Ramsey Campbell - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

…and hello 2026

I intend to write something substantial for the site every month this year, but it’s nearly midnight on the 31st of January and nothing is finished for January, so here are some disparate notes and thoughts instead.

Despite the non-appearance of the big January post I’ve actually written quite a lot this January – 22, 546 words (not including these ones) in fact; that’s about half a novel, length-wise, but it was split between ten reviews, five articles of various types for my substack and, more unusually for me, a little bit of fiction.

In January I also enjoyed various things, so here are a few of them; I suppose you could think of them as recommendations, so the heading shall be…

Recommendations

I read several good books in January. One of them was Ramsey Campbell’s Scared Stiff, a collection of sex-themed short horror stories from the 80s. You may have come across some of my thoughts on Campbell before. The short version is; I want to like his work a little bit more than I generally do. He is I think the most critically acclaimed British horror author of his generation (unless you count Clive Barker, who was born just six years later but who seems to belong to a slightly younger generation. Maybe best to say that Campbell is the most acclaimed author of straightforward horror fiction of his generation, since at this point Barker’s reputation is based more on his imaginative/fantastical writing than his early horror work.) But anyway; Campbell is an acclaimed author and while I think that’s nice and I’m glad about it, more often than not I find there’s a surprisingly unremarked-on awkwardness to Campbell’s prose that mars it for me. Having said that, Scared Stiff included some of the best stories I’ve read by him and if it was a slightly mixed bag, it was a very enjoyable and genuinely chilling one, though I never really need to read the word ‘dwindled’ again.

I also read and enjoyed (in translation, naturally) Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret, which was fascinating and enlightening and occasionally (not Madame Albaret’s fault) a little disappointing. I’m very glad to have read it even though a little part of me preferred the Marcel I had imagined from reading his work to the more mundane but also much more rounded and believable human being that came across in Monsieur Proust. Almost the exact opposite happened when I read Andrew Graham-Dixon’s revelatory biography Vermeer – a Life Lost and Found, in which the mysterious and opaque Vermeer of the imagination. As Jonathan Richman sang in No One Was Like Vermeer (2008):

Vermeer was eerie
Vermeer was strange
He had a more modern colour range
As if born in another age
Like maybe a hundred or so years ago

What’s this? A ghost in the gallery?
Great Scot! The Martians are here!
These strange little paintings next to the others
No-one was like Vermeer

Unexpectedly, to me at least, Andrew Graham-Dixon dispels much of the mystery, without undoing any of the magic; the Vermeer he describes is a man very specifically of his time and milieu, but ultimately to me that makes his particular kind of alchemy more rather than less extraordinary; maybe it’s just because I’m lacking in ‘negative capability,’ but for me knowing that the Girl With the Pearl Earring and the rest have a meaning and function that was highly specific to 17th century Delft, but which still communicate their human quality of warmth, empathy and connection down the ages is the miracle of art.

I also watched some good films this January, most recently, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), which I had seen before, but watched two nights in a row, utterly hypnotised by it, just like the first time. By now it’s already a cliché to use the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ – but it also feels slightly wrong. In a way it’s the banality of the characters itself, especially Hedwig and Rudolf Höss, brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel – but also their children and the assorted businessmen and soldiers – that is what’s evil about them. At first it seems that to Rudolf Auschwitz is just his job, and to Hedwig it’s just her husband’s job – which is bad enough. But the genius of the film is the way that Glazer undercuts their blasé attitude by showing that they do understand not just the reality but the implications of what’s going on in the camp and that it’s not some kind of inexplicable mass hysteria; Hedwig’s own mother, though presumably just as unthinkingly loyal to her homeland and its government as her daughter is almost immediately struck by the utter wrongness of Auschwitz; Rudolf and Hedwig get it too; they just don’t mind.

The feeling of being hypnotised by a film is a rare one for me, but coincidentally(?) I watched two of the very few others that have that effect on me this January too. I watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) several times last year and then watched it twice in January too. The first time the feeling is all about the suspense of not knowing how events will unfold, but obviously that can’t be true when rewatching it. And yet for me it remains just as appallingly gripping and sad every time, The same is true in a very different way of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Der Untergang. I watched that in January too, only once, but for the third or fourth time in the past few years. Key to its hypnotic quality is the great Bruno Ganz, but also the brilliant pacing, editing and performances of the whole cast. It feels like a thriller, even though it’s mostly people squabbling in a bunker.

