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Happy Halloween: Event Round-Up

Happy Halloween fellow Twisted Tale-ers, and happy birthday to us!

This weekend marks the 1st birthday of Twisted Tales and we sealed the deal in fine fashion with a double bill of events. The first at Halton Lea Library in Runcorn, the second in our more regular location of Waterstone's Liverpool One. Both events were cursed by my failure to bring my camera which means we've begged and borrowed the photos you see below, other than that they went superbly. Thanks to everyone who came to the events, and to everyone who has come to all our other events over the last year - don't worry, there are plenty more to come...

An Evening of Occult Horror

Halton Lea Library, Runcorn.

Part of the library's 10th annual Paranormal Week. Originally the billing included John Reppion but he had to pull out at the last minute, Adam Nevill and Ramsey Campbell were more than capable of taking up the slack however and entertained the substantial Runcorn crowd to brilliant readings from The Ritual and The Grin of the Dark respectively. There was then time for a panel discussion between Adam and Ramsey about the nature of the occult and its role in fiction, before being thrown open to audience questions.

The staff at the library were great and set everything up perfectly (shout out to Janette and Mike) and the audience were superb.

(Photos from eximiusparanormal.wordpress.com )

Adam Nevill reading from his novel The Ritual.

Adam and Ramsey discuss the occult,
Twisted Tale-ers David McWilliam and Glyn Morgan in the middle.

House of Fear
Waterstone's Liverpool One, Liverpool

An event tied to the release of the new haunted house anthology House of Fear published by Solaris. A good sized crowd took their seats to hear readings from three authors who feature in the collection: Nicholas Royle, Lisa Tuttle and Adam Nevill. Once again there was time for a panel discussion and the three authors swapped their tales of hauntings (or lack of) and spoke about their inspiration and writing process, we then took a few questions from the audience before signing some books.

(As is probably evident these photos are from a camera phone and not of great quality, but thanks to Anna Garnett for providing them. Hopefully some others are on their way to us soon and they'll be added into the post once they've been received).

Twisted Tale-er Glyn Morgan introducing the night's proceedings.

Adam Nevill reading from Apartment 16.

 

David McWilliam leads the panel discussion on haunted houses with Nick, Lisa and Adam.

Once again, thanks to everyone who came out for their pre-Halloween scares. We announced our next event this weekend too - expect full details in a midweek post.

If you have any pictures from the events please let us know, we'd love to see them and feature some on our blog (fully credited of course).

Once again: happy Halloween, but remember - horror lives on all year round!

Adam Nevill interviewed by David McWilliam

Adam Nevill, photo by Tania Glyde

Adam Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels Banquet for the Damned (2004), Apartment 16 (2010) and The Ritual (2011). He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com

DM: How did you come to write horror professionally?

AN: Ramsey Campbell published my short story ‘Mother’s Milk’ in Gathering the Bones. Couple of years later, PS Publishing published my first novel, Banquet for the Damned. ‘Mother’s Milk’ made its way to Ramsey through two intermediaries, from what I remember – James Marriott and John Coulthard. You could honestly say I was of absolutely no interest to major publishers or agents for ten years; I was saved from the abyss, into which so many fall screaming, by Ramsey Campbell and Peter Crowther. A few years later, my agent John Jarrold―the only agent who’s ever had any interest in my work―continued to pull me out of the shadows in which I crouched, muttering and swatting at small black angels.

DM: Who are your greatest influences, and why?

AN: If I answered this question with absolute precision, we’d run into pages. I’ve been in receipt of major influences from so many writers and poets, as well as painters and film makers, and still am as I go along. I think I have my own voice now, which still changes timbre on every book, but I am constantly under the influence of the many writers I read. Some at a craft level, some at an imaginative level, some at every level. Chiefly, I’d say M R James, H P Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell from horror. But Robert Marasco, Shirley Jackson, Edith Wharton, W F Harvey and H R Wakefield all made me realise how much they made me want to write during recent rereads of their work. Maupassant and the other James ditto.

Outside of the genre weird tale, Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, James Joyce, Alan Warner, all dropped major pennies for me too, as did Nathaniel West, Bernard Malamud, Knut Hamsun and Dostoyevsky.

Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and Francis Bacon have a guiding hand in my work too.

