[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 centuries, or perhaps they were stages in a search for the ultimate atrocity.

—The Nameless

Introducing the short story collection assembled to represent the first twenty-five years of his career, Ramsey Campbell said that he hoped to "offer a little of the quality that has always appealed to me in the best horror fiction, a sense of something larger than is shown" [Dark Feasts]. As the above passage from Campbell's 1981 novel suggests, this sense is central to his writing in terms of thematic content as well as effect, and is associated intimately with the concept of evil that his work has developed. We can therefore usefully begin our discussion of that concept with a pair of quotations from a story by one of Campbell's acknowledged paragons, Robert Aickman: "Sin is a sense of something larger than oneself, and "Woe betide the man who looks outside himself for what he can only find inside" ["Larger Than Oneself," in Painted Devils, 1979].

Charles, the inwardly empty protagonist of Campbell's seminal study of evil, "Potential," should have read Aickman. He might then have been wary when his new-found companion paused in the process of conveying him to an "experiment" which promised to "help you find yourself in order to point at the night sky and declare: "Infinity. There must be something in all that to fill us." Alas, Charles is ignorant even of Lovecraft; the untapped power of his morbid imagination is thus greater even than that of Lovecraft's Robert Blake ("The Haunter of the Dark"), a similarly inclined individual who differs from Charles primarily in that he is well versed in the art of the macabre. Blake could recognise, if not avoid, the avatar of Nyarlathotep; Charles, whose opinion of the International Times ("the little he had understood he hadn't liked") apparently extends to literature in general, is apt to a more complete conversion, becoming himself such an avatar when ritual murder opens the floodgates of his hitherto repressed imagination. Blake's "I am it and it is I" is a fleeting impression which leaves him with the dignity of a recognisable corpse—albeit a rather discomposed one; Charles' mortal remains are scraps for stray dogs to fight over.

In an earlier article, I invoked Tennessee Williams and Steve Rasnic Tern to suggest that such acts of the imagination are inevitable attempts to compensate for every human individual's sense of incompletion, an understandable condition when we recognise that our lives are but a brief contribution to an ongoing process of evolution whose goal we cannot see and will never reach. Guilt and desire—hatred of the limited nature of the self and the urge towards self-transcendence—spring from this perception, and the imagination—"a sense of something larger than oneself"—is the medium that gives them form. Through it we create, or are seized by, something which the personality embraces, or is ingested by. The need to understand the imagination, so that it may be used to enhance the personality through creation (finding inside, to use Aickman's terms) rather than be permitted to destroy the personality by yielding it to something else (looking outside), is the "moral" of many of Campbell's psychological fables; failure to do so, the lot of the majority of his characters, is the "sin" which brings its own punishment.

Of course, the danger with generalised analysis like the above is that it might seem to support Thomas F. Monteleone's complaint that Campbell's short fiction is cold and samey ["The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association," in Horrorstruck, November-December, 1987]. A look at one of Campbell's most horrifying tales will show that even a strict adherence to the basic framework I have described—and I am by no means suggesting that all, or even most, of Campbell's stories involve such adherence—gives enormous scope for the exposition of various characters and situations, none of which need resemble the standard Lovecraftian scenario.

"The Guy", another story from Demons by Daylight, is its narrator's not-so-fond reminiscence on a doomed childhood friendship and failed attempt to understand the atrocity in which it culminated. Denis' overly sheltered middle-class suburban upbringing is encapsulated when he recalls the fatal Guy Fawkes' Night: "Of course I was to have no bonfire; it might dull the house's paint or raze the garden. Instead, a Beethoven symphony for the collection I didn't then appreciate." The lack of adventure and excitement imposed by such a parental regime had found expression only in a vague idolisation of the Army ("In those days that was my idea of heroism") until at fourteen Denis met Joe Turner, the archetypal Kid from the Wrong Side of Town. Denis' attendance, in the face of his parents' disapproval, at Joe's Bonfire Night party was to have set the seal on a friendship which had introduced Denis to "sides of life I never knew existed"—in particular, the side which found fullest expression in Joe's former neighbourhood of Lower Brichester: "Stones through the front windows, boys backing girls into alleys, knives and bottles outside the pubs."

Instead, the party becomes the scene of what seems like an act of supernatural revenge, when the guy, dressed by Joe's drunken father in clothes which had belonged to Joe's younger brother Frankie before his death exactly a year before, goes missing from its place atop the unlit bonfire. Frankie, we learn, had died of burns following an accident with paraffin for which Joe may have been to blame; now Denis watches as Joe attempts to rekindle this year's smouldering bonfire:

My eyes searched the shadows. Near the hedge stood a Guinness bottle which should have held a rocket. Desperately, I searched beyond. A figure was creeping along the hedge toward Joe. As I discovered it, it leapt.

