Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death

by Ramsey Campbell (Introduction by Clive Barker)
TOR Books
ISBN: 0-765-30004-4; Price: $22.95

About the origins of "The Limits of Fantasy," Campbell says: "I suppose ... in my original suppression of 'In the Picture,' I was afraid of losing friends, but that really isn't something writers should take into account when writing."

It's a dilemma those of us who have tried our hand at so-called erotic horror face over and over. If our characters and their deeds spring from within ourselves, how much of our dark depths are we putting on display? And why? We may not be able to answer the question, but it's surely worth posing. Ultimately, the fact that fiction leads to universal or cosmic truths demands that we lie as little as possible within the lies we make up and call stories. But increasingly authors are mistaken for their creations and we may be excused for hedging a bit.

Campbell rarely hedges and that's what makes him so good at this game. Some refer to him as the "father" of erotic horror, and the stories in the original 1987 edition of this collection surely buttress their case. This new edition adds three recent tales to the randy round-robin of grotesquerie and perversion that will thrill and chill most of us, possibly excepting those made uncomfortable by the thin line drawn between the erotic and the gruesome. Sex and death have always coincided naturally—the "little death" of sex has been written about at length and much more perceptively than I can—and the advent of AIDS injected a sense of the literal to the allusion. Pain/pleasure, sex/death—all of a piece.

In "Dolls," petty villagers frolic orgiastically with a woody Devil in the woods and repay grudges with curses. Graveyard visits for sex constitute "Loveman's Comeback." In "The Limits of Fantasy," a porn photographer gives his spanking fantasy life with dire consequences. In "Merry May," a music teacher's predilection for schoolgirl spanking drives him to a weird village and its fertility rites, which curiously echo Jackson's "The Lottery." Everything in decadent Amsterdam is rendered obscene by the supposedly puritanical Woodcock (!), who searches for the worst he can find and finds it within himself in "The Body in the Window." A loner's new love doll takes over his life in "Lilith's." Other tales include "Stages," "Kill Me Hideously," "The Seductress," and "The Other Woman."

Campbell's up to his usual tricks with his use of language and description, not to mention Dickensian character names. He evokes urban or pastoral menace equally well with the turn of a graceful phrase or image: "an elongating lozenge of moonlight inches" down a wall, a pavement is "tarred with shadow," "swollen lumps of light hover over pavements," walls are "muscular," a pink phone is fleshy, tulips recall vulvas, windows "glow pink as lipstick," and even a church spire rears in phallic tumescence when superimposed on a cloud which appears to stream out of its tip. Clive Barker's introduction refers to how easily Campbell renders the sex act strange and chilling.

In Campbell's tales, which he insists are not ABOUT sex, lonely yet anti-social people seek solace in solitary sex practices such as voyeurism, or attempt to influence others into becoming unwilling partners through sex magick. Who among us hasn't at least fantasized our imaginations bringing us demon lovers or perhaps luring a coveted neighbor into an illicit dalliance? If we were to tell the truth, would it be shocking? Perhaps the answer to that early question is best addressed by one of Campbell's final Afterword statements:

"Still, I'm committed to telling as much of the truth as I can, as every writer should be. If we can't tell the truth about ourselves, how can we presume to do so about anyone or anything? Secretiveness is a weakness, whereas honesty is strength."

Indeed.