Alone with the horrors : the great short fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991

Bom in Liverpool in 1946, Campbell inherited a world literally reduced to ruin from the apocalyptic events preceding his birth, a world whose continued existence during his lifetime has been threatened by nuclear annihilation and wrenching human dislocation. In his stories Campbell summons the hallowed supernatural tradition to embody this legacy of twentieth-century horrors. Such themes as urban decay, institutional disintegration, paranoia, loneliness, alienation, neurotic anxiety, sexual repression, loss of identity—all are accorded spectral expression amid a surreally shifting chiaroscuro of reality and unreality. [From the inside cover.] Gathers a representative selection from thirty years of the author's horror stories