Ramsey Campbell (1946–) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies; three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’.

Grady Hendrix is a frequent contributor to Tor.com and author of the recent 80’s-inspired horror novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. In this contribution to the Weird Writers series, Hendrix examines a story by an author who influenced him as a horror writer.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

Ramsey Campbell’s fiction is crazy. Not in the sense that it’s arrow-through-the-head wacky, nor in the sense that it’s over the top, but in the clinical sense of the word. Campbell writes horror that gets its mileage by deploying the effects of mental illness. His characters are gripped by depression, their perceptions can’t be trusted, inanimate objects are conscious, living creatures behave like automatons, personalities are overridden and replaced, consciousness is detached from physicality. More than that, Campbell seems determined to induce these symptoms in his readers. His style is his substance.

Born in Liverpool, much has been made of his childhood devotion to H.P. Lovecraft and his early career as a Lovecraft impersonator. His first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was set in the Cthulhu mythos, and his first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, contained nothing but variations on Lovecraft, with their locations changed from New England to plain old England. But Campbell was done with Lovecraft by the age of 23. A far more fruitful way to think about his writing is to take seriously what he wrote in an essay at the end of his second novel, The Face That Must Die, “The object of writing is to tell the truth.”

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think. His descriptions are crazy-making, full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. Porches “sprout tubular metal scaffolding,” and doors and suitcases are invested with agency (“The porch door had opened. When it had displayed its gap for a while, a suitcase emerged.”) and usually the narrative voice is linked to the distorted perceptions of characters who are delusional, dreaming, or mad:

“The clock was chanting: see you on Jan, see you on Jan. His mind listed places he must wipe, over and over. Had he forgotten one? The door. The doorknob. The table. The chair in which he’d sat. The cup — he must wipe all the cups, to make sure.”

All of the examples above are taken from his first two novels, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Face That Must Die (1979), both of them slim volumes about psychopaths, neither of which was a financial success. Campbell was writing a lot of short stories at the time but his agent was convinced that all the money was in big fat novels, like the ones Stephen King was writing. In 1980, all the horror guys were publishing 400 and 500 page books and getting rich. Didn’t he want to get rich, too? And so Campbell wrote The Parasite, a big fat horror novel about a woman who experiments with astral projection and winds up becoming possessed.

There’s nothing wrong with The Parasite, but you get a much more concentrated dose of Campbellian terror in his short story “The Brood,” published that same year. Blackband is a depressed veterinarian, well on his way to total dehumanization by the vast metropolis where he lives, spending his days with pet owners he loathes, spending his nights staring out the window at the homeless people who shamble down his street like lost souls. He’s fascinated by The Lady of the Lamp, his nickname for a woman who trudges in circles around a streetlamp all night long. When she disappears he tracks her to her squalid home and enters her ruined basement where he finds disgusting worms, hatched from nearby eggs, feeding on a cat that may or may not still be alive (Campbell is typically vague on this point). Blackband goes to fetch gasoline and returns to burn the place down, but he winds up becoming food for this newborn brood.

The one Lovecraftian trick Campbell still uses is keeping his monsters offstage. When Blackband sees the creature that laid the eggs, Campbell describes it as “a stain” an “inverted coat” and he tells us what it doesn’t feel like (“something that was not flesh”) rather than what it does, much as Lovecraft prefers to go on about “indescribable horrors” rather than describing them. Which would seem to be the job of a writer. But Lovecraft, and Campbell, want to invoke a feeling in their readers, and Campbell had decided that the best way to do that is to mess with their minds.

“I do value the shift of perception fiction can achieve,” he said in an interview. “Within the narrative and within my mind.” If Campbell believes that “the object of writing is to tell the truth” then the fact that all perception is untrustworthy is the truth as he lived it. As he writes in an afterward to The Face That Must Die:

“For as far back as I can recall my mother showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia: she was convinced that radio programmes and newspapers contained secret messages for her; she would recognise people as someone quite different and insist that one was disguised as the other.”

He writes that this experience taught him, “That one’s perception of reality (or, in this case, my mother’s) need not be the same thing as objective reality.” Never was this more obvious than when he writes about his own experiences with altered states:

“At times my own indulgence in this [acid] brought me unnervingly close to my mother’s condition, especially when I suffered a protracted nightmarish flashback not long before I began to write this book [The Face That Must Die]. As I penned the tenth chapter I saw the words start to writhe on the page and found it difficult to continue, but I did.”