New to me though, was a film I’ve wanted to see since 1988 when I first read about it in (I’m fairly sure) FEAR magazine; a confusing memory because I clearly remember the picture of Anthony Edwards below (though in black and white), which is a still from the film. And I remember the headline was ‘Miner Miracles‘ and part of the article related to Steve Miner. But as far as I can see, Steve Miner (director of the great Warlock (1989) has nothing whatever to do with Miracle Mile, which was written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt. So maybe it was a general film roundup that mentioned both Miracle Mile and Warlock, which was definitely promoted in/by FEAR.

Anyway, I loved Miracle Mile and found it completely gripping and kind of sweet and heartbreaking and in a weird way nostalgic for the expected nuclear holocaust of my childhood. Partly it was nostalgic because it was like a cross between two different things from the 80s, both of which I love. Firstly, the kind of teen romance movie most associated with John Hughes (Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful etc) and secondly Jimmy Murakami’s adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ cosily apocalyptic comicbook When the Wind Blows. I loved the glossy, 80s way it was filmed (especially the opening, idyllic shots of Miracle Mile itself) and its goofy humour and especially the two leads. I knew Anthony Edwards from a few things (though not his 80s work, oddly. I never liked and barely remember Revenge of the Nerds and I’ve never seen Top Gun) but I thought he was perfect in this; likeably dorky but also sincere – and I love Mare Winningham. She’ll always be Wendy from St Elmo’s Fire (1985 – one of my favourite 80s teen movies) to me, so it was strange at first, seeing her as cool-quirky rather than nerd-quirky. Anyway, loved it (and watched it three times). I’m glad/surprised the studio didn’t chicken out on the perfect ending. Oh. and it had the great Brian Thompson (Kabal from Doctor Mordrid) in a small but vital role; it couldn’t be more 80s and yet less typical of 80s Hollywood at the same time. Great Tangerine Dream soundtrack too.

Blot – but will it be as good as I remember?

Music-wise I heard a lot of things but especially liked a vast (101 track) compilation of bands associated with the legendary New York club CBGB, ranging from the obvious (Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith) to 70s oddballs like the Dictators and the Harlots of 42nd Street to classic 80s hardcore like Bad Brains and the early Beastie Boys. I’m cautiously excited about a reissue of Mactatus’s 1997 album Blot but haven’t gotten round to listening to it yet so don’t know if it’s retained it’s old potency. And I still haven’t listened to the new Ulver album, so there’s that.

Anyway; I’ll try to get at least one of those more substantial things finished and posted in February.

gratuitous text and bloody violence – the commercialisation and death of 80s horror

This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre

The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously, both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags; twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.

* 1950s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour

Corporate gloss was everywhere. As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation (Last House on the Left is possibly the most representative example) seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos. They had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and – to young teenagers at least – they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.

the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update

The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. ‘Tasteful’ is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic – which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.

70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s

But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age.

The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books themselves became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like a combination of director and star actor, but whereas the blockbuster actors – Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Tom Cruise were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated author, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.

The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition

The extent to which it was the superstar authors, rather than the books themselves, that were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives.

James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of ‘classy’ as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.

New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album

Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the novels’ titles, took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.

Stephen King’s Greatest Hits

Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed. All of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach. After wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontz and Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.

80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)

Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s.

Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the legal convention of the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in cases of trademark infringement. Said moron would not necessarily have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel, any more than someone accidentally buying something that looked like Coca-Cola would find themselves with an undrinkable alternative – but they would quickly know they weren’t reading Stephen King.

the other Stephen of 80s horror

In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical, mid-80s horror stodge but it graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own.

Clive Barker’s books appropriately looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors’ works. From then until the end of the horror boom (which died around 1990-’91) his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.

Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author

From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. The sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half and has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable.

In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, while Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain. Horror movies were boring and passé, and when they were revived half a decade later they would be drenched in irony, allowing movies like Scream and its imitators to peddle the same tired, threadbare ideas that had killed the genre one more time, under the guise of a clever joke. Nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.

Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)

You Shouldn’t Always Get What You Want; cautionary tales of the 80s by Stephen King & Ramsey Campbell

The 1980s is a decade most often defined – at least in Western countries by some of its most visible features; greed and consumerism, accelerated capitalism, wealth-as-glamour, blockbuster entertainment (and not just in Hollywood; what could be more 80s than the novels of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer?) Even charity – one would think the polar opposite of everything the decade stood for – took on a big, glossy, stadium-filling character. One of the decade’s most beloved humanitarian events, Live Aid was for all its positive impact, complicated at best; essentially an advertisement for the very culture that created gross inequality which simultaneously attempted to right some of its wrongs. If the 70s had been ‘the me decade’ with its post-hippy focus on the discovery and nurturing of the inner self, the 80s turned that focus outwards; now you know who you are it’s time to get what you want – all well and good if you had the means to do it.

