Ramsey Campbell started off as that lower than low lifeform, the Lovecraft imitator, but after a few years of derivative short story scribbling he busted wide open like a zit with two novels, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and, three years later, The Face That Must Die (1979) probably the only book ever written by a son trying to understand his mother’s schizophrenia which features razor killers, homicidal homophobia, and some of the most hallucinogenic prose this side of a King Crimson album. It was ripped raw from a deep place, technically precise, and deeply perverted, the kind of book that fit the times perfectly. The kind of book that is to be read while listening to the Sex Pistols’s 1979 The Great Rock n’Roll Swindle.

The recent reissue from Centipede (previously Millipede) Press.

Campbell is dedicated to transmuting the ordinary into the surreal through sheer technical prowess. He’s like a more goth David Lynch, or the David Cronenberg of Naked Lunch.  As Too Much Horror Fiction has documented, he was a mainstay of Tor’s paperback line in the 80′s but his covers promising TERROR and BLOODY CHILDREN do a deep disservice to the industrial strength unease within.

She seems like a nice little girl…

…OMG! she’s burning in HELL!!!

Campbell doesn’t write stories that are uneasy in their plotting or character development. His books are usually pretty straightforward when stripped of their style. Stories unfold in banal, middle-class settings: boarding houses, rundown seaside towns, anonymous suburbs, brutalist housing estates. His characters are usually a married couple experiencing tensions, a child at risk, a deeply obsessive neurotic coward. And his horrors are pretty rote – possession, ghosts, serial killers, blah blah blah. But it’s in the writing that he shines.

Campbell’s prose pulls off dazzling technical tricks, one after the other, making him a horror writer’s horror writer (who sometimes has a hard time finding a mass audience – as evidenced by the fact that in 2002 he started working in a chain bookstore). He’s strongest in his short stories where his heady, atmospheric writing goes down like horror acid and causes skulls to melt, but his earlier novels are still strong stuff, and nothing compares to the DMT madness of The Face That Must Die.

Face is the story of yet another miserable young couple (Cathy and Peter – yawn) who are having problems with their marriage. Meanwhile, in a more interesting part of the book shambles John Horridge, a middle-aged man who is terrified of gay people and obsessed with hunting down a razor killer who is slashing gay men. It’s not long before he himself become the razor killer (and maybe was all along) and after that it’s a quick collision with Cathy and Peter followed by a disappointingly action-based ending, which is redeemed with a spooky, oblique coda that seems to suggest that our “heroes” are about to find their faces hanging in tatters.

The Centipede reissue unfortunately contains this photo

art that was part of the 80′s version of Face. It kind of

made me sad.

Campbell has talked before (and in this edition he talks again) about how this book was his attempt to inhabit his mother’s schizophrenia. Terrorized by her as he grew up, he wanted to get inside her head and John Horridge serves as a posthumous ventriloquist’s dummy, a psychic mouthpiece for her more vile racism and homophobia. If it all sounds a bit like a thesis paper, in practice it’s pretty thrilling. Campbell is a page magician, able to make innocent details throb with menace, misdirecting your attention to some grotesque curlicue while the real terror slips up on you from the other direction.

Horridge’s violence is downright banal. “He opened his eyes minutely, to see exactly where her head was. Then he struck until his arm was tired. He could tell he’d done enough by a change in the quality of the blows. That dismayed him, but it was easy not to think about.” Whoops, there’s someone’s head bashed in. How dismaying. But the everyday shimmers and pulsates like something surreal. In one of the book’s sweaty-palmed setpieces, Horridge buys a ticket to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is repulsed by how flamboyantly gay it is, and runs from the cinema, convinced the razor killer is right behind him. He’s not, but that doesn’t stop Campbell from pulling out all the stops:

“Revulsion surged through him, sweat burst out of his skin, gluing his clothes to him. The dim face that was bearing down on him was the face of the sketch in all the papers. An expression was emerging onto the face. It seems slow as corruption. Before it could reveal itself, he hurled open the double doors. Beyond them was another airlock. It was full of people, almost immobile beneath a stagnant spread of tobacco smoke. The hot thick cloth that blocked his way hardly yielded; people turned slowly to stare at him. He was panting, and deafened by his heartbeats.”

Later, he sits in his flat, but even that is tinged with horror:

“On Sunday, the children were intolerable. Horridge felt as though he were locked in a zoo. Did the neighbors let them out of their cages in shifts, to make sure there wouldn’t be a moment’s silence? Cries and squeals surrounded him until long after dark. A football pounded the wall of the flats, oppressive as a pulse, dismaying in its unpredictability. Just let them break his window – he thought of the razor in his coat pocket. He must control himself.”

Inanimate objects acquire malign life, bodies become stone, plastic, mold, and bark. Human activity is insectoid and nonsentient, while architecture plays with Horridge’s senses and plots his destruction. All in all, it’s incredibly insane and by the time one character actually drops acid you feel like it’s gilding the lily: how do you hallucinate in a book that’s nothing but hallucinations?

Most people first encountered Ramsey Campbell in Stephen King’s nonfiction Danse Macabre in which he spends a chunk of time with Campbell, describing his writing as the “…shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that’s just ending.” He reprints this passage from Campbell’s The Parasite and it’s what captured my attention as a kid:

“A group of toddlers watched her pass, their eyes painted into their sockets. On the ground floor, red and pink and yellow hands on stalks reached for her from the glove counter. Blind mauve faces craned on necks as long as arms; wigs roosted on their heads.”

Ooo…demon face in her hair…

…demon parasite baby in her belly!

If you want to take on some straight Campbell, check out his chunky short story collection, Alone with the Horrors. His “In the Bag” about a haunted plastic bag (Ramsey Campbell is the H.P. Lovecraft of plastics), gives you a taste, and  “The Chimney” is one of the most disgusting, and true, stories ever written about Santa Claus. Either of these will serve as the gateway drug to let you know if your mind is strong enough for the channeled schizoid madness of The Face That Must Die, a title that trembles with self-loathing, an invitation to mutilate the self.