Ramsey Campbell - The Height of the Scream

[sean]

'The Height of the Scream' was Ramsey Campbell's third short story collection, and pretty nifty it is too. Stylistically, by this point he had moved away from his early Lovecrafty mode, and this collection bears similarities to his work in 'Demons by Daylight' although some of the tales collected here are a tad more ambiguous...

Arkham House (1976):


Star Books (1981):


Babbage Press (2004):


BLURB FROM THE STAR BOOKS EDITION:
A fracture in the smooth surface of everyday lif lets loose the liquid rush of pure terror that clutches your heart into spasm, and casts you out into the limited darkness of your own fears. You are reaching THE HEIGHT OF THE SCREAM.


THE SCAR
Jack Rossiter's brother-in-law tells him that he has a double, identical in every respect except for a large scar running from his temple down to his jawbone. Shortly after, Jack is attacked in the street, suffering facial injuries...

Possibly the most disturbing 'doppleganger' story I have ever read.

THE WHINING
A journalist working for Radio Merseyside is continually bothered at his flat by a stray dog. After finally snapping and killing it, he finds that it is even more trouble now that it is dead.

I thought that the title to this one was a play on King's 'The Shining', but I think I'm right in saying that this story predates it.

MISSING
Written in diary form, this tells of a student who becomes increasingly obsessed with a beautiful dark haired girl and some old murders.

REPLY GUARANTEED
Personal ads cause trouble in this one, especially since the guaranteed reply of the title appears to be from a man who died of a venereal disease...yuck!

JACK'S LITTLE FRIEND
A play on the Jack the Ripper theme, in which the reader, after discovering a mysterious box with a series of dates carved into the top of it, begins to take actions similar to those of the original.

BESIDES THE SEASIDE
A travelling salesman is stuck in a seaside town when his car breaks down, and soon begins to encounter a rather sandy problem.

THE CELLARS
Creepy, with (like the cellars themselves) lots of hinted unpleasantness going on beneath the surface, this is the story of a couple of workmates whose visit to the catacombs has some unpleasant results.

THE HEIGHT OF THE SCREAM
A vaguely druggy story of a man whom repeatedly sees the worst of people, after first thinking it in advance.

Contains a brilliant 'artistic' suicide - a painter blows his brains out onto a blank canvas!

A personal favourite.

LITTER
The litter in a marketplace becomes more than a little active and vicious. More dangerous than it sounds.

CYRIL
A painfully shy man, a woman with leanings towards the paranormal, lashings of supressed sexuality and a doll called Cyril make for one of those stories that is somehow more disturbing than the sum of its parts would suggest.

SMOKE KISS
An illustrator tries to give up smoking, with dubious sucess.

THE WORDS THAT COUNT
Features an overbearing religious father, his daughter, and a mysterious book that arrives in the post.

Here's a few posts on the subject of this story from Mr C's message board a couple of years back:

(Sean_parker) on Thursday, November 17, 2005 - 08:54 pm:

I had a little moment of fright during reading 'The Words That Count', when I started to realise the first word of each paragraph was very familiar (Roman Catholic upbringing, you see).
---
(Francis) on Friday, November 18, 2005 - 10:18 am:

I have a little moment of fright everytime I undress.
---
(Ramsey_campbell) on Friday, November 18, 2005 - 10:36 am:

Sean - and I'm not exaggerating - your post here makes "The Words That Count" worthwhile for me. I've never been sure that anyone got that point, but equally I've often wondered if it's so obvious that people don't think it's worth mentioning.

I was quite chuffed by that, especially since it is one of my favourite Campbell stories...

ASH
A man unwittingly rents a cottage with an unpleasant history. As he attempts to research local legends, he has trouble with mysterious deposits of ash around the house, and with the furnace in the cellar.

THE TELEPHONES
A man regrets answering a public phone when the person he talks to begins to stalk him from phone box to phone box. Tense, but laced with humour.

IN THE SHADOWS
A shadow play performed in a public library appears to take on a life of its own.

HORROR HOUSE OF BLOOD
A low-budget film crew use the interior of a couple's house to film the murder scene of their film. Tensions are passed back and forth between the fictional situation and that of the increasingly irritable couple for whom the strangeness doesn't depart along with the film crew.

Subtle, with a horrible feeling of the inevitable about it, this is a fitting climax to a fine collection.

[coral]

Silly as it may be to reply to a post of yours, I must say this is absolutely fantastic, I'm going to read it again now!!!

