Ramsey Campbell Quotes

Tradition is a pretty poor excuse for perpetrating stereotypes.

One way to avoid what has already been done is to be true to yourself.

But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers. They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after. If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.

Smile while you can,’ Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. ‘Smile like the skull you’ll be, you fool, before you’re worse than bones.

Darkness blinded him. It was heavy on him, and moved. It was more than darkness: it was flesh".

The corridor didn't seem long enough to contain so much blackness. 'Passing Through Peacehaven

Perhaps the woman was waiting beneath the lamps for cats to drop from the trees, like fruit.

Leaves that rustled, twigs that scraped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren't falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some might never have had any skin. She saw their shriveled eyes glimmer eagerly and their toothless mouths gape with an identical infantile hunger. Their combined weight bowed the lowest branches while they extended arms like withered sticks to snatch the child. ("With The Angels")

I nearly forced my own way through the undergrowth to leave the sight behind. I was afraid I'd encouraged the figure to advance by trying to see it, perhaps even by thinking about it. ("The Long Way")

When he shut himself in his apartment he found that he hoped he was waiting for nothing at all.

As soon as Todd drove off the motorway it vanished from the mirror, and so did the sun across the moor.

He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.

I'd forgotten - perhaps preferred to forget - that I'd caved in to the interference of some copy-editor... somebody anonymous whose commitment to finding something wrong would not disgrace an Eastern European clerk.

He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces.

The best spells are the ones you write yourself.

I don’t care much for this homogenised religion, and I told him so. This notion that you mustn’t think your way to faith is obviously not far from the intolerance that leads to burning books.

The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.

She walked Toby to Victoria Station and left him at the barrier. On her way into the underground she thought he’d followed her, but there was nobody to be seen behind her on the escalator that sailed downwards with a faint inconsolable squeal. She sat on a bench on the empty platform, the breaths of oncoming trains stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. She leafed through Graham’s notebook, but couldn’t concentrate; she found she had to keep glancing along the platform towards the tunnel. Some fault in the mechanism made the train doors reopen after she boarded, as if someone had leapt on at the last moment. The galloping rush of the wheels made her think of a hunt in the dark.

Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn’t seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too.

Flapping down from the pale sky, in a flock which stank of caverns and worse, came wings. Their span was greater than the spread of his arms. They were the blotchy white of decay; between their bony fingers, skin fluttered lethargically as drowned sails. All this was frightful—but there was no body to speak of between each pair of wings, only a whitish rope of flesh thin as a child’s arm. Yet as a pair of wings sailed down near him, Ryre saw a mouth gape along the whole length of the scrawny object. Its lips resembled a split in fungus, and it was crammed with teeth.

All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become.

As the light wavered into the rooms, they looked impossibly large with darkness, which seemed less still than it ought to be.

Mischief is the way evil toys with the world. Its presence can corrupt the very fabric of existence.

Everything was real except her.

On Aigburth Road, wind was doing its best to direct the shoppers, but failed to throw Rose under a car. Layer on layer of dark cloud piled up like sediment at the horizon. Against the sky trees glared, bunches of frayed rusty wire. Birds were scraps of light high overhead, in danger of being blown out. Above a church doorway a Virgin and Child were caged by wire netting, which rattled as though they were trying to escape.

Perhaps some of the best research into the media’s handling of the crack epidemic was conducted by Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell for their book Cracked Coverage, published in 1994. For the book, Reeves and Campbell studied some 270 network-news packages dealing with cocaine between 1981 and 1988 and, from that coverage, identified three phases of what they call the media’s “cocaine narrative.

The measurements of space and time, the photographs of far stars and of points of light which proved to be composed of thousands of stars, filled him with an awe which felt like the edge of a delicious panic.

far softer than putty, indeed, to be able to do to her what they began to do then.

the most enjoyable Western she knew and one of the most fruitful to analyze, but her students could see only John Wayne’s politics: his presence wiped out the rest of the film for them, destroyed its personality. “But one has to take their feelings into account,” she said.

What do you think of Jack?

many aficionados now seek originals of his powerful studies of the alien, which depict distorted colossi striding across mist-enshrouded jungles or peering round the dripping stones of some druidic circle.

