RUPERT has a lot to answer for. The whimsical cartoon bear and his friends in Nutwood have brought a safe and timeless comfort to children for nearly 90 years.

Did someone say safe? Comfort? The young Ramsey Campbell would have begged to differ, back in the 1940s.

It was the image of a tree that did it. A grotesque tree with branches that could almost be human, uprooted from its soil and storming aloft into the sky.

He chortles at the memory now, but it was the stuff of nightmares over 60 years ago.

A precociously early reader, he recalls his mother passing her finger over the words in the Rupert cartoon, words that gradually came together and made sense,

But there were the images, too. “It was a 1947 annual,” he recalls, “and Rupert encountered this spectral Christmas tree that had uprooted itself from its tub and scuttled back to the forest.

“It absolutely terrified me. I remember lying awake in bed and thinking about this.”

Mrs Campbell, it seems, picked up on the young Ramsey’s terror and took the offending book away, but the memory lingers. Thanks to some detective work on the part of his family, a reprint of the original annual has been tracked down and Campbell produces it with some glee from the books that line his study.

It’s a spooky image, but the almost human tree is still the stuff of a toddler’s nightmare – but a nightmare that was to spark the youngster’s macabre imagination and launch him on a literary career that would see him hailed by critics as the greatest living British writer of horror fiction.

That’s some accolade, especially when you consider that he is up against the likes of Clive Barker, a near-contemporary who, like Campbell, was brought up in suburban Liverpool.

But, while Clive Barker has carved an international career, as much at home in Hollywood as Mossley Hill, there remains something essentially English about Ramsey Campbell in his rambling house in Wallasey with its muddy wellingtons by the door, and family photographs displayed with pride.

He has been described as standing straight in the tradition of MR James, whose ghost stories of the early 20th century are understated English classics, with seemingly normal people discovering themselves in abnormal situations and the horrors hinted at rather than spelt out. “You show just enough to suggest far worse, basically,” Campbell observes.

So it is with Ramsey Campbell’s novel, Thieving Fear, published in paperback next week. Four teenagers from the same family camp out in the back garden of a big Wirral house overlooking the River Dee at Thurstaston.