DM: All three of your novels to date feature a supernatural threat. What is the continuing appeal of the otherworldly in your writing? Do you ever see yourself writing a mundane horror novel, in which danger stems from the world we know?

AN: The first question is a big one. Much of why I write what I write still remains unexamined. Will I ever truly know? But I’d say I’ve had an innate receptivity to the idea of the supernatural and unworldly since my first memories. I still write about what frightened me when I was younger – in fact, much of my horror still comes from that time. The unseen or barely glimpsed other world was very much a possibility to me then. Even as an adult I still have a strong sensitivity to the uncanny, and have never stopped, at least in my imagination, working out a kind of poetry of the grotesque that lends itself to horror. If I have any kind of artistic vision, then supernatural horror is it.

There are few more liberating and terrifying and dreadful and awe inspiring experiences than realising you are close to something so immense that a glimpse is nearly too much, but a full revelation would be unbearable. Lovecraft’s wonder and awe. That’s the force I want underwriting my horror fiction. I am still overwhelmed in this way. Quite recently while lying on a couch, in the early hours of the morning, outside a farmhouse in Catalonia (where I was a guest writer), I looked at the largest and clearest night sky I had ever seen―just dense with stars and debris disintegrating as it hit the atmosphere―while a violent electrical storm set fire to trees in the forest around the farm (in which boars could also be heard crashing around from time to time). I’d watched the storm get closer as it came in from the sea, and it looked like the end of the world. It could have been for all I knew in an unfamiliar place while alone at night. And for a few minutes I realised with the fullest comprehension possible, that I was on a planet for a miniscule fragment of time in a universe so vast I couldn’t even understand it. I nearly screamed. For a few moments I completely lost my mind and expected to be yanked up and into the sky. Is there anything more significant than our crushing insignificance within this wondrous and utterly dreadful universe and its infinite possibilities? So why would you write about anything else? There is nothing bigger than the mystery of life and the unmapped vastness of existence. Much derided, but horror is the best vehicle, in my humble opinion, for exploring this.

[NO DRUGS WERE INVOLVED IN THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IN SPAIN BESIDE NICOTINE]

As for the second question: if not in physique, but in temperament, I’ve always shared an affinity with Conan, who only feared the supernatural and not men. But Lovecraft’s more atheistic sci fi horror really appeals to me, so I wouldn’t rule out that in the future. But I haven’t felt a significant enough pull yet, toward realism without mystical embellishments. I’ve tinkered but end up in the usual place. I once tried to write in a social realist style and before I knew it, the characters I attempted to draw from life were grotesque puppets and hyper real … perhaps I was on to something. But I think my reading of more social realist writers has taught me to prepare the ground for the uncanny in a believable world, which inevitably amplifies the supernatural when it appears. Or when, as M R James wrote, it “put out its head”.

DM: The atmospheres you evoke in your novels have a distinctly cinematic quality to them. Do you draw inspiration from horror films? If so, can you name some favourites and explain why they are important to you?

AN: Yes, lots of inspiration. In fact I imagined The Ritual as a film as I wrote it. It’s a cinematic novel. I wanted to get as close to an amalgam of the two mediums as I could, without eschewing the inner life and the lyricism you need in prose, while also not losing the immediacy of cinema with too much exposition or description. Lots of popular fiction novels do this, but I rarely feel transported by the books, even if the plots are engaging. The Ritual also had to be a transporting book for me, or it would have been a failure.

Often with films, it’s a scene, or an image, or an aesthetic that stays with me and can inspire me years later. For instance, in recent years, the last fifteen minutes of REC (2007) are as good as anything I have ever seen in a horror film; the photographs and the cult in Martyrs (2008) made me shiver; the interview with the Dachau survivor in The Nameless (1999) took me out of myself; the teeth in the rags in Blair Witch (1999), preceded by the cries of the victim in the dark of that wood, have never left me; the peep over the door in House of Blood (2011) made my head spin. Even before I’d seen the original Nosferatu (1922), as a child I’d seen a clip of Max Schreck walking up the stairs with those long fingers and probably came as close to paralysis through fear as I have ever done since. The clown under the bed in Poltergeist (1982), the jackals bones in the grave of Damien’s mother in The Omen (1976), the Venice of Don’t Look Now (1973) … these are a few of my favourite things. One day I will edit them all into one long loop and play them on a huge screen in a dark room, and listen to ‘A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh’ by Celtic Frost at full volume, and just wait for the men in white coats to be called … Perhaps I’m a supernatural terror junkie.

