Horror Laureate:

Ramsey Campbell

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.

Ramsey celebrated his 60th Anniversary of his debut publishing in 2024, meaning that his work and influence spans the 50 years, both as an author, the longest running President of the British Fantasy Society (1977 – 2013) and his inimitable presence at Fantasycon in the UK.

Reading Ramsey Campbell

The Wise Friend (2020). The mythologies and bestiaries of the fantastic and supernatural are populated with all sorts of different strange and mysterious creatures. The biographies of these varied and different monsters are often the way we are introduced to them, rather than through a story that demonstrates their qualities.

The Wise Friend, by Ramsey Campbell is a case in point and a clear example of showing rather than telling. Other writers might attempt something that engages with a wide selection of mythical influences, but in this book, Campbell keeps the immediate focus narrow and builds his mythology from there.

The familiar, the homunculus and the Muse are common creatures referred to in a variety of fantastical fictions, drawing their roots from a series of classic stories and legends. Campbell plays with this existing set of diverse mythologies, devising his own, that leans on the others and so makes use of them to give the story an ancient depth.

The Wise Friend examines the ramifications of its supernatural subject material with great depth, allowing the less considered aspects of occult magic to be explored in the story and considering the motivations and agendas of lesser forces that have no less motive to survive and thrive than a would be wizard or witch might when pursuing their goals through their quest for power. The modern setting of the story gives it a grounding that anchors the narrative in realism. There is a deceptive simplicity to how Campbell has approached, this, providing the reader with a sinister self-contained story that resonates and lingers long after it is finished.

Ramsey’s most recent novel, The Incubations, is available in a collectable hardcover edition for Ramsey Campbell’s 60 years in publication. The next in the serise, An Echo of Children, is intended to be released in September 2025.

In 2024 he also released a collection, Fear Across the Mersey, which collects all of his shorter Merseyside based tales