The Searching Dead: The Three Births of Daoloth Book One (2016) by Ramsey Campbell

The Searching Dead: The Three Births of Daoloth Book One (2016) by Ramsey Campbell: The great Ramsey Campbell looks both forward and backward in his newest novel: forward in the sense that he's writing something new for him (a bildungsroman and a trilogy of which The Searching Dead is Book One), backward in the sense that he's returned to the Lovecraftian themes and creatures of his earliest published work back when he was a teen-ager (!) in the early 1960's with a collection released by the Lovecraft-centric Arkham House.

The Searching Dead is also a retrospective narrative. And it may turn out to be a Künstlerroman -- when the first book ends, it remains unclear as to whether or not our narrator will become a writer. He's still in his early teens.

Our first-person, teen narrator, Dominic Sheldrake, lives in 1950's Liverpool. A recently widowed neighbour starts acting strangely several months after the death of her husband. So too her dog. The neighbour initially praises the new Church she's joined, as it's allowed her to contact her dead husband. Soon this doesn't seem like much of a bargain: the woman starts behaving erratically. And Dominic starts to be convinced that something follows her around, something insubstantial that nonetheless has the power to attach itself to things living or dead and reshape them to embody its form.

Dominic has also just begun his year at a new school, a private Catholic boys' school, along with his best friend Jim. The third member of their childhood trio, Roberta/Bobbie, is still around as well. But puberty has started changing things for the three. And age has its other effects -- the imaginary trio of child heroes Dominic writes the adventures of in his notebooks, heroes who are even named after Dominic, Bobbie, and Jim, no longer have much allure for Jim and Bobbie. They're becoming kid's stuff.

As Dominic finds himself pulled into the increasingly strange events surrounding his neighbour, he discovers a connection between her and the oddest of his school-teachers. And the oddness of that school-teacher becomes more and more pronouncedly odd the longer and closer Dominic looks. Jim and Bobbie come along for the ride, for awhile. But everyone grows up, and the exploits of pre-pubescent detectives are invariably fictional. Which is too bad, as Dominic has stumbled across events that would probably require the combined efforts of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Harry Potter gang to combat.

Dominic is a poignant, self-critical narrator, letting slip hints of what's coming (something dire) from his retrospective position. Campbell does a fine job situating his narrator in that liminal zone between child and teenager, with the attendant confusion amplified by the awful events into which Dominic finds himself being pulled. Dominic wants to believe in a world in which teen detectives save the day. But that belief stands revealed as a fictional conceit as the events of The Searching Dead unfold.

The evocation of a specific place and time helps make The Searching Dead one of Campbell's strongest novels. Post-war shortages, the continued existence of entire unoccupied neighbourhoods of Blitzed houses, the arrival of the first neighbourhood televisions just in time for Elizabeth II's coronation, the street parties that accompany that coronation, the day-to-day school activities of Dominic and Jim -- all these are beautifully and complexly depicted. And there's a sad and tragic scene in which the Liverpool police return a woman to the husband she's fled because clearly the husband knows best and the woman has no right to run away with her child from an upstanding male citizen.

We end with a scene that suggests mounting horrors to come while satisfyingly bringing to a close the first part of the story. The sinister, cult-like 'religion' of The Searching Dead seems entirely plausible. Its rituals make almost more sense than those of 'real' religions. Something is coming, something even the trees fear. Something else has already arrived. Its work is not yet done. Highly recommended.

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971 (2014): edited by S.T. Joshi: Essential, informative, and educational reading for any reader of horror, and especially for those who admire both H.P. Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell.

August Derleth was a fantastically important editor and publisher in the realms of the weird. He kept H.P. Lovecraft in print, in book form, for decades until the rest of the world started catching up with the Cthulhu Mythos. And he also published the first book by Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell after Campbell started corresponding with Derleth back in 1961.

In 1961, Campbell was 15. His first collection -- The Inhabitant of the Lake -- would come out from Arkham in 1964. And while the precocious Campbell's early works would be Lovecraftian pastiches not-dissimilar to some of Derleth's own work, Campbell's growth curve as a writer was startlingly steep. By the late 1960's, his voice was uniquely his own and he'd helped pioneer a new approach to visionary horror.

Derleth and Campbell carry on a lively, wide-ranging correspondence for ten years, though the last three years are a bit spotty because many letters have gone missing. While thoughts on horror are the main attraction, Letters to Arkham also offers a glimpse into the cottage industry that was Arkham House. We also learn just how prolific Derleth was as a writer. And a lover, though some of that may be taken with a grain of salt.