DM: There is a recurrent theme of ancient beings with whom we should not meddle via rituals and occult magics. Do you have a personal fascination with/fear of the arcane?

AN: Both a fascination, and the fear of the sensibly cautious. I’ve never dabbled myself, and won’t even go near a Ouija board, but I tend to consider occult magic as complicated and sophisticated a system of belief and ritual and discipline, as so much of philosophy or psychiatry is. It also brings a great deal of comfort and insight into many of its practitioners, who I do not mock, and has little to do with evil. It’s almost a therapy and system for outsiders too, which I like. I just prefer to consider the occult at an imaginative level, or as apocryphal. It creates a discourse through its symbols and metaphors and reputation that facilitates supernatural horror, if used sparingly. I think I also tend to use it in fiction as part of a process in which reader receptivity is cultivated to accepting something beyond natural law. In Banquet I used it as a medium that prepared the characters to make contact with something in a process, rather than it wielding great power alone through spells and ceremonies etc. I believe the bane of horror is the magic amulet, the cursed skull, the trinkets, lotions and potions, the spells and incantations. They’re too often risible. I think M R James and H R Wakefield hit the right note that I also try and catch. The occult is a wonderful aesthetic if used economically, same with folklore in antiquated dialect. But I fall short of the Reverend Montague Summers’s fear/reverence of satanic evil within magic and the world, if that’s what you’re getting at!


DM: With Apartment 16 and now your story 'Florrie' in Jonathan Oliver's House of Fear anthology, you have demonstrated your love for the haunted house subgenre. At Alt.Fiction you stated that we are currently enjoying something of a Renaissance of the haunted house story. Can you list some of your highlights from recent years, with a little explanation as to what you think they are adding to the subgenre?

AN: The haunted house has never gone out of fashion. The commissioning process may have considered it old hat in film and in book publishing, but I doubt readers and cinema fans ever have done. Paranormal Activity (2007) was made outside of the Hollywood system, but grossed $150 million at the box office (I think that’s as fair a comment on what gets made within the system). The director shot it in his own house with his own equipment. I struggle to think of anything else in recent years that so vividly and vicariously captured the public imagination in a theatrical release, besides maybe Avatar (2009), though for different reasons. Avatar had a huge push behind it, but Paranormal Activity seem to find most of its success from word of mouth, from a communal expectation and desire to be frightened by a haunted house. The Birthing House (2009) by Christopher Ransom was a first novel from an author with no profile that sold into six figures on the UK high street. I liked it a lot and wanted it for the Virgin Books horror list. His second novel I enjoyed even more and it features another haunted house, and then an entire housing estate abandoned during the downturn – The Haunting of James Hastings (2010). It perplexes me why critics are so unkind about his books. His writing reminds me of Stephen King. I had very little profile as a writer, but my own Apartment 16 was popular within this vogue too, and it’s a strange and idiosyncratic book, not one I’d say is overtly commercial, but the idea of a haunted apartment block seemed, again, to ring bells. On that note, I’d like to see Burnt Offerings (1973) by Robert Marasco brought back into mainstream print (another shattered dream from my time at Virgin Books); I often struggle to find anyone my age or younger who has read it. It’s one of the very best haunted house novels.

It’s a popular subgenre because we’re all frightened in houses at one time or another, and particularly at night when we’re young. The haunted house story probably has more universal appeal than any other horror story because most of us spend at least half of our lives at home, in places older than us where others dwelled before us. Buildings are the places (and the older they are the better) where presences are probably more likely to be sensed. The places we live and visit are loaded with history and atmosphere and the curious things that get left behind.

