RAMSEY CAMPBELL

A lifetime of fear: meet British horror’s elder statesman

- Jonathan Wright

WHEN YOU BECOME A PARENT, THE idea of your children being in danger engenders a particular dread. And if you’re a horror writer, that can change your attitude to your work. This, says Ramsey Campbell, is what happened with his friend James Herbert.

“[He told me] if he wrote about children in peril, he wouldn’t really be able to go the whole way in the way that he had with The Rats, where there’s a baby being eaten by rats,” he says. “He said he’d never do that sort of thing again now he had children. But the odd thing is, with Steve King and me the opposite seems to have happened. We seem driven to imagine the absolute worst that could happen.”

In Campbell’s case, the latest manifestation of this is The Wise Friend, the story of a father, Patrick Torrington, whose Aunt Thelma “was a painter with a distinct tendency towards the occult, who died in mysterious circumstances” and who left behind “an account of places she visited for inspiration”. Visiting these spots, Torrington comes to believe, is dangerous because of the risk of “rousing what lies beneath”. But Torrington’s teenage son Roy is now fascinated by Thelma’s work.

“It’s partly about parental fear – your children growing up and becoming independent,” says Campbell, “and you’re attempting to guide them, but obviously you can only do that so far. There’s a point at which you and your offspring deviate, they become absolutely separate people.”

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