拉姆齐·坎贝尔

Ramsey Campbell (born 4 January 1946) is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for over sixty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.

Since he first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T.E.D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today", and Robert Hadji has described him as "perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition", while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood." In a 2021 appreciation of his collected works, The Washington Post said: "Taken together, they constitute one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction."

Early life

Campbell was born in Liverpool, England, to Alexander Ramsey and Nora (Walker) Campbell. He was educated by Christian Brothers at St Edward's College, Liverpool. Campbell's childhood and adolescence were marked by the rift between his parents, who became estranged shortly after his birth. Campbell's father would consistently leave the house early in the morning and not return until night, and consequently, Campbell said, he did not see his father face-to-face for nearly twenty years; when Campbell became old enough that his schedule would lead to occasional chance encounters with his father, his father would always hold the door closed so that they would not come face-to-face. Campbell said he never got the chance to ask his father why he did this. Years later, Campbell's mother developed schizophrenia, an experience he has discussed in detail in the introduction and afterword to the restored text of The Face That Must Die. Other autobiographical pieces regarding Campbell's life appear in Section V, "On Ramsey Campbell" in his essay collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably: 30 Years of Essays and Articles (ed. S. T. Joshi), as well as in the novella The Enigma of the Flat Policeman (2020).

According to Campbell, his mother "wrote a great deal, novel after novel, but was largely unpublished aside from a handful of short stories in writer's magazines." She encouraged her young son to send his writing off from an early age. Growing up in post-war Liverpool, Campbell avidly consumed the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Franz Kafka, Fritz Leiber, Graham Greene, and the cinema of film noir.

Career

Ghostly Tales

Campbell cites Rupert the Bear as one of his earliest supernatural influences. He tells The Guardian of a story he read in 1947, entitled Rupert's Christmas Tree:Rupert acquires a magical tree that decamps after the festivities and returns to its home in the woods.... Perhaps this was meant as a charming fantasy for children, but the details – the small high voice from the tree, the creaking that Rupert hears in the night, the trail of earth he follows from the tub in his house, above all the prancing silhouette that inclines towards him, the star it has in place of a head – are surely the stuff of adult supernatural fiction. I think I got my start in the field right there, and many of my preoccupations must derive from my early childhood.Campbell's earliest tales were written when he was 11 years old (1957–58) and were influenced by a magazine from Bolton, Lancashire, called Phantom. These early tales formed a self-illustrated collection of sixteen stories and a poem entitled "Ghostly Tales". Campbell intended to submit these to Phantom, but his mother, who regarded literary success as a possible way of financing her escape from her disastrous marriage, persuaded him to wait until he had a whole book to show to publishers. His English teacher, Brother Kelly, used to have him read his stories to the class. Campbell (as John R. Campbell) submitted Ghostly Tales to "numerous publishers" including Tom Boardman junior; Boardman rejected it as they did not publish ghost stories, but his rejection letter included encouragement to Campbell to keep writing. This collection of juvenilia was published thirty years later, as a special issue of Crypt of Cthulhu magazine titled Ghostly Tales: Crypt of Cthulhu 6, No 8, whole number 50, Michaelmas 1987, edited by Robert M. Price. Though the stories are mostly mainstream spectral lore, one story ("The Hollow in the Woods") can be considered a very early mythos yarn.

Another issue of this magazine Crypt of Cthulhu No 43 (Hallowmas 1983), titled The Tomb-Herd and Others collects various early stories, including some early drafts of tales later published revised in Campbell's first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964). The manuscripts of Campbell's early tales are housed at the Local History Library of the Liverpool Public Libraries.