Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas

in an engaging and accessible way. Well, happy Halloween, everybody. I am so excited to present

this episode with legendary horror author Ramsey Campbell.

I just wanted to say a little something on horror before we started.

Horror is obviously very important to me.

I've had other horror writers on the show.

I find myself coming back to it again and again

as one of the main repositories of the spiritual impulse in popular culture. Horror is a

literature of miracles. Strange things go on.

Unexpected things.

Spectral encounters.

Encounters with beings from other places, other dimensions, other planets.

And the lawfulness of what we know in the world tends to go away in horror fiction.

At the center of all this is that most familiar theme in horror of believing and not believing.

A lot of times horror narratives just take on belief for like 75% of the narrative. Someone's trying to

convince other people that a werewolf is around, a vampire is around, whatever, and everybody

says, no, no, no, it's not true. They're not there. Don't be crazy. And then, of course, what was once not believed in bursts into the

real with a kind of terrifying fury and revelation. In some ways, horror teaches the lesson that

incredulity is not to be trusted, that it can't protect us. It's not a talisman. In fact, there are some

horror narratives that play on this directly, like I'm thinking of Candyman, for example. And when we

read horror novels or watch horror movies, we find ourselves getting kind of antsy, angry at the people in them. How could they not see this is a vampire? How could we not see that, how could they cannot see that this is a zombie or a werewolf or whatever? Don't they know? But of course, if you knew someone who came up to you and said, listen, there's a werewolf killing everybody around town,

...