As Campbell notes in his afterword, he was something of a fan-boy in his early letters. But that element gradually slips away, leaving the reader with a dialogue between two friends who never met in person. Their debates on the merits of everything from Peter Sellers to Samuel Beckett are lively and fascinating. Derleth functions as a mentor figure for Campbell throughout their correspondence when it comes to writing and, more generally, living. 

And we find out that Derleth took to the Wisconsin woods where he lived every May to collect morel mushrooms. Thousands of them, their number dutifully reported each year. Fungi from Wisconsin. How Lovecraftian is that? Highly recommended.

Ramsey Campbell, Probably (2015 edition)

Ramsey Campbell, Probably (1968-2015/Collected in 2015 Revised Edition) by Ramsey Campbell, edited by S.T. Joshi: 40 years of non-fiction pieces by World's Greatest Horror Writer Ramsey Campbell. There are autobiographical pieces which illuminate Campbell's often harrowing early life, essays on various writers, pieces on social issues related to horror, and essays and introductions originally written for Campbell's novels and short-story collections. 

In all, they're dandy. And so many of them in this big book from PS Publishing! Campbell is thoughtful and often self-effacing when he writes about his own work, and those essays that do this offer a wealth of information about how and why certain decisions were made in the writing process, and what Campbell thinks about those decisions in retrospect. 

He's also debilitatingly funny in many of the essays, never moreso than when he deals with The Highgate Vampire hoax. There's also hilarity to be had in portions of his self-appraisal (for some reason, a section on his attempt to include the word 'shit' in a Lovecraftian story submitted to August Derleth's Arkham House nearly had me lying on the floor). 

His essays on writers are occasionally scathing but for the most part positive. A melancholy essay on the late John Brunner stands out as a painful meditation on what happens when a very good writer is forgotten in today's publishing climate. A wide-ranging essay on the novels of James Herbert is a sensitive reappraisal of that (alas, also late) best-selling writer's work as a foundational stratum of working-class, English horror shot through with deeply held social concerns not usually seen in English horror up to that time.  Many of the writers Campbell writes about are also friends, thus shedding a certain personal light on writers ranging from Robert Aickman to the (then) Poppy Z. Brite.

General pieces include the almost-obligatory '10 horror movies for a desert island' essay, several examinations of horror in general and the general public's attitude towards horror, the 'Video Nasties' censorship hysteria in the Great Britain of the 1980's and early 1990's, and examinations of the history of horror. Campbell's lengthy autobiographical essay "How I Got Here" is also invaluable in understanding his life and work. He's almost painfully self-revelatory at points, while remaining refreshingly free of self-pity. 

Oh, and there's an essay on British spanking-based pornography. Really, you can't go wrong with this collection. How often is one going to find revelatory close readings of major H.P. Lovecraft stories and brief 'plot' synopses of faux-English-school-girl spanking pornography in the same book? Highly recommended.

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell; illustrations by Randy Broecker: containing the following stories and essays (dates are first publication, not composition):

