Horror in Brief

Ramsey Campbell and the power of the short story in horror writing.

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ONCE, YEARS AGO, I POSTED something on the internet about my disappointment in a novel by the revered, almost superhumanly prolific, Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell. The details of what I said then are not relevant here; what is relevant is that someone responded to what I wrote by recommending that I read a particular short story by Campbell called “The Companion.” As it happened, I owned a collection of Campbell’s short fiction that contained the story, so, with some skepticism, I read it. “The Companion” instantly became one of the best horror stories I had ever read, and it remains so to this day.

I shouldn’t have been all that surprised at the sharp contrast between what I felt about the novel by Campbell and my intense admiration for that short story. I’ve long maintained that horror fiction thrives in the short form, and that horror novels can often stretch an idea beyond its breaking point. This is not a hard and fast rule—see last week’s essay about Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley, and Lord knows I’ve spent a decent amount of my life reading Stephen King and Richard Bachman—but novels tend to suffer from a nagging impulse on the part of the writer to either explain too much or to hammer on certain unnerving effects until they’ve lost all power. Not always, but often enough.

This can make writing about short horror fiction complicated, because my instinct is, and my enthusiasm pushes me, to simply describe “The Companion” in full, including the ending. I want to quote the story’s last few sentences because they hold such a chilling power that not spoiling the story in this way would almost defeat the purpose of describing it at all. I will say that the basic idea is that a man named Stone—who has a habit of seeking out new carnivals, or “funfairs,” during his vacations from work—encounters something while riding an attraction called the Ghost Train that he will remember with horror to the end of his days. In Danse Macabre, his 1981 book about the cultural history of the horror genre, Stephen King singles out “The Companion” for praise in this way: “‘The Companion’ may be the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years; it is surely one of half a dozen or so which will still be in print and commonly read a hundred years from now.” I don’t think King turned out to be all that accurate in his assessment of the story’s lasting impact, but if there was any justice in the world, he would have been dead on the money.

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WITH ALL OF THIS IN MIND, I have continued to read Campbell’s short fiction, and while nothing else I’ve read matches “The Companion,” his seemingly endless run of stories has much to recommend it. One thing about Campbell’s fiction that really strikes me is that, even though he’s been publishing horror and thriller fiction since the 1960s, he is still, even now, able to find a great variety of stories to tell. The genre has not worn out his imagination. This is partly because Campbell’s understanding of the genre is rooted in the idea of memory: either a first-person narrator looking back, or a pattern of behavior that has brought his protagonists to this moment, this story. Not only that, but the stories he tells can redefine and expand what can be considered a legitimate facet of horror. One story, written in the early 1980s (a boom time for both Campbell and the genre as a whole) is particularly illustrative of this. It’s called “The Puppets,” and it would seem at first to follow a traditional horror path, dealing with an unnerving version of the titular objects. And in fact the puppets in question are a set of traditional Punch and Judy figures, those beloved British manikins that plumb domestic violence as a source of comedy. In the story, they are owned, and used in performances by, an old man named Mr. Ince. He lives in a small town, and often takes his show on the road. He is not the story’s central figure, however. That would be Jim, a young man who falls desperately in love with a young woman named Rebecca. The story is essentially about their brief romance and the obstacles set in their path not only by her disapproving parents, but also Jim’s own exasperating immaturity. While “The Puppets” never becomes a story of violence, the mysterious, haunting figures of Punch, Judy, and Mr. Ince always lurk in the background. At one point, Jim, the narrator, observes Mr. Ince’s small, personal puppet theater in the old man’s garden:

The theater wasn’t deserted. Though there was no sign of Mr. Ince within the proscenium . . . Punch and Judy were on stage. Were they nailed to the ledge, and moving in the wind? Certainly their nodding and gesturing looked lifeless, all the more so when I made out that the paint of their faces and fixed eyes were peeling, yet I had a hallucinatory impression that they were actually fighting the wind. Apart from the rattle of wooden limbs on the ledge, they made no sound.

Some might question whether these brief, if disquieting, interludes are enough to categorize “The Puppets” as horror. The answer, to me, is a resounding yes. This, more so than a heedless plunging into passages of extreme graphic violence and sexual sadism, is what pushing the envelope of the genre really is. This is what is exciting, displaying, not just to the uninitiated but also to those who’ve been reading horror for years, that horror can be anything, be about anything. It doesn’t have to be just what it’s assumed to be.

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SPEAKING, IN A SENSE, OF VIOLENCE in horror, Campbell is also one of those very rare writers who can write a horror story in which nobody dies. That sounds flippant, or glib, but this is an extremely rare thing, and it’s the mark of someone who takes horror seriously if they can instill in the reader a sense of dread even as everyone in their story makes it out alive. Which is not to say they make it out okay. Take another well-regarded Campbell story, “The Man in the Underpass,” from 1973. It’s about a group of young girls who go to school together, form cliques, and either willingly get into trouble or fearfully avoid it. One girl, Tonia, who’s a bit of an outcast, becomes obsessed with an elaborate piece of graffiti depicting a man:

He was as tall as the roof, and his spout was sticking up almost as far as his chin. Someone had painted him in white—really they’d just drawn round him, but then someone else had written on the wall, so he was full of colours. He’d got one foot on each side of the drain in the middle of the underpass, that the gutter runs down to. Jim said the man was going to pee, so I had to tell him he wouldn’t be going to pee when his spout’s like that.

There is not only an unnerving undercurrent of sex about all of this, but also, we learn, a connection to ancient tribal customs. Both of these elements consume Tonia (who is closely observed by the similarly naïve and youthful narrator). Her status as an outsider helps to fuel this, so that even when the underpass comes to be considered by the wider community as a dangerous place that must be avoided by children, and is even watched over by local police, Tonia is only drawn further into its mysterious blackness.

Though, again—and spoilers for this one, I guess—no one dies. Of course, here, as in other Campbell stories where everyone escapes with their lives, it’s difficult to imagine that in the parts of the story that Campbell leaves unwritten things turn out well for Tonia, or for those who know her. But we don’t know, we can’t know, especially since we’re not even entirely sure what we’re dealing with.

You shouldn’t take any of this to mean that Campbell doesn’t have a playful side. He does. He has an affinity for stories about writers, and movies (the latter of which is unsurprising, given his many years as a film critic for Tim Lucas’s late lamented magazine Video Watchdog). “Out of Copyright,” his story about a villainous editor, has a pleasing EC Comics vibe to it, and “Meeting the Author,” about the frightening motivations of an author of children’s books, is rather brash in its imagery. Then again, that story ends on a rather distressing note, and both “The Show Goes On,” which involves a decrepit movie theater, and “Beyond Words,” about a struggling writer, have such an air of loneliness about them, that one soon understands that in his fiction, Campbell is as interested in lives lived in despair as he is in tales of supernatural menace.

Ramsey Campbell’s career has been admirably long and productive, and it is in the short story that he seems at his most free. As I suggested earlier, one thing that Campbell understands, better than most in his field, is that the horror genre is often preoccupied with the past. Yes, it’s also concerned with death, and the unknown, and terrors that flow naturally from both. But in almost all of the stories I’ve mentioned here, and in others, there is something from before the story begins that the narrator is looking back upon, or that has led our protagonist to this point in their life. This, just as much as what we can only imagine follows their enigmatic conclusions. It is the fear of what has come before, the terror of retrospection, which fuels these tales. As Campbell writes in “The Show Goes On,” as the main character begins to face a horror he can’t fully understand, “Before he could help it, he was remembering.”