[dem bones]

The Scar: Brichester. Jack Rossitor's brother-in-law, the hapless Lindsay Rice, meets Jack's doppelgänger, similar in every respect to the original save for a nasty scar down his face. When Jack is attacked by his double and has his face slashed with a rusty tin can they are identical - even his wife, Harriet, can't tell them apart. Lindsay begins to suspect the awful truth behind 'Jack's recent irrational behaviour, including the savage beatings he inflicts upon his kids. His worst fears are confirmed with the discovery of a body in a derelict building.

The Telephones: Tim, constantly persecuted because of his long hair, is seemingly pursued from telephone box to telephone box by a man intent on picking him up. Tim is eventually confronted by the caller when he materialises in the booth behind him. Implications of male rape for a change.

Ash: Lloyd, researching local customs and folk tales in the Cotswolds, temporarily moves into a house which has a reputation for being "tragic", although the only recent history attached to it concerns a couple who had a dreadful flare-up, with the guy burning all his girl's possessions before moving out. Before long Lloyd detects a female presence about the place, trailing ash throughout the rooms, interrupting his tape-recordings and telephone calls to girlfriend, Anthea. On inspecting the furnace in the cellar, he learns the dreadful truth ...

Missing: "Then he saw that what she was pulling from the body was coiled around her feet, and as he watched she arranged it into a pattern, chanting." Set in 1973 and told in diary form from the point of view of a drug-binging student who finds himself haunted by the ghost of Edna, "the sad-faced brunette", a dabbler in voodoo who murdered her husband in 1947.

The Words That Count: The liberating powers of Black Magic. The repressed 23-year-old daughter of a Religious fanatic receives a pamphlet though the post (sent by her more worldly boyfriend?) on which the words to the Lord's Prayer are printed singly on each page, the whole in reverse order. Her father's predictable reaction and the seed of rebellion the pamphlet plants in her suggests that she will soon break free of her claustrophobic excuse for an existence. Or something. I must admit, I struggled with this one.

Smoke Kiss: Cartoonist King is haunted by a derelict, drunken old woman ("Go on, you sods ... I'm dying. You don't care. I don't either."), the unwitting model for his portrait, Death Embodied, after he passed her in the doorway of a large department store.

intruder2k

Dem:

THE WORDS THAT COUNT: Here's a hint: go back to this story, go to the last paragraph, and read the first word. Then read the first word of the paragraph above, and above that, until you get back to the beginning.

;D

Yep, it's an acrostic, so you could say that Campbell is being gimmicky or it's all in the name of "art". I thought it was okay, you realise why the writing is so awkward in any case.

Cheers

Graham

demonik

I go for gimmick, myself. There's a modified version of the story in Dennis Etchison's Masters Of Darkness and Campbell explains:

" ... on it's original publication the story was greeted with some blankness, none of it the fault of the readers. I'd been trying the kind of juggling act that W. F. Harvey achieves so brilliantly in August Heat where the narrator tells the reader everything without ever suspecting what he has revealed. In my case, unfortunately, my narrator left many readers as much in the dark as she had been throughout the writing (though perhaps no longer once she rereads what she wrote: I hope not, anyway)."

Ramsey goes on to add that in this revised version he's "made one slight but crucial change, in the interests of clarification."

I'm still working through the rest for the first time in about five years. Am enjoying it - especially The Cellars!

intruder2k

Hi Dem

Your post makes me wonder whether there's some kind of 'secret' about AUGUST HEAT - a story that admittedly left me cold (I have it in the kid's anthology GHOST ENCOUNTERS, editor Susan Dickinson). I've checked but there's nothing obviously funny about it - acrostic or otherwise.

THE HEIGHT OF THE SCREAM is a great little collection which I've got and, surprisingly, read! (I also have Campbell's COLD PRINT and DARK COMPANIONS which look fantastic). The ones I enjoy are REPLY GUARANTEED (Jamesian), JACK'S LITTLE FRIEND (definitive Jack the Ripper story) and THE CELLARS (fungoid frenzy). They kind of tail off towards the end of the book, IMO, although that's not to say they're not interesting - just not very 'exciting'.

I do love Campbell though - just take a look at the volume of his output - how can any lover of anthologies not be entranced? He may veer on the side of 'literary' rather than 'entertaining' at some points, but he's still good value and a real champion of the genre.

Cheers

Graham

demonik

I think Dark Companions is a far stronger collection myself, so if you enjoyed (the bulk) of The Height Of The Scream it's almost certain you'll love it as, by then, he seems to have got over his willfully obscure tendencies for the most part.

The Height Of The Scream was the first collection of his I read cover to cover and it totally bamboozled me - I even put RC on my 'authors to avoid at all costs' list for a while (I bet he was gutted): I just thought it was all too clever-clever, but then I was probably od'ing on the slightly less challenging Vampirella novels or something equally deep at the time. Now, I reckon he's the top man or thereabouts. The fickleness of fans, eh?

Oatcake

In The Shadows works marvellously for me. There's a quiet vein of tragedy underlying the horror, the opening is a fine example of Campbell's skill at evoking a mundane but realistic setting and situation, and the narrator's mounting horror and disquiet as his shadowplays seem to turn on him before the genuinely supernatural denouement is a skin-crawling piece of writing.

Which Ramsey Campbell short story is it which features unpleasant use of polythene bags? It might be called something like In The Bag, but I seem to recall it being in this collection. Confirmation/correction much appreciated. Thanks.

demonik

I think In The Bag first appeared in Hugh Lamb's Cold Fear anthology for W. H. Allen in 1977. Ramsey later included it in his collections Dark Feasts and Dark Companions.

[sean]

Bloody hell, your synopsis things are far better, Dem!

Anyway, I hope no-one minds me setting up all these threads, I'm hoping they're just a starting point (and apologies if I'm repeating stuff which was on the old board, I'm too fucking lazy to go and check!) and certainly aren't meant to be in-depth or anything...

[dem bones]

sean said:

Anyway, I hope no-one minds me setting up all these threads, I'm hoping they're just a starting point (and apologies if I'm repeating stuff which was on the old board, I'm too f**k**g lazy to go and check!) .

On the contrary, Sean, I''m delighted you're doing them and have finally given Ramsey a section to himself. No worries about repeating stuff from the old board, either. I still tend to transfer stuff - like the hefty chunk above - if it still seems relevant (to me, if nobody else .... ). Oh yeah. And my "synopsis things" are crap, but scrawling them keeps me off the streets.

sean said:

... and certainly aren't meant to be in-depth or anything...

"in depth?". Pull yourself together, man! This is Vault!

[dem bones]

The Height Of The Scream: Martin, a dazed, perma-stoned leftover hippie, confides in his friend - our narrator - that he can drive people to commit violent acts merely by visualising same. Martin regards his psychic "gift" as a curse and struggles to contain it, but the friend, fascinated, requests a demonstration. He receives one that same night at a party hosted by Betty and Mildred Slater, sponsors of a local art gallery. When the guest of honour, a Sci-fi illustrator of some talent, makes Betty a gift of a framed sketch, the sisters inexplicably and very brutally set upon one another. Two days later, the illustrator blows his brains out, splattering a blank canvas. A terrified Martin realises the power is now beyond his control. Shortly before his own bloody demise, Martin lets on to friend that he too is possessed of the same dreadful ability.

Our man can't wait to try it out.

Reply Guaranteed: First published in Tandem Horror 2 and intended for inclusion in Demons By Daylight until a friend of the author suggested it wasn't up to scratch (!). Viv is bored stiff awaiting hospital discharge following a minor operation. When a reporter friend shows her a copy of a personal advertisement intended for the lonely hearts column of the Brichester Herald, Viv sends a provocative reply "for a laugh." The ad is pulled when the address provided checks out as an empty house on Mercy Hill, the former resident an Olympic standard pervert who died of syphilis. As it happens, the late occupier is buried in the cemetery further up the hill - at least he was the last time anyone checked. If you like your horror stories sick and twisted look no further.

[dem bones]

Has been so long since I read The Height Of The Scream thought it would be like starting a brand new selection, but so many of these stories are familiar from their anthology appearances. Further cases in point:

Horror House Of Blood: Why Frank and Marilyn Taylor should never have allowed aspiring film director David Lloyd to shoot a slasher movie in their home. See Frank Coffey [ed.] Modern Masters Of Horror, 1982.

Cyril: (Richard Davis [ed], Tandem Horror 3, 1969). Its the Lysistrate prints confuse me. Flora hardly comes across as a woman on sex strike, and you worry for young Lance's bones if she gets her hands on him. As for her guest, he either genuinely doesn't want to know, or is way too timid to respond to her serial come on's. 'Cyril' is less reticent. Presumably the doll is animated by repressed sexual desires but whose? Lance's most likely, given that he felt such a weird gift appropriate to the occasion - what would she want an ugly doll for - or possibly a fatal combination of both? I find it impossible to read the ending without thinking of the Sweets To The Sweets episode in The House That Dripped Blood.

In The Shadows: Stressed out librarian's Halloween treat for kids goes horribly wrong. Stories like this make me realise that reading horror fiction must be especially nerve-wracking for parents. See Hugh Lamb [ed.] Return From The Grave, 1976.

[Johnlprobert]

I see in my notes for this collection I've summarised Reply Guaranteed as 'Ghost of syphilitic sex pervert places advert in local newspaper to which girl inadvertently replies'. One day that's going to be a clue in a Ramsey Campbell short story crossword puzzle ;-)

[ropardoe]

Oct 14, 2017 8:48:45 GMT Johnlprobert said:

I see in my notes for this collection I've summarised Reply Guaranteed as 'Ghost of syphilitic sex pervert places advert in local newspaper to which girl inadvertently replies'. One day that's going to be a clue in a Ramsey Campbell short story crossword puzzle ;-)

Yes please - to the Ramsey crossword, I mean!

[Johnlprobert]

Oct 14, 2017 8:52:28 GMT ropardoe said:

Oct 14, 2017 8:48:45 GMT Johnlprobert said:

I see in my notes for this collection I've summarised Reply Guaranteed as 'Ghost of syphilitic sex pervert places advert in local newspaper to which girl inadvertently replies'. One day that's going to be a clue in a Ramsey Campbell short story crossword puzzle ;-)

Yes please - to the Ramsey crossword, I mean!

It's slowly taking shape! :-)

[bluetomb]

Finished this last night and thought to write on it while its fresh.

So, I had mixed feelings about a number of the stories in Demons By Daylight. The good kind of mixed feelings, the "I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure whether I entirely got it or whether it entirely came off for me and I need to revisit it more carefully" kind, for sure, but mixed feelings all the same. By contrast I thoroughly enjoyed just about all the stories in The Height of the Scream. Very few mixed feelings. Almost everything is clear and direct, in places where there is some ambiguity the horror still comes straight through. Not that Campbell has switched to straightforward shockers, by any means. There are a couple of shockers at least, disturbing doppelganger opener The Scar and Ripper ripper Jack's Little Friend. Perhaps restrained but only just closer Horror House of Blood (on one of my favourite subjects in fiction, horror movies!). But Campbell's spooks are as likely to be malevolent as curious or sad or combinations. There are ghosts, possession, madness, the inanimate animated (lots of this, which I consider a good thing!), some murder, abundant unease, but nothing too conventional, and everything takes attention and thought. Generally the order of things is long, measured opening and mid-sections, layering suspense with increasingly sinister hints, mounting into climactic bursts of eerie, offbeat supernatural excitement that often take right into the last few lines to fully play out. Campbell's way with place and character and their cracks that let horror in or out keeps coming on. He gets better and better at depicting everyday confusion and mess and tension with precise yet lyrical details that cast foreboding shadows, mixing them with more overt hints at what lies beneath or beyond, and placing all about with a sort of inexorable, compelling and uncomfortable rhythm.


He also, intentionally or otherwise, has come up with some interesting continuities outside of the common setting of Brichester (sadly it doesn't seem to appear on maps, I'd like to visit some day). Fungoid chiller The Cellar is a sort of companion to the previous volume's The Interloper, both being about lunch hour catacomb explorations, exchanging terror for quieter creeps and eerie sadness. Litter (vicious litter) could follow from a number of other stories, as he is so good at describing litter, but works very well just after art/telepathy nightmare The Height of the Scream, in which litter notably appears. The fiery climax of Cyril (creepy doll and ironic use of the name Lance) leads aptly into Smoke Kiss (the perils of smoking and possibly a ghost) and the later Ash (dubious locals and restless past misfortune), and The Telephones (sexual insecurity, a lewd caller) has an unfortunate protagonist who comes off a little like a more sympathetic echo of Carol from Demons By Daylight story The Second Staircase, telepathy reminding of The Height of the Scream and a brief appearance from a vehicle possibly full of samples that I like to think was driven by at least a colleague of the protagonist of Beside The Seaside. Also several of the various manifestations in different tales could be relatives, arising from the same supernatural principle. Not essential for comprehension or enjoyment, these connections, but rather fun I think.

All in all I don't really have any complaints about this collection. Even the more muted endings fit in with the preceding vibes quite nicely. Some might be put off by the general style and some of the more elusive qualities, but generally speaking this is highly recommended.