GARY FRY

AN INTERVIEW WITH RAMSEY CAMPBELL ABOUT HIS LATEST NOVEL THE WISE FRIEND (Flame Tree Press) My spoiler-free review of Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel, The Wise Friend , can be found HERE . It offers a hint at what readers can expect from the book, which is out now from Flame Tree Press (hardcover, paperback, and ebook). I recently chatted with the author about the novel, and here’s what he had to say. Gary : The Wise Friend is the first standalone novel you’ve written since the three-year, three-book project that was your Brichester trilogy, though it shares spiritual connections with the field’s tradition, especially with Machen and Blackwood, I felt. Could you tell me a little bit about the origins of the book? Ramsey : I see from my notes that as usual ideas gathered haphazardly around a theme. In this case I believe it was the notion of an artist whose late work betrays an occult influence. I’m not sure whether I initially had the idea that a present-day relative wou

THE WISE FRIEND by Ramsey Campbell Review by Gary Fry If you ask the average person in the street to define horror fiction, s/he will almost certainly say something like “blood, gore, screams, monsters, killings” – in short, all the stuff s/he’s come to expect from mass market films. Well, horror literature doesn’t (always) work that way. On the printed page, practitioners have to be more artful. They cannot resort to the jump scare. They have no thunderous soundtrack to enhance suspense. If they’re doing their job well, they must rely on atmosphere and canny descriptions of frightening events. Of course, some authors are better at achieving this kind of thing than others. And if the horror field has a living master, a writer all of us in-the-know – we aficionados of the dark – consider the finest of all, it’s Ramsey Campbell. For decades, Campbell has been writing the kind of work that relies on the unique aspects of literary prose: its capacity to suggest and allude (perh