RC: It certainly did as far as schools were concerned. Does personal experience with such institutional “demons by daylight” inform this aspect of your work? There are also stories in Dark Companions featuring sinister, abusive school staff. Reading your early collection, Demons by Daylight, one notes that a fair number of the characters attend schools where corporal punishment is unduly relied upon. Washburn: Not to put it too crudely, but issues with authority crop up often in your writing. Ramsey Campbell (selfie by Ramsey Campbell). It’s not every day that one gets to ask questions of an author one has admired for the better part of one’s life, but the indefatigable Campbell, who published his thirty-third novel this year, The Wise Friend, and has more projects in the works, recently was kind enough to grant an interview about his remarkable body of work, its influences, and the contemporary weird scene. “Campbell is a pioneer in urban horror, in psychological terror, in the intense fusion of sexuality and horror, in the use of weirdness and terror to illuminate personal conflicts and social evils, and so much more,” Joshi states. But it is the latter setting, in particular, that comes across with disturbing immediacy in novels like The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976), The Face That Must Die (1979), Incarnate (1983), The Last Voice They Hear (1998), Silent Children (2000), and Thieving Fear (2008). Nearly all of Campbell’s work is set in the U.K., and he is as adept as evoking eerie rural landscapes (see the opening of “The Hands”) as he is at depicting the blighted inner city. His prodigious output, coupled with the consistently high quality of his work, sets him apart from nearly all other writers in the field.” Joshi, an immensely erudite scholar and the author of Ramsey Campbell, Master of Weird Fiction, due out in 2021 from PS Publishing, provides the following assessment: “Ramsey Campbell is easily the greatest writer of weird fiction in our time, and perhaps any time. It instilled in the reader a building sense of dread as characters pursued the next shocking revelation in their struggle with bizarre forces that a part of us had always sensed lurked far out in the shadowy corners of the quotidian world, but that we lacked a vocabulary to classify or explain. His fine prose style, coruscating and understated, vivid and subtle, seemed the perfect instrument. In contrast to much genre writing, his novels aroused unease through the masterful cultivation of atmosphere rather than jump scares. I began reading Ramsey Campbell as a teenager, and his books quickly gave me a sense of being in the presence of an idiosyncratic talent unrivalled in the weird and horror field.
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