At my current address, I still receive mail for an elderly woman who used to live here. I have a horrible feeling she either died here alone, or was transferred from here to a hospice. She may have lived here since the war, had children here, loved, lost, and suffered here – it’s an old place. Who has more right to the house now? I’d probably say she still does, or my family with her blessing. It’s probably the safest way to think of houses. That’s what the story ‘Florrie’ came from. Few would say we are not influenced by or affected by our environments, but who can really define what is influencing us, or at least watching us … just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there …

In terms of adding to the genre, it’s probably up to each new generation of writers to reinterpret the classic genres for which there is an established and enduring curiosity and fascination. Paranormal Activity and REC did this via more democratised means of film making, (even in its production in the case of Paranormal Activity) through improvements in digital filmmaking technology (that also seems to account for most current affairs visuals these days too). The haunted house/building story moved effectively with the times and wasn’t dispelled by technology – isn’t that beautiful and satisfying? The portability of ready-to-use cameras is perfect for haunted building stories, eschewing the quasi-paranormal science of the past. And I think reinterpreting the haunted house for your own time, in this way, while staying within the tradition of the ghost story, is probably more valid that trying to reinvent the wheel, which often, though not always, leads to silliness. I’m most often criticised for being “unoriginal”, but surely, how you interpret a theme or subgenre in your own time and voice is what counts? From Hill House to Burnt Offerings, to Hell House (1971) and The Shining (1977), the haunted building has a great modern tradition and isn’t only the preserve of horror fans, as other subgenres of horror might be; it tends to attract the general reader too. And many younger readers are introduced to a field or genre for the first time by writers in their own time.

DM: What are your writing plans for the next 12 months?

AN: I’m writing the final drafts of my fourth supernatural horror novel, Last Days ― my most ambitious work yet ― which is out in May 2012 through Pan Macmillan. I’ve worked on it every day, more or less for a year. Never had that luxury before. I’m also doing research and development for the novel after, which is taking me to some strange places.

NEW EVENT: House of Fear

I think the poster says it all really. It should be a really good event and we're expecting demand to be quite high with people in the Halloween spirit so don't delay getting your tickets. It will be a double celebration as it will mark our 1st anniversary of events! See you all there!

Official Facebook event here

(Thanks to John Reppion and the team at Solaris for the poster design)

Ramsey Campbell interviewed by Adam Nevill

Ramsey Campbell with his wife Jenny,
photo by Kathleen Probert

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films. 

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com. 

AN: For an author whose mastery of language I have long admired, I’m very keen to know something about your writing process. What is your approach to writing a first draft and your subsequent rewriting process? 

RC: I very rarely plot much in advance. Once I’ve begun to focus on developing an idea I gather any amount of material around it. This all goes in my notebook (one of them – I always have at least one for the imminent novel or the novel in progress, another for random ideas and also any short story I’m about to write). Many of the notes for a story often get abandoned as I form a clearer picture of it – of the characters and the situation, for instance. Sometimes a tale may move so far away from my early notes for it that I’ll use some of them elsewhere. For instance, the novel I was planning to write as The Black Pilgrimage has already travelled so far away from that notion that I’ve dropped that title and renamed it as The Kind Folk. 

I’m here at my desk every morning I’m at home (Christmas and my birthday too), usually in time to see the dawn. Certainly I’ll be working on the first draft of a tale about six in the morning, when I’m generally most creative. One thing I’ve learned in fifty years as a writer is always to compose the first sentences before I sit down to write. I generally work until late morning on a first draft, sometimes later. If we go away the tale in progress goes with me. 

I was also lucky to learn very early in my career – even before August Derleth sent me editorial advice – to enjoy rewriting. These days I do more of it than ever. Absolutely everything in a first draft has to justify itself to me to make the final version, which is pretty nearly always significantly shorter than the first one (anything up to twenty per cent shorter, I’d estimate). The first drafts of fiction are always longhand (with the solitary exception of “A Street Was Chosen”, written in the form of an experimental report, which I couldn’t write except on the computer) and the rewrites are at the keyboard. 

AN: Are you conscious of your ideas and themes for stories gradually filtering and distilling in your imagination, or do they come at you suddenly? 

RC: Sometimes suddenly, sometimes they lie forgotten or almost so in my notebooks for years. Not to boast, but I do find ideas are the easy part – it’s developing them that takes so much work. Anything at all can set me off initially – I still owe Sylvester Stallone a debt for the five or six lines of dialogue in Rocky II that instantly suggested to me the basis of my old novel Obsession (not my title, which was to be For the Rest of their Lives). Thieving Fear came out of the image of the trapdoor that proves not to be one – I liked that so much that I built a novel to house it – but it had been in my notebook for several years before I was apparently in the frame of mind to take it anywhere. I recall going back to it a number of times and not being able to work out what to do with it. There have been a number of cases where I’ve suddenly seen how to put two dormant ideas together and they immediately came alive in the form of a tale. 

