BOOK REVIEW: BY THE LIGHT OF MY SKULL BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Ramsey Campbell has been one of our essential voices in horror fiction for over fifty years now, and his admirably prolific stream of novels and short stories shows no signs of drying up. By The Light Of My Skull, his latest short story collection from PS Publishing, helpfully collects together highlights of his short fiction from the past six years. Whilst Campbell has released iconic short story collections in the past like Alone With The Horrors, this new collection easily reaches the heights of quality and consistency of his previous ones, whilst showing off again just how in control of his craft Campbell is. Wide-ranging in approach, yet uniformly chilling and beautifully written, the stories in By The Light Of My Skull are essential for long-time fans of Campbell’s work and newcomers alike.


As much as being a horror writer, Campbell is one of Britain’s leading chroniclers of urban decay. From the earliest of his Brichester Mythos stories, his is a world of crumbling castles, abandoned tenement buildings, empty roundabouts and decaying hotels. In his rich, evocative prose, Campbell uncovers the uncanny in abandoned high streets, isolated urban overfill towns and musty bingo halls. As always with Campbell, setting is key, almost a character in and of itself. In each story he presents us with the landscape of post-industrial Britain, be it the moors dissected by roundabouts or forgotten seaside forests encroaching on stately homes, as an ancient force reasserting its will over an oblivious and vulnerable people. His great talent is his ability to find terror hiding in the mundane, shining a light on the anxieties that haunt the corners of British working class life. At this time of austerity in the shadow of the Tories and Brexit, his vision could not be more relevant or timely.


Appropriately enough, given the early influence of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm on Campbell’s writing, the collection opens with Find My Name, a modern retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story. The tale is brought up to date by Campbell’s gritty kitchen sink realism, the collapse of the child’s family due to an abusive father and a suicidal mother, and is never less than terrifying for all that we know the direction the story must go. The Moons, with its malevolent spirit luring children away to their doom, also taps into folklore and Peter Pan, whilst its British north western sea-side setting gives it a vivid and discomforting flavour all of its own. Many of the tales operate on their own macabre fairy tale logic, with children or other vulnerable people under threat, and the protagonist forced to find out the set of arbitrary rules they are playing against or suffer the consequences. At Lorn Hall finds this primal terror in the most unlikely of sources, the automated headphone guides at museums.


Campbell has always been adept at exploring the descent into madness that lies at the core of much horror, couching the reader in the close up first person perspective of the crumbling minds of his characters. In his recent work, this has gained added poignancy and power through his exploration of old age and the fear of the onset of dementia. Stories like On The Tour and Know Your Code achieve their terror from characters realising too late the cruel reality of their situation, with supernatural elements reduced to the minimum, whereas The Fun Of The Fair and Fetched undermine their protagonist’s sense of reality by revealing a past to beloved, safe locations that is hostile and at odds with their cosy reminiscences. At the heart of these stories is a profound understanding of the loneliness of old age, whether from losing those close to you to death and dementia or through the passing of the world you thought you knew and understood. This makes them some of the most powerfully affecting stories in the collection.


At the other age of the spectrum are Campbell’s stories of youth and coming of age, which revel in that shocking moment of discovering that adult figures who are meant to care for you and protect you are prey to their own fears and anxieties alien to those of childhood. In these stories this becomes a source of insurmountable tension. Her Face, The Impression and The Watched see their young protagonists forced into the role of protector as they begin to understand the terrible forces stalking the adults in their lives. In Reading The Signs, we see an inversion of this as the adult protagonist tragically misunderstands the sinister relationship between a boy and a man, whilst The Callers sees old bingo women preying on young men.


The collection also displays Campbell’s wry sense of humour, as well as his deep abiding love and knowledge of his genre. The Page is a wistful tribute to Ray Bradbury, one of Campbell’s key influences. Rather than copy Bradbury’s singular style, Campbell crafts a narrative around Bradbury’s key themes and obsessions – the transience yet importance of books and storytelling – with his own voice. The Words Between sees the nightmare madness of The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari spiral out of the reels of the film and into the head of its protagonist. It is both a wry tribute to the film and an astute dissection of its concerns and power. The Wrong Game, one of the highlights of the collection, is a metafictional tale about Campbell’s own career that manages to be both funny and disturbing.


By The Light Of My Skull confirms that Campbell still reigns supreme as the master of the modern horror short story. His skill at evoking a sense of place, of delineating his characters' psychological collapses, and of finding terror in the mundane, remain as sharp and effective as ever. It's a handsome book too, with each story lovingly illustrated by longtime Campbell collaborator J. K. Potter. As with his illustrations for the stories in Alone With The Horrors, Potter's surreal photorealistic nightmarish images perfectly capture and reflect the dark heart of Campbell's writing. The collection also ends with an Afterword in which Campbell explains the Genesis and gestation of the stories in the collection, providing a fascinating insight into the writer's process.

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