What’s drawn you in more recent years to this particular form? Aside from the early (1973) work Medusa, you’d only written one other novella over your career– Needing Ghosts in 1990. SB: Since 2013, you’ve worked extensively in the novella form, producing The Last Revelation Of Gla’aki, The Pretence and The Booking. To put it somewhat more positively, I’ve more ideas than I’ll ever be able to develop, and I’m anxious to get as many of them into fictional form before I bequeath the rest to whoever would like them.
I imagine you know the satisfaction that having just completed a novel or even a short story brings, but half an hour (if that) after finishing a first draft I’ll be pondering what to write next.
Admittedly that’s not the case when I have to get up early to travel, but otherwise it’s every day, Christmas and my birthday too. For a long time, and increasingly now, I grow frustrated if a day goes by when I’m not either writing or working on what I’ll write next or rereading a draft as a preparation to rewriting it. Ramsey Campbell: It’s a compulsion, Simon. What do you attribute this productivity to?
Simon Bestwick: You’ve had, to date, an enviably productive career: thirty-one novels (thirty-five including your film novelisations of Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter and The Wolfman), five novellas, fifteen story collections and now a book of limericks, along with fourteen anthologies as editor and countless individual short stories and non-fiction articles. Author of such classics as The Parasite, The Influence, The Face That Must Die, Ancient Images, and more recently, Ghosts Know, Holes for Faces, The Booking, and the forthcoming The Searching Dead, Campbell has won more awards for his writing than any other living horror writer. Other notable titles of his filmography are Sleep Tight (2011), Muse (2017) and his latest work Way Down (2021).Simon Bestwick recently chatted with the legendary British horror writer, Ramsey Campbell. Then came Darkness (2002), Fragile (2005) and in 2007, together with Paco Plaza, the great critical and box office success with, which would become the origin of one of the most popular horror sagas. In 1999 he directed his first feature film, The Nameless, an adaptation of the novel by Ramsey Campbell, which won the Méliès de Oro for the best European fantasy film of that year and won more than fifteen awards at various international festivals. His first film work was the short film Alicia (1994). Before dedicating himself to the cinema, he worked as a journalist and radio presenter. Film director and screenwriter born in Lleida.
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