cannibal cop
Grimscribe
For me, perhaps the finest example of a horror story that captures something of the complex character and mystery of nightmare is Ramsey Campbell’s novella Needing Ghosts. Campbell himself has referred to this piece as an example of what he calls “the comedy of paranoia” but I think that sells it a little bit short. Simply calling it a nightmarish horror tale also, I think, doesn’t quite do it justice. “Nightmarish” in common use is basically shorthand for “creepy things happening that defy reason”, a description that doesn’t entirely apply to the creepy things that occur in this story. The way Campbell conjures the spirit of nightmare in this tale is a little more sophisticated than most, and he makes full use of the novella format to achieve this.
A nightmare is often more than must “creepy things happen”, and in its most powerful form, the one that lingers most strongly in the memory, it has a definite marked progression, a trajectory that seems to have a life and consciousness of its own directing it. And that’s exactly what Campbell has created in this tale, a progression that mimics the life of the nightmare as well as any work of art or fiction that I can call to mind today. I don’t want to spell out too much, but I’ll lay out here my basic idea.
The story of Needing Ghosts passes through roughly three distinct stages. The opening section is very ominous and mysterious: the main character, Mottershead, wakes up alone, in pitch darkness, and, with only a vague apprehension of his purpose in mind, proceeds out from his dark and empty home into a strange and shadowy world that only grows ever stranger and more shadowy, gradually opening out into what I consider the best example of “liminal horror” I have encountered, quite possibly the best ever.
As things seem to reach a peak of creepiness, though, the unsettled protagonist finds himself stumbling onto what seems to be the route that leads out from this silent and increasingly sinister district he’s wandered into, and back into something like the ordinary bustling “real” world. And the tone of the story shifts smoothly from darkness and menace to an understated kind of farce and social satire that is nevertheless not much less nerve-wracking for the main character. But then, just as the narrative appears to have settled into a comfortably wacky absurdist mode, Campbell pulls the rug out from the reader and Mottershead both and plunges them into the terrifying darkness and revelations of the concluding section, a descent into a seemingly bottomless hell.
It’s this trajectory that leads from a seemingly all-pervading dark to a world of (apparent) light (or at least a kind of semi-familiar, daylight reality), finally followed by a sudden plunge back into a darkness even worse and deeper than before, that makes Needing Ghosts such a masterpiece of “nightmare horror” to my mind, at least as much as any of the horrors described within. That torture of hope, that seeming reprieve from the endless dark, and its sudden final shattering, that precipitous plunge back into the funhouse of horrors, makes for the perfect “nightmare horror” story in my eyes, and Campbell, while he’s always been great at it, may have perfected the form in Needing Ghosts.
I know Kafka and Ligotti are names that usually get cited, but in my view Campbell and Charles L. Grant at their best were particularly good at this sort of thing.
A nightmare is often more than must “creepy things happen”, and in its most powerful form, the one that lingers most strongly in the memory, it has a definite marked progression, a trajectory that seems to have a life and consciousness of its own directing it. And that’s exactly what Campbell has created in this tale, a progression that mimics the life of the nightmare as well as any work of art or fiction that I can call to mind today. I don’t want to spell out too much, but I’ll lay out here my basic idea.
The story of Needing Ghosts passes through roughly three distinct stages. The opening section is very ominous and mysterious: the main character, Mottershead, wakes up alone, in pitch darkness, and, with only a vague apprehension of his purpose in mind, proceeds out from his dark and empty home into a strange and shadowy world that only grows ever stranger and more shadowy, gradually opening out into what I consider the best example of “liminal horror” I have encountered, quite possibly the best ever.
As things seem to reach a peak of creepiness, though, the unsettled protagonist finds himself stumbling onto what seems to be the route that leads out from this silent and increasingly sinister district he’s wandered into, and back into something like the ordinary bustling “real” world. And the tone of the story shifts smoothly from darkness and menace to an understated kind of farce and social satire that is nevertheless not much less nerve-wracking for the main character. But then, just as the narrative appears to have settled into a comfortably wacky absurdist mode, Campbell pulls the rug out from the reader and Mottershead both and plunges them into the terrifying darkness and revelations of the concluding section, a descent into a seemingly bottomless hell.
It’s this trajectory that leads from a seemingly all-pervading dark to a world of (apparent) light (or at least a kind of semi-familiar, daylight reality), finally followed by a sudden plunge back into a darkness even worse and deeper than before, that makes Needing Ghosts such a masterpiece of “nightmare horror” to my mind, at least as much as any of the horrors described within. That torture of hope, that seeming reprieve from the endless dark, and its sudden final shattering, that precipitous plunge back into the funhouse of horrors, makes for the perfect “nightmare horror” story in my eyes, and Campbell, while he’s always been great at it, may have perfected the form in Needing Ghosts.
I know Kafka and Ligotti are names that usually get cited, but in my view Campbell and Charles L. Grant at their best were particularly good at this sort of thing.