Given that context, it’s no surprise that during that decade, horror authors should have taken on the venerable theme of the Faustian pact; the true cost of getting what you want. The most extreme and morally complex version (that I’ve read) is probably Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986; filmed by its author as Hellraiser a few years later), but this article was inspired by a recent reading of two novels: Needful Things by Stephen King (published 1991, but written between 1988-91) and Ramsey Campbell’s Obsession (1985).

The stories are dissimilar but have a kind of 80s horror family likeness; both concern the effect of evil, perhaps supernatural forces in small, ‘sleepy’ communities (Stephen King’s Castle Rock and the seaside town of Seaward in East Anglia) and both depict the lives of their characters unravelling after they are granted their heart’s desire (or at least what they think their heart’s desire is) at a cost which is not apparent until afterwards.

Although more than twice the length of Obsession, Needful Things, in some ways the last of King’s big 80s blockbusters, is the simpler of the two stories. It concerns the arrival in Castle Rock of the sinister Luciferian salesman Leland Gaunt and his shop Needful Things, wherein the town’s residents find objects with apparently great personal value (a signed baseball card, Elvis memorabilia, a fishing rod) at surprisingly affordable prices; but in addition to the cash price, Gaunt also requires his customers to perform duties for him, in the guise of ‘pranks’ which range from the innocuous to the seriously criminal. At the heart of the book are the opposed forces of darkness – Gaunt himself but also the various underlying rivalries and tensions within Castle Rock which he brings to the surface – and if not light, then at least law and order, in the stolid shape of Sheriff Alan Pangborn. Needful Things is a very self-referential novel; King takes for granted that readers will recognise allusions to other ‘Castle Rock’ stories; most obviously The Dark Half (1989) which introduced Pangborn, but also Cujo (1981) and The Body (1982, filmed as Stand By Me), which introduced Leland Gaunt’s petty criminal henchman “Ace” Merrill as a juvenile delinquent teenager. It’s also typical of King’s long (790 pages) novels of the 80s in that it weaves together various plot strands and characters, bringing the story to a dramatic (in fact almost apocalyptic) climax reminiscent of the final, blood-drenched act of the typical 80s horror movie (though the movies themselves were arguably orchestrated in that way because of the influence of King’s earlier works like Carrie (1974).

Sometimes this structure works better than others. For me, it’s at its best in It (1986) where the final catastrophe has an inbuilt logic and even inevitability. The entity terrorising Derry (best known as Pennywise; and really, people think clowns are cool nowadays?? Surely even more lame than finding them scary) pre-dates the city itself and shaped its sinister history. So the destruction of the creature naturally entails the destruction of Derry. It works less well (again, just for me) in Apt Pupil (1982) where the genuinely disturbing opening (one of King’s best) and rising tension is undermined by the ludicrously spiralling body count and in Pet Sematary (1983) where the very human bleakness and nihilism at the novel’s heart is weakened by the over-the-top supernatural carnage of the closing chapters.

Needful Things falls somewhere in the middle; the town being literally blown up at the novel’s climax never feels as necessary or as cathartic as the destruction of Derry in It, but on the other hand, it’s a fitting end to a novel whose main villain is larger-than-life, theatrical and slightly campy and whose hero has a sideline as an amateur magician. If there’s a moral to Needful Things, it’s not only the proverbial ‘be careful what you wish for’ but also a very 80s one; if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Obsession (Campbell’s preferred and superior title was For The Rest of Their Lives) is less of an extroverted, cinematic rollercoaster ride than Needful Things, but ironically has the blood of a bona fide slick 80s blockbuster – and not a particularly inventive one – running in its veins. The novel’s genesis came when the author was sent to review Rocky III (1982) and became intrigued by the scene in which Apollo Creed agrees to train Rocky with one condition; with the caveat that he won’t find out what that condition is until the training is complete. In Campbell’s story, a troubled teenager in the 1950s receives an anonymous letter offering aid (WHATEVER YOU MOST NEED I DO) with the somewhat vague price of something you do not value and which you may regain. He and four friends take up the offer, with the short term effect that their wishes come true. A quarter century later, the friends are still in Seaward, living outwardly successful lives which proceed to horrifically fall apart.

Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell’s writing styles make for an interesting contrast; as a teenager I found Campbell’s books a little slow and understated for my taste, but in fact one of the most noticeable things about Obsession (which I just read for the first time) is that it feels a little rushed, unfolding over 280 pages where it could comfortably have been twice as long and half as fast-moving. Positively, this brevity makes the story fly by, but it also feels a little disjointed and illogical at times, especially in the final climactic chapters. Where King’s writing is largely conversational in tone (chapter one of Needful Things begins, In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.* Campbell’s is very carefully-worded and precisely descriptive, although ironically this precision sometimes works against the effect, producing oddly un-illuminating pictures of the people and places involved. In contrast to Needful Things‘s almost cornily old-fashioned opening, Obsession begins Twenty-five years later, when Peter realized at last what they had signed away, he had still not forgotten that afternoon: still remembered the waves flocking down from the horizon to sweep up the fishing boats, the glass of the classroom windows shivering with the wind, chalk dust drowsing in the September sunlight, his throat going dry as he realized everyone was looking at him.** It’s typical of the ambiguous tone of Obsession that after reading what is quite a long descriptive paragraph the reader doesn’t really have a firm idea of the kind of day it was – sunny and windy presumably, but could equally be mellow and warm (chalk dust drowsing) or stormy and cold (waves flocking, windows shivering).

* Needful Things, 1991, New English Library, p.13

** Obsession, 1985, Futura Publications, p.9

Stephen King’s cast of characters is vividly and firmly drawn, a familiar mix of wholesome youngsters gone bad, feuding neighbours, eccentric old timers etc, whereas Campbell’s – at least the four main protagonists – are a little indistinct and interchangeable, not helped by their (entirely plausible but bland) names: Peter Priest, Robin Laurel, Steve Innes and Jimmy Waters. As adults, all four of them lead successful but somewhat tortured existences (Peter is a social worker, Steve an estate agent, Jimmy a police officer and Robin a doctor), all make strange, inconsistent and illogical decisions and can be a little irritating. Where Campbell really excels though is in the antagonists; not larger-than-life supernatural forces of evil like Leland Gaunt, but believable, intensely annoying and depressing people like Robin’s unbearable senile mother and the sinister but ultimately just petty and small-minded brother of one of Peter’s clients.

In keeping with its broad, movie-like feel, Needful Things gives us (relatively) clear dividing lines between good and evil, and shows us the tainting of one by the other, personal gain taking precedence over empathy, but Obsession has no real sense of good and evil at all. None of the main protagonists initially acts out of purely selfish motives, and few of the horrors that happen do so because anybody really means any serious harm. The main characters never seem to fully grasp the bigger picture of what is happening to them or why, and neither, in the end, does the reader. In Needful Things, implausible things happen and the reader, immersed in the story, makes the required suspension of disbelief. In Obsession, whether intended or not, the everyday action – small town dramas involving rival estate agents(!), romantic relationships, sci-fi conventions and drug smuggling – feels as peculiar and implausible as any of the perhaps-supernatural occurrences.

And yet, Obsession is the opposite of unreadable; the dowdy seaside town ambience is irresistible, the almost tangible feeling that the characters are trapped within their own lives, whatever the outcome of the actual plot, makes it both immersive and oddly depressing for an 80s horror novel. Stephen King builds slowly to a frenzied, bloody and cathartic finale where those who commit acts of evil are punished and/or expelled and good, however temporarily, prevails. Ramsey Campbell shows us a world where good and bad are punished equally, peoples’ lives are destroyed, a town is perhaps haunted, but essentially not much of substance ever changes; Stephen King gives us another (efficient and gripping) Hollywood blockbuster, Ramsey Campbell gives us Friday the 13^th Part 7 directed by Ken Loach.

What the books share is that they are variations on that cautionary, Faustian tale. The small town settings and down-at-heel characters mean that they aren’t really commentaries on 80s consumerism in the manner of the more imaginative end of horror cinema like David Cronenberg’s surreal Videodrome (1983) and John Carpenter’s satirical They Live (1988). Instead, and appropriately for the Faustian theme, they are concerned with human nature, and as such both books fit into the generally conservative nature of 80s horror (punish the transgressors, restore the status quo!); and although Campbell’s novel is less black and white than King’s, its very ambivalence strengthens that core message; be very careful what you wish for. You can’t always get what you want – and probably, you shouldn’t.