Welcoming Ramsey Campbell

Flame Tree Press welcomes horror legend Ramsey Campbell to the blog to talk about his short story “A Solitary Voice”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September from Flame Tree Press in our Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.

Today, Ramsey Campbell shares an excerpt from his story along with a short glimpse into his inspiration.

Excerpt:

She ignored the occasional dull twinge while she showered and dressed. Cold slices of the Sunday roast her mother had left her in the habit of preparing, together with a salad improvised out of the remains of its accompaniments, did for dinner. A surreptitious voice followed her out of the house and kept reappearing as she headed for the station. Surely only some were the same one, and she hadn’t time to distinguish which.

“Got a phone, you’re not alone…” She felt compelled to count the stops she’d suffer before she could escape the repetitions, which had started to feel like the threat of a headache. “You don’t need to keep telling me,”  she called and had to laugh, because she hadn’t noticed someone else was in the carriage. How had they sneaked in? She could have thought the voice had found itself a body. “Isn’t it getting on your nerves as well?” she called, only to see nobody was there—just the reflection of a poster that she’d taken for the face of someone lurking by a window. No wonder she’d made the mistake when the portrait of a standardised commuter looked so much like the kind of person who would own the voice of the train.

Campbell writes:

“I’ve often written about mental illness, as far back as my second novel, written in the 1970s. No doubt the underlying cause of my preoccupation has always been my mother’s mental state. She went undiagnosed for most of her life – certainly once I was born, though I believe her family may have suspected but summed her up as simply odd – not least because she indoctrinated me from a very early age not to discuss her with anyone. At three years old I learned to distinguish what she perceived from reality. I’m sure this helped me as a writer to depict – indeed, inhabit – minds besieged from within.”

As well as Campbell’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”

"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, The Wise Friend, Somebody’s Voice, Fellstones, The Lonely Lands and The Incubations. His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull, Fearful Implications, and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) as well as The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly, while Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is a book-length study of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks. His novels The Nameless, Pact of the Fathers and The Influence have been filmed in Spain, where a television series based on The Nameless is in development. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films. 

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and still lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.

This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now