Campbell doesn’t want to describe actions, he wants to alter perceptions, and giving oneself over to his writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Sounds are heightened, perceptions are warped, hallucinations loom. Reactions are divorced from their causes so that they become alien and strange, and his descriptions of horror go hand-in-hand with descriptions of squalor. Reading his books, one begins to feel strongly that their room needs to be cleaned and that bugs are crawling over their skin.

Philip K. Dick

Seen in this light, Lovecraft pales as an influence and some of Campbell’s other favorite authors seem much more relevant. Philip K. Dick played with reader perceptions in some of the same ways and Campbell praises several of Dick’s stories for how they monkey with notions of reality and identity. Campbell’s twisting of words comes from Nabokov whom he cites as “a crash course in how much more you could do with language.”

The problem with Campbell’s work is that it’s hard to sustain this kind of effect for long without driving readers mad. The Parasite begins with a heady seance set piece in which a bunch of children lock a little girl in a dark room along with something unwholesome. By the end of this prologue the reader is wrung out, stressed out, and a little bit burned out. As Campbell said in an interview about this book:

“The problem I’d set myself, which I don’t think you can sustain for novel length, is that it’s from the viewpoint of the character to whom it’s all happening, and she’s aware of what is happening to her. All I think you can do is convey her sense of mounting terror and panic, but there’s a limit to how much you can do that.”

Campbell’s novels are good, but his style really shines in his short stories, each of which feels engineered for maximum intensity, to make the reader feel off-kilter, unable to trust his or her own perceptions, unable to trust the perceptions of the characters, unable to even trust the language on the page. They’re designed, in other words, to make you feel crazy.

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They were just finishing up their second case of Bud when the Vampire King showed up. Hinckley’s wife wanted to get pregnant again, so he was putting away two for every one of Chad’s. Gerrold was pissed off because he’d gotten screwed by yet another investment opportunity. Also, his wife had left him, backing up over his dog as she tore out of the driveway. Gerry’d been planning on selling that dog to a fellow over in Aiken. He sat in his busted-out lawn chair flicking survival matches at a paint can full of gas.

“Come on, man,” Chad said. “Those cost fifty cents each.”

“This is how I relax,” Gerry said. “My wife left me, my dog’s dead, and I’m broke.”

“How much did you lose?” Chad asked.

“More than I got,” Gerry said. “They told me I could make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year selling real estate. Goddamn LandTrayde.”

He flicked a survival match and it flew in a perfect arc, landing in the gas can.

“Gimme those,” Chad said, snatching the matches out of Gerry’s hands.

“Who the hell is that?” Hinckley asked, looking past the blazing can. The three of them watched the shiny Prius crawl up the mud track and pull into the big dirt yard in front of the Barn. The spookiest thing about the vampire was how clean his car was.

“Probably a child predator,” Chad said. “They’re always scrubbing their vehicles of evidence.”

“Goddamnit,” Gerry said. “We come out here to bang on shit with tools and forget how our lives are bad country western songs, and here comes some pedophile driving a battery-powered kiddie car asking directions.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” the vampire said, picking his way across the mud. He was beautiful, his clothes were Italian, and he had the diction of a movie star.

“You in a band?” Hinckley asked.

“No,” the vampire said. “My name is Karl and I require your assistance.”

“Fuck off back to Germany,” Gerry said.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” Karl said.

He picked up Gerry’s F‑150 by the back end. Gerrold cussed because it wasn’t even close to paid off yet. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out his Glock.

“Put it down, you fucking meth-head,” he said, his two-handed stance swaying slightly.

“Gerry, you’re drunk,” Chad said. “David Bowie, put down the truck. Gerry put down the gun.”

Karl talked to them casually while holding the truck’s rear tires a foot off the ground.

“It is all right,” he reassured them. “Gerry? I would like you to shoot me.”

“Don’t do it, Gerry,” Chad said.

“I’d already’ve double-tapped your ass if it wouldn’t fuck up my paint job,” Gerry said.

“Come closer,” Karl said. “Shoot me right in the chest.”

“Gerry!” Chad said.

But Gerry was crab-walking towards Karl.

“Do not hesitate,” Karl said. “I will give you this.”

He reached into his expensive suit jacket. Gerry shot him twice.

“Dammit!” Chad yelled, he plucked the gun out of Gerry’s hand, dumped the clip, and popped the round out of the chamber.

Gunsmoke hung in the air.

“It is nothing,” Karl said, casually putting the F‑150 back on the ground. “See, I am unharmed.”