1. The Stone on the Island (1964): Campbell begins his transition from Lovecraftian pastiches to his own style of horror here, as he mixes an idea from M.R. James, a Lovecraftian island, and his own experiences at work. 
2. Before the Storm (1980): Written in the 1960's, the story again shows Campbell mixing cosmic body horror and his own Lovecraftian deities with the daily grind at an office.
3. Cold Print (1969): Campbell's first truly great short story by my reckoning. A quest for a particular form of (perfectly legal, now anyway) pornography by a Physical Education teacher takes him to a bookstore he never, ever should have gone into.
4. The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973): Fun, disturbing metafiction about a mysteriously vanished horror writer.
5. A Madness from the Vaults (1972): Really a deft riff on the sort of stories Clark Ashton Smith used to write, set on an alien world and involving all-alien characters.
6. Among the pictures are these: (1985): Campbell describes a series of sketches he made back in the 1960s. Interesting.
7. The Tugging (1976): Campbell suggests that this is a too-literal interpretation of the Lovecraftian chestnut about the "stars being right" to bring back certain deities. I like it a lot -- it may be literal, but the images are grand.
8. The Faces at Pine Dunes (1980): A great, great story. Its imagery climaxes in something deeply disturbing and chilling; its 20-year-old protagonist is sympathetic and carefully drawn.
9. Blacked Out (1985): Fun scare is, as Campbell notes, Lovecraftian primarily because it appeared in his previous Lovecraftian collection Cold Print because the editor wanted to include at least one previously unpublished story. Rarely has a Campbellian protagonist had a more emblematic last name.
10. The Voice of the Beach (1982): Maybe Campbell's crowning achievement in writing a Lovecraftian story without any recourse to all the machinery of Lovecraftian terms for 'gods' and creatures and menacing books. It most resembles Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The imagery and situations are sinister, horrifying, vague, and often uncomfortably vertiginous and hallucinatory.
11. The Horror under Warrendown (1995): Very funny pastiche turns a famous English children's book series into a source of cosmic body horror.
12. The Other Names (1998): Very solid combination of a sensitive character study and a Lovecraftian menace.
13. The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash (2010): Funny, satiric examination of one very bad Lovecraft fan.
14. The Last Revelation of Gla'aki (2013): Campbell's return to his Lovecraftian god Gla'aki manages to be both disturbing and weirdly soothing at points -- and it does a better job of showing why people might find comfort in the embrace of these terrible 'gods' than any story I can think of after David Drake's brilliant Lovecraft-meets-Joseph-Conrad novella "Than Curse the Darkness."
15. The Successor (First draft of Cold Print) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
16. The Franklyn Paragraphs (First draft) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
17. Mushrooms from Merseyside (2015): Campbell's often hilarious salue to Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth sees the writer summarize all of his Lovecraftian fiction in a series of... limericks.
18. Two Poems by Edward Pickman Derby (2015): Interesting early poetry.
19. The Horror in the Crystal (Story fragment) (2015): 1960's fragment; interesting.
20. Rusty Links (Essay) (2015): A snarky Ramsey Campbell from the 1960's.
21. Lovecraft in Retrospect (Essay) (1969/1994): A very pissy Campbell from the late 1960's gets critiqued by the lovable Campbell of the 1990's.
22. On Four Lovecraft Tales (Essay) (2013): As good an explanation of Lovecraft's strengths as a writer as you'll ever read, this essay really caused me to re-evaluate certain aspects of Lovecraft's work. It's a concise piece that explains how much more complex Lovecraft's style and structure were than he's generally given credit for from even his greatest admirers.
23. Afterword (Essay) (2015): Campbell contextualizes all the pieces in the book. Invaluable, but I want more!

Overall: The stories are great, the non-fiction pieces are great, and the illustrations by Randy Broecker are extremely enjoyable and often very much 'Old School' in an early 20th-century pulp magazine way. Highly recommended.

The Influence of Anxiety

Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell:
Star Books edition (1975, identical to 1973 Arkham House edition): Potential  (1973); The End of a Summer's Day  (1973) ; At First Sight  (1973); The Franklyn Paragraphs  (1973); The Interloper  (1973)   [as by Errol Undercliffe ]; The Sentinels  (1973); The Guy  (1973); The Old Horns  (1973); The Lost  (1973); The Stocking  (1968); The Second Staircase  (1973); Concussion  (1973); The Enchanted Fruit  (1973); Made in Goatswood  (1973).

Jove/HBJ edition (1979): omits The Second Staircase and The Enchanted Fruit; adds The Last Hand (1975), The Telephones (1976), and Reply Guaranteed (1968).

The great Ramsey Campbell's writing shifted almost tectonically between his first and second collections. And all this shifting, which took place over a decade, occurred before he was 25. Demons by Daylight is that second collection, in slightly different forms for its British and American paperback editions (Arkham House originally published it in hardcover in 1973).

Campbell went from being a very young (16!) and gifted writer of pastiches of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos fiction to being a still-young horror writer with a prose style and approach to the supernatural that was, even with this second collection, uniquely his own.

Cosmic horrors would still appear in Campbell's work, along with ghosts and monsters and homicidal maniacs. But the description would be disturbingly off-set from the usual -- Stephen King once likened Campbell's descriptions of reality as being almost LSD-derived in their disturbing, vaguely hallucinatory quality. Everything, even the most simple of objects, has been radically destabilized and gifted with malign life. Sometimes that malign life is subjective. Sometimes that malign life is objective. Sometimes the whole matter remains unclear.

Already at work in this collection is Campbell's wedding of horror and anxiety. That anxiety usually occurs within the minds of his protagonists, and finds some answering echo from the world around them. That answer may be supernatural. It may be mundane but horrific. Or the answer may be unanswerable as to its provenance: is it real or is it entirely inside the mind? Or is the 'or' really 'and'?

Take "The Telephones," for instance. The settings are mundane: a pub, the side of a highway, a succession of phone booths. But the protagonist seems to think he's telepathic. And he may be. But he's also in the midst of a personality crisis about his sexual orientation. And weird things are happening, ultimately never to be entirely answered. It's not a great story, but it's a very good one.

