Visions from Brichester aims to collect all of Ramsey Campbell’s Lovecraftian fiction that came after (or was not included in) his first, extremely Lovecraftian, collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake. Doing so, it spans 40 years of writing, from “The Stone on the Island” (1963) to his 2013 novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki. What’s more, it spans several interesting changes in Campbell’s writing.

The first, and most obvious, change is the basic one of finding a voice — the themes that inspire him, and the techniques that work for him. To me, the very early stories in this book (“The Stone on the Island”, and “Before the Storm” (1965)) may be imaginative takes on horror ideas, and have the occasional arresting image, but they just don’t work as stories. Certainly not as those from 1966 and 1967 (“Cold Print” and “The Franklyn Paragraphs”) do. It’s illuminating to compare the latter two stories with their early drafts, included here as appendices. “The Successor”, from 1964 (which was rewritten as “Cold Print”) attempts to blend Lovecraftian horror with details from Campbell’s own life and environment, but the literary and biographical influences feel like separate, unmixing streams. “Cold Print”, on the other hand, is a definite artistic success. It draws a clear parallel between its prurient protagonist Sam Strutt’s interest in hard-to-find power-fantasy smut with those ‘searchers after horror’ who, as Lovecraft puts it, ‘haunt strange, far places’. At the end, it even manages to turn the tables on the reader, reminding them of their own dubious pleasure in witnessing Strutt’s comeuppance (‘somewhere, someone had wanted this to happen’). It’s as much a story about horror as it is a horror story. The same goes for “The Franklyn Paragraphs”. The early version is a straightforward horror story; the rewrite is playful, and, once more, about horror, questioning the legitimacy of writing about the supernatural if you don’t believe in it. Yet, it’s also a tale with a genuine horror element — and a genuine human element — as it’s about being trapped: by relationships, by beliefs, or simply by being a conscious, living mind stuck in a corpse in a grave.

By the mid-seventies, Campbell is very much in my favourite mode, combining the kitchen-sink realism of sixties British cinema with an often psychedelically-tinged Lovecraftian horror. Examples of this are “The Tugging” (1974), “The Faces at Pine Dunes” (1975) and “The Voice of the Beach” (1977). The latter two are both set in a real place, Freshfield, where, Campbell says in his afterword, ‘I had several seventies chemical experiences’. Here, the supernatural or cosmic horror is utterly entwined with character-based horror, most notably in “The Faces at Pine Dunes”, whose trapped young male protagonist, living a peripatetic life in his parents’ caravan, starts to find his own place in the world, only to have his few personal gains immediately overwhelmed by awful truths about his parents, himself, and (this being a Lovecraftian tale) the universe.

Going straight from these seventies tales to “The Horror under Warrendown” (from 1994), completely wrongfooted me — I was so intent on the serious mode of those earlier stories that I was halfway through “Warrendown” before I got the joke, let alone that it was a joke. An utterly straight-faced (and highly Lovecraftian) handling of an idea that’s very funny, “The Horror under Warrendown” ends in a brilliant but loving parody of Lovecraft’s febrile crescendoes of prose freaked with scientific terminology (‘Partly vitrescent, partly glaucous… pullulating… internodally stunted…’), which is twice as funny once you realise what it’s describing.

It’s not all comedy from here on. We have another grim piece of socially-minded horror in “The Other Names” (1998), and a tale of writerly horror, “The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash” (2010, from Black Wings), whose narrator’s tone can perhaps be detected to a certain extent in Campbell’s own early piece of criticism, “Rusty Links”, also collected here. But Campbell’s later writing as a whole is perhaps best represented by his darkly slapstick Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki (originally published standalone, in 2013). His take on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, it’s the tale of university archivist Leonard Fairman travelling to the seaside town of Gulshaw to retrieve what is, for him, ‘the rarest Victorian book’, a complete set of the multi-volume Revelations of Gla’aki. He’s at first frustrated to find the inhabitants are intent on running him something of a dance, as, rather than being handed the full set in one go, he has to collect it a book at a time from different people. His strained relationship with his girlfriend (‘He’d learned to find fondness in her voice, since she hadn’t much time for nicknames or other expressions of intimacy’) is contrasted with the very warm welcome of the people of Gulshaw, who insist on calling him by his first name, and seem intent on making him feel one of them. It’s that same theme again from “The Faces at Pine Dunes” and “The Franklyn Paragraphs”: how human relationships can become traps, and how the supernatural can present a weirdly welcoming alternative, where you can become part of something larger than yourself, though perhaps too literally.

