Short Story Criticism | Campbell, Ramsey - Ramsey Campbell (essay date 1986)

Ramsey Campbell (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: "Dig Us No Grave," in Fantasy Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, March, 1986, pp. 35-6.

[In the following essay, Campbell discusses the current state of the horror fiction genre.]

The tale of supernatural terror often deals with the cyclical nature of things: the ghost that always returns, the events that are repeated from generation to generation, the personalities that are reborn. As well as dealing with the cyclical, the genre suffers from the process too. Perhaps it should: we shall see.

"I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art. It's just possible that another Montague Rhodes James may appear one day, but I profoundly doubt it." So wrote H. Russell Wakefield in 1961, and I wonder why. Perhaps he might have overlooked Russell Kirk, whose tales had not then been collected, or even the publication ten years earlier of We Are For The Dark, but could he really have been unaware of Cynthia...

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