Campbell, Ramsey | Simon MacCulloch (essay date 1993)
Simon MacCulloch (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Glimpses of Absolute Power: Ramsey Campbell's Concept of Evil," in The Count of Thirty: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell, edited by S. T. Joshi, Necronomicon Press, 1993, pp. 32-37.
[In the following excerpt, MacCulloch explicates Campbell's concept of evil as illustrated in the story "The Guy. "]
He believed that the worst murders were inexplicable in terms of the psychology of the criminals. One of the criminals he'd interviewed had described a sense of being either close to something or part of something which the act of torturing had never quite allowed him to glimpse—a sense that he was trying to assuage a hunger which was larger than he was. Ganz had argued that he and all the rest—Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper, Peter Kürten—had been driven to experience the worst crimes they could on behalf of something outside themselves. Perhaps the crimes formed a pattern over the...
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