Masters of the Weird Tale

The early 1960s saw two invasions from Liverpool, one was the musical group the Beatles. When the question “Who are these guys?” was asked the answer was emphatically provided with their first album. When the short story “The Church in High Street” was published in the August Derleth-edited anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart, the question of “Who is this guy, writing like a British Lovecraft?” The publication of The Inhabitant of the Lake in 1964 gave a resounding answer that here was a true master of the pastiche, writing at a level not seen since the glory days of Weird Tales when the “Lovecraft Circle” was at the combined height of their prowess. Nine years passed and a second collection appeared, the magnificent Demons by Daylight. Totally free of Lovecraft's shadow, now the question was “Who is this young man writing horror fiction completely unlike anyone else in the field?” The answer of course was Ramsey Campbell, and he was just getting started. Over the next decade the question became “Who is this man setting the bar for the state of the art in this genre?” The decade of the 1980s saw Campbell nominated for, or win, over a dozen genre awards for his fiction, an unprecedented amount.