J K Potter

First published in the US in 1991, and in the UK in 1992, Waking Nightmares is Campbell’s next all-original collection after 1987’s Scared Stiff. Most of the stories it collects are from the 1980s (three were originally published in Night Visions 3, alongside fellow Liverpudlian Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart), but there are a few mopped up from the 70s: “Jack in the Box” (one of Campbell’s EC Comics tributes), “The Trick”(previously published in the UK edition of Dark Companions, and presumably included here — despite Campbell himself thinking it “coldblooded” — because it had not been published in the US before and is set during Halloween), and “Eye of Childhood” from 1978. There’s also “Playing the Game”, written in 1980 — or, rather, rewritten, because it was originally written in 1974 as “Snakes & Ladders”. That earlier version was published in Twilight Zone Magazine (April 1982), but by this point Campbell had completely rewritten it because he felt the characters lacked motivation. (Having read both versions, I have to say I prefer the earlier one: motivation doesn’t seem to matter, as it gets straight into the action, and reads like a persecutory nightmare. By comparison, the 1980 version feels a bit overthought-out, and loses the fraught atmosphere of the first version through trying to make it seem more realistic. But, aside from the central idea, they’re almost completely different tales.)

Having a peppering of 1970s stories among the 1980s ones highlights what might have been a change in Campbell’s style (or, anyway, an expansion of his available styles). The 80s stories are less hallucinogenically intense and claustrophobic, with a clearer, pacier style — more easily readable (which isn’t meant as either criticism or praise), while still touched with moments of the perceptual weirdness that’s Campbell’s trademark. One that stuck with me from my first reading of this collection, back when it first came out in paperback, is “Old Clothes”. Here, 40-year-old Eric is working as a removal-man’s assistant, clearing out the house of a deceased medium. As her belongings are all going to be either sold or junked, when it starts to rain he grabs her coat and puts it on. Subsequently, he starts to find little items in the pockets: a flower, rare coins, a ring. He’s sacked when a pearl necklace suddenly appears in one of the pockets while he’s helping move house for a somewhat confused old lady who claims it’s hers. By this point, though, he’s realised that something is making these increasingly valuable objects appear. He learns that the medium whose coat it was had one particularly devoted but mischievous “guide” whose apports took an increasingly dark turn. As they now start to do for Eric, too… There’s a lot of action compressed into a short story, but it doesn’t veer into the territory of borderline mental instability (in both prose style and character) that marks a lot of Campbell’s fiction. Eric is quick to accept what’s going on and try to take advantage of it, at first, anyway.

“Old Clothes” points to a theme in Campbell’s fiction, not just in Waking Nightmares, but throughout: how characters are made to feel, and even be punished for, a guilt that is not theirs. Eric’s taking of the coat might be questionable (though the medium had no relations, and the chief removal man pockets the proceeds from selling her furniture), but the persecution he suffers — and the worse he manages to avoid by passing the coat on — massively outweighs whatever punishment he might be owed.

Elsewhere, the guilt-to-punishment ratio is even more out of whack. In “The Trick”, for instance, two girls are punished — by being drawn into a dark tunnel at night, towards a potentially nasty fate — and not for anything they’ve done, but because their dog barked at a local woman all the kids call a witch. To make it worse, the main character, Debbie, tries not to think of the old woman as a witch because she thinks it’s unfair — only, of course, the old woman is a witch, and Debbie’s simply the one who’s punished for it all.

In some cases, the very sympathy or sensitivity a character feels is what leads to them being singled out for a punishment that’s absolutely undeserved. The prime example of this is “The Old School”, whose protagonist, Dean, is a teacher who tries to connect with his pupils on their own level. Meeting a few eleven-year-olds kicking a can and smoking in the grounds of a historical house, he manages to direct them into a game of hide-and-seek. But while seeking, he finds himself lured into the woods, to the ruins of an old school renowned for the brutality of its teachers, and haunted by the cobweb-and-dried-leaves ghosts of ex-pupils, who, in a dark echo of “the best days of their lives”, have returned to the “greatest terror of [their] life” as a reaction to the greatest terror of all, their own deaths. Dean tries to assure them that, though he’s a teacher, he’s a kind teacher, and will even play with them for a bit. But, of course, they want someone to play with them forever, and they’re well beyond kindness.