Or take "The End of a Summer's Day." The protagonist's anxiety relates to her belief that she's unworthy of the love and marriage she's found relatively late in life. There's a bus tour with her spouse. There's a cave. Something happens that may or may not be real. My take is that what happens is real, in a supernatural sense, but that it also preys upon the anxieties that could conceivably reflect an unstable mind that's actually invented everything that's happened. A certain portion of Campbell's fiction exists in this gap.

But there's also the windy, twisty supernatural, overtly deployed, to be dealt with. Demons by Daylight contains my favourite dual narrative in Campbell's body of work, "The Franklyn Paragraphs" and "The Interloper"  [as by Errol Undercliffe], appearing jointly under the title of "Errol Undercliffe: An Appreciation."

Campbell himself (well, a character called Ramsey Campbell) narrates "The Franklyn Paragraphs." That faux memoir deals with (fictional) cult horror writer Errol Undercliffe, his disappearance, and the Lovecraftian events leading up to that disappearance. "The Interloper," ostensibly a story by Undercliffe, mixes the supernatural with the anxieties and fears of teenagers as related to the world of adults and authority and their peculiar powerlessness against authority figures who are not what they appear to be. It's a great duo.

The collection begins to flesh out the fictional cosmos centered around the fictional English city of Brichester that would appear a lot in Campbell's work around this time. Brichester, modelled partially on Campbell's hometown of Liverpool, would eventually be superseded by the real city in Campbell's work, though his fictional towns and cities of Brichester, Goatswood, Temphill, and others would continue to appear right up to the present day. These are places in the Severn Valley you don't want to go. But it's great to read about them. Campbell's work would continue to grow and improve after this collection. Still, this is a delight, and a sign of things to come. Highly recommended.

Ghoulish Grab-bag

Nameless Places: edited by Gerald W. Page, containing the following stories: Glimpses by A. A. Attanasio; The Night of the Unicorn by Thomas Burnett Swann; The Warlord of Kul Satu by Brian N. Ball; More Things by G. N. Gabbard; The Real Road to the Church by Robert Aickman; The Gods of Earth by Gary Myers; Walls of Yellow Clay by Robert E. Gilbert; Businessman's Lament by Scott Edelstein; Dark Vintage by Joseph F. Pumilia; Simaitha by David A. English; In the Land of Angra Mainyu by Stephen Goldin; Worldsong by Gerald W. Page; What Dark God? by Brian Lumley; The Stuff of Heroes by Bob Maurus; Forringer's Fortune by Joseph Payne Brennan; Before the Event by Denys Val Baker; In 'Ygiroth by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.; The Last Hand by Ramsey Campbell; Out of the Ages by Lin Carter; Awakening by David Drake; In the Vale of Pnath by Lin Carter; Chameleon Town by Carl Jacobi; Botch by Scott Edelstein; Black Iron by David Drake; Selene by E. Hoffmann Price; The Christmas Present by Ramsey Campbell; and Lifeguard by Arthur Byron Cover (1975).

Some of this classic (and never-reprinted) Arkham House anthology from the demon-haunted 1970's consists of stories submitted to Arkham co-founder August Derleth before his death in 1971. Overall, there's no real theme to the anthology, as editor Gerald Page notes in his introduction. It's simply a large collection of often very-short stories of horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural.

This being an Arkham House release, and Arkham having been originally founded to get the stories of H.P. Lovecraft into permanent hardcover editions, there's more than a soupcon of Lovecraftian shenanigans at work here. Lin Carter and a few others pastiche for all they're worth, both Cthulhu Mythos-era HPL and earlier Dunsanian HPL.  Joseph Payne Brennan refers to Lovecraft in his story, though the style and content of "Forringer's Fortune" remain much in line with Brennan's other work, written in a much more demotic plain style than anything Lovecraft assayed.

It's interesting to me that two horror writers who began as Lovecraft pastiche writers, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell, both give us tales of non-Lovecraftian supernatural horror set on trains. Both tales are effective, though Campbell's "The Last Hand" is the more effective simply because he doesn't try to explain outright the true identities of the three passengers his protagonist must engage in a poker game with.

Several stories herein have been much anthologized, including Campbell's Christmas-short "The Christmas Present." We also get Arthur Byron Cover's poignant story of small-town inertia, a couple of stories from a young David Drake, and an extraordinarily good riff on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos that I've never seen anthologized elsewhere -- A. A. Attanasio's "Glimpses." The quality of the stories is mostly high, and the relatively large number of very short stories means that dissatisfaction with one story may quickly be soothed by another story. Highly recommended.