He walked towards them, pulling two stacks of cash out of his jacket.

“I am a vampire,” he said. “And I will pay you gentlemen $20,000 to kill me.”

Gerry looked at Chad. Chad looked at Hinckley. Hinckley looked at Gerry. They all looked at Karl.

“I’m gonna need to be a lot drunker for this shit,” Gerry said.

***

They started out slow. Gerry’d already broke the seal on the thing, but it was still hard to take the first shot.

“On three,” Chad said. “One…two…THREE!”

No one moved.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s passed out,” Hinckley complained.

Lying in the mud at their feet, Karl looked like a baby. A big, beautiful baby wearing an expensive Italian suit who had just drunk four bottles of Jack and sixteen beers. He snored softly.

“He asked us to!” Gerry hissed.

“That don’t mean it’s easy,” Hinckley said.

“We all shoot at once,” Chad said. “Come on.”

“Why’re we whispering?” Hinckley asked.

“One…two…THREE!”

This time they each pulled the trigger. Gerry had his Glock, Hinckley had his .38, Chad had his Guide Gun, and when they fired it sounded like a single crack and looked like a single flash.

“We get him?” Hinckley asked.

Chad took a squat and fingered the bullet holes in Karl’s suit. The vampire stirred and mumbled something.

“Didn’t even break the skin,” Chad said.

They each unloaded full magazines into Karl, shredding his suit, ruining his tie, and reducing his shirt to scrap. The echoes rolled away and Karl gave a little wet snore.

“What the fuck is up with this fuck?” Gerry asked.

Chad went into the Barn and came back out with his shotgun. He put it right up to Karl’s face and peppered it with buckshot. Nothing.

“Shitfire,” he said. “We’re gonna have to earn that money.”

***

They all needed the money.

“$20,000, man,” Gerry begged. “I can double that in two months with my day trading system.”

Hinckley’s problems were more urgent.

“She bought some sexy panties,” he said. “I’m a weak man. She’s get a baby out of me before October. How’m I gonna send ‘em all to law school?”

Chad looked at the Barn and the collection of crapped out cars sitting on the oil-stained dirt lot. This was supposed to have been his moneymaker, instead it was sucking him dry. He didn’t even have enough money to put new tires on his truck. They were so old and bald they were going to blow out any minute and send him spinning off the highway. Might be doing him a favor, broke as he was.

They agreed on a three-way split. The vampire suggested they get him drunk before trying to kill him.

“If I am conscious, I might defend myself,” he purred. “It is better if I am incapacitated first.”

“You care what you drink?” Chad asked.

“It is difficult for me to taste anything that is not a part of my regular diet,” Karl said.

“You on Paleo?” Hinckley asked.

“He means blood, dumbass,” Chad said. “Who’s sober enough to drive? Hinckley?”

“You’re more sober than me,” Hinckley complained.

“I’m not leaving this son of a bitch on my property unattended,” Chad said. “Karl, give Hinckley $100 out of that vampire money. Hinckley, beer run.”

Hinckley came back an hour later with six cases of Bud and eight bottles of Jack Daniels, along with two packs of Pampers and a case of paper towel.

“Mei told me we’re all out at home,” he said, then turned to Karl. “Sorry, no change.”

They sat out front of the Barn and started drinking. No one said anything until Karl moved from Budweiser to whiskey.

“What’s it like to sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“I do not understand,” Karl said.

“Sparkle, glimmer, shine, whatever it is you vampires do,” Gerry said.

“Ah, like the book,” Karl said.

“Yeah, like the book,” Gerry said. “You may be immoral but you ain’t real swift on the uptake.”

“Unfortunately, it is nothing like that,” Karl said. “Being a vampire did not turn out to be what I thought it would be.”

“Thought you’d sparkle?” Gerry asked.

“Something like that,” Karl smiled. “Live forever, I challenge you. I cannot digest solid food. For more than 100 years I have smelled pizza, but not once have I tasted it. I am haunted by memories of investments I never made. IBM! I could have gotten in on the ground floor but instead my money was tied up in canals. It has been 30 years since I have had an interesting conversation. People have been talking about the weather for hundreds of years. It is always boring. Always! I have reached a point where I prefer the embrace of death to hearing once more person wonder whether it is cooler today than yesterday or if this rain will last.”

“Yeah,” Gerry observed. “Sucks to be immortal.”

“To find some purpose I have hunted down the others like me and torn them to shreds,” Karl said. “I am all that is left.”

