James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers went on to praise Campbell's "unflinchingly bleak vision, his richly allusive style and his chilling analysis of abnormal psychology." While none of this has led to the bestseller lists, Campbell has remained prodigiously productive, turning out hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels during his career.
Growing up Weird
Born in 1946, in Liverpool, England, Campbell is the son of Alexander Ramsey Campbell and Nora Campbell. It has been noted that his home life was a great influence on his later work, for Campbell was frightened of his policeman father and would try to always be asleep before the elder Campbell came home at night. His mother, on the other hand, suffered a slow ascent into mental illness. "I first got into horror fiction when I was five years old," Campbell explained to David J. Howe in an online interview with Here Be Dragons. "I was walking past a newsagents in Southport with my mother when I saw an issue of Weird Tales in the window. I wanted it. I remember the cover vividly. . . . My mother refused to buy it for me and so I didn't get it, but the memory stayed with me."
Soon, however, Campbell was reading all the horror stories he could get his hands on, checking them out from the local library, and when he was ten, he began collecting Weird Tales, finally buying the very edition he had seen when he was five years old.
This is a free page. This page contains 186 words. This
biography contains 2,783 words (approx. 9 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ramsey Campbell Access Pass.
