By J. Keith Haney
Today’s writer is definitely not unknown, but this Ramsey Campbell collection printed in 1985 focuses on Campbell’s early, Cthulhu Mythos fiction. For the young horror readers out there (and even some older ones), it may come as a surprise to see that Campbell produced so many Lovecraftian tales before moving in a different direction. This often-overlooked volume, and facet of Campbell’s life, deserves another look.
Campbell, Ramsey. Cold Print. Scream/Press: October 1985. 219 pages, ISBN 0-910489-13-0.
For fans of horror, the name “Ramsey Campbell” scarcely needs any introductions. From “The Doll Who Ate His Mother” to “The Darkest Part of the Woods”, this Grand Master of Horror has amassed a respectable body of work, both horror and non-horror, dealing with the twists and frailties of human relationships. It is hardly a surprise that, in his own words, “The first book of Lovecraft’s I read made me into a writer.” That is actually the first line of “Chasing the Unknown”, Campbell’s introduction to Cold Print, which features some of his earliest efforts to follow the trail Lovecraft blazed for him.
Campbell spends the rest of his introduction tracing his evolution as a writer alongside the influence Lovecraft had on him, from his early efforts at age fifteen under the thoughtful gaze of August Derleth (who edited his early stories) to his hypercritical “Lovecraft In Retrospect” (which, by Campbell’s own admission, was more a condemnation of his dependence on Lovecraft than of Lovecraft’s actual work) to coming back to the Mythos in 1971 with “A Madness From The Vaults” (which, alas, does not turn up in this collection). Along the way, he defends Lovecraft from his detractors (comparing his style to no less than Alfred Hitchcock in accessibility and genius) and Derleth from the critics that have sprung up after his death (which makes me curious as to what he thinks of S.T. Joshi’s Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, which had a few hard words for Derleth in it). Indeed, he has nothing but kindness for Derleth, whom he credits for changing the settings of his first stories from New England to Old England and rewording his prose. One need only look at samples of Campbell’s first draft of “The Church In High Street” (which Campbell reproduces in this intro) and compare them with the finished product (which immediately follows the introduction) to see how much of a debt he owes to Derleth.
This is not an easy collection to get through quickly. Reading one of the longer pieces of Cold Print is a bit like eating a full meal you thought was much smaller. The immensity of the worlds that Campbell sketches out in just a few pages gives them the feeling of novels in miniature with the time needed to digest them that it implies. That said, Campbell’s take on Lovecraft’s ideas is refreshingly true to its source while going in its own direction.
The aforementioned “The Church In High Street” has several of Lovecraft’s staples – Yog-Sothoth, a new faux quotation from “The Necronomicon”, far-off locations such as Yuggoth and Leng – and transplants them to the Cotswald town of Temphill. Our doomed narrator, Richard Dodd, comes to this ancient town to work as a secretary for a friend, who, like all good Lovecraftian scholars, is poking into local history better left undisturbed. He gets there just in time to find his friend missing and the research left behind to pick up the same fatal trail. It is a good, rousing first piece for this collection, which, as a bonus, sets up some of the locations of his subsequent stories such as Brichester and Goatswood.
“The Room In The Castle” expands upon a creation of Lovecraft’s, Byatis (first mentioned in “The Festival”) with certain nods towards “The Dunwich Horror”. Here, our narrator is only looking for local history of the Severn Valley (another fictional location which most likely owes a debt to Lovecraft’s Miskatonic Valley) when he stumbles across a legend of a sorcerer and an ever-expanding beast he kept in the basement of his castle. It is a story with a “happy ending” in the sense that the beast is taken care of, but our narrator must live with the knowledge of the true nature of Byatis in the process.
“The Horror From The Bridge” also owes a bit of a debt to “The Dunwich Horror” as well as taking up a couple of never-developed ideas from Lovecraft’s “Commonplace Book”. A family of magicians spend two lifetimes raising an alien race entombed inside of an old Roman bridge. By 1931, they’ve succeeded, but the powers of the creatures are beyond the last survivor of the family’s ability to control. Only a solitary scholar and his reluctantly drafted (and, more importantly, armed) assistants can keep this infestation in check. The whole story, in spite of its Lovecraftian trappings, strikes me as being an alien invasion story along the lines of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the key difference being the length of time between when the invaders arrive and when they make themselves known. It ends on a fairly pessimistic note, suggesting that the efforts of the town’s defenders only gained a respite for humanity.
“The Insects From Shaggai” offers up another parallel to War of the Worlds as it takes us back to the area of Goatswood. An inebriated fantasy writer, on a dare, goes into a certain section of forest near Goatswood to chip off a piece of a rock formation (said to be part of a meteorite) where horrors lurk both day and night. What he finds is a race of giant insects with an ability to infect and take over the human mind. This story is where Campbell starts to truly flex his writing muscles. Via the injected memories of the insects, Campbell gives vivid descriptions of an alien culture and what it is like to live in one. The infection model of alien invasion may recall Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the feel to this is as different from that paranoid classic as Lovecraft’s conception of truly alien races is from that of the humanoid conceptions of several of his contemporaries.
“The Render of The Veils” is the first short piece of the collection, a unique exercise in body horror. A chance encounter between two strangers leads them on a mutual occult experiment to see the world beyond the constructs of three-dimensional space (recalling Roger Corman’s scientific take on the same concept, “X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes”). Needless to say, it does not end well. The subtext of the story makes an interesting, applicable point about perception. How we see ourselves may well be completely different from how we truly are.