The Last Revelation of Gla’aki is, like The Grin of the Dark and The Overnight, at once both stark horror and slapstick comedy; its constant playing with perception is halfway between gleefully nonsensical punning and paranoid horror. Is Leonard’s tale one of cosmic horror or deep fulfilment? It seems to be both — but that’s also a brink Lovecraft seemed to be teetering on in his later tales, such as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.

Visions from Brichester ends with some of Campbell’s Lovecraft-related non-fiction. The early pieces are of mostly historical or biographical interest (in particular his denunciation of HPL, then his denunciation of that denunciation), but the final piece, “On Four Lovecraft Tales”, from 2013, is a brilliant piece of criticism, an insightful look at how Lovecraft achieved his effects through orchestration on a prose level. It’s almost a shock, after the intense, paranoid-hallucinogenic prose of the stories, to find Campbell writing in such a measured, calm and collected manner. I’d love to read more of such in-depth studies by Campbell like this.

I’ve been reading a few ghost stories lately. Most recently Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (having already seen Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV film, and the recent Hammer version), though I found it wanting in a way I didn’t with, say, Dark Matter, or my recent re-read of The Turn of the Screw. Thinking about why this was has led to a little bit of theorising about three types of ghost stories and how they work. So here goes.

The first, and purest, type of ghost story revels entirely in the protagonist’s horror of the supernatural. To make it work, the ordinariness of both the protagonist and their everyday world has to be clearly established, so when the supernatural makes its appearance, it feels truly weird and frightening. In this type of ghost story, the ‘ghost’ doesn’t even have to be a ghost, in the sense of a undead human spirit. M R James’s stories are probably the best example of this type, and his ‘ghosts’ are more often demons or elementals — embodied curses or prohibitions — and when they are human, as in, for instance, ‘Number 13’ or ‘Count Magnus’, they’re often supernaturally-tinged sorcerers or necromancers. This type of ghost story is all about technique — the way the supernatural is hinted at, built up, and finally revealed. The only emotion required of the protagonist is terror; details of his or her inner life just get in the way. You don’t get a lot of human insight from M R James’s stories, but you do get a good ghost story.

from Nigel Kneale’s 1989 adaptation of The Woman in Black

The second type is as much about the protagonist’s horror at the display of human qualities, such as despair or sorrow, driven to such an extreme they’ve become supernatural. The Woman in Black is of this type. (The book is, anyway. I’d say the 2012 Hammer version, upping the cinematic shock value, turned the Woman into a far more demonic creature than she is in the book.) The bulk of conventional Victorian ghost stories are of this type, too. There, a ghost lingers beyond death because either it has been wronged, or has done wrong, and needs to set things right before it can move on. With The Woman in Black, there’s no longer that Victorian feeling of a moral order keeping certain dead souls from moving on till they’ve done what they’re supposed to; rather, it’s the Woman herself, so consumed by sorrow, anger and the need for revenge that she can’t pass on. The thing about this type of ghost story is that the protagonist is still looking on the ghost as something separate — as purely a horror. Things change slightly in the last chapter of The Woman in Black (the narrator comes to experience something of what made the Woman what she is) but not enough to take this story to the next type; the Woman is still seen as something exceptional and horrific, a twisted and rare form of human being, something to be pitied and feared, not empathised with.

