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CHIZINE INTERVIEW SERIES: Ramsey Campbell Q: What is the most abstract concept you've ever tried to convey in your work? A: I think a sense of the truly alien. Blackwood did it in “The Willows”, Lovecraft in “The Colour Out Of Space” and in much else, but I’m still reaching for it. The Darkest Part of the Woods was my latest attempt to catch it but falls short once more, alas. Mind you, I could also answer by saying a sense of the terror of randomness—I think “A Street Was Chosen” conveys some of the paranoia of that. Q: I'm a horror reader and writer from Pakistan. Having read most of your books, I can safely say that the real uniqueness of your writing is the 'poetry within prose' style you have adopted and furthermore popularised. a) You play with words more so than any other horror writer I've known. b) You add two meanings to most of your dialogues. Is that something you've learnt from your own experience? Is it something unique to the current British way of speaking and writing? I guess I'm saying, how did you learn this specific writing skill? A: Well, thank you! I don’t think it’s uniquely British. From a very early age—certainly early teens or before—I valued the way the best of the field achieves its effects through the selection of language, certainly one of my reasons for admiring M. R. James, for instance. By contrast, the first Not at Night paperback I bought struck me as having very little flavour to its prose. But the major revelation for me was Nabokov—Lolita to begin with, and very soon after that Pale Fire, Bend Sinister, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and others of his novels. They were a crash course in how much more you could do with language, and a joy to read. I’ve been trying to repay some of that ever since. I do also think that ambiguity of language is a great source of prose comedy, and I like to write that too. Q: "The Entertainment," for its length, is packed with several themes, all treated with the characteristic dread of much of your writing. What was the background to your writing of this story? To use a quote from the tale, "Are you the entertainment, Ramsey?" A: I hope so! I think the story began with the notion of being made to entertain—becoming some kind of a clown without being able to control it. Of course folk may say that’s autobiographical. There was also certainly the strangeness of hotels out of season, though this one turns out not to be a hotel. Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice” was somewhere at the back of my mind, but I tried to book into a different establishment. Q: Your best short stories achieve an incredible tension of atmosphere with word choice that is pinpoint accurate. Do these words flow in first draft, or are they the result of revision? A: Some of both. Actually, I rewrite a great deal more than I used to. It’s pretty unusual for even a paragraph of the first draft to survive unscathed now. I should say that rewriting is probably the point where I most enjoy the writing process. Q: Scared Stiff is an incredibly erotic collection of stories, yet the explicit content is minimal. How the hell do you do it? Can you explain how you are able to wring so much eroticism from sometimes mundane syntax and vocabulary? A: Well, I’m not sure. When most of those stories were written—in the mid-seventies—they were pretty explicit for their time. Indeed, the very first (“Dolls”) had to be shown to the publisher’s lawyers to make sure it wasn’t legally obscene. Maybe the business of trying to write horror fiction in a way you weren’t then supposed to lends those tales some power. One of these days I’ll write Spanked by Nuns, a novel, and we’ll see how that turns out. To be honest, I wasn’t trying to be erotic in Scared Stiff, but certainly quite a few folk say I succeeded anyway. Q: Your fiction often features a lone protagonist fighting a profound sense of paranoia, often detached from the world and his surroundings. Do you think, as a wired society, that we are becoming more insular, more detached, and less apt to socialize? A: I think it could certainly be a danger. These days I seem to be encountering my characters all over the place. Mind you, maybe the paranoia is mine as I peer out of the lair of my head. But I tend to agree with you, and my next novel (that’s to say The Communications, which will follow Secret Stories, the one I’m presently rewriting) will have to do with life in the Internet age. Q: Of the newer dark fiction writers these days, who do you enjoy? Or do you not read much of the newer writers. And on that front, do you think these newbies have lost touch with conveying what's truly unsettling and disturbing in favour of trying to shock and revolt? A: To answer the last part first—no, I’m delighted to say. I think the field always returns to its best roots, whatever explosions of excess may distract from that process. I’m not so sure who’s new any more. Among the newish folk whose tales I especially like and who are actively working in the field at the moment I’d include Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tim Lebbon and Glen Hirshberg. Adam Nevill is coming up fast, I believe. But I’ve never found much reason to quarrel with Steve Jones’ taste, either when we co-edited Best New Horror or since I left, and you can find an impressive display of new talent alongside hoary folk like me in those anthologies. Q: Reading a reader review at Amazon.com of Alone With the Horrors, the reader mentions that they're a high school teacher who was struggling to fit horror fiction into the curriculum until he found your work. He says he teaches "Mackintosh Willy" straight after Frankenstein. What do you think of this? How does it make you feel to know your work is being used to teach English courses in high school? A: More than happy, believe me. I tried to email him to say so but, alas, it came back undeliverable. If I’ve written tales that help gain our field the respect it deserves I couldn’t ask for better. Visit Ramsey's website for more information on his work.