“The Inhabitant of the Lake” touches on one of Lovecraft’s favourite tropes, the too-sensitive artist who sees more than is good for his sanity or life. Macabre painter Thomas Cartwright moves into a certain abandoned lakeside house in the Severn Valley. Via a series of vivid dreams and strange discoveries, he finds himself prey to our title creature, “Glaaki” by name. The story is told mostly by a series of letters given to our narrator with the final revelations reserved for his first – and last – visit to Cartwright’s house. Making several nods to “Pickman’s Model” and “Call of Cthulhu”, this is probably my favourite story of the collection for its gradual build-up and satisfying payoff.
“The Will of Stanley Brooke” is actually a bit of a humorous takeoff on Simon Orne, the immortal sorcerer from Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”. A man dying from cancer gives his inheritance to an old friend who just happens to look exactly like him, to the bewilderment of his surviving family and the cold understanding of his lawyer. Nothing is truly spelled out in concrete terms in this story. You have to read between the lines to get the joke and the denouement.
“The Moon-Lens” takes the reader into the town of Goatswood proper as a man with a strange tale begs a Brichester doctor who advocates euthanasia to kill him. On his way to Exham (a nod to Lovecraft’s “The Rats In the Walls”), the man was tricked into staying in Goatswood’s only hotel. Then, under the light of the full moon, an unusual form of sacrifice took place. Equal parts “Shadow Over Innsmouth” and the unknown British horror gem “City of The Dead”, this story is an argument that death is not always the worst outcome.
“Before the Storm” is an exercise in perspective shifting. Specifically, the story jumps back and forth between an occultist who made a bad deal that allowed him to shift to other bodies and the perplexed office workers who cannot understand why this man is in their place of business. The occultist is only partially aware of his surroundings; most of his mind is lost in his memories of how he got to this desperate state of affairs. He has lost all control over what he bargained for and now is just trying to put off the inevitable. I would call this one only peripherally Lovecraftian myself. Remove the references to Glaaki from this story and it would still stand on its own two feet as a singular story of horror.
The title story, “Cold Print”, pays tribute to the impact of books on a reader’s mind. A snobbish connoisseur of rough porn is lured into a book shop on the promise of more of his favourite reading. What he finds instead is an utterly unknown copy of “Revelations of Glaaki” (referred to several times in the previous stories) and an offer that is fatal to refuse. Campbell seems to be making a comment about horror fiction in general with the snob’s reaction to the volume, making him believe in things that he considers rubbish to be as palpable as his own pulse.
“Among The Pictures Are These” is not a story but rather a description of pictures Campbell had drawn in 1963. Rediscovering them twelve years and finding that they still had a disconcerting power over him, he felt compelled to share them with his readers. There are a number of disturbing, surrealistic images detailed in this piece, Richard Upton Pickman-meets-Salvador Dali in layout. My one true regret about this is that the pictures themselves are not reproduced.
“The Tugging” finds an arts reporter for the Brichester Herald stumbling upon signs of the end of the world. It starts with his dreams, but takes him through an unusual picture of Atlantis, the arrival of a wandering planet to the Solar System (a bit of an oxymoron as “planet” translates from the Greek as “wanderer”), and a decrepit theater with a connection to the reporter’s past. Even more so than the others, this story emphasizes the investigative nature of Lovecraft’s best works, taking separate pieces of a vast puzzle to find out the truth. However, also true to Lovecraft, the truth does not, contrary to the Bible, set our reporter or anyone else free. It only confirms the inevitable.
“The Faces at Pine Dunes” is probably my second-favorite of the collection as well as the one that disturbed me the most. A young man named Michael has spent his whole life traveling in his parents’ camper. Now he is adjusting to what will be a permanent residence in the trailer park of the town of Pine Dunes. He meets a girl with a taste for LSD, falls in love, and finds out the reason for his parents’ constant travels over the years. Every time I think of this story, the words “the making of a monster” flash through my mind. You sympathize with Michael’s struggles, want him to strike out on his own, and get away from his poisonous parents. But, by the story’s end, Michael’s true nature asserts itself and the reader is left with the uncomfortable proposition that he never stood a chance.
“Blacked Out” was, oddly enough, not written with Lovecraft in mind, yet pulses with the same cosmic dread. An English tourist named “Lamb” is driving across Germany to find an eerily quiet village. An all-encompassing darkness gradually makes itself known to the unfortunate victim. This story, true to its origins, has zero references to the cosmic entities in the other stories. But Campbell includes it here to make the point that one needs none of these elements to make a proper story with Lovecraft’s themes.
The final story, “The Voice of The Beach”, puts the period on this thought, a conscious return to what Campbell describes as “Lovecraft’s first principles, to see how close I could get to his aims without the encumbrances of the mythos.” A tribute to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”, nothing overtly horrible is ever spelled out about our narrator’s sojourn to a lonely beach with his friend Neal. All we get are hints – the ravings of a previous bungalow inhabitant, certain patterns in the sand, the increasingly isolated behavior of Neal. What do they add up to?
The reader has to figure that one out.
Much as Campbell has rightly gotten acclaim for his later work, Cold Print is an oft-overlooked milestone that needs to be better-known. Anyone who cares about Campbell and/or Lovecraft should take the time to look this one over.
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