Joe twisted round, still kneeling, as it reached him. The fire caught; fear flared from Joe's face. His mouth gaped; so did mine as I struggled to call the others, still watching the kitchen. The figure wore trousers and a blazer, but its hands—My tongue trembled in my mouth. I caught at one boy's arm, but he pulled away. Joe's head went back; he overbalanced, clawing at the earth. The rocket plunged into his mouth; the figure's other hand fell on the bonfire. Flames blazed through its arms, down to the rocket's fuse.

The adult Denis is still trying to understand this experience: "Perhaps subconsciously Joe had meant to spill the paraffin; who knows? But why had his father given it to him? Perhaps Joe had wanted it to happen, but what justice demanded that revenge?"

The answer is, of course, that it was not justice of any kind that demanded Joe's grotesque demise, but the destructive power unleashed by the conjunction of three mutually compatible but explosive elements: Denis' suppressed imaginative craving for violence, a family in which the pattern of violence and guilt had become ingrained, and a British folk ritual which celebrates violence masquerading as justice by making festival of the cruel public execution of a seventeenth-century terrorist. The explanation that eludes Denis lies in the nature of his own participation in the event.

To apply the terms of our framework, the sense of incompletion with which all human beings are afflicted to a greater or lesser degree has in Denis' case become associated, by virtue of his overprotective upbringing, with the absence of violence in his life. Finding insufficient resources within his own closely circumscribed environment with which his imagination might fashion a form for the resultant desire which his personality was capable of assimilating, he is forced to look outside, yielding the prerogatives of his imagination to Joe and by extension to the tradition of violence of which Joe is a product. (Joe's family first comes to Denis' attention when he hears "arguments, the crash of china, a man's voice shouting" from within their home; his friendship with Joe proceeds from a fight.)

Just before Joe's death, Campbell reminds us of the power which that tradition holds over the human imagination when he describes an especially impressive firework: "Over the houses rose a red star. It hung steady, dazzling, eternal. Our gasps and cheers were silenced. The white house-walls turned red, like cardboard in a fire about to flame." The story thus implies the drawing of the innocent but underfed imagination from its naive attachment to the exploits and ordeals of a bolder and tougher companion ("he told terrifying stories of his father's buckled belt"), through the more terrible fascination exerted by street crime, into the awe-inspiring spell of the emblem of the God of War. This carefully orchestrated escalation achieves the "sense of something larger than is shown" which imbues the climactic scene and makes the enactment of a climactic barbarity seem not only credible but inevitable; the collective imaginative machine which Denis has helped fuel with his own simple yet burning desire for excitement (note that it is he alone of the party who witnesses his friend's death) demands such sacrifices in order that it may perpetuate itself as what Tennessee Williams described as "a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature" ["Desire and the Black Museum," in The Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams, 1988].

As for the rest of Denis' life, this is ironically prefigured when, on an earlier visit to Joe, he encounters Joe's father in a drunken rage: "I looked at Joe and his mother in turn, attempting to convey my regret for having been a witness, for my incomprehension, for fleeing, for everything. Then I escaped from the misshapen house." For the adult, the regret and incomprehension remain, but as the first line of the story tells us, he has now realised that there is no escape: "You can't hide from Guy Fawkes' Night." His desire has led him to experience a power too large to assimilate, so the power has assimilated him. His imagination, drawn too far, too soon outside the confines of the world he could comprehend, is now condemned to dwell forever in Lower Brichester. He gives up his intended career of banker for that of probation officer:

A papier-maché hand, a burning fuse, a scream that never came—But the memory was framed by the day's events; the houses of the past, my own and Joe Turner's, were overlaid by the picture I'd built up from behind my desk that morning, the imagined home of the boy who'd stood before me accused of setting fireworks in a car's exhaust pipe: drunken father, weak wife, back-garden lavatory, all the trimmings—I could see it clearly without having seen it.

We leave Denis still doing penance for his sin, "still searching for the truth in each face before my desk while I work to release them from backgrounds like my own and Joe Turner's".

"The Guy" remains one of Campbell's most powerful depictions of a barely comprehensible crime perpetrated by entirely uncomprehending "criminals". Kaspar Ganz would have been delighted.

When the likes of Ganz enter the scene, however, we meet a new degree of sin. The difference between Ganz and those he studies is that he has consciously cultivated and dedicated himself to that "sense of something larger" to which they are the unwitting slaves. If the fate of the short story protagonist in much of Campbell's work is to be absorbed by whatever has captured his or her imagination and converted it into itself, the role assumed by the villains of Campbell's major "supernatural" novels is that of agents of the collectively imagined equivalent, which has the capability of performing the same act in respect to the human race as a whole.