The Collected Short Fiction

Foreword To Waking Nightmares

Horror fiction can be many things. The field includes the ghost stories of Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James, not to mention the best tales of Russell Kirk. It ranges from the psychological terrors of John Franklin Bardin to the philosophical terrors of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable and Not I. It embraces both the supernatural visions of Algernon Blackwood at his best—"The Willows," "The Wendigo"—and the relentless violence of Joe Lansdale's The Nightrunners, the last horror novel I found genuinely frightening. Horror fiction can work as humor, as metaphor, as political allegory, as the imagination's reveille. I won't presume to claim that the present book has such scope, but I'm inclined to be pleased with its range.

I've arranged the stories in the interest of variety, but I'll discuss them chronologically. The earliest is "Jack in the Box" (1974), the first of a group of stories (several of which may be found in Dark Companions) written in emulation of Tales from the Crypt and the other E.C. comics, which themselves derived from Poe and Weird Tales magazine, and in particular from Ray

Bradbury. By sheer carelessness I managed to transpose the words "torchlight" and "daylight" in the penultimate paragraph of the original typescript of "Jack in the Box," an error which destroys the whole point of the story. My apologies to any readers who ended up scratching their heads over a previous printing of the tale.

"The Trick" (1976) comes next, and it isn't a story I would write now. Jim Herbert told me recently that since he became a father he has tried to steer clear of the theme of children as victims. For my part, parenthood seems to keep sending me back to the theme of the vulnerability of children—Night of the Claw, Incarnate, The Influence—but what bothers me about "The Trick" is its coldbloodedness. Still, people whose opinions I respect have found the story frightening, and I've included it here on that basis. I think it also contrasts well with "Eye of Childhood," written two years later. I would have given that story a somewhat more obvious title, but Robert Aickman had already based the name of his second American book on the phrase from Macbeth. There's another child protagonist in the next tale, "Bedtime Story" (1980); like The Nameless, this was written after our daughter Tammy was born. Ideally—though in fact, I fear, too seldom—having children reminds one what it was like to be one.

"Playing the Game" also dates from 1980. At least, this version does, though the first version I sent to my agent was completed in late 1974 as one of my E.C. emulations. My friend Mike Ashley, the anthologist and bibliographer, suggested that the characters in that version were feebly motivated, and I came to agree with him. In 1982 I learned that T. E. D. Klein had bought the tale for Twilight Zone magazine—the original version, to my surprise. "When you rewrite," he commented to me, "you really rewrite, don't you?" Later Herb Yellin published my preferred version in an anthology from Lord John Press. Both versions of the tale attempt to convey how parts of the Liverpool docks affect me.

I wrote almost no more short stories until 1983, the year which produced the next four tales in this book. The first, "Watch the Birdie," carries its own explanation. "Next Time You'll Know Me" can be read as some kind of response to my being sent unsolicited manuscripts. It appeared in Douglas Winter's Prime Evil, where one of those copy-editors whom writers abhor tried to change all the narrator's said-bookisms into "said." "In the Trees" stems from a walk in Delamere Forest, where I often go to play with ideas for new stories, and "Old Clothes" derives from the idea of apports, one of the very few mediumistic notions odd enough to appeal to my imagination.

"Beyond Words" (1985) owes something to the comment with which Kenneth Jurkewicz rounds off his essay about me in Everett F. Bleiler's Supernatural Fiction Writers: "For him it is indeed the words that count." Stanley Wiater suggests this is a tale best read aloud. Just as odd is "The Other Side" (1985), but perhaps the oddness is more studied, insofar as the tale was written in response to a request to write a story based on J. K. Potter's cover for the program book of the 1986 World Fantasy Convention, where J. K. and I were among the guests of honor. On one level the story is about my attempts to write something which would equal, rather than simply quote, Potter's surreal image. I should have liked to use the picture for the cover of the present book, but instead you may find it on the sixteenth volume of Karl Edward Wagner's Year's Best Horror Stories.

"Second Sight" (1985) was produced for J. N. Williamson, who asked me to write a two-thousand-word story for his anthology Masques II, and "Where the Heart Is" (1986) was composed for Kathryn Cramer's The Architecture of Fear, an anthology of tales in which the architectural setting is also a metaphor of some kind. I liked this idea, but was disconcerted to find that in her letter describing her requirements to potential contributors she had cited me as having achieved in various stories what she had in mind: I felt as if I were being asked to imitate myself. (In general writers are likely to be truest to themselves when they are trying not to repeat themselves.) However, the family and I had recently moved house before managing to sell our previous home, and I was also losing patience with hearing the perennial claim that no ghost stories were being written anymore— at least, not by writers within the field. Together, these elements prompted "Where the Heart Is." That kind of synchronism—putting coincidences to use whenever they're useful—I believe in.

"Another World" (1987) was another tale written to order—a useful discipline—but its readers may not have noticed. I was originally approached by Paul Gamble ("Gamma") to contribute to an anthology of stories on the theme of a forbidden planet, to be published by the London bookshop of that name. I duly wrote on the theme. Later the editorship was taken over by Roz Ka-veney, and the scope was widened to include writers who had signed books at the bookshop and who were allowed their own choice of theme. Almost the opposite happened in the case of Book of the Dead, originally an anthology of tales set in the world of George Romero's trilogy of zombie films. I turned down a request to contribute, simply because I felt Romero had himself said all there was to say on his subject, but when I learned that the tales had only to use the theme of the zombie in some way I thought I might have something to offer: "It Helps If You Sing" (1987). Imagine my bemusement at reading on my contributor's copies of the book that "each of the stories in this anthology is set in a world where the dead have risen to eat the living," which is certainly not the case with my story. Incidentally, the introduction by Skipp and Spector to the book strikes me as the most persuasive statement I've seen on behalf of the splatter-punks, though I don't think all the stories in Book of the Dead live up to its claims.

"The Guide" (1988) was another story written on request, and one I especially wanted to do right by. Paul Olson and David F. Silva asked me to write a traditional ghost story for their book Post Mortem. Now, I was becoming convinced (and still am) that many of today's horror writers are unaware of the traditions of their field. Indeed, one course on writing horror advises its students to avoid learning from the old masters, as if there aren't already too many writers who appear to have read no fiction older than themselves. I therefore welcomed the chance to demonstrate that the techniques employed by M. R. James are as valid as ever. Incidentally, the James book cited in the story is genuine, as are the quotations from it.

The idea of being directed by a (probably supernatural) prompter had been lying dormant in one of my notebooks for some time when Chris Morgan asked me to write a story for his anthology Dark Fantasies. I suspect that I might otherwise have developed the idea along more comic lines than I did in "Being an Angel" (1988), and perhaps it still retains enough potential for me to do so in another tale.

I believe I can thank Jenny's and my children for generating the last two 1988 tales. It was our daughter Tammy who introduced me to the game of Blocko which prompted "The Old School," while both she and our son Matty were fond of Jan Pienkowski's pop-up haunted house book, which set me thinking along the lines which led me to write "Meeting the Author." I should think that you, the reader, have done enough of that for one book by now. British members of any professions or other groups who feel maligned by any of the tales herein should address their complaints to the Fictional Depictions Complaints Commission in the first instance, then to the Royal Commission on Representation in Storytelling. Complainants in other countries should approach the appropriate bodies. Me, I'll blame the copy-editors.

Ramsey Campbell

Merseyside, England

20 June 1990