General Studies

Ancuta, Katarzyna.  Where Angels Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Metaphysics of Horror.  Frankfurt Am Main:  Peter Lang, 2005.

Brief discussions of The Face That Must Die and Dark Companions.

Carter, Lin.  Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos.  Mercer Island, WA:  Starmont House, 1992.

Colavito, Jason.  Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge and the Development of the Horror Genre.  Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 2008.

Mentions Campbell at various points, and discusses The Face That Must Die with only one paragraph.

Joshi, S.T.  Classics and Contemporaries:  Some Notes on Horror.  New York:  Hippocampus Press, 2009.

Gathers a large amount of shorter pieces on Joshi's commentary on horror fiction, devoting large portions to Joshi's significant criticism of Ramsey Campbell throughout the book.

Joshi, S.T.  The Modern Weird Tale.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Drawn from Joshi's previously published work on Campbell.  Approaches Campbell's work from several angles--dream and reality, art and reality, urban life, paranoia, childhood, and prose style.  Remarks that even though some of Campbell's work falls flat, this prolific artist produces consistently good work that rises above most of his contemporaries writing in the form.

Joshi, S.T., ed.  Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares.  2 vols. Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 2007.

A good collection of essays on horror icons, such as ghosts and vampires and their appearance in the arts.  Campbell is mentioned or discussed in a number of the essays.

Joshi, S.T. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2008.

Joshi regards "Cold Print" and "The Franklyn Paragraphs" as Campbell's best Cthulhu Mythos fiction.  Notes that Campbell in his Lovecraftian stories focuses on abnormal psychology that his similar to his other non-Lovecraftian tales.  Campbell sees the mythos with his own unique vision.

King, Stephen.  Danse Macabre.  New York:  Berkeley, 2001.

Notes that Campbell carries on the pioneering "urban horror" of Leiber in his short stories and especially the novel The Parasite.

Mendleson, Farah, and Edward James.  A Short History of Fantasy.  London:  Middlesex University Press, 2009.

"Ramsey Campbell was writing ghost stories throughout the 1960's, and stories inspired by Lovecraft, but in the 1970's he picked up on the growing conspirary element that was affecting both American and British culture, and also focused on the nature of evil.  Campbell, even more than King, was interested in exploiting the cracks in the moral order that was emerging as organized religion was losing its hold and New Age religions were increasingly visible."

Mitchell, Charles P.  The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 2001.

Campbell's stories have influenced films based on Lovecraft's work.  Regards Campbell as the leading practitioner of the modern Lovecraftian tale.

Murphy, Margaret.  The Book of Liverpool:  A City in Short Fiction.  Comma Press, 2007.

Salomon, Roger B.  Mazes of the Serpemt:  An Anatomy of Horror Narrative. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2002.

Studies Campbell's stories that contain the motif of the doppelganger.  A salient example of this is "The Scar."

Sawyer, Andy, and David Seed, eds. Speaking Science Fiction:  Dialogues and Interpretations.  Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Briefly discusses Campbell's papers, which are housed at the library of Liverpool University.

Stableford, Brian.  "The Magic of the Movies."  In his Slaves of the Death Spiders, and other Essays on Fantastic Literature.  Borgo/Wildside Press, 2007.

"Ramsey Campbell [in Ancient Images] is a past master of the suspenseful horror story, and he brings all his careful craftsmanship to the unraveling of this fairly predictable plot.  His great strength as a writer is his ability to build sinister elements by slowly-amplified degrees into a narrative which is full of realistic detail, extrapolating the artistic method of M. R. James to novel length."

Varnado, S.L.  Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987.

In studying the "numinous" in Gothic Fiction, Vazrnado discusses modern writers such as Campbell.  He notes that Campbell "displays a sophisticated employment of techniques and themes developed by earlier masters of the genre, such as Henry James, Arthur Machen, and H. P. Lovecraft."