Alone with the Horrors
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961--1991 |
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| Author: | Ramsey Campbell |
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| Publisher: | Tor Books |
Three decades into his career, Campbell paused to review his body of short fiction and selected the stories that were, to his mind, the very best of his works. Alone With the Horrors collects nearly forty tales from the first thirty years of Campbell’s writing. Included here are “In the Bag,” which won the British Fantasy Award, and two World Fantasy Award-winning stories, “The Chimney” and the classic “Mackintosh Willy.”
Campbell crowns the book with a length preface which traces his early publication history, discusses his youthful correspondence with August Derleth, illuminates the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on his early work, and gives an account of the creation of each story and the author’s personal assessment of the works’ flaws and virtues.
In its first publication, a decade ago, Alone With the Horrors won both the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. For this new edition, Campbell has added one of his very first published stories, a Lovecraftian classic, “The Tower from Yuggoth.” From this early, Cthulhian tale, to later works that showcase Campbell’s growing mastery of mood and character, Alone With the Horrors provides readers with a close look at a powerful writer’s development of his craft.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Stephen King on Ramsey Campbell: “He is literate in a field that has attracted too many comic book intellects, cool in a field that tends toward panting melodrama by virtue of its subject matter, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners fall prey to cant.” You can’t find a better introduction to Campbell’s work than this attractive collection of 39 tales spanning 30 years, with photomontage illustrations by the award-winning J. K. Potter. Modern paranoia and identity confusion, wasted urban landscapes, surreal transitions between inner fears and real-life horrors—all in a terrifyingly enigmatic style.