Perhaps Campbell’s best-known story from this collection, “The Guide”, is a subtler continuation of the theme. The main character, Kew, on holiday with his daughter and grandkids but wanting a break from the children’s taste for the bloodthirstier extremes of horror, takes himself off for a day, led by an old guidebook written by the sort of writer whose subtle scares he much prefers, M. R. James. But the place he ends up in, thanks to some handwritten annotations in the copy he’s picked up, is one, it turns out, James deliberately left out, so seekers after the subtler thrills wouldn’t be tempted to go there. Kew’s very sensitivity to a rarefied aesthetic, then, makes him a victim. (This story contains a nice Jamesian joke, when the landlord to a pub Kew finds himself outside says “Come in and wet your whistle, my lad.”)

There are a number of main characters who are writers, in this collection, though Campbell never uses this as a mere background detail, but always as a key part of the story. Most effective is “Beyond Words”, in which a certain propulsive rhythm starts to infect the main character’s use of words. And this is at a time when his wife is pregnant and expecting their first child, as though the story were contrasting one, perhaps more authentic and natural, type of creativity with another that may just be a gateway to mental instability. Elsewhere, the mental instability has already arrived, as in “Next Time You’ll Know Me”, in which a budding writer keeps finding his ideas being stolen before he’s had time to even write them down, unaware that it may be an entirely different talent — precognition — that’s the cause. In “Meeting the Author”, on the other hand, the writer-figure is the source of horror, as the child-narrator is persecuted for not liking the writer’s first book, and is haunted by, of all things, a card-thin but looming caricature of the author that emerges from a pop-up book.

The writer-characters in this collection, though, are outnumbered by characters who are teachers. (This may be down to the fact that Campbell’s wife is a now-retired teacher.) But again, the choice of profession isn’t an arbitrary detail, as it allows Campbell to explore the relationship between children and adults — something he’s explored in a number of his novels that focus on parenthood, including The Nameless, The Claw, The Influence, and The House on Nazareth Hill. In “Eye of Childhood”, a girl casts a vengeful spell on a replacement teacher, showing how deeply even casual abusiveness can affect a vulnerable child. The teacher in “The Old School” has already been mentioned; another here is “The Other Side”, which Campbell wrote as his response to an image created by J. K. Potter (printed on the cover of the 1986 World Fantasy Convention’s Program Book, which contained Campbell’s tale). Here, the teacher is Bowring, who has moved across the river from the school where he teaches, but spends his time spying on his delinquent pupils on that other side through a pair of binoculars. He starts to see a clown-like figure whose assaults on these pupils are increasingly tied to Bowring’s own repressed disdain, even hatred, for those he teaches.

Waking Nightmares is a fine and varied collection, and though the developments in Campbell’s craft aren’t as dramatic as those in his earlier collections — The Height of the Scream and Demons By Daylight especially — it’s evident that even two decades into his writing career he’s continuing to expand and develop.

After Dark Companions, Campbell’s next all-original story collection was Scared Stiff, which came out in 1986 from the peculiarly-punctuated Scream/Press. All but one of the tales it contained in its original form (Scared Stiff was republished in 2002 with a few more stories), were from the mid seventies, and so could have been included in 1976’s The Height of the Scream. The Scared Stiff stories share a similar feel with those in Height of the Scream, in that the protagonists are mostly young adults seeking to find themselves, often creative people, often experimenting with drugs, often struggling with their first adult relationships. And it’s that “struggling with their first adult relationships” that’s a key part of the stories collected here, as Scared Stiff, subtitled Tales of Sex and Death, are all stories where Campbell veered into more sexually explicit territory.

It started when Michel Parry, editor of the Mayflower Book of Black Magic anthology series (which produced six volumes from 1974 to 1977), said to Campbell that he was surprised he wasn’t getting any stories about sex magic. And this was the seventies. Campbell decided to have a go, and produced “Dolls”, an unusual tale in his oeuvre for being set in the past (the late 17th or early 18th century). Its protagonist, Anne, belonged to a coven of witches when she was a teenager, but lapsed after marrying. When a new parson, Jenner, forbids her furniture-maker husband John from producing the carved figures he so enjoys making, John lends his creative power to the coven (which Anne has returned to after finding herself unable to enjoy the marriage bed), carving figures and using them to curse the coven’s enemies. John has an obvious power, both creative and magical, and after he joins the coven the Devil even starts making personal appearances at their night-time sabbaths, choosing a woman from their number to be his partner. Never Anne, though. Frustrated, she has a plan to make the Devil choose her, and to rid them all of Parson Jenner’s repressive disapproval for good. It’s a heady mix of frustration, power, creativity and desire, and proved to be a bit more explicit than Parry was expecting. He checked it with Mayflower’s lawyers, though, and it was published in The Fourth Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories in 1976.