Another thought – I was writing the afterword to a new edition of Dark Companions (imminent from Samhain in America) and did my best to turn up the notes on which the stories were originally based. I was amazed to find that “The Companion” was founded on a set of notes so different from the actual story that they’re still available to be written into a tale, and I’m planning to do that soon. Waste not, want not… 

One more observation: you may know this yourself, Adam – it’s all too easy to be distracted from the story in progress by the next idea, which seems so much more inspiring than the one you’re working on that the temptation is to follow the will-o’-the-wisp. I’ve only ever done so once, back in the days of The Inhabitant of the Lake. It worked then, but I’ll never risk it again. 

AN: I’ve never really considered the social class of writers in relation to modern horror fiction, but a notion struck me at WHC 2010 after attending a large number of panels: it seemed to me that the major British horror writers of the last forty years that I have heard speak in public and have read – yourself, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker, James Herbert, Graham Masterton – may have working class backgrounds or backgrounds from the lower middle class. As I look at the lesser in profile, who form part of what we can only hope is a new wave of British horror, like myself, David Moody, Gary McMahon etc, as well as most of the writers I have met who emerged between these points chronologically, a similar pattern seems to emerge. And yet, the late Victorian and Edwardian forebears of horror from James, the Bensons, Wakefield, Del La Mare, the other James and Wharton, seem to present an almost “Oxbridge” precursor set and the more traditional representation of classically educated British writers. My own experience in publishing is that it is a predominantly a middle to upper middle-class preserve. I have wondered if the critical dismissal of the post war horror field as pulp fiction might have something to do with it being perceived as low class and low brow. Do you think social class amongst British writers has any bearing firstly on who now writes horror with dedication (not as a dilettante), but also why they write it? And could horror writers be, in a curious way, angry young men? 

RC: And women, we hope! There’s certainly more willingness on the part of horror writers to engage with social conditions and issues of class than there used to be. Right now writers such as Joel Lane and Gary McMahon and Simon Bestwick – I could go on for pages – are very concerned with these themes. Jim Herbert was a pioneer in this regard, and I was having a go at themes of a similar kind early on (with “The Guy” in 1968, for instance). It isn’t only British – look at Steve King from the early short stories onwards, or the oppressive sense of class snobbery in Peter Straub’s Mystery. We’re often told that modern horror writers have taken the genre out of the Gothic castle and the country house into the everyday, as if authors such as Le Fanu and M. R. James weren’t already using mundane settings that would have been familiar to their readers. But I do think that some authorship has moved down a class – no equivalents for Lady Cynthia Asquith or Lord Halifax, not even many writers such as Robert Aickman, who was familiar enough with weekends at country mansions, I believe. It could be argued that horror really made this shift in the EC comics, which reflected in their physical gruesomeness the wartime experiences of some of the contributors. I think disreputability has always dogged the genre, though, and eventual (usually historical) respectability is also part of the recurrent cycle. 

AN: In my reading experience, there are few writers who have instilled a change in my perception, in the way I see the world, for some time after reading their work. Sometimes this is even twinned with an element of disorientation, as if from waking or from being transported by poetry. Alongside Robert Aickman, M John Harrison and Thomas Ligotti, I consider you to be one of the chief purveyors of what often feels to me like a surreal and strange force that underwrites your work. The first time I can remember experiencing this quality in weird tales came from stories like Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour out of Space’, Maupassant’s ‘Le Horla’, Machen’s ‘The White People’ and Wakefield’s ‘Immortal Bird’, which are stories not necessarily typical of the full body of these author’s respective works, but almost all of your novels and short stories that I have read, as with Harrison and Aickman, sustain this power. Could this be the distinction of a poet from a prose craftsman? Is there an innate imaginative power you are conscious of calling upon when you’re in the zone while writing? If so, do you ever try to fathom its source? 

