Short Story Criticism | Campbell, Ramsey - Kim Newman (essay date 1988)

Kim Newman (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: "Campbell Is Coming," in New Statesman, Vol. 115, No. 2974, March 25, 1988, p. 28.

[An English critic and playwright, Newman is the author of Nightmare Movies (1985), a critical history of horror film since 1968, and coauthor of Ghastly beyond Belief (1985), a celebration of the most ridiculous moments from science fiction books and movies. In the following excerpt, he finds that Campbell's most affecting stories in Dark Feasts combine "almost surreal ghastliness and almost too-real urban decay. "]

Campbell's importance as a force in modern British horror is . . . demonstrated Dark Feasts, a representative selection from the first 25 years of his career. He began, very young, as a disciple of H. P. Lovercraft, and produced a series of stories he now refers to as "youthful indiscretions" in the tentacled and overheated style of the Sage of Providence, one of which ("The Room...

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