Liverpool author Ramsey Campbell, whose difficult childhood included his parents' divorce and his mother's undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, has become one of the most highly acclaimed horror writers in the genre. Now 80, he has received recognition from Academy Award winning director Guillermo del Toro, who has called him "an absolute master of modern horror. And a damn fine writer at that."
Early career and breakthrough
While Campbell struggled to make a name for himself early on, it was in 1980 when he released The Parasite that he first started to gain recognition. Since then, he has cemented his name among the biggest names in the genre after picking up a number of accolades, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and being made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for his services to literature.
However, possibly his proudest moment over his career came nearly three decades ago when he received a missed call from Del Toro. He told the ECHO: "My wife Jenny and I had gone away to a Greek island for our summer holiday and when we came back, we had the answering machine playing various messages. And there's a message saying, 'it's Guillermo del Toro calling you from Mexico.' And so I thought, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. Who's kidding me? Pull the other one'."
Del Toro adaptation rekindled
After Campbell finally took the call, Del Toro asked permission to dramatise his short story Down There, but it ultimately fell through. However, now more than two decades later, Campbell said plans to dramatise the story have been rekindled and it looks like Del Toro's adaptation will make its way to Netflix.
Campbell's love of the genre can be traced back to his difficult home life growing up near Childwall, when he would treat writing as a form of escapism. He said: "I'd have to say that my childhood was a place of frequent terror. My parents divorced at a very early age, when I was three. They had an argument over my father having taken me out and supposedly putting me into peril, which I don't think he did actually, but the fact remains they had this dreadful argument."
Childhood as source of material
Following the breakdown of his parents' Nora and Alexander's marriage, he said that his childhood was further affected by his mum's mental health struggles. He said: "My mother was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, who was convinced that the radio show The Archers was basically a series of coded messages about her, written by the neighbours under assumed names.
"You'll appreciate that my childhood was unusual, but also later on it became very much a source of material. There was a time when I theorised that reading horror fiction kind of packaged up my terrors, and put them away to an extent.
"As far as I was concerned, this was just how life was. It wasn't until I looked around somewhat later and thought, 'well, you know, other kids have different sorts of lives, and they don't involve quite as much darkness and dread as mine did'. Which is not to say by any means that that was all it was about. There were plenty of positives in it. My mother and I got on pretty well despite her mental health condition. We would read together and listen to the radio together and go to films together."
Lovecraft inspiration and latest work
After taking up writing as a form of escapism during his childhood, he said that it was the works of one particular author that focused his mind on wanting to turn his hobby into a full-time profession. He said: "When I was 14-years-old, I discovered H.P. Lovecraft in a big way. The first one of his I came upon, I read it in a single day. I thought 'this is what I want to write.' I'd already been writing kind bitty little horror stories and ghost stories, which were just imitations of all sorts of different things that I'd read. But now I had a focus. I wanted to write like Lovecraft."
After admiring his work for years, Campbell saw himself published alongside Lovecraft and Psycho author Robert Bloch in 1962 with the release of his The Church in High Street forming part of the Dark Mind, Dark Heart anthology. However, it wasn't until 1980 with the release of his third novel, The Parasite, that he made a name for himself. Since then he has gone on to release dozens of novels and continues to publish new books, with his latest titled Ancestral, which will be released in November this year.
Looking back over his career, Campbell said he sometimes weaves elements of his own upbringing into his work. He added: "There was a trilogy I did quite recently, the first of which is The Searching Dead, and the first novel is set in the early to mid-1950s, and the young chap in that, who starts at 11-years-old at his new grammar school, is in many ways me. He's not entirely me, but, he draws on a lot of my experiences and a lot of my memories of living in Liverpool in the 1950s."