“Okay, why don’t you get that second bottle of Jack down your piehole,” Gerry said. “It’s getting late and we need to kill your ass and get the hell home.”

***

It went on for so long that it stopped being serious and got funny, then got serious, then got funny again. They took turns hauling Karl up on top of the Barn and throwing him off while one of them stood in the yard shooting at him with Chad’s shotgun. Vampire Skeet. Chad finally called a halt because they’d gotten so drunk they were mostly hitting the Barn.

They lit him on fire, hit him with kitty litter napalm, dropped a ‘71 Chevy Malibu on him, and tried to take off his head with a cutting torch. They chained him up between their cars, and tried to pull him apart by driving in different directions, but Hinckley’s Caddy kept stalling out, and Gerry’s F‑150 just spun its wheels in the mud. Chainsaw blades dulled, radial saws wouldn’t bite, and when Chad clamped his head in the drill press, he couldn’t get the bit to bite into Karl’s eye even with all his weight on it.

“That is sick,” Gerry observed.

“You got any better ideas?” Chad asked.

By now, Karl was wearing a shop apron they’d tied around his waist because Gerry objected to seeing his vampiric junk flapping free. His body was scorched in places, red in others, dirty as hell, but otherwise it was unmarked.

“We’re never gonna get that money,” Hinckley whined.

“How do you even split $20,000 three ways?” Gerry asked. “It’s like he’s fucking with us.”

It was like he was fucking with them, Chad thought. He’d been divorced twice and audited three times and he knew what it was like when someone was fucking with you. He looked at the perpetually pissed-off Gerry and big dumb Hinckley arguing over whether you carry the one or what, and he realized what he needed to do.

$6,650 each,” Chad said. “Take that last $50, Hinckley. You’re going on another beer run. It’s time we got serious.”

***

“Why us?” Chad asked Karl.

The vampire was feeling the effects of alcohol poisoning. His eyes were sinking shut, his head kept nodding forward and snapping back.

“Your YouTube videos,” he mumbled.

Gerry, Chad, and Hinckley had been putting up YouTube videos of themselves blowing the shit out of shit for a while. Their best was a refrigerator they’d stuffed with home-made dynamite. They’d set it off with an incendiary round and it launched itself into the sky like God kicking a field goal, made a great big arc trailing fire, and punched through the roof of the Barn. They’d had to cover the hole with two sheets of plywood.

“If he can find us on Youtube so can other people,” Hinckley said. “We gonna get in trouble?”

“He’s out,” Chad said, lifting Karl’s arm and letting it fall back down. “Get the guns.”

***

Chad made sure they pounded so much beer while wiring the homemade C‑4 that Hinckley finally had to go inside the Barn and sleep it off. Gerry lasted about an hour longer. In that time, the two of them turned the field behind the Barn into a war zone. They strapped an explosive vest to Karl, they wired him with dynamite, they put him inside an old bank safe and set off a charge so big it puffed out the walls. By four AM, Karl was sporting some scorch marks and minor bruising but that was it.

“Get me another beer,” Chad said. “And get me the rubber tubing and some of the napalm. I’m gonna go deep.”

He turned around. Gerry was stretched out next to a steaming pile of half-digested chicken fingers, snoring softly.

“Finally,” Chad said.

It took him a while to drag Karl around front. The vampire was heavier than he looked.

***

The first rays of the rising sun were resting on Karl’s face when he cracked one eye open.

“Morning,” Chad said. “I was kind of hoping the sun would make you burst into flames or something.”

“No,” Karl said, standing up and stretching in the cool morning mist, joints popping. “I am very sore but it appears I am still alive.”

“Yeah,” Chad said. “Sorry about that. What happens now?”

“Now I am forced to kill you,” Karl said.

“I figured it’d be something like that,” Chad said. “Them other two are inside, I got ‘em drunk as lords when I realized what was gonna happen. No reason for ‘em to suffer.”

“How deeply moving,” Karl said. “Usually by the time I wake up you’ve all killed each other over the money. You’re so noble.”

“Your poker face ain’t as tight as you think it is,” Chad said. “You cocky-ass European bucket of fuck.”

“How are we breaking our fast?” Karl asked, adjusting his balls as he sat down on the broken lawn chair.

“Moonshine,” Chad said, kicking the wooden spindle between them and making the mason jars clink together. “My daddy’s recipe.”

He raised his jar in a toast and slammed back half of it, then exhaled kerosene vapor and pounded his chest. Karl smiled.