Two more of the stories included here were written for the Mayflower Black Magic series. “Lilith’s” is about a young man who gives up on his frustrating (because real) girlfriend and buys himself a sex doll (from, of course, a shop that also sells occult paraphernalia), only to find himself unable to have a relationship with that, either. This might sound comic, but, as with all the tales collected here, the tone is more kitchen sink drama than Carry On. (I can’t help imagining what the dark slapstick humour of later Campbell might make of the same situation, though.) The other story, this time published in The Sixth Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (in 1977), is “The Seductress”, whose female protagonist, Betty, rejects her boyfriend, Alastair, when she finds he’s been using black magic to keep their relationship going. As a result, Alastair kills himself, and Betty does her best to forget him, but Alastair learned his magic from his witchy mother, who’s not going to let death get between her precious son and what he wants.

In general, I found the stories in this collection which had male protagonists to be mostly about frustration, an inability to connect emotionally with wives or girlfriends, and an ultimate attempt to get past those frustrations through control (which veers into the supernatural and horrific). On the other hand, those with female protagonists were more about vulnerability — not the passivity of victimhood, though these are of course horror stories and never end well, but more the vulnerability of someone opening up to find themselves through the most intimate of human relationships.

There’s a lot about the blurring of lines between sexual and artistic energy, too. In “The Other Woman” (published in The Devil’s Kisses, an anthology edited by Michel Parry under the pseudonym Linda Lovecraft, in 1976), Phil, a book-cover artist, overcomes a patch of creative sterility when he finds himself painting a new type of woman as the stereotypical victim on his schlocky thriller covers. Not just a new type of woman but, seemingly, an actual woman, with one blue eye, one brown. She’s a hit with the publishers, but less so with Phil’s girlfriend, who ends up writing into a magazine for advice, as she’s sure the increasingly impotent-with-her Phil is having an affair. Phil, like the sex-doll-owning Palin from “Lilith’s”, finds himself better able to have a relationship with an unreal woman than a real one. In “Stages” (written in 1975, but not published till this book, as the anthology it was intended for never came out), the protagonist is a sculptor, who finds himself able to partake in both sides of other people’s sexual encounters when tripping on a new batch of a drug his friend cooked up. In these stories, sexual frustration is often tied to creative frustration, leading to a dangerous mix of the need to create and an inability to relate. As with the stories in The Height of the Scream, there’s a sense of the protagonists veering into territories of new, strange, destabilising and dangerous experience that allows the supernatural to enter into their lives and take over. Sex is just one more element in the mix of creativity, personal experimentation, and forbidden experience you find throughout that earlier collection.

Scared Stiff ends with a tale written especially for this collection, so from 1986 rather than the mid seventies. Like “Dolls”, the story that opens the book, “Merry May” is firmly in folk horror territory. Its protagonist is another frustrated creative, a middle-aged lecturer on music and would-be composer who’s feeling increasingly lonely after a break-up with one of his pupils. In desperation, he responds to an advert offering “Renewal of Life”, and finds himself spending the weekend at a country village, and partaking — of course, a little too closely — in their May Day rituals.

Campbell’s writing, since he broke from the Lovecraft pastiches of his first book, has always had a relentless psychological honesty about it, laying bare his characters’ human weaknesses, desperations, and desires. It’s those human vulnerabilities, in fact, that provide the openings for the supernatural, or the horrific, when it comes along, so the sexual element, so evident in Scared Stiff, doesn’t feel at all bolted on, or prurient. It fits naturally (supernaturally?) into Campbell’s style and approach. And certainly, once we’d been through the 1980s, there’s nothing as extreme here as, say, Clive Barker was writing. (And Barker, fittingly, writes the introduction to Scared Stiff.)

One thing that does remain to be noted is the illustrations for the Scream/Press edition, by J K Potter. Potter’s pre-Photoshop photo manipulations and collages blend an edge-of-reality sharpness of image with a nightmare surreality, and are a perfect match with Campbell’s fiction.