Just finished my new painting. It shows these houses, with the lake in the foreground, and the bloated body of a drowned man at the edge of the water—Relentless Plague, I think. I hope they like it.

horses which drew the hearse, and far more ineffectual. Every open grave I had to stand beside was a gateway to knowledge which nobody other than I appeared to realise was there to be tapped. As mourners dropped earth on the coffin it sounded very much like knocking on a door, and I imagined how terrified the priest and his little congregation would be if any opened in the earth.

happy not to think this looked as though someone kept peering

In his classic study Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood, the American scholar Jack Sullivan divides traditional tales of the supernatural into two camps: the antiquarian and the visionary. The former is typified by a certain emotional detachment, coupled with subtle irony and a dry, precise evocation of a world that is recognizably our own, inhabited by sensible characters—male Edwardian antiquaries whose stolidity borders on dullness, and whose invocation of horrors is as inadvertent as it is irrevocable. The antiquarian ghost story is typified by the work of the English don M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James, himself inspired by the more open-ended horror of his Irish predecessor, Sheridan LeFanu. As Sullivan puts it, “For LeFanu’s characters, reality is inherently dark and deadly; for James’ antiquaries, darkness must be sought out through research and discovery.” The visionary ghost story, in contract, has more in common with the robust stream of American transcendentalism that emerged in the late 19th century, as well as with the hermetic and decadent artistic movements popular in fin de siècle Europe. Little surprise, then, that one of the most successful visionary writers, the British-born Algernon Blackwood, based his most rapturous and terrifying tales on his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, or that the other great supernatural visionary, the Welsh Arthur Machen, was a friend of Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and drew upon Celtic myth in his short fiction. Sullivan identified a later, third stream in supernatural writing in Lost Souls, the companion volume to Elegant Nightmares: he simply calls it the contemporary ghost story, a capacious portmanteau term that makes room for writers such as Robert Aickman, Walter de la Mare, Elizabeth Bowen and Ramsey Campbell. To this list I’d add Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, and now, with the publication of Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan.

Once upon a time there was a boy who thought he was a comet.” Toby’s voice took on a rhythm not unlike an incantation. “Every night he flew past the sky and went round all the stars,” he said. “And then he flew out where there aren’t any stars and they’re so far away you can’t even see them. It’s so big out there that things have to get giant to fill it, and it’s so dark they can be anything they like. So the boy got longer and longer till he met himself, and he could go all the way back to when nothing was alive, except it’s really a kind of life people don’t know about yet. And because he could meet himself he came back every morning without anyone knowing he’d gone, and that’s what he did till the things he met came to find everyone.

[…] Although it’s hard to imagine it now, there was a time when horror was nearly unrivaled in popularity with the general reader. In the 1970s and ’80s, local bookstores had whole shelves devoted to it. You couldn’t miss them: they were the ones stocked between Mystery and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, with all the black and red covers, the raised titles dripping blood, and the leering skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. These books had notoriously short shelf lives, but because there was such a demand for them—owing largely to the success of books like The Exorcist and writers like Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub—it was possible to hack a living if you could turn them out fast enough. A lot of folks tried their hand, and a lot of bad books were published. So many that the market eventually collapsed under its own weight. Among those bad books, though, were some truly great ones written by great writers—writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert R. McCammon, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, to name just three—who delivered lasting contributions to the genre. While it would be nice to think that all the deserving books were saved from being swept away in the vast tide, that just wasn’t the case. [...] Excerpt from ”Introduction” to Michael McDowell’s ”Blackwater: The Complete Saga” (2017, Kindle edition)

personal expression … book lacks the disciplines of semiology

Bering Strait and the Pacific Ocean, leading the twenty-four Atlantic Fleet submarines making the inter-fleet transit across the top of the world. Standing on the Conn of his Los Angeles class fast attack submarine, Commander Ramsey Hootman leaned against the railing, his eyes fixed on the display of his Sail High-Frequency under-ice sonar. His eyelids were getting heavier, but this was no time to leave Control for an hour or two down. Annapolis was approaching the most hazardous portion of her passage under the ice cap and there was no way he could tear himself away now. Had he managed the transit better, he might have been able to nab a few hours of sleep before reaching this point. But the ice pack seemed to be conspiring against him. Two days earlier, Annapolis had slipped under the polar ice pack, proceeding at ahead flank through the deep water portion of the Arctic Ocean. The Commanding Officer’s Eyes Only message had instructed him to abandon all caution; time was paramount. As Annapolis began the most dangerous leg of its underwater journey—transiting the Alaskan continental shelf toward the Bering Strait passage—Ramsey had maintained a high speed, slowing only to ahead full. But the high speed increased their peril. The last portion of their voyage beneath the ice cap required transit in water depth less than six hundred feet. Although the bottom was mapped, not every feature was known and water

if you look closely enough you might find me in my place among the trees.