“You did your best,” the naked vampire said. “I’m sure.”

“You were just messing with us,” Chad said. “You knew you couldn’t be killed.”

“A little bit,” Karl admitted.

“Is that fun for you?” Chad asked. “Makes you feel like a big shot?”

“It passes the time.”

“Well, cheers to you, dickface,” Chad said.

The two men clinked mason jars and Karl knocked back his in one slug.

“Thirsty,” Chad observed.

“I have much to do,” Karl said. “You have left me a small mess to clean up and it will take some time.”

“You’ll find a way,” Chad said. “You gonna suck our blood?”

Karl smiled.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Chad said. “You don’t even got fangs.”

“I have fangs, I assure you,” Karl said.

He parted his lips, his jaw unhinging like a snake’s. Two long, sharp incisors unfolded from the roof of his mouth. He hissed, unable to help himself, which is when Chad struck three survival matches and flicked them in. Karl swallowed reflexively.

“I felt that,” he said, sternly. “I was going to make your passing relatively painless but that was not a pleasant sensation.”

He stood and advanced on Chad, who fell backwards out of his chair, then scooted away on his butt across the mud.

“Where are you running, little man?” Karl smiled.

Then he paused, hand on his stomach. Something inside of him twitched.

“Napalm,” Chad said. “My daddy’s recipe. I gave you a napalm enema, too. Only probelm was I couldn’t figure out how to get it lit.”

Karl screamed fire, and dropped to his knees.

“Your skin was tough as shit,” Chad said. “I figured your guts might not be.”

Black, greasy smoke poured out of Karl’s throat, a secondary explosion inside his cloaca jerked his body and a lava flow of molten innards oozed out onto the ground in an endless mudslide. He lay on one side, panting steam, guts boiling, convulsing painfully.      “Don’t thank me,” Chad said, prying the two bundles of cash out of Karl’s hands. “It was my pleasure.”

Karl snatched for Chad’s arm, hitting it hard enough to numb it from the elbow down. The two rolls of bills fell into his pile of flaming organs. They flared up as they caught fire.

“That’s okay,” Chad said. “I did it for love.”

He sat for a while, sipping warm Budweiser to get the shitty taste of moonshine out of his mouth, watching the vampire cook from the inside out. By the time Gerry stumbled outside, squinting in the sun, Karl was little more than a smoldering, deflated sack of indestructible skin propped up by his diamond-hard bones.

“You cooking bacon?” Gerry asked, sniffing the air.

“Killed that vampire,” Chad said.

“Smells good,” Gerry said, popping a Bud, and dropping into a lawn chair.

When Hinckley got up, he took his morning piss on Karl’s skin bag.

“That’s what you get for fucking with a bunch of good old boys,” he said. “So how’re we splitting up that money again?”

“There is no money,” Chad said. “It burnt up.”

He pointed at the two nuggests of charred paper immersed in the smoldering mess.

“You burnt our money?” Gerry asked, jumping to his feet, knocking the lawn chair over backwards. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“How the hell am I gonna pay for another baby now?” Hinckley yelled, on the brink of tears. “I was counting on that!”

“Your baby?” Gerry roared. “My retirement fund! I don’t have a safety net anymore thanks to LandTrayde! And you went and burned it all up.”

“You’d prefer I let him kill you?” Chad asked.

“You’re jealous because you knew I’d invest it and double my principal in six months,” Gerry said. “You’re a petty man, Chad Bowers.”

“You’re jealous,” Hinckley said. “You envy me the family love I’ve got in my life. You’re a sad, lonely man.”

He turned to go. Gerry followed.

“Wait just one minute, you assholes,” Chad said. “I saved your lives. That cash was collateral damage.”

“I’m sure it was, you jealous prick,” Gerry said. “Come on, Hink. Let’s get the fuck away from this little man before he drags us down to his level.”

“Yeah,” Hinckley said. “See you next Tuesday.”

“I’ll bring my hex wrenches,” Gerry said. “Yours suck shit.”

“Fine,” Chad said. “Get on out of here. Leave me to clean up.”

“Serves you right,” Gerry said. “You burnt up our futures.”

Chad watched their cars bounce up the mud track and vanish into the woods. Then he sat for a while, contemplating his situation. It took him another warm beer before he started seeing the silver lining. He hosed Hinckley’s piss off the vampire husk and picked it up. A few measurements and he felt like it was about right. If he could just find a way to cut it there was plenty here.

He might be getting those new tires after all.

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