At the tender age of fourteen, Ramsey Campbell began writing pastiches of the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. In 1961 he sent a batch of stories to August Derleth, Lovecraft’s publisher and the proprietor of Arkham House. Not knowing how young Campbell was, Derleth found merit in the stories, but he made a prescient suggestion: he urged the teenager from Liverpool to set the stories in the present day and in England. Campbell immediately took Derleth’s advice, creating a network of imaginary cities in the Severn Valley—Severnford, Brichester, Goatswood, and Temphill—that echoed Lovecraft’s constellation of fictitious New England cities.

Derleth gathered these early stories as The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). But soon thereafter, the English writer moved on to write dense, complex stories that used Lovecraft’s conceptions as a springboard for the expression of Campbell’s evolving vision of a world where social and domestic conflict, sexual trauma, and other modern concerns are at the forefront. This volume collects stories from two decades of Campbell’s career.