The third type is about how the protagonist’s own despair or sadness is brought to the fore by encounters with a ghost, until they experience it as a manifestation of their own inner world. The ghost still exists to embody (in a ghostly, disembodied way) supernaturally-distorted human qualities, but as much as the protagonist is haunted by the ghost, they’re haunted by something inside themselves too. The ghost and the protagonist’s inner life become entangled to the point where they’re indistinguishable. This is the type of story where the ghost needn’t exist at all — or it can exist in that Tzvetan Todorov hinterland where the story never makes it clear whether the ghost is a ‘real’ ghost or is just an externalisation of the protagonist’s own mental state. Listing examples, I find all my favourites: The Haunting of Hill House, The Influence, The Turn of the Screw.

It has to be said these three types have permeable walls. (Ghosts being ghosts, they’re not going to be stopped from wandering through walls anyway.) Jonathan Miller, after all, turned M R James’s ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ from a ghost story of the first type to the third, by emphasising how the basic character-type of so many of M R James’s protagonists (academic, reserved, distant and somewhat disapproving of lesser human beings) is exactly what makes them so vulnerable to the terror of an isolating ghostly visitation.

Overall, I tend to like examples from the first and third types. The first work best as short stories — shocks work best when kept short. (Cinematic ghost stories, more and more, tend to be overlong examples of the first type, with nothing but shock after shock after shock. I ended up fast-forwarding much of the second half of the 2012 Woman in Black, searching for morsels of story, because I got bored of being supposedly shocked.) The third type mixes the supernatural with the psychological, which is how I prefer it, and this tends to be best when done at length, with plenty of build-up to establish both the protagonist’s psychology and the ‘normality’ of their world.

The trouble, for me, with the second type, is it’s basically disapproving. It’s about marking certain humans (undead ones, admittedly) as separate from ‘us’ (as represented by the protagonist and the rest of a quietly-ordered, functioning society). It seems to be saying that most of us don’t experience extremes of emotion, particularly negative emotion, so we can safely regard those who do as alien, other, horrific. But saying this is also saying that as soon as we experience such extremes, we have to regard ourselves as now separate, alienated, and horrific, too. This is perhaps a very English thing, where reserve and social propriety can make for a ridigly-defined norm, where extreme emotion is met with an embarrassment and disapproval close to horror — meaning you have to repress such emotions, to the point of being haunted by them. Perhaps that’s why the English write so many ghost stories.

Mary Rose is, literally, a sinister play: right-handed J M Barrie, suffering writer’s cramp, wrote it with his left hand. It is, in a way, the anti-Peter Pan, dealing not with the wonderful adventures of children in Never Never Land, but with the loss felt by those left behind — an adult play, rather than one for children, and a post-World War play, too, rather than one set in the Arcadian Edwardian era of long, golden summers.

It starts with a young man, Harry, visiting the house he used to live in before he ran away to sea at the age of 12. Now empty and a long time on the market, the house is reputed to be haunted, though its stony caretaker, Mrs Otery, is not to be drawn on the matter. The second act gives us the back-story: when she was eleven, a young girl called Mary Rose disappeared, for twenty days, on a small island in the Hebrides, where she had been sketching whilst her father fished. Her parents were frantic; but then Mary Rose returned thinking only a few hours had passed. As a grown-up woman she apparently remembers nothing of the incident, though feels a vague fondness for the island. She tries to convince her husband-to-be Simon to spend their honeymoon there. He, having been told what happened, thinks better of it, until several years into their marriage, by which time they have a two-year-old boy, and Simon has grown to disbelieve the story about Mary Rose’s disappearance. They visit the island, and she disappears again — not for twenty days this time, but twenty-five years. When she returns, she’s not a day older. Everyone else, of course, has aged: her parents are now old, her husband is grey and used to being alone, her baby boy has grown up and run away to sea. The play, which for much of its time is a lightly comic portrait of a rather idealised, Edwardian ‘perfect’ marriage — with the man being decent, strong and a little stupid, and the woman being quirky, wilful and doting — is bookended by a sense of utter loss, both loss-through-absence and an even worse sort of loss, when the presence of someone longed-for or loved but irretrievably changed only serves as a reminder of all that is lost. Mary Rose’s parents, Mr and Mrs Morland, lose Mary Rose (at first through marriage, though she continues to live at home, then to the mysterious island); husband Simon loses his wife; Mary Rose loses her parents and her husband and her child. When she returns after her second absence, the years have come between her and those that remain, and she can only pine for her baby, who is now not only grown up but run away. This multi-generational, omnidirectional sense of loss is even more concentrated on the boy, Harry, whose running away at the age of twelve isn’t explained, but could be seen as an attempt to lose even himself, having spent his early years so overshadowed by the loss of his mother.