'Old' Books

The Dark Man and Other Stories by Robert E. Howard, edited by August Derleth (1963): Eclectic collection of non-Conan stories from Robert E. Howard, originally published in hardcover by Arkham House. Magazines of the 1920's and 1930's originally published everything included here, including the wonderfully named Oriental Tales. Boy, those were the days. Was Edward Said the editor?

Basically, one gets some contemporary horror stories, of which "Pigeons from Hell" is the marvelously titled best, and at worst Howard's second-best pure horror story. Howard's ancient Pict leader Bran Mak Morn shows up a few times, even after he's dead. Some Lovecraftian horrors show up, as do a few ghosts and demons and one malevolent magic snake.

Roaming freebooters of the Middle Ages, Turlogh O'Brien and Athelstane, have a couple of adventures involving lost civilizations and massive bloodshed. And a couple of (then) modern-day Americans suddenly flash back to past lives of adventure, as happens a lot in Howard's stories. Viva reincarnation! Recommended.

Cinder and Ashe: written by Gerry Conway; illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Joe Orlando (1988): Solidly written thriller from Gerry Conway, Cinder and Ashe follows private detectives Jacob Ashe and Cinder DuBois as an enemy from their shared past in Viet Nam long thought dead suddenly turns up in a case they're working in 1988.

This miniseries, from that long-lost era when DC Comics regularly released non-superhero work under the main DC banner (as opposed to under the Vertigo banner) has never been collected into book form so far as I know, so you'll have to check out the back-issue bins.

Conway's writing does the job -- you can see how he would seamlessly transition from writing for comics to working for the Law and Order franchise in the years to come .

And the art, by longtime DC mainstay Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, is fantastic -- beautifully detailed and fluid. Because Garcia-Lopez works here on normal people and not super-heroes, his artistic similarity to the great Milton Caniff and other comic-strip giants really shines through. Not only does the art alone make a case for permanent collection, it makes a case for oversized permanent collection so that the often exquisite linework becomes fully visible. Recommended.

Memories of Glaaki

The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell (1964; revised edition 2011): Ramsey Campbell's first published book was the Lovecraftian horror collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, published by Arkham House in 1964 when Campbell was 18 (!!!). This 2011 anniversary edition from Great Britain's PS Publishing (the anniversary being 50 years since Campbell first put pen to paper on the stories herein) is a terrifically well-produced and generous piece of work.

It's obviously best suited to Campbell completists, but it also offers a great deal of insight into the development of Campbell as a writer and into the methods of H.P. Lovecraft's posthumous Boswell, August Derleth, who co-founded Arkham House to keep HPL's work, and the work of other horror and dark-fantasy writers, alive.

The original cover illustrator actually got the title agreed upon by Campbell and Derleth wrong, as Campbell explains herein. The intended title is restored here. Along with the original contents of the volume, we also get new commentary from Campbell (Derleth died in 1971), the original versions of several of the stories, a story published elsewhere by Arkham House as a 'teaser' for Campbell's collection, and reprints of several of Derleth's letters to Campbell about the stories Campbell had submitted. Oh, and there are extremely apt new illustrations that capture the flavour of such classic Weird Tales illustrators as Lee Brown Coye.

Campbell's still very much a developing writer here, paying homage to the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and other Cthulhu Mythos scribes. But the original and published versions of several of the stories show how quickly Campbell was capable of developing, especially after he took Derleth's career-changing advice and created his own English environment for his Mythos stories.

Campbell's imaginary Cotswolds city of Brichester and its surrounding, demon-haunted towns of Temphill, Goatswood, and Clotton would serve Campbell well as he swiftly moved from pastiche writer to idiosyncratic, unique wordsmith. Campbell's unique narrative viewpoint would develop with great rapidity -- by 1968, he was writing stories that were recognizably 'Campbellian.' But one can see some of that individuality surfacing in this collection; flashes of what's to come.

Campbell's commentary on his own stories depicts a Derleth who was astonishingly generous with his time -- Campbell got Derleth to read several of his stories with a simple letter. It also takes the reader through some of the missteps that remained in the published versions (Campbell notes, for instance, the peculiar ability of a couple of his protagonists to fall asleep in situations during which no normal human would fall asleep, or his peculiar ideas about American regional history that ended up putting a decaying, ancient castle in rural Massachusetts).

But there's a lot that's compelling about these early efforts, especially for anyone interested in the Cthulhu Mythos and/or Ramsey Campbell. And the volume itself from PS Publishing is a handsome piece of work with surprisingly good copy-editing for this day and age. Kudos! Highly recommended.