Ramsey Campbell's distinctiveness derives from the union of a seemingly inexhaustible imagination with a prolificity virtually unmatched in the field. Not even Algernon Blackwood, his only conceivable rival, can match either the quantity or the consistently high quality of Campbell's work. Beyond his first few novels, Campbell has rarely allowed himself to be led by market considerations to give readers what he thinks they want; instead, he has preserved his artistic integrity by producing an array of novels and tales whose only goal is the working out of their own inner logic. While it is difficult to specify the means by which Campbell achieves his effects, some general remarks may help to clarify both the intentions and the methodology of his work.

How does Ramsey Campbell produce that frisson of horror we find so bountifully in his novels and tales? Indirectness, allusiveness, ambiguity: these terms all suggest that it is a deliberate vagueness as to the nature of the weird phenomena that allows the reader momentarily to experience the sensation of the strange reality of the unreal. The technique certainly has its pitfalls: just as overexplicitness can lapse into absurdity and unintentional humour, so can excessive vagueness lapse into obscurity and confusion. On the whole, however, Campbell manages to walk the tightrope with notable success.

Certain choices of language are immediately recognizable as harbingers of the weird in Campbell's work. Since so many of his tales focus on an individual—whether mentally disturbed or not—perceiving, or seeming to perceive, some anomalous entity or event, the supernatural is most often a result of a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of one's eye. ‘He was drifting, or being dragged, towards the centre of the pool by a half-submerged heap of litter’ (AH, 294): this is the narrator's first perception of the supernaturally animated derelict in ‘Mackintosh Willy’; the analogy is chosen not merely as a sociological commentary, but as the narrator's distracted attempt to encompass the entity within the bounds of the natural world. Another frequently used turn of phrase—‘It must be …’—has the same effect.