Often described as a ghost play (because, even though she’s said to have died, Mary Rose somehow lingers in the house to which she returned, acting as both a playful, absent-minded child, and a pining mother), Mary Rose resonates just as much with fairy stories about people who disappear — as in Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall, or, much more intensely, Alan Garner’s Boneland — or who disappear then return — as in Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale — only to feel severed from those they once loved. The key fantasy element, Mary Rose’s disappearance, is never explained. (The island is known as ‘The Island that Likes to be Visited’, though as a local notes, ‘an island that had visitors would not need to want to be visited’.) Perhaps this is why the overlap between the ghostly and the fairy seems to work so well: it gives the play an uncompromising feeling of dropping you into an utterly unexplained abyss, a terrible fact that is just there, and which can never be assimilated or ameliorated. Which is, of course, what loss feels like.

It’s easy to see parallels with J M Barrie’s life. When his elder brother (his mother’s favourite) died in a skating accident just before turning 14, Barrie tried but failed to take the boy’s place. Later in life he adopted the Davies children (one of whom inspired Peter Pan), after both their parents died; then Barrie’s favourite of those children, George, died in the War. But it’s odd the play doesn’t feel, to me, to be about death, as such, but about a mix of both absence and presence — and a very physical presence, at that (Mary Rose, as a ghost, is not insubstantial, though the caretaker Mrs Otery says ‘she’s as light as air’, linking her with Peter Pan). Of all the parallels in J M Barrie’s life, Mary Rose herself seems most like Barrie’s mother, depressed after the death of her most beloved child, and failing to recognise that child in Barrie himself, who was trying to play the role.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a film of Mary Rose, though it feels like, with Vertigo, he already did, as that film is also about a very physical haunting, centred on a woman who seems trapped in the past and unable to make an emotional connection the male lead desperately needs. If any film captures Mary Rose’s sense of sudden, utterly unexplainable loss, though, it has to be Picnic at Hanging Rock.

One more connection I’d love to make — and it almost but perhaps doesn’t fit — is with David Lindsay’s second novel, The Haunted Woman. Both Lindsay’s novel and Barrie’s play start with someone going over a house being put up for sale, and both deal with a room in that house which is sometimes, unexplainably and supernaturally, inaccessible. (In Mary Rose, the room is the nursery, whose door, though unlocked, is sometimes ‘held’; in The Haunted Woman, there’s a staircase that appears to some people, not to others, and only at certain times, giving access to an area described as ‘far and away the oldest part of the house’ — just as the ‘held’ room in Mary Rose is also ‘the oldest part of the house’.) I like to think of Lindsay — whose books make a lot of reference to theatres, plays, and so on — going to see Barrie’s play and getting the seed of an idea which sparked off his own, very strange, reinterpretation. Mary Rose was first performed on April 22nd, 1920 at the Haymarket Theatre, London; David Lindsay, apparently, began work on The Haunted Woman immediately after the acceptance of his first novel, which was finished in March 1920. Does this fit? I don’t know. But both times I’ve read Mary Rose, the opening reminds me of Lindsay’s second novel.