Ramsey Campbell - Coincidence

Ramsey 'The Master' Campbell's Recenty Used story is also in Black Static #24. In it his central character ambles along hazy hospital corridors containing fog. Ramsey is a keen advocator of coincidence, so he won’t bat an eyelid when he hears that this incurred a similarity regarding one of my own stories from 2006, Emergency Servery, in which a hospital corridor is also described as a kind of ghostly spectral pipeline between one world and another. No doubt it’s been done umpteen and a half times before. In fact, a number of years ago, he admits to having wrote the exact same story as someone else without ever being aware of it beforehand. My own teenage opus was about three people who wrote the exact same books. An almost identical chunk of my novel Slithering Lake from nearly ten years ago now ended up in a movie called Slither (would you stop banging on about it?). But where do plagiarism and coincidence divide?

Never underestimate the frequency of coincidences. Ramsey has brought to bear the sheer overpowering odds of the collective consciousness. We are all getting our ideas from the same places. We are all tapping into the same emotions. And there are so, so many of us. Connections are bound to appear abundantly. It’s all about levels of consciousness. Ramsey has been published since he was 16 and had a lifetime in books, so nobody should know much better about it than him. He sent his first book to a publisher when he was 11 or so, his only copy, written in crayon—and they sent it back, bless ‘em! In a portion of his latest work, which read like an episode of Big Brother gone absolutely barking mad, a car alarm goes off whenever a certain character gets an erection—is that genius or what? Don't you wish you'd thought of that? 

P.S Ramsey has never read a single line of Dan Brown’s books. Nor me.

~ ALWAYS REMEMBER ~ 

THE STORY BELONGS TO WHOEVER WRITES IT BEST