IMAGES from the horror section of our local Borders Book Shop.
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