Author Interview with Ramsey Campbell

Below is the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month by investigating how authors define the terms. Thanks to the legendary Ramsey Campbell for his time and insightful answers! Check out our Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Page for more interviews and original fiction.

 

How do you define the term Cosmic Horror?

Fiction that stands in awe of the vastness and literal inhumanity of the universe, and attempts to convey a sense of the powers that might be at large out there on whatever imaginable or unimaginable business. In general the sense of horror flows or oozes or otherwise proceeds from their encounters, disinterested or voracious or loftily engaged but certainly mind-altering, with human beings. Some of the latter may summon them, rarely to their own ultimate benefit or ours.

 

How do you define the term Cthulhu Mythos?

It was the term August Derleth insisted upon, a stricture I initially encountered when I referred to the Lovecraft mythos in a letter. Lovecraft himself never used it; Yog-Sothothery was his self-deprecating name that summed up his creations. Derleth’s preferred term may have helped shore up the spurious Lovecraft quotation Harold Farnese fed him: “all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on one fundamental lore or legend: that this world was inhabited at one time by another race, who in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.” I don’t mind saying I suspected the authenticity long before research refuted that, simply because many Lovecraft stories don’t conform to it. If I can slip in a personal reference, I’ve come to call my own little contribution to the literature the Brichester Mythos.

 

Can you recommend a tale of Cosmic Horror, in the Cthulhu Mythos, or both?

I think Lovecraft’s greatest tale (and not coincidentally his favourite of his own work) is “The Colour out of Space”, in which he finds his single purest symbol of the otherness of the universe. “It was just a colour out of space”, but it epitomises Lovecraft’s vision at least as powerfully as his mythos. His sense of structure has never been more powerful, nor his careful selection and moderation of language. It’s a classic instance of a story that progresses from suggestion into gruesomeness and beyond that reaches for awe.

 

Can you recommend something of your own work? Cosmic Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, or Otherwise?

I’ll nominate the Three Births of Daoloth trilogy—The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. I think it achieves some authentic cosmic terror, the kind of thing I attempted in Midnight Sun and The Darkest Part of the Woods and more recently Fellstones. It spans the lives of the protagonists, starting in the early 1950s and ending in something like the present, and also lets the antagonists develop. From a clandestine cult in a deconsecrated church they’ve grown into an organisation with charitable status and premises openly situated on the Liverpool waterfront, but if anything their aims are more inhuman than ever. The trilogy was written over three years, and I think it was worth it. I believe it contains much of what I’ve tried to do over sixty years and more. It’s published by Flame Tree.

 

About the Author

Ramsey Campbell’s short cosmic horror stories are collected in two volumes from PS Publishing, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants (completed in 1962, when the author was sixteen) and Visions from Brichester, bringing his work in the form up to date.

 

About the Interviewer

Jeremiah Dylan Cook is the author of A Mythos of Monsters and Madness, which includes Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos short stories. He founded Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month in January of 2023.