Рэймзи Кэмпбелл превратил детство в кошмаре в основу карьеры одного из самых почитаемых авторов хорроров

'My childhood was a place of frequent terror but I used it as inspiration for my career' Ramsey Campbell is one of the most respected authors of his genre After a difficult childhood trying to navigate his parents' break-up and his mum's mental health struggles, author Ramsey Campbell, from Wallasey, took refuge in reading and later writing horror stories. Now decades later he is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in the genre and has even received recognition from an Academy Award winning director. While he struggled to make a name for himself in the early stages of his career, it was in 1980 when he released The Parasite that Ramsey first started to gain recognition. Since then, Ramsey, 80, has cemented his name among the biggest names in the genre after picking-up a number of accolades including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild as well as being made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for his services to literature. However, possibly his proudest moment over his career came nearly three decades ago when he received a missed call from Academy Award winning director Guillermo Del Toro. He told the ECHO: "My wife Jenny and I had gone away to a Greek island for our summer holiday and when we came back, we had the answering machine playing various messages. And there's a message saying, 'it's Guillermo del Toro calling you from Mexico.' And so I thought, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. Who's kidding me? Pull the other one'." After Ramsey finally took the call, Del Toro asked permission to dramatise Ramsey's short story Down There, but it ultimately fell through. However, now more than two decades later, Ramsey said plans to dramatise the story have been rekindled and it looks like Del Toro's adaptation will make its way to Netflix. The director has since referred to Ramsey as "an absolute master of modern horror. And a damn fine writer at that." While he has forged a remarkable career down the decades, Ramsey's love of the genre can be traced back to his difficult home life growing-up near Childwall, when he would treat writing as a form of escapism. He said: "I'd have to say that my childhood was a place of frequent terror. My parents divorced at a very early age, when I was three. They had an argument over my father having taken me out and supposedly putting me into peril, which I don't think he did actually, but the fact remains they had this dreadful argument." Following the breakdown of his parents', Nora and Alexander's marriage, he said that his childhood was further affected by his mum's undiagnosed mental health struggles. He said: "My mother was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, who was convinced that the radio show The Archers was basically a series of coded messages about her, written by the neighbours under assumed names. "You'll appreciate that my childhood was unusual, but also later on it became very much a source of material. There was a time when I theorised that reading horror fiction kind of packaged up my terrors, and put them away to an extent. "As far as I was concerned, this was just how life was. It wasn't until I looked around somewhat later and thought, 'well, you know, other kids have different sorts of lives, and they don't involve quite as much darkness and dread as mine did'. "Which is not to say by any means that that was all it was about. There were plenty of positives in it. My mother and I got on pretty well despite her mental health condition. We would read together and listen to the radio together and go to films together." After taking up writing as a form of escapism during his childhood, he said that it was the works of one particular author that focused his mind on wanting to turn his hobby into a full-time profession. He said: "When I was 14-years-old, I discovered H.P. Lovecraft in a big way. The first one of his I came upon, I read it in a single day. "I thought 'this is what I want to write.' I'd already been writing kind bitty little horror stories and ghost stories, which were just imitations of all sorts of different things that I'd read. But now I had a focus. I wanted to write like Lovecraft." After admiring his work for years, Ramsey saw himself published alongside Lovecraft and Psycho author Robert Bloch in 1962 with the release of his The Church in High Street forming part of the Dark Mind, Dark Heart anthology. However, it wasn't until 1980 with the release of his third novel, The Parasite, that he made a name for himself. Since then he has gone on to release dozens of novels and continues to publish new books with his latest titled Ancestral, which will be released in November this year. Looking back over his career, Ramsey said he sometimes weaves elements of his own upbringing into his work. He added: "There was a trilogy I did quite recently, the first of which is The Searching Dead, and the first novel is set in the early to mid-1950s, and the young chap in that, who starts at 11-years-old at his new grammar school, is in many ways me. "He's not entirely me, but, he draws on a lot of my experiences and a lot of my memories of living in Liverpool in the 1950s."