What books (or writers) have been the most influential in your development as an artist?
Lovecraft to begin with, of course. At fourteen years old I’d already tried to imitate various writers, most substantially Arthur Machen and John Dickson Carr (who had a fine sense of the macabre), but reading a complete collection of Lovecraft’s tales gave me a much closer focus, even if I began by imitating the bits that were easiest to copy or (unconsciously) to parody. Before I’d finished my first published book I was already employing methods of my own and, having read Night’s Black Agents (another Macbeth title!) and in particular “Smoke Ghost”, I began to take Leiber as my model, especially in terms of finding the supernatural in everyday settings rather than having them invaded by it. Through Fritz’s work I rediscovered M. R. James, and he too became a great influence, not least his paragraphing – his often unemphatic way with disquieting images, refusing to isolate them on the page. And very shortly after that I discovered Graham Greene – Brighton Rock was my splendid introduction – and I’d just turned seventeen when I found his recommendation on the cover of Lolita, which I bought at once. Nabokov was an enormous revelation – his joy in language, his oblique approach to the material, his discovery of comedy in the most unlikely material – and I bought everything else of his I could find. (Pale Fire came out in paperback around then, and I loved it just as much.) Those were the main influences, but two films that I saw during that period – Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad and Buñuel’s Los Olvidados – influenced me too.
OCCUPY DARKNESS - Ramsey Campbell
