Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contents
- Preface
- My Roots Exhumed, by Ramsey Campbell
- I Biography and Overview
- II The Lovecraftian Fiction
- III The Demons by Daylight Period
- IV The Transformation of Supernaturalism
- V Dreams and Reality
- VI Horrors of the City
- VII Paranoia
- VIII The Child as Victim and Villain
- IX Miscellaneous Writings
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
VI - Horrors of the City
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contents
- Preface
- My Roots Exhumed, by Ramsey Campbell
- I Biography and Overview
- II The Lovecraftian Fiction
- III The Demons by Daylight Period
- IV The Transformation of Supernaturalism
- V Dreams and Reality
- VI Horrors of the City
- VII Paranoia
- VIII The Child as Victim and Villain
- IX Miscellaneous Writings
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ramsey Campbell is the poet of urban squalor and decay. His Brichester and Liverpool (which, as we have seen, had already become interchangeable by the late 1960s) evoke the filth, noise, decadence, and smouldering class tensions that typify much urban life, and this is another way in which Campbell has radically modernized the horror tale, which had previously been content to seek horror in the remote wilderness (Machen, Blackwood) or in the small villages of England (M.R. James) or America (Ambrose Bierce). Lovecraft was, to some small degree, a forerunner, for, aside from a few stories that etch his detestation of the megalopolis of New York, his New England cities, real or imagined, certainly have a meticulous realism of a kind. But that realism emphasizes the loathsomeness that may emerge from antique structures or dubious history (‘witch-haunted Arkham’) rather than the social pressures that can make daily life a hell for so many urban denizens. Clearly Campbell has drawn upon his own experiences in Liverpool, a city with which he has maintained a love-hate relationship even after moving out of it in 1980.
We have already seen that the evocation of the seediness of the urban landscape—slums, pornography, prostitution—made ‘Cold Print’ [1966–67] far more than a simple pastiche of Lovecraft. An earlier story, ‘The Cellars’ [1965], is in fact Campbell's first tale to be set in Liverpool, drawing upon an actual subterranean location for a tale of supernatural horror. A description of a walk through the city sets the stage for terror:
Fewer feet splashed through the dirty puddles at the end of Church Street. They skirted the cloaked black figure among the Victoria Monument's pillars and hurried down the line of parking meters like hooded cobras. On either side the discreet life insurance buildings with their golden nameplates mounted to wild turrets. Vic led the way below the regimented windows and cream rain-striped walls of Exchange Flags; scattered men and women, dwarfed by the ebon figures chained below a maritime motto, ran from the scything rain. Here Julie lost her way; they wandered through a maze of streets whose sides descended to unlabelled blackened doors, past makeshift bookstalls cloaked in drooling oilskin, between opaque windows and boarded doors.
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- Information
- Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction , pp. 97 - 108Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001