Ramsey Campbell is the poet of urban squalor and decay. His Brichester and Liverpool (which, as we have seen, had already become interchangeable by the late 1960s) evoke the filth, noise, decadence, and smouldering class tensions that typify much urban life, and this is another way in which Campbell has radically modernized the horror tale, which had previously been content to seek horror in the remote wilderness (Machen, Blackwood) or in the small villages of England (M.R. James) or America (Ambrose Bierce). Lovecraft was, to some small degree, a forerunner, for, aside from a few stories that etch his detestation of the megalopolis of New York, his New England cities, real or imagined, certainly have a meticulous realism of a kind. But that realism emphasizes the loathsomeness that may emerge from antique structures or dubious history (‘witch-haunted Arkham’) rather than the social pressures that can make daily life a hell for so many urban denizens. Clearly Campbell has drawn upon his own experiences in Liverpool, a city with which he has maintained a love-hate relationship even after moving out of it in 1980.

We have already seen that the evocation of the seediness of the urban landscape—slums, pornography, prostitution—made ‘Cold Print’ [1966–67] far more than a simple pastiche of Lovecraft. An earlier story, ‘The Cellars’ [1965], is in fact Campbell's first tale to be set in Liverpool, drawing upon an actual subterranean location for a tale of supernatural horror. A description of a walk through the city sets the stage for terror: