I want to talk honestly at last about why I write what I write. This Introduction Supersedes All Others. In particular I want to suggest why I wrote this book, which of all my stories seems the one most prone to provoke unease or worse. For example, not long ago I was sorting through the horror titles in a second-hand bookstore (split spines, wilting corners, ballpoint scrawls, unidentifiable stains) when the shop woman told me she liked horror too: King, Herbert, but not that Guy N. Smith — rubbish, him. I was opening my mouth when she corrected herself: not Guy N. Smith — who was that writer who set his stories in Liverpool? Ramsey Campbell, that’s right — that Face That Must Die .
She wouldn’t have encountered much disagreement from most of the editors I was published by when I wrote the book. For a while it seemed it would never be published, and the eventual British edition was edited without my knowledge (taking out most of the paranoid puns, which still seem to me to ring truer than almost anything else in the book). The edition you have in front of you is definitive, including a complete restored chapter, but more of that later.
There’s no doubt the book is very dark. I had reasons at the time: the first edition of. The Doll Who Ate His Mother had sold, as Barbara Norville of Bobbs-Merrill put it over Black Russians at Thursday’s, “dreadfully”; I’d suffered the aftermath of some psychedelic experiences, had spent a night trying not to see things such as my face becoming mouthless in the bathroom mirror, and was terrified of a recurrence, which led eventually (terror, recurrence, or both) to a writer’s block on the first day of chapter X, when I saw the words I was penning begin to writhe on the page. Of all my novels, this is the one that strays least from its original plot, improvised hardly at all once I’d settled on the title, having played with Knife-Edge and The Man Who Killed A Face and The Face That Called For Killing . Under all the circumstances, presumably I was scared to take risks. Really, though, I think the book is so dark (not least in its well-nigh complete identification with Horridge) because its sources in my experience were.
Describing them is a risk in itself. Steve King tells how one Janet Jeppson claimed that he’d been writing about a macabre incident in his childhood “ever since”, and I sympathize with his resentment, not least because it’s a very small step from “ah, so that’s what your fiction is about” to “that’s all your fiction is about.” All the same, I think that in interviews I’ve been too concerned with presenting myself as a genial everyday guy who just happens to write horror stories. Steve King to the contrary, I don’t believe there’s any such animal. As Steve himself points out, it’s pretty strange to write fiction for a living at all, and there are cases besides mine in which the reasons are stranger: Robert Aickman (who wrote “My father remains the oddest man I have ever known”), and Lovecraft, and two writers with whom I feel a particular affinity, whose family lives gave them an obsession with madness that the conventions of their genre were sometimes unable to contain — Cornell Woolrich and John Franklin Bardin. I have to hope now that knowledge of a writer’s life can enrich rather than diminish one’s reading of his work.
Last year, while reading to a student audience in New York, I had the disconcerting experience of realising what I had “really” been writing about in several stories: “The Chimney” and “Mackintosh Willy” (the old man whose face you never see) and “Again”. It seems I had to write about my deepest nightmares before I could remember what they were. The process of overcoming my fears as best I could, which I take to have been the process of gaining confidence as a writer and performer, somehow involved forgetting them while acquiring whatever was necessary — technique, distance, trusting to imaginative instinct — to write about them. It has often been disconcerting to realise that I could have forgotten, or at any rate filed away in the dustiest rooms of my mind, so much.
Though I lived in the same small house (three bedrooms, a bathroom, two rooms downstairs) as my parents, I didn’t see my father face to face for nearly twenty years, and that was when he was dying. My first memory of him — of anything, I believe — dates from when I was three years old. He used to take me out on Sundays, and that day he’d walked across the line at the end of a railway platform with me instead of using the pedestrian bridge. He told my mother this, to her horror. They had a hearty argument above my head which ended, as I recall, with my mother ordering him out of the house.
The front door contained nine small panes of glass, reaching from chest level to the top of the door. My father blocked the door from outside as my mother tried to close it: presumably they were struggling for the last word in the argument. My mother’s hand went through one of the panes, bloodily.
I remember my mother dripping bright red blood and crying out that he’d deliberately closed the door on her hand. The sight of blood except for my own has distressed me ever since. A neighbour looked after me while her husband took my mother to hospital. I suppose they humoured her to calm her down, but they seemed to me to be accepting her version of what had happened. Since my father had fled, I tried to set the record straight. What did I know about it? I was only three years old.
I don’t recall the aftermath, but my mother told me years later that she had subsequently asked me in front of my father if I wanted to go out with him again. How could I have said yes when it might have led to another such scene? It feels as if that was the last I saw of my father, though it may not have been. Certainly relations between my parents grew steadily worse, until soon they met hardly at all. One reason must have been that my father (who was in his late forties, my mother having been thirty-six when I was born) felt robbed of his only son.
Divorce wasn’t easy in those days, not least because my mother was a Catholic. I accompanied her as she trudged from lawyer to lawyer in a futile quest for legal aid to help her make a case for a divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. Soon the refusals convinced her that the lawyers were conspiring to thwart her, perhaps on instructions from the police, since my father was a policeman; many people in Liverpool (which she hated) were in on the secret too. Recently I found the notes for a novel she was planning at the time, in which her neighbours were given fictitious names and classed according to their attitudes to her — ”snoopers,” “kind but afraid for themselves,” “were nice but obviously worked on,” “passer-on”( of gossip about her, presumably). By now she hated the house for its smallness, and frequently told me how much better her home in Huddersfield had been. She insisted that my father had tricked her into living there by promising it would be temporary, though in fact she had written to him shortly before they were married that she would live there always. They kept each other’s letters, and I found them after my mother died.
For most of my childhood, then, my father was heard but not seen. My mother told me things about him (she referred to him solely as “him”, in a tone of loathing): though he was a policeman he dressed like a tramp, he spoke several languages but made no use of them, he wrote letters in my name and hers to the Christian Science Monitor (religion therefore being one of their early conflicts, and his use of Americanisms to me another), he’d got her lost on a fell in the Lake District during their honeymoon (an incident which she grew to believe meant he’d tried to kill her), he came downstairs in the mornings and damaged the already dilapidated furniture, he blew his nose with his fingers in the bathroom sink (for years she would go in the bathroom every night as soon as his bedroom door closed and I would hear her ritual cry of disgust), he’d thrown a toy of mine in the fire, she’d given up the love of her life for him. . . He left her housekeeping money on Fridays, and she cooked his breakfast last thing each night and left it on the table. Now I imagine him coming downstairs in the mornings to be faced by congealed fried egg and bacon seven hours old in the cold kitchen with its flagged floor (hardly surprising if sometimes he went and kicked the furniture), but then his unseen presence was infinitely more powerful than anything I might be told about him.
I used to hear his footsteps on the stairs as I lay in bed, terrified that he would come into my room. Sometimes I heard arguments downstairs as my mother waylaid him when he came home, her voice shrill and clear, his blurred and utterly incomprehensible, hardly a voice, which filled me with a terror I couldn’t define. (Being a spectator to arguments has made me deeply nervous ever since.) If he was still in the kitchen when it was time for her to make my breakfast she would drive him out of the house — presumably it was unthinkable that I should share the table with him. Once I found I’d broken a lens of my glasses as I’d put them down by the bed the previous night, and was convinced by my mother that my father had come into the room while I was asleep to break them. In my teens I sometimes came home from work or from the cinema at the same time as my father, who would hold the front door closed from inside to make sure we never came face to face.
Very occasionally, when it was necessary for him to get in touch, he would leave me a note, in French. (He’d lived in Glasgow, his birthplace, until his family moved to Liverpool.) Worst of all was Christmas, when my mother would send me to knock on his bedroom door and invite him down, as a mark of seasonal goodwill, for Christmas dinner. I would go upstairs in a panic, but there was never any response.
My mother did her best to make up for his absence, though perhaps she never realised that his presence was the problem. We drew pictures together, played word games and board games and cards and ball games, the last of which must have been a trial for her, since she’d suffered a prolapsed womb at my birth. She encouraged me to write and to finish what I wrote. She saved up to take me on holiday to Grange over Sands, where she’d stayed on her honeymoon, or Southport, where her widowed mother lived until she came to stay with us; sometimes we stayed with her sister and brother-in-law in Yorkshire. As I went to films more often in my teens, so did she with me: she liked the Hammer horrors and Tourneur’s Night of the Demon , William Castle’s films and Hitchcock’s with the exception of Psycho , Last Year in Marienbad and Muriel and 8½ and (apart from the rape scene) The Virgin Spring , Vincent Price’s films except for those he made with Corman, for premature burial was one of her nightmares. Her favourite film, to which I accompanied her dutifully on each reissue, was Gone with the Wind . At home we listened to radio shows together — plays and serials and comedies, though she never liked Spike Milligan’s “Goon Show”, with its gleeful explosion of taboos — or simply sat by the fire and read (sometimes the same authors: Highsmith, Ray Bradbury, Cornelia Otis Skinner). I was always enthralled when she told me her memories, of Father Young, the Catholic priest who used to scuttle after her and her sister in Lon Chaney’s latest role, of working at Rushworth’s department store in Huddersfield where eventually she became a buyer and where her assistants used to confide all their problems to her, of her years at the Ministry of War Transport and the Christmas Day she had been working there alone while a man prowled outside in the deserted street, her chaste love affairs which she always terminated, her pet dogs (one of which had been kicked to death), the plots in great detail of films she’d admired: The Barretts of Wimpole Street , the Mamoulian Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera . . . More than once she told me her most terrible memory, of the morning (five days before her birthday, I realised many years later) she found her father burned to death, having had a stroke and fallen on the fire. Recently I found she had shared many of these memories in her several years of correspondence with my father. I recently condensed these letters into an account of their relationship, “Coming to Liverpool”, in Spook City, edited by Angus Mackenzie (PS Publishing, 2009). It was her way of sharing herself, which she did with only a very few people — too few.
I’m reminded by her letters, heartbreaking though I find them, how skilfully she could tell an anecdote. She had published short stories in a Yorkshire journal before the Second World War, and during the war she wrote her first, largely autobiographical, novel. It was encouraged by my father, whom I gather she met through an advertisement she’d placed under a false name (possibly in a writers’ journal) for pen friends.
As their marriage deteriorated and divorce proved unavailable, she set her hopes on writing novels, mainly thrillers, to make enough money to bring me up on her own. My impression is that they were technically skilful but already dated. She used numerology to work out which titles ought to bring her good luck. In my early teens she listened to “The Archers”, a nightly radio soap opera, and grew convinced that the names and actions of the characters represented messages of hope for her. When her manuscripts were rejected yet again she concluded that the messages had been deliberate lies, meant to break her down. I think it was then I became fully aware that all was not well with my mother.
I don’t think my grandmother was living with us then, but I believe I was only a few years old when she gave up her flat in Southport and divided her time between her two daughters. I don’t know why I remember her only in glimpses — her singing “Just a Song at Twilight” to me in a high sweet voice, her groaning loudly on the toilet, her praying (“Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) and beating her breast so loudly that I could hear it in my room. I say my room, but during my adolescence I shared it and its single bed with my mother. It may be that the reason why she didn’t share her mother’s room was that she refused to accept there could be anything wrong with her sleeping with me: it must have been about then she began to fulminate Freud and his dirty mind.
My grandmother died of gangrene when I was fifteen. Later my mother told me that she’d found one of her mother’s toes in the bed. I was in my room when I heard the doctor pronounce her dead, and I began sobbing uncontrollably. Yet that night, as I lay on the ramshackle couch downstairs because I didn’t want to sleep upstairs where the corpse was, I read nearly the whole of a John Dickson Carr novel. Sometime after midnight my mother woke in the chair in which she’d dozed off and told me angrily to go to sleep. Once we returned from the funeral I had my own room at last, and lay in the dark praying hysterically that some undefined terror would stay away from me, now that I no longer had the night light my mother had always kept burning, whether in case she had to go to her mother in the night or for fear that my father might come into the room. Some months later she saw her mother at the top of the stairs, wearing a nightgown which, she claimed, crumpled emptily to the stair and was still there when she went up. Now and then she would feel the ghost of her father tap her meaningfully on the shoulder.
(One more thing I’ve only now remembered about my grandmother: during her final illness I once had to help lift her onto the bedpan, and this was my first glimpse of a female pubis. It appalled me, and made me think for some reason of a spider.)
It must have been soon after the funeral that we began to have our differences. I was the only one left there in whom she had invested her affection, and I suppose it seemed a betrayal when I turned into a drinking cursing adolescent who read dirty books (Henry Miller and William Burroughs whose banned books I had sent to me from abroad, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell). I took a wicked delight in quoting her some of the naughty bits and, I admit, in being generally disagreeable. (My correspondents of the time will confirm this: sorry, Alan Dodd, David Johnstone, John Derry. . .) I became involved in science fiction and fantasy fandom, which she viewed with deep suspicion: half the writers were probably homosexual and lying in wait for me. Later I discovered she’d been opening my letters and had written to one correspondent telling him to moderate his language. With very few exceptions she refused to let me invite friends home, since she was ashamed of where she was living. Soon we no longer laughed together, perhaps because I’d grown too pompous to.
All the same, I needed to build my self-confidence somehow. On top of all I’ve recounted, I spent my adolescence at a Catholic school, much of the time in terror of being beaten for getting answers wrong. In my experience this is not conducive to learning, and I did rather badly until my last year there, when I was taught by several excellent teachers. (Corporal punishment is a British institution, of course, especially in our pornography, where the use of school settings points up to the Sadean isolation of schools from outside intervention; clearly it appeals to something in the British.) I went into the Civil Service when I was sixteen, and floundered about for several years, trying to relate to people. Several characters in my stories show how I was: Vic and Kirk (both ironically named) in “The Cellars” and “Concussion”, Lindsay Rice in “The Scar”, Peter in “Napier Court”— Peter being how I became as I put myself together to my own satisfaction, if to nobody else’s. You can see what a loudmouth I was from my pontification in the fanzines.
I was twenty when my mother decided I could be left alone while she went into hospital for the operation she should have had twenty years earlier, on her prolapsed womb. A neighbour of about her age, Miss Holme, took in my laundry, much to my embarrassment and resentment. Resentment and impatience and indifference were all I felt at the sight of my mother in a hospital bed, a well-nigh psychotic reaction I have never understood. I remember leaving one Sunday before visiting was over so as not to miss the pre-credit sequence of Modesty Blaise ; I remember telling my mother that I’d allowed a friend who was giving me a lift to come into the house while I put on my coat. She never forgave me or him for that, and took me to task for it for years.
Her operation led to complications, and she was moved to a different hospital for further treatment. She believed she’d been misled about the operation and its aftermath, and refused to undergo a further operation to repair the damage. She left hospital as soon as she could, and tried to sue the surgeon, but couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case.
When I suggested that the lawyers weren’t necessarily in league with the surgeon, she felt I had turned against her — that someone had got to me. I don’t know if that was the first time I tried to persuade her that things weren’t always as they seemed to her: that Liverpool wasn’t full of people conspiring against her, that radio programmes weren’t about her under an imperfectly disguised name. My denials seemed like betrayals to her, and she tried to find reasons why I was changing: I’d turned gay, I was taking drugs (which I wasn’t and hadn’t been), my friends were turning me against her. Sometimes I tried to argue her out of her paranoia, but it was fruitless: she would accuse me of trying to drive her into a hospital or a home, and make me swear never to have her put away. Increasingly, perhaps defensively, I accepted that this was simply the way she was and that I could do nothing.
The house seemed much smaller. I went to the cinema a great deal by myself. Just as my mother avoided many local shops because she disliked the people there, so she ceased going to church on Sundays, but insisted I continue attending. I strolled to a church a couple of miles away, then turned round and came back, reading a book all the while.
My fiction was becoming steadily more autobiographical. My invented town of Brichester, originally intended as the Severn Valley equivalent of Lovecraft’s Arkham, was Liverpool by now in all but name. I believe I was still avoiding using Liverpool itself because my mother had half-convinced me that offended Liverpudlians would hinder publication of anything they thought detrimental to the town. Writing “The Cellars” cured me of that nonsense — it was too good a setting to waste.