Ghosts and Grisly Things

Ramsey Campbell

I sometimes wonder where books get their titles. In this case, I have to lay the blame on some copy editor at Tor who hadn't even bothered reading the manuscript, or at best skimmed it a tad. There's the odd ghost in this collection of stories, and a grisly thing or two, but anyone who's read Ramsey Campbell before should be well aware by now that the horror which Campbell makes his stock in trade has far less to do with such external fear-inducing stimuli. Stephen King writes in the opening pages of Cujo about how our fears change as we grow older, how the monster in the closet becomes the horror of not knowing how you're going to pay the rent on time. Within that perspective, Campbell is very much an adult horror writer; while his characters find themselves in widely disparate situations doing widely disparate things, the horrors that plague them are usually those who invoke the same fear as not knowing whence the rent check. And perhaps this is why Campbell has yet to find the audience in America that King and his monsters or Koontz and his aliens have found. When the monster is something other than the average Joe (even if he's a serial killer or some other damaged version of humanity, he's still "other"), there's a cushion of safety against which the reader can lean. When the monster is a guy on a cell phone ("Going Under"), a return to one's hometown ("Welcomeland"), or the banal passengers you're stuck with on the train ("Missed Connection"), you can't help but identify. We've all been there and done that.

Campbell is probably better known as a novelist, but he's published a number of collections of top-quality short stories. Add this one to the list. He's the grand master of writing the type of horror that has fueled the recent careers of such lights as Kathe Koja, Lucius Shepard, and Patrick McGrath; fans of such writers should have no problems glomming onto what Campbell's doing, and those few who haven't discovered him yet deserve to.