RC: I never would, Adam. To the extent it works (and I’m happy that it does for you) I believe it’s instinctive. I recall Jack Sullivan once asking me if I’d considered therapy (not that I was being especially deranged at the time, but I think he’d just learned of my family background) and I was equally wary of that. I don’t need to know the sources of my writing – indeed, I’ve a feeling that being too aware of them might risk robbing them of energy. Often I realise much later what I was writing about - the father with the hidden face in “The Chimney”, for instance, or the mothers who turn monstrous in my novels of the early eighties, or the father who does so in Nazareth Hill, representing my own fears about how I might be capable of behaving. It may be interesting to note that some readers thought I was writing about drug experiences (in Demons by Daylight) years before I’d had any. I’m reminded that Arthur Machen caused himself to have a protracted mystical experience after having written about them in his fiction for years. Language and imagination may expand our minds more than we can predict, and perhaps they sometimes prefigure the possibilities or prepare the way – I’m happy to think so. 

To come back to the business of fathoming sources – I was sixteen when I first saw Last Year at Marienbad and became aware that an enigma can be more satisfying than any explanation. I think too much horror fiction explains more than it should, for my taste anyway. One more thought: the only contemporary filmmaker whose horror films genuinely affect me with dread – half a dozen of them, and to a level of intensity that’s only just bearable at times – is David Lynch, and I’m guessing his method is pretty intuitive. 

AN: Personal spiritual beliefs may be the least important thing about writing supernatural horror. Reading your collected non-fiction some time ago – Ramsey Campbell, Probably – I think I came away with the impression that, like Edith Wharton, you didn’t believe in ghosts, but were still frightened of them. Is this a fair impression, or entirely the wrong set of runes I am casting about with? As we’ll both be meddling with the supernatural at the Occult Horror event at Halton Library, I feel obliged to ask what your take on the possibility of the supernatural is? 

RC: Well, as I get older I get more agnostic. I grew up being terrified of M. R. James’s spectres without necessarily believing in an afterlife, particularly once I threw off the kind of Catholicism that being taught by Christian Brothers had imposed on my mind for a few years. But it’s too easy to use your childhood as an excuse for what you are, and I’ve had the odd experience that my rationalism doesn’t always quite contain. Has this affected my fiction? Maybe a few recent stories don’t hold the supernatural at such a metaphorical remove as most of mine do. I’m still mostly trying to convey the aesthetic experience of terror, however – it’s what brought me into the field in the first place. My ghosts and less nameable forces embody a sense of the uncanny – well, they try. 

AN: Horror is one of those genres that comes with a specific set of reader expectations (often marketed by publishers as a guarantee of terror that will make the reader leave the lights on) and if the work is not terrifying a writer has somehow failed. A tall, if not, unachievable order; so could this expectation, perhaps the USP of horror, actually be a hindrance? You once wrote in an editorial, that the goal of your own work was to be disturbing. I found that liberating. As your own work consistently explores paranoia and a kind of psychic distress in your use of the uncanny, do you think this a more relevant approach to affecting a reader with horror in the modern age? 

RC: I don’t think I’ve ever set out to scare the reader – certainly not for decades. It’s rather that I write what I write because that’s how it feels to me – that’s what engages my imagination and takes shape there. I’ve often been intrigued to find that material that didn’t strike me as especially unnerving when I wrote it proves to affect some readers more intensely – the scene in the derelict Preston theatre in The Grin of the Dark was one example. But disturbing the reader – yes, that’s a worthwhile aim, and doing so to myself too. Making us look afresh at things we’ve taken for granted – that’s unlikely ever to become unnecessary. If I had to offer a single phrase to describe much of my recent stuff I’d call it comedy of paranoia. 

AN: In terms of your writing, what’s next for Ramsey Campbell? 

RC: Much and then, I hope, still more. As I mentioned, The Kind Folk will be the next novel. I’ve another collection in view, Holes for Faces, and another one of non-fiction, Fresh From Frugo. As well as all those, PS will publish definitive editions of Demons by Daylight and of my later Lovecraftian tales. On top of all that Centipede Press will be publishing an enormous retrospective two-volume collection of my better tales, and the title came to me in a dream the other night – Fearful Implications. You heard it here first! 

Adam Